Activity vs. Outcome in Business
Feb. 2nd, 2021 03:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalker"Are you creating activity or achieving outcomes?" That's an important business question my department head taught me the language for a few years ago.
The issue at the time was our sales team was falling well short of its revenue goal; yet we were very busy. We had plenty of prospective customers we were talking to; we had plenty of meetings and demos; and we were tying up solutions architects on my part of the team with proof-of-concept (POC) engagements. We were doing so much activity, so where were the results?
In sales you can look backward from the result— a completed sale— and see a fairly repeatable sequence of stages to the process. 1) Get a lead. 2) Qualify that there's interest in the product. 3) Demo the product. 4) Go through a POC (usually). 5) Negotiate price & terms of purchase. 6) Sale!
What trips people up in applying this model is that you can't just push every prospective customer through the process and expect a sale to come out the end. Offering a demo to every prospect will not make them more willing to spend money buying the product. Delivering POCs will not convince people to buy if they haven't determined there's a significant problem our product solves and funding that can be allocated to buy it.
In sales a sales person has got to qualify for these things. Qualify, qualify, qualify! But qualification is harder to measure than activity. Activity looks good on paper. It rolls up naturally as KPIs. Look at all these meetings we've had! So many demos! We ran POCs, too! Weak sales people— and weak sales managers— get misled by busy activity reports into thinking they making real progress toward results. They're not. They're just getting activity for activity's sake.
The issue at the time was our sales team was falling well short of its revenue goal; yet we were very busy. We had plenty of prospective customers we were talking to; we had plenty of meetings and demos; and we were tying up solutions architects on my part of the team with proof-of-concept (POC) engagements. We were doing so much activity, so where were the results?
In sales you can look backward from the result— a completed sale— and see a fairly repeatable sequence of stages to the process. 1) Get a lead. 2) Qualify that there's interest in the product. 3) Demo the product. 4) Go through a POC (usually). 5) Negotiate price & terms of purchase. 6) Sale!
What trips people up in applying this model is that you can't just push every prospective customer through the process and expect a sale to come out the end. Offering a demo to every prospect will not make them more willing to spend money buying the product. Delivering POCs will not convince people to buy if they haven't determined there's a significant problem our product solves and funding that can be allocated to buy it.
In sales a sales person has got to qualify for these things. Qualify, qualify, qualify! But qualification is harder to measure than activity. Activity looks good on paper. It rolls up naturally as KPIs. Look at all these meetings we've had! So many demos! We ran POCs, too! Weak sales people— and weak sales managers— get misled by busy activity reports into thinking they making real progress toward results. They're not. They're just getting activity for activity's sake.
