Category: Uncategorized

One of the joys of being in business is that I get to meet lots of interesting people. Everyone has a back-story and any product or service can be fascinating to learn about, when you’re talking to an enthusiastic expert. This is, in essence, my approach to selling …be interested and enjoy finding out about people and their work. 

Selling, as in making sales, causes heartache for many people. They worry about being rejected, and fret that they are not good enough to win a sale. Whereas the truth is that we all sell all the time. We sell ideas to our manager, we sell holiday plans to our partner, we sell the need to go to bed on time to our children.  We constantly discuss options and make our views known …we sell our position. And we get buy in, we just don’t realise we are doing it.

So, we can all sell and the easiest way to be begin the process is to go and drink coffee. Recently a colleague of mine was criticised by her friend for ‘drinking too much coffee and not spending enough time on sales’ …which is a foolish comment to make. Meeting people, being sociable and sharing a cappuccino is a brilliant way to sell. We build trust and confidence over a frothy coffee and we ‘sell’ ourselves as being reliable, decent people to do business with. 

This week, go and drink coffee with someone. No agenda, just be friendly and make contact with them. You’re welcome to ask me and I will tempt you to some delicious green tea!

Next week: Doing The Right Thing

Measure me stupid! That’s the phrase I always keep in mind when working with clients on organisational change pieces. It’s tempting to set up complex KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) to ensure people stay on track and are pushed in the right direction, but we have to be careful of the law of unintended consequences, where bright people make dull decisions in order to fall in line with the metrics that govern their performance.

For example, I once advised a colleague who was struggling to change an administrative department. The staff there were busily answering the telephones instead of filing the correspondence. This lead to a huge increase in calls, with customers chasing their goods, because the lack of filing created a 3 week bottleneck in the system. The manager was only measured on the number of calls answered, so there was no incentive to organise the filing. In fact she was worried that if she sorted the filing, by taking staff away from the telephones, she would be penalised at her next performance review. Madness you cry! And yet this is a true story – measure me stupid, and I will act stupid. (Even if I really don’t want to, but I’d like to have a good appraisal thank you and keep my job). The answer here was to go and see the manager’s boss’s boss (go high to get senior level buy-in) and get the measure changed to a dual telephone/filing one. When that happened the backlog shrank from 3 weeks to 24 hours.

We need to think before we set a measurement in place. What is the outcome that we really want? If we want more goods out of the factory, then that’s the key measure and what happens inside the process is less relevant. If we want someone to make 10 telephone calls an hour, is that what we really want, or would we prefer that person to complete the customers’ requests? Measuring the calls alone might make us feel good, but it’s likely to sabotage customer satisfaction.

Measurement is all about nudging people in the direction you want them to go, not constraining them with tight barriers. We can see this in action with speed cameras. Place one on a motorway and people brake hard and then speed up again. Swap a lonely camera for an average speed check and people all slow down to a steady pace. The authorities are nudging us to drive at a sustainably safer speed. Easy!

This week take a moment to review the KPIs in your business. Are you using them to nudge good behaviour? Or are they encouraging people to spend time polishing the bricks in their office wall, without fixing the hole in the roof?

Next week: Drinking Coffee Is Selling