All Dressed Up And No Place To Go
If you don't know where you're going you'll wind up somewhere else. - Yogi
Berra
During a recent telephone coaching session with one of my newer Clients (let's call him Bert), he expressed a great deal of frustration at his inability to show progress increasing sales in his territory.
As part of our sales development program, Bert's company had performed specific assessments of their markets, and his territory had a huge potential for growth. Although Bert appears to be very ambitious, and seems to work extremely hard, he has a lot of trouble implementing the company's plan for growing his territory.
Another part of our assessment process for this company included measuring the sales force for Call Reluctance®, using the SPQ*Gold® Call Reluctance Scale®. In addition to measuring the presence and severity of Call Reluctance, it also measures the strength of Motivation and Goal Direction.
I was not surprised to find that Bert has strong Motivation. I WAS surprised that it is as strong as it is - on a scale of zero to 100, Bert scored 93! People whose Motivation measures 75 or more are generally considered to be in 'blue chip' range, so Bert's Motivation was extremely high, even when compared to top producers.
When I saw that Bert's Goal Level was only 40 out of 100, I knew what his problem was. He has lots of energy to apply to achieving his goals - lots of 'juice' to get things done, but nowhere to direct it. In short, he is all dressed up and has no place to go!
People with this challenging imbalance are usually frustrated, because they expend lots of energy and tend to be busy, busy, busy, most all the time. Unfortunately they frequently lack meaningful results to show for their hard work, because all that energy is not applied toward achieving the proper goals.
Bert is not alone. For some unknown reason, I'm seeing a lot of these situations lately.
We process a lot of SPQ*Gold assessments every month for Clients as part of their selection process in hiring new salespeople. For some unknown reason, recently I have been seeing an unusually large number of highly motivated salespeople who lack strong goal direction.
Dear Reader, people who need stronger goal direction need to recognize and deal with these three dimensions of performance development:
1. TARGETS - Be sure you have identified the specific goals you want to achieve, can measure how well they are accomplished, and have committed to a date to have them done. Are you truly passionate about achieving these goals, and what they will lead to? If not, think hard about what you truly care for and what you really want.
2. STRATEGY - It's easy to have written goals - lots of people do. However, it requires more thought and effort to develop a step-by-step plan to achieve these goals. Remember, you can't DO a goal; you can only do the activities that lead to the achievement of the goal, so be sure you have identified these necessary activities and developed a written plan to perform them.
3. PURSUIT - Finally, you have to actually do these activities day in and day out. Be sure that you are not making excuses or substituting more comfortable behaviors, but actively performing the tasks required to achieve your goals.
The key to success is doing what you need to do, when you need to do it, whether you want to or not. - Walter Hailey
If you are doing a good job of identifying goals you truly desire and preparing plans for their achievement, yet find that you are having trouble actually doing the things you need to do to close more sales, Call Reluctance may be holding you back.
For a no-cost, no-obligation preliminary estimate of the presence and severity of Call Reluctance go to www.Sales-Assessments.com and click on Prospecting EKG.
Be encouraged.
____________________
The core competency of sales is developing new business. - Mike Stewart, CSP
Mike Stewart, CSP
Stewart & Stewart, Inc.
Sales Development Resources
Break-Away is a proprietary trademark of Stewart & Stewart, Inc. when used in conjunction with a business skills or personal improvement topic description.
