If your business is any more complex than a lemonade stand, it’s likely that you do not need (and should not have) a unified, organization-wide workflow. But what you should have are unified inboxes within each department.
In order to be productive, we do NOT want members of a team to be busy, we want them to be responsive.
Dashboards are all the rage right now. Senior executives, in particular, love the site of a huge monitor, busting with enough colorful charts to put NASA Mission Control to shame. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about. But I’m concerned that this kind of display is in danger of giving dashboards a bad… “The incredible power of a single number, carefully selected”
Sales is not about personal relationships Salespeople (and other folks who should know better) accept it as a given that sales is all about personal relationships. The problem with this position is that: It’s not generally true. It’s a default assumption that informs the design of most sales environments. However, because it sounds reasonable enough,… “Mistruths, salespeople’s personal relationships and crashing the schedule”
A common problem our silent revolutionaries face is that they don’t know how to calculate if their new (or reengineered) sales functions are making them money. A worse problem is that they think they know but end up massively under-estimating their performance. Consider this scenario. It’s the end of your calendar year. This year, you started work building a… “You are probably making a lot more money than you realize!”
You know, there are two types of people in the world. Those who tolerate complexity, in pursuit of simplicity. And those who revel in complexity, having long forgotten what it is that they’re actually pursuing. I write this a little exhausted, after spending countless hours debating technology, terminology, definitions and process with a parade of… “A simple growth formula (for folks who’re tired of needless complexity)”
Real-time feedback enables miraculous feats! Imagine standing on an overpass watching the traffic on a freeway below. It’s amazing more accidents don’t occur when you consider the number of cars being piloted, at high speed, in such close proximity to one another. Imagine the same scene again without real-time feedback. Imagine you could pull a… “The miracle of real-time feedback: an introduction to Nsyteful”
I’ve noticed an interesting trend. I’m seeing organizations starting to celebrate the fact that they’re implementing SPE—inside the organization, and even outside! I’m thinking, maybe the popularity of The Machine is empowering executives to be a little bolder. Or maybe we’re just doing a better job of selling the end-state. Either way, it’s a nice trend.… “Celebrating SPE”
An introduction to unit economics (and to a drunk and his car keys) This business is growing at a predictable 20% per year, but you can’t see that from the chart of top-line revenues below. You can’t see this growth if you look at a profit-and-loss report or a cashflow analysis either. Consequently, the board… “This business is growing at a predictable 20% per year. So why does the board want to shut-down its growth engine?”
Sales meetings, properly run, have a tremendous impact on sales performance. But most sales managers are reluctant to run them and, when they do, they run them in precisely the wrong fashion because of a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept of motivation. Why run a sales meeting? We should touch on why before we get… “How to run a sales meeting”
