Happy Sunday Everyone:
Before starting, I’ll announce, goal here is not to sound like a sniveling baby who didn’t get the attention he deserved.
I was doing a sales call on Friday around business planning. For the past 10 years I’ve been doing a similar business planning exercise to prepare for the year. This isn’t a new found idea..companies do it without question (I think) but I don’t believe individual sales people do them as often as they should. If they do, its typically like a New Year’s resolution in that it lasts until January 15th. I’ve taken them more serious than I take a lot of things and have seen my income go up 5X and saving go up 8X in that period of time simply by having a plan.
33% of the people that signed up for the call actually attended the call. This is where I’d really like not to sound like the sniveling baby. When you have a 33% response rate, it’s not good. Yes I understand you go to the hall of fame in baseball with that batting avg but this isn’t baseball. I don’t care what the reason, it’s not good and it causes some reflection. I’m finding there to be a very fine balance of not taking things personally and also getting better. I can’t value myself on an attendance rate for a sales call, and at the same time, I think I need to understand the dynamics of “why” the attendance rate sucked so bad.
With coaching, one of the keys to be successful is to find the motivation of an individual student and use that to drive results, it’s the “purpose” of the process. As an individual however, I don’t have the bandwidth to find the motivations of every person in our company. I also have to accept the fact that not every person wants to grow, and certainly not every person wants assistance from me. I like growing, I like seeking help from others, to me it’s what makes life exciting and fun. Stagnation would suck, which is what you get if you’re not growing/learning. So going back to the sales call and my head….I’m left with two choices…be a sniveling baby and give up and just focus on my own personal production…truth is I’d make a lot more just doing that, or, figure out a solution and thought process to keep me sane when I don’t get the results I hoped for from others…..Here is what I came up with…
There are 3 types of people inside of an organization (organization can be a team, group, a department, or the whole enchilada).
1. People that want to help themselves and their organization.
2. people that want to help themselves and don’t really care about their organization.
3. people that don’t want to help themselves and don’t care about their organization.
Finding the motivators of every single person in your organization is pretty hard but quickly figuring out what buckets people fall into based on the above is fairly easy. Way more scalable. I’d consider bucket 1 your A players, bucket 2 your B players, and bucket 3, your C players. Honor and support A players, try to bring up and drive your B players, and get rid of your C players as quickly as humanly possible.
Thinking through it further, the same is true for organizations: There are 3 types of organizations (Same rules apply, could be a team, unit, department, or whole enchilada).
1. Organizations that care about themselves and care about their people.
2. Organizations that care about themselves and don’t care about their people.
3. Organizations that don’t care about themselves and don’t care about their people.
A people are typically going to find A organizations over time. I like the accountability of creating a culture where you attract and retain the A people by having an A organization. Altruistic, perhaps…but why not, the alternative sucks.
So net net-This is not to suggest that I have all the answers or the master plan to help all loan officers, God only knows I DO NOT, but I’m certainly going to continue to try to identify and help the A & B players of the organization,, including me, and then let the chips fall where they may.
Have a great Sunday.