I’m sure you laughed when you read that. Heck, I laughed when I wrote it.

Think back to the end of 2019. There you are in a conference room or your office (remember those?) reviewing historic sales figures, thinking through your marketing plans designed to help generate leads and customer demand and then crafting the perfect set of sales goals for your team. A thing of beauty.

Ah… the good old days.

And then BAM!

Three months later the floor drops out from under your sales team and all those PowerPoint slides you prepared for the C-Suite are now just bird cage carpeting.

What do you do now?

Hold people to goals established during the PC time (pre-Covid?)

Update the sales goals to reflect the impact the pandemic has had on the economy? If you know what that would look like send me a note – I’d like to share that with the world because you’d be the ONLY one with that insight right now.

Every day is different, new.

Did I say different?

In other words, you really can’t forecast anything with any accuracy or precision right now.

But you need to do something. Sitting and waiting is what victims do.

Don’t be a victim.

Be a victor!

Focus on Systems of Success Not Measures of Success

The book Atomic Habits is worth your time. It is more apropos today than ever because it focuses on the building habits that feed a SYSTEM of success, helping you adjust and adapt as things change. Sound like something you should have in place right now?

You bet. And you still can.

The author does a newsletter that highlights principles of Atomic Habits and in his most recent newsletter he wrote something so obvious I smacked my head like Homer Simpson and actually said “D’oh!”

The author stated:

Winners and losers have the same goals.

Think about it.

Your counterpart at ACME Competition sat in a similar room as you did at the end of 2019 and went through the same process, built the same PowerPoint and presented similar information as you did to their board.

And they are now in the same boat as you.

But the person that identified the system that leads to success, the steps, the little “to-dos” done every day that build to success is probably stealing a few (a lot) sales from you every day.

And if they have an influence, incentive and reward program that focuses their sales team or their channel partners on those steps to success they are turbo-charging their outcomes.

Success metrics today are not the success metrics of yesterday.

But I’m confident that many (if not all) of the steps needed to achieve success are similar.

  1. Identify the steps.
  2. Motivate people to do the steps.
  3. Revel in the success that brings.

Need help targeting your audience with a bespoke program that focuses your critical audiences on the important steps… I’m Paul Hebert … and I’m listening.