Quinquennial Workers Productivity Survey Selling Link
"In the last five years, have you taken the initiative of making improvements to work processes?"
That, I learn from The Times columnist and worker's friend, Harry Wallop, is what he considers the most revealing question asked of around 3,000 random British workers - not bosses, note - in their Skills & Employment survey every five years.
I was instantly quite taken with it.
Reminiscent too, of the canny interview question along the same lines, about the last time you undertook to change something at your current workplace.
Here, there's the worrying 'British disease' spectre of the productivity puzzle; output per unit of input has remained static for a restricting, eye-watering, league table position dropping, fifteen years now.
The professor running the study, almost three decades in, leans towards searching for bottom-up, not top down, improvement sources.
A supplementary question being[*];
"What changes, if any, would make you personally more productive in your current job?"
And so it ought follow in selling. In your Sales.
There's an argument that the biggest single factor towards selling success, is to be self-aware.
Know your process. Know it must be in a state of constant question, testing, refinement. Pursue its evolving uniqueness, repeatability, success.
Be ever on the look out to make changes. Enlist help of others.
Become the pattern of events that when in train, virtually guarantee you prevail.
When was the last time you made such a 'process' change?
Which such would you want to make right now?
You could even ask your happy customers, delighted to sign up with you already, what they liked about your work, and for their ideas on tweaks too.,
* If one of your answers to this is along the lines of 'maybe our video meetings could be a bit better', then p'raps you and I should talk...