“Give Your Best Leads To Your Top Performers!”

I can’t begin to count the number of “experts” filling my social feeds with the sage wisdom and advice on maximizing performance: “Give your best leads to your top performers!”

The rationale they provide goes something like: “If your top performers have win rates 2X more than the average for the rest of your sales team, then giving them your best leads will drive 2X yield over giving them to others! You don’t want to be wasting your leads!” They go on to say, “The easiest way to hit your goals is to give all the best opportunities to your top performers.!”

That’s logical, it seems to make sense…………….. At least until you start thinking more deeply about it. Let’s look at what this means:

1. Our top performers are already very busy. They are probably using their time very well and are both effective and efficient. And, because of the way they work and their ambitions, they probably don’t have a lot of spare time. They aren’t sitting around, twiddling their thumbs wondering what to do with their time, they are filling it with high quality/impact efforts. Stated differently, they are the people that probably don’t have the time to absorb more work!
2. Now we dump our very best leads onto people that are already very busy. They become overloaded and overwhelmed. Inevitably, even for our very best performers, their performance declines. Their win rates will decline, their productivity will decline. They are at risk for not performing as well as they had done before we did them the favor of giving them more high quality leads. So the decline in performance has a couple of effects. They aren’t producing as much revenue as they might. They aren’t earning as much money as they might. Frustrated, they may start looking for other jobs where they aren’t overwhelmed with too much work. And we lose them to another company.
3. But there’s more. Our B players are no longer getting high quality leads. At best, they get mediocre leads, and probably a lot more junk than they got before. Their performance will decline. Even though they might sell better, they were producing something, after all they were B players. But we are consciously giving them lower quality leads, leading to further declines in their performance. And since there are probably more of them (remember our normal curves), the aggregate impact of the individual declines in performance could be pretty big.
4. So with just the two items immediately above, we’ve seen a high probability for an overall decline in performance, rather than the improvement we expected! We thought we would produce more, but the more likely result is a decline.
5. What about the C players. Since it seems obvious that managers are doing no coaching, the C players are probably just hiding out with poor performance. The quality of leads is relatively meaningless for them. And, too often, they hide out until managers can use the excuse of a Lay-Off to get rid of them (Rather than addressing the performance issues straightforwardly.).
6. What if I’m wrong? What if the A players can absorb the extra workload with no adverse impact on time. After all, there are usually about 9-10 hours in a normal business day, we have another 14-15 hours we can have them work, every day! But this still means the B players are getting lower quality leads, so their performance will decline! Is the incremental business being produced by the A players enough to offset the decline of the much larger number of B players? Or are we netting less revenue overall?
7. But let’s look at the previous statement. Let’s say I’m wrong again. We are netting at least equal revenue, perhaps a little more by steering the best leads to the A players. Now all of a sudden I have a huge cost of selling problem. Since the number of B players far exceed the number of A players, and their performance has plummeted, the economics of the sales organizations have changed profoundly. (I know many of you are thinking, “Dave you are so silly, don’t you realize the mantra is grow regardless of cost……” I find that unacceptable, as, increasingly, investors are coming to the same conclusion). The majority of my spending is on B players, simply because of the numbers of them. Now I have a real cost/affordability challenge. I have to start doing reductions, “Let’s do a layoff!” Now I get rid of my C players, perhaps some of my B players, to get costs in control. But I’m still held accountable for the same revenue numbers, I have overloaded A players, underperforming B players, and morale is plummeting, so more will leave.
8. Then there’s another perspective. We know the high quality leads are great to go after. But what about the leads that are good, but not great? Who is more likely to convert them, A or B players? To be honest, I’ve always given the very toughest deals to the top performers.  We want our best people going after those tough deals.

So let’s go for it. After all, the experts have clearly thought through this and they still think we should give the best leads to our A players!

Or there’s another way to look at this. What if, rather than redistributing the leads, what if we looked at how we might improve the performance of our B players? It might look like this:

1. We would study what our A players do differently. We would look at what makes them higher performers. We would identify 2-3 things, initially, thinking, “What if we get our B players doing more of those things?”
2. We would start coaching and developing these B players, leveraging the experience from A players., improving their performance. This has a huge multiplier effect, they win more of the deals they are already working on (or do a better job of disqualifying the deals that are a waste of time). So fewer of those “good leads” we give them are wasted.
3. Then we drive the performance of a larger group of people, which has a great impact on our numbers, overall.
4. Since our B players are more productive, our CPOD improves.
5. And we still have our C players—suck it up, work with them, if they can’t improve move them into roles where they can be A or B players (and that may be out of the company).

Stated more simply, we always have “normal curves” when we look at performance. What would happen if we shifted the entire curve to the right?

Our jobs, as leaders, is to maximize the performance of each person on our teams. If we focus only on our A players, and we continually give them the best opportunities, over time, they fail, we fail……