Change Your Grades

Travelling back from a meet, I radioed on three English artists discuss a renowned modern novel, Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple.

Not my natural terrain, yet I enjoyed the debate around its Seattle school. Where no-one is allowed to fail.

It trumpets only three grades.

S  – surpassing excellence
A  – achieves excellence
W  – working towards excellence

I could have easily railed against this quasi-political correctness gone mad, its corporate-babble echoings or the flagrant disregard towards promoting any clarity of reality.

Yet I chuckled along.

At least in this fiction, there is an attempt at adding colour to the traditional calibrations.

The A to F of my youth has since got replaced by a back-to-the-future 1 to 9, then again by some bizarre ‘*’ star structure.

And so it is with Sales ‘grades’.

When a deal is Won / Not Won is pretty obvious.

But some deals are different to others. Surely.

Why don’t more of us duly demarcate as such then?

And what about the traditional deal likelihoods?

Are you (still) using a percentage probability for each forecast line?

Even worse, one awarded by the randomising of a piece of tracking software?

A little imagination can get more Sales juice flowing.

Whilst also making dastardly non-alignment behind ideal customer profiles a thing of the past.

Work towards excellence…