Greg's Right FIT #359

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Momentum
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Momentum

• Effective sales teams are challenging because we're working in groups. Take a tip from game shows and split goals into time dependent segments, changing groups up between timeframes. Time limits have a way of focusing even the most group-resistant individuals. 
• Movies are time dependent projects. Studies look at the optimum team overlap for success. All new is bad, but so is total familiarity. Optimum is enough intimacy to get things done mixed with new people to keep everyone on edge. 
• Successful sales teams need a high performer mixed with salespeople striving to be better. This puts a lot of pressure on the high performer to exhibit your preferred behaviors. High performer doesn't mean lone wolf.
• The highest performing sales people are made, not born. Investing in your top performers comes with a trade-off. They need to behave in line with your culture moving toward your vision. If they don't, you're allowed to make a change. "Culture eats strategy for breakfast," fits here. 

Being Human - Short-term performance vs. culture

“No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent. . ." – John Donne

As I read about the wave of tech company restructuring and office space vacancies, I think about one challenge my clients have been dealing with since the early days of the pandemic.

Expectations.

In sales/selling the expectations seem like they'd be easier to define because they are attached to results, but there's more to selling than hitting a number. When sales teams went from regular gatherings in the home office to fully remote, unwritten expectations outside of results were exposed like abandoned cars on a receding riverbank. We had to deal with them. 

We define culture as the behaviors your people engage in every day. These behaviors are the unspoken rules of the workplace. Humans are natural mimics. Stand in line next to an infant at the grocery store and widen your eyes. The baby will do the same. We come out of the womb ready to imitate. This translates into the workplace. From day one we start watching what goes on around the office day-to-day. Sure, we read the employee manual and listen to the CEO's description of the amazing culture, but then we get to the real work of determining how things really work 'round these parts.

Going remote not only exposed deeply entrenched unwritten culture behaviors, but magnified the reality of no entrenched behaviors for remote work. This gap left some managers with a choice: accept performance at all costs as the only expectation, or pay the price of re-thinking, teaching, and managing new behaviors for a new hybrid culture. Either choice brings a cost. 

My advice is to take the time right now to think about new behaviors, even if it comes at the expense of performance. If you don't you risk building a lot of little remote island dwellers creating their own rules and defining their own culture.

Present pain, future gain. Do the hard work of thinking about, arguing, and testing new expectations now, no matter what it does to short term results. 

You're going to have to do it at some point. The hit you'll take today is only going to get more dramatic over time. 

Random Stuff

"And therefore never send to know for whom 
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." – John Donne

After 30-some-odd years in selling I have consumed my fair share of sales banter, books, and trainings. In recent years, every time something new comes my way I've comforted myself muttering about the more things change, the more they stay the same. I'm turning into a cynic. I see a sales guru's video on LinkedIn and roll my eyes before she finishes her thesis. I start a sales book and never get to the point where I crease the spine. 

It's bad. 

I'm starting to rethink what I know and don't know. I picked up an article about how Millennials are changing sales. The younger generation is taking over buyer roles, the article tells me, and selling is changing. Deals take longer and involve more people. At least that's what I think it said. I started skimming. 

This article isn't what has me rethinking things. ABBA is. 

This week we lost a significant person in our lives. Her favorite band is the super group ABBA, a band I know well. I'm listening to their music with a new intensity when their most famous song comes across the screen. Dancing Queen. It's on YouTube and the lyrics are scrolling across the television. 

"Friday night and the lights are low
Looking out for a place to go
Where they play the right music. . ."

Wait, what?

I had to look it up on my phone. Mother cusser. I've been singing "When the play the rock music" for, geez, over 40 years now? It made sense to me. They're Swedish. It was the 70s. English is their second language. Rock was still newish. 

Now I'm rethinking everything. I know nothing. And what I thought I knew, well, it might just be wrong. 

Rest In Peace, dear Molly.