What Info Is Thin On The Ground?

From the blog of a London Business School strategy prof, I happened across an explanation of how people become seen as beacons of killer info.  When I deliver solutions aimed at spreading best-practice throughout each nook and cranny of a salesteam, the isolation within which an alarmingly large minority wish to work is truly frightening.

I’ve found that when providing such solutions, I considered it vital to set the expectation that take up will (only) be better than for crm compliance.  Then when they investigated what level such engagement was at, leaders of salesteams were often spooked at why their charges never seemed to embrace with any initiative at all.  In the early days, my solutions in this area were very wide-ranging.  I’d simply hunt down any and every nugget of best-practice that I could.  And for around a third of each sales team, the incredibly powerful, performance-improving intel crazily went unused.

Too downbeat a view?  Well, the reality is that what I learned is echoed in the findings of the quoted report on the aforementioned blog.

The posters, those passing on winning morsels of sales knowledge (memes, in one sense) that get sought out invariably focus on oft-rarely communicated topics.  And (through colliding with several exasperating salesrep erected brick walls) I found similar results.

The temptation when creating any form of sales management backed knowledge repository, is to throw as much info into it as possible.  Yet that absolutely dilutes your impact.

I’ve evolved to laser in on just one solitary activity or initiative.  And everything works a whole lot better for all concerned.  They key decision, is to isolate what that sole focus should be.  A couple of years ago, most people I met were competitor obsessed.  Nowadays, people appear more interested in supporting a particular training thread or (in what has I’m pleased to say become a fascinating addition to my personal proficiencies) ensuring a new or recently launched product’s sales do not stall short of expectations.