Posted in Leadership, Measurement, Toolkit on March 12th, 2012
I talked to a great client today about how to have conversations about your “sales engine” with your board. I serve on boards, and the best CEOs I know use a few key tactics when managing their boards:
1. They are consistent. One of the things I did wrong (a long list) in running my first company, and thus managing my first board, was to report different things to the board every month. Why did I do this? Because I wanted to emphasize the progress we were making, and often the progress was in different parts of the organization. This is an honest – but stupid – mistake. The best CEOs gain the board’s agreement on what sales metrics they will track, and then they give us clear guidance on how these are changing – good or bad – every month. This allows a board to see patterns, and be more helpful in crafting solutions.
2. They are data-driven. One great thing about sales is that you can measure everything (and the best sales people WANT to be measured). The best CEOs walk into a board meeting and report on how they are shortening the time-to-conversion, reducing attrition, qualifying harder and getting to “no” (or “yes”) more quickly, etc. All of these things require data.
3. They provide feedback. In order to “tune” a sales engine, the best CEOs pick out pieces of the sales process to focus in on in a given time period and then they wring it out. Whether it be time-to-proposal, seeding objections, or the cold-calling script, the best CEOs focus on one challenge and then give direct, honest feedback to each sales person on how they can improve. Over time, and with consistent attention, this focus increases skill and discipline and by extension, performance. All things a board loves to hear..
Posted in Measurement, Teaching, Toolkit on July 12th, 2011
In my first company, we used a “two words” feedback process that was surprisingly powerful. After our first real work meeting with a new client, we would hand out one small post-it note and ask the client team to describe their experience with us in just “two words.” Clients always had the same reaction. They would say; “How could you possibly get any insight into how we feel with just two words?” And then they would see the two words, good and bad, and they would see that the feedback was actionable.
The rules are simple. You can use this simple process with many people or few, and you should always make sure they understand that it’s anonymous (this is awkward when there’s just one person!). That way, people feel free to tell the truth and give you real feedback. I strongly recommend using a process like this to gauge how you are doing. Sales professionals should use this with clients once into the sales process to ask; “How am I doing?” Entrepreneurs and leaders of all types should use it to ask their teams the same question. And then take action on it.
I’ve used this with my clients and students for years, and it’s very powerful to look at the patterns in the data over time. It shows me where I’m strongest and where I need to bring resources and people to bear on my weaknesses. Here’s a real example, good and bad, from one of the courses I taught last night to 70 people in Chicago, in the form of a tag cloud..
Posted in Entrepreneurship, Measurement, Web presence on June 27th, 2009
My kids are getting to that age when they are now telling me how to drive! The other day, they were in the backseat of our Mini, and they kept telling me that I was going too fast. But that got me thinking (and slowing): my kids can monitor (and improve) the way I’m driving from the backseat, because in the Mini the dashboard odometer is HUGE. What if we could all see the dashboard for our company? What if the metrics were there such that we could make real-time decisions?
This is starting to happen. I was in California recently with a client CEO who, in the middle of a meeting, pulled out his iPhone and showed me an up-to-the-minute look at some of his key business metrics. Very powerful.
Most businesses now have the systems in place to build a dashboard that will allow them to make better, faster decisions. How many dashboards do you have in your life? It doesn’t stop with the car’s dashboard. This blog has a dashboard. My Facebook page, LinkedIn page, Twitter account, my iPhone screen…all are dashboards. Cripes, even my home thermostat looks like a dashboard now. Actually, we are surrounded by dashboards. I just built a very powerful version in salesforce.com for my firm’s sales efforts. So…at last count, I’ve got about 12 dashboards I check on a regular basis…some hourly, some daily, some weekly (or when my kids tell me to).
If you could put together a dashboard for your business, what would it measure?
