Raising My Game

I find myself, increasingly, writing posts about the terrible state of practice in selling. There are the posts about terrible prospecting, clueless sales people, horrible managers.

These posts generate a lot of attention and activity. The comments, likes, and shares skyrocket. I suppose it’s human nature, we all have so much fun calling out obviously bad performance.

And sadly, there are too many examples of horrible sales practice. It becomes too easy to call these out. It really isn’t a problem with the sales people we call out, it’s a management and leadership problem. It’s managers that encourage and train people to execute badly, particularly when we know what great selling is about. They implement programs that are unfocused, sloppy, that represent the worst practice. But they make up for the shoddiness by demanding high volumes of this self centered practice.

Or it’s managers that do nothing about consistently bad performance, they don’t coach and develop the people, they don’t address performance issues.

But, thanks to a great friend calling me out on these posts, I’ve realized I’m not helping my readers. As much fun as it is to make fun of such obviously poor performance, we learn nothing.

It’s much harder, yet possibly more impactful, to look at good performance, discussing, “How do we improve? How to we go from good to great performance (with thanks to Jim Collins)?”

So I’m refocusing my writing. I’m going to focus more on identifying the good things sales people and managers do, but examine, how we can improve on that, continuing to learn and constantly improving.

I will, periodically, just for fun, do posts on the obviously stupid, but they will be the exception–and purely for comic fun, to laugh. The majority of my posts will focus on how the good get better.

It is really about you, the reader. Bad sales people and managers don’t read this blog. Good and great sales people and managers who want to get much better, who want to learn and grow are the primary audience. I need to serve you better.

Please hold me accountable for raising my game.

Afterword: Thank you Brent!