Once you are tracking the right metrics, The success of any scorecard is limited by the actions you or do not take when you review the numbers. We discussed a few key points in our recent blog: Things your scorecard tells you about your business:
- Developing a mature scorecard is a challenging but worthwhile journey to enable you to take your business to the next level.
- There are three areas to consider when improving metrics: People, Message, and Processes.
This blog is a deeper dive into actions to help develop your people if they aren’t hitting their numbers.
Let’s look at a sales team as a use case to see what actions you can take to help improve your numbers. The goals may vary depending on the experience or ability of the sales reps, but all of the sales team members with the same responsibilities should have the same metrics.
If one team member is not performing, there are three different paths forward. You can:
- Help them level up
- Move them to a different seat
- Move them out of the business.
Helping them level up is the first logical path for a rep trending in the wrong direction. The EOS® GWC™ concept is a great framework to help you determine what is going on:
- Do they get it?
- Do they want it?
- Do they have the capacity to do it?
Getting to the root cause of the problem and a mutual agreement on the action items to take is the key to helping people take the proper corrective action to improve. Let’s look at Get It, Want It, and Capacity to do it as a tool to analyze the possible actions for People.
Get it
Ideal state is that everyone deeply understands of their position and what they need to do to drive the desired results. “Getting it” depends on the person as well as the complexity of the position. As it says in this EOS Blog, if a person does not “Get it,” there is not much you can do.
Want it
People are motivated in many ways, and there are many possible motivational factors at play here, for example:
- Sense of purpose
- Company culture
- Relationship with leaders
- Relationship with co-workers
- Recognition
- Opportunity for growth
- Personal life
- Compensation
Leaders can try to understand what may be the cause here through effective questioning and coaching discussions. Taking the proper corrective action might not be as easy as the “Get it” challenge because some of these items might be beyond the leader’s control. Sometimes people just don’t want it.
Capacity
Capacity is about having the mental, emotional, physical, and time capacity to do the work. The good news with capacity is that sometimes this is solvable, and you can take action to improve capacity. If the issue is time capacity, then the solution is easy: take some things off their plate!
If it is a different issue, then the key to taking appropriate action is to understand the root cause and take appropriate action to develop them. Once you know the root cause, point them to learning resources to help them build their skills. Examples of resources include internal or external training resources, industry, or functional content.
Let’s take a look at an example and look at what you might do if a sales rep is presenting the required number of proposals but is not closing any of them.
Symptom: Sales rep is not hitting their proposal win rate number.
Root Cause: Upon looking at the proposals they are presenting, you realize that the rep is not capturing the client’s specific goals and needs into the proposal. So you explore further with the rep and find that they do not understand the client’s business goals and challenges during the early stages of the sales process.
Corrective action: Point them to some resources to help them to sharpen their questioning and listening skills and continue to help them improve in that area.
Conclusion
When tracking the right metrics on your scorecard, it is a lot easier to take the right action. When it comes to people, the key to improvement is ensuring you get to the root cause of the issue and take corrective action.
