Lessons from our Sales team’s Jan Success

So this is what happened

In the month of Jan, our Sales team achieved 150% & more across all of their goals. What was particularly exciting was the goal of Annual Recurring Revenue(ARR). However, this wasn’t the case for the past few months. The earlier months were testing times for the Sales team, as their experiments & efforts weren’t showing results as expected & were disappointing. But come January, the whole story was quite opposite. How did that happen?

More importantly what are the life lessons’ I learnt by witnessing this.

Note: These are just my personal thoughts & observations.

1. Approach your problem at hand from the First Principles

At this phase of our company’s journey, Growth is really critical. And of course, Sales plays an important role in it. What has been interesting to see is the approach we have taken to our competition, to understand our USP, to understand our strengths, to discover our story. It’s easy to succumb to pressure and copy a model that is proven forgetting one’s unique strengths.

Every time, we have faced a roadblock, our approach has always been to approach the problem from first principles. Of the many choices we made, I want to mention one here. Choosing against adding more Account Executives that seemed popular. And we chose to rather first focus on more fundamentals like understanding the real problem, understanding where the process was broken and understanding where our strengths & weaknesses lie. This observation was very fascinating for me.

Personally, I feel I have to still learn a lot about this approach of first principles but I truly believe that this is the way. In life, we are always in hurry & settle with that path that is easy, however, unless you approach your problem it in this way, you will be lost or should settle for something less than what you actually deserve. And it’s not easy, as we have been conditioned since birth against this process so don’t worry, you are not alone but understand that the magic happens if you take this approach.

2. Get clarity, Set the process & Stick to it

This I think is the very important step & the main reason why many of us don’t succeed in what we set out as a goal. Many of us after getting clarity about the steps to achieve our goal, don’t follow it for long enough time to see the results to manifest. We expect results to show immediately, and when that doesn’t happen we give up on the process we set. And we’ll be back to square one worrying that things are not moving as planned.

Our sales team clearly knew that they are trying a few experiments & that they would take time to get reflected, and yet they stuck to their fundamentals & processes all this while.

Once it is known what needs to be done, after approaching the problem from fundamentals, there shouldn’t be much doubt, and the focus should be on action. However, many of us succumb to laziness or distractions or indiscipline & lack that commitment. We ought to realise that if not today, one day soon things have to fall in place. It is just logical. There is no other way around.

I realise that keeping the motivations up is difficult when the end result is not in sight, and on the contrary, we need to keep up the same effort.

And, that’s where the next step helps.

3. Make goals, sub-goals, processes to achieve them also as measurable as possible.

Sales, as such that way, has an advantage by its very virtue where its goals are metric driven. However, my learning has been that even the sub goals or processes around should also be been broken down to measurable & improvable metrics. As the famous quote goes, “ the one that can’t be measured, can’t be improved”. It is critical, to keep one’s motivations & to keep our internal compass in the right direction all the time to succeed in achieving big goals. As much as it is critical, it is difficult too. And unless we measure & continuously improve our smallest, everyday efforts towards that goal, the goal will remain impossible. In times of despair, in times of doubt, in times of anxiousness & anger, these numbers that reflect your effort alone can pick you up and give that confidence to move into another day with your head high.

It’s not easy to put metrics in our day-to-day activities which are not as clear as sales goals. But they are surely doable with a certain amount of effort & thought. I shall write another blog around my personal experiments with it, in a few months time.

4. How to respond? When the result is not as expected, when doubts arise, from within & outside.

Be objective & unbiased, be open to the new ideas or suggestions you haven’t explored. While ignoring the ideas or suggestions that are not apt, without getting too emotional. What was very interesting for me, was to observe in the last few months, that the non-sales team members like me, who weren’t closely part of the internal Sales team processes etc, could only notice the goals not being achieved. And as Sales goals are number driven, it was clear & evident when things weren’t going well.

And I clearly remember about myself giving certain suggestions & asking a few critical questions to the Sales team at different points of time. When I look back at the way they were responded, I felt there was a great lesson to understand & share.

In life, when we are down, society be it our well-wisher like our parents, siblings, friends or enemies etc, who are not aware of our entire process or entire journey or the entire story, would surely make judgements based on the outcomes. And based on those outcomes, they do give us some suggestions. Before this incident, I would have responded to these kinds of suggestions mostly with anger. However, now as I understand how beautifully these could be responded to.

I observed that the Sales team used to listen & was open to our suggestions unbiasedly & objectively. Many of the suggestions we gave were already being implemented. Due to the long Sales cycles, they were taking time to show results. Yet they heard to these suggestions with humility. To the suggestions that were not apt or suitable for our market or our product, they responded with reason. To the suggestions which they themselves didn’t explore, they were candid to accept them & were ready to work on them.

Whatever goals or process or steps we set out initially may not be foolproof. Also, many things around us change, which force us to change our strategy or approach. Be alert from within, before the external world points out. At the same time, be objective & unbiased when others give their piece of advice.

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For me, 2019, is about getting more clarity on my life’s goals & aspirations. My mind has a crazy amount of interests that range from education to public service to entrepreneurship to women empowerment to people operations to parenting to arts to ….the list goes on. Getting some direction would be a lot helpful I realise. And I hope by the end of this year, I would have some answers if I stick to the above process.