I had a mentor that used to say, “You better make sure your house is in order, before you start complaining about the mess in your neighbor’s.”
Another mentor used to say, usually when I was whining about something, “Remember, when you point your finger blaming something else, three fingers are pointing back at you.” (The visual below may help.)
I wrote, It’s Never JUST A Sales Problem, Kurt, correctly pointed out “a superior organization will as much and as long as possible take responsibility for delivering results, regardless…..” He’s absolutely right.
Too often, I hear sales people and even managers complaining, “If only we had more competitive products, If I had this feature and capability….” Or, “I don’t have enough leads and the quality of those I get sucks,” Or, “If only we had these tools and programs…..” Or “Our competitors can do these things and we can’t do the same….”
Some of these may be fair and accurate, but we can’t use them as excuses.
Our obligation as individual contributors, or leaders, is to make sure our own performance is the best it possibly can be. Regardless how few and bad leads are, if we aren’t doing our own prospecting we aren’t fulfilling our responsibilities to ourselves and our companies. Even if our products are trailing edge, if we make the conversation only about the products, we will fail our customers, companies, and ourselves.
There will always be problems. There are always things that need to be changed and improved (if there weren’t we wouldn’t have jobs). It’s critical that we look within our selves and our organizations to make sure we are doing the best we possibly can do.
There’s another critical reason, I’ve touched on them in my It’s Never Just A Sales Problem, and What We Can Learn From The ER articles. Often, until we have really understood and addressed our own problems and challenges, we can’t identify the real underlying problems.
In so many of the situations we see, we can’t find the real underlying issues until we fix our own performance. Once we do, the underlying issues pop out.
So while it is never JUST a sales problem, that is NEVER an excuse for not maximizing our own performance.
