Are Leaders Treating the Symptoms Instead of the Causes?

Have you ever come across Leaders who frantically increase sales quotas in the delusive belief that higher targets will inspire reps to sell better and faster?

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Me: several times and it works until it stops working

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Here is an account of one such experience that I witnessed and had the opportunity to support needed change efforts.

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Two years in a row, the general manager of the French branch failed to meet his sales targets, which caused a lot of unrest at the head office. Therefore, I was asked to investigate the situation and advise on the best way to resolve the situation.

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According to the general manager and head of sales, the reasons for their inability to meet sales targets were competitive pricing, inferior product performance, saturated market, government regulation, etc.

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You get the gist…

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Meanwhile, the competitors continued to gain market share!!!

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What was going on?

I decided to analyze their historical sales trend only to find out that they had achieved their sales growth targets 4years in a row, mainly by increasing sales quota year over year.

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A recipe that had worked for the first 4years until it stopped working. Why?

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The belief was that if the sales people visited more customers, they would bring in more orders. There was strong pressure from both the GM and the sales leader through:

- Installing sophisticated dashboards to measure no. of visits

- Modification of the commission schemes to encourage more customer visits

- Robust sales review cadence to ensure targeted no of visits per week

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Guess what?

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“What gets measured gets improved”

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So yes, visits have increased, but at the cost of hitting sales quotas or generating more revenue.

Everyone worked twice as hard, was baffled by the result and caused even more chaos in the organization.

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They had no answers - Nothing they tried worked because it wouldn't and couldn't because they were treating the symptoms rather than the cause.

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What followed was a genuine intent to demystify or unravel the behaviors that caused the revenue/sales quota shortfall.

As it turned out, the clunky quoting system, lack of customer trade-in options, heavy administrative ordering processes, and substandard KPI measures kept salespeople from meeting their targets.

With focused effort to resolve 20% of these high-impact issues over 12 months, enabled them to close their revenue gap and aim for higher growth in the following years.

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Most leaders are in a rush to achieve ambitious goals that they fail to STOP and THOUGHFULLY decide what key behaviors do they want to change.

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Are these symptoms or a cause?

Instead of acting hastily and creating costly side effects, grow your influence to EFFECTIVELY lead change & make your big ideas impact by applying these tools to identify KEY behaviors:

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Ride ALONG

The most powerful tool that allows you to observe people in real environments facing real challenges. It is a very effective tool for understanding why and how people behave under certain circumstances, regardless of whether the behavior is preferable or not preferable to your goals. The key here is to observe multiple people in multiple scenarios over a period of time to neutralize any anomaly.

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What-if scenario building

In a fun and gamified setting, divide your teams into groups and instruct them to come up with a plan to reach higher sales goals, making a list of things to do, stop or keep doing. The outcome will provide good insight and means for validating the vital behaviors that need to be changed or reinforced.

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Observe positive anomaly

Start by analyzing your data to see if there is a stark difference between good performers & worst performers. For example, in your effort to sell more solar panels, observe the town with the highest adoption rate versus the lowest. Interview the members in the town with a high adoption to understand what drives their willingness versus those who are not inclined to adopt. This will generate interesting insights that can be used to nudge the town with lower rate of adoption.

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These three concepts are deceptively simple, yet powerful tools to identify KEY behaviors that lead to effective change. Ride along with your teams, engage in building WHAT-IF scenarios and keep an eye open for anomaly to increase your influence to make your BIG IDEAS IMPACT.

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