Each of us has had some small cut or scratch with, perhaps, a little bleeding. Band-Aids are indispensable for those. Usually, we use them less for stopping the bleeding, rather to prevent further aggravation of the cut and reduce chances for infection. But when the injury is much bigger or deeper, band-aids are insufficient. These usually require more serious wound management treatment–perhaps stitches (my med device clients are shuddering–I mean sutures), surgery, more robust wound coverings and so forth. And sometimes, there are more profound injuries, internal trauma and other things. Band-Aids are useless, even dangerous in those cases.
In certain kinds of injuries, it’s necessary to triage the injury. Stated differently, you need to stop the bleeding, knowing, fully, this is a temporary fix. You are just buying time to get someone to a hospital where the real injury can be treated. And forms of “band-aids” are critical in doing this–but they are temporary fixes.
We see the same phenomena in virtually every aspect of selling. We have a problem which we immediately “triage” with a “band-aid.” It may be anemic pipelines—more emails, more dials–we have to fill the pipeline. We struggle to close deals–discounts/concessions are the answer. We aren’t getting enough responses–even more emails and dials. A sales person is struggling–we can replace that person with another. We need to scale our 15% win rate–so we hire more sales people, teaching them how to achieve 15% win rates. We need to boost seller focus–let’s put a SPIF in place. W need to free up seller time—buy technology to free up that time.
We forget, too often, these are just addressing symptoms, not the root causes. Or we forget these are temporary fixes, buying us a little time to understand and address the underlying problems. We layer band-aids on top of each other……
Yet, when we continue to see performance decline, when we see problems persist, we fail to understand what’s causing them. We don’t take the time to understand the root causes. We don’t connect the dots to see understand the ripple effect on problems. For example, low win rates create a pipeline challenge, which creates a prospecting challenge, which creates a time management challenge, which creates a quota attainment challenge……… (While you read this, hum the old song “The ankle bone’s connected to the shin bone, the shin bone is connected to the knee bone, the knee bone’s connected……)
If we want to drive the highest levels of performance and sustain that, over time; If we want to grow and scale profitably; If we want to lead the industry; We have to understand root causes. We have to understand the interconnections between every aspect of selling and how they impact each other. We have to start understanding the whole process from start to finish and how they interact.
Unless we do this, we will constantly be scrambling. We will fix, refix, and refix the same problems year after year. We will get temporary reprieves, but never achieve our full potential and sustain that performance.
But it’s hard work! It requires critical thinking, analysis, creativity, experimentation, and continuous improvement.
We will not improve by just applying band-aids to our problems. We have to identify and fix the problems themselves!
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