Sales Organizations: How Do You Define a Win?

In sports, the goal is to win. Everyone knows what a win looks like in a sport because a win is so clearly defined. Either your team won or it didn't.

In business, managers need to define what a win looks like so employees know when they've won. Employees want and need to celebrate their wins, and managers must lead these individual and group celebrations. But before we can celebrate, we need to make certain our employees know when we've won, when we've come close, and when we haven't won.

A playbook is the roadmap to success (whether for a sports team's or a business). Managers need to ensure that playbooks are written, followed, and revised and followed and revised again. Without a playbook, people will expend huge amounts of energy going somewhere other than toward a win. Activity does not get results. Focused activity focused in the proper areas gets results, and the only way to focus your team is to make sure your team knows what to focus on. That's the role of a business or sales playbook.

Sales plans, training initiatives, policies, procedures, value statements, mission statements, organizational charts and systems are the elements of a business playbook. Great businesses figure out the plays first, and then go about doing business based upon those plays. Struggling businesses never get around to creating the playbook, and in doing so, create a sense of randomness or confusion which causes organizational inefficiency, employee dissatisfaction, lack of profitability, or worse.

If you want to maximize your effectiveness to perform strongly next quarter, spend time and effort now to create or tweak your sales playbook. It will tell your team how to get where you want them to go, and that's what creates a win. Get ready to celebrate!

 

If you like this post (or don't) please leave a comment. Skip Anderson is the President of Selling to Consumers Sales Training. He works with companies that sell to consumers in all B2C sectors to increase sales by leveraging the buying potential of every prospect and shopper.

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Comments

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I would have to add, a win in my book is it must be profitable. And you need to really understand your processes to know if this is true. in the current market there is not much spare or wasted money for chances!