3 Questions You Must Answer to Know if You’re Setting Your Employees Up for Success

If you’ve ever had employees work for you then you’ve likely been in the situation where you have to decide whether or not to let them go for poor job performance. How did you get there? What led that employee to perform poorly? If you’re in a leadership role your job is to set your people up to succeed; to give them what they need to do what you hired them to do.

There are legitimate reasons to fire someone little to no notice. For me that would involve willful or gross negligence, or criminal activity. In those cases the answer is fairly simple – termination is warranted right then. There are other factors, as well, that would rightly lead to ending their employment with you.

But, if you have an employee that is struggling to do what you hired them to do and you are considering letting them go, there are three questions that you must answer before you make that decision:

1.      Did the employee know what was expected of him/her? It seems like a simple question but I have worked with a few clients that had let people go without knowing if the person knew what was expected of them. If your employee doesn’t have a clear understanding of what is expected of them, then how could they know what they were supposed to do?

2.      Was the employee properly trained to perform their duties? There have been many times when I have seen people thrown into a job or a task without adequate, or sometimes any, training to do the job. That seems incredulous in this day and age but it happens more often than you would think. If they haven’t been shown the proper way to do the job, how can you expect them to do it properly?

3.      Does the employee have the right tools to do the job? This is the last question I ask. If they know what is expected of them, and have been properly trained to do the job, were they given the appropriate tools? If the employee’s job is to drive nails into the wall, sending them out with a spoon is of little help. Why weren’t they given a hammer?

Our job as leaders is to set our employees up to succeed. The calculation is simple – our success is dependent upon their success. If you can’t honestly answer ‘YES’ to each of these questions, you have set them up to fail. And in that case, you have failed as a leader, too.

Make sure you can answer each of those questions with a resounding ‘YES’.

For more information about employee engagement, or to see how The Cobalt Group can help you with this or any other business or leadership challenges you are facing, Contact us.

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Copyright © 2018 The Cobalt Group LLC. All rights reserved.

Your Value To Your Customer

Most companies have a value proposition. They have some product(s) or service(s) that they believe will benefit their customers. While this value proposition is a great thing to be able to articulate, it isn’t what your real value to your customer is or should be. The customer, on the other hand, wants to believe that they will see value from those products or services. But is that what they really want? My experience is that the value that they see comes more from how you do business with them rather than the actual product or service you’re providing.

The key is to go beyond a value proposition statement and do what you can to help the customer solve their problems. So how do you do that? To begin with, your value begins by getting to know your customer. Get to know them deeply. Know what they do, why they do it, and how they do it. Know what their strategic plan is; learn what their problems are. Many of the problems you can help solve are based in them getting from where they are to achieving their goals. Knowing those goals and why they are important is key here, and will differentiate you from the competition that doesn’t try to understand them.

To do this you have be in there talking with them. Find out what they are trying to do and why. Be an Excellent Listener. Try to get to know their problems before they become a business opportunity. Help shape the way they want the solution to look. For this to happen it will require an investment of your time so that you can understand what they are trying to solve.

The truth is that what customers really want are partners that can help them solve problems. They have plenty of vendors trying to sell them something. So what this really means is that you must move beyond the transactional sale of a product or service and become a business partner and a trusted agent. If you are able to do that then you will increase Your Value To Your Customer.

We want to hear what you think. Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Copyright © 2015 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

The Hot Wash

Almost every evolution that occurred in my Navy career was hot washed. That is a military term for reviewing the lessons learned. We debriefed every flight, every exercise, and almost every evolution. We looked at what we did right and what we did wrong. It never made us perfect at what we were doing but when those lessons learned were incorporated into the next event, it made for fewer and fewer mistakes. This especially helped in the planning phases.

Since joining the corporate world I have not seen that done very often. In my first job as a sales rep I went to my boss after the first win to see if she wanted a debrief. She asked me if we won and I said yes. Then she asked what there was to debrief. Being new to the corporate world, I guessed that winning meant not needing to review things. I was used to hot washing everything so I figured it was how things were done. After my first loss I went back with the same thing and the response was about the same with the exception of her asking what I would do differently the next time. That was the extent of the hot wash.

In successive jobs I have had much the same experience. Most of these were not small companies but big multi-billion dollar corporations. Even the company that had a process for what I call a hot wash did not enforce it, nor did it ever really even ask for one. I offered to do one and while they did agree to it, I would have thought that they would have been more interested to know why we lost a $30M+ opportunity. So I put the presentation together and gave it. They were grateful and said all the right things, but nothing really changed.

So why should you do a hot wash? That could be a rhetorical question, but worth addressing nonetheless. All of our lives we should learn from our mistakes. We all make them and nothing is perfect. But, if we don’t take a look at what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong we will set ourselves up to possibly repeating the same mistakes again. And in business, those mistakes make us look bad, at best, and can cost a lot of money, at the worst.

Hot washes shouldn’t be finger pointing exercises either. Establish a formal process to review every bid you make. Look at what you did right. Reinforce those actions. Give praise to those responsible for it. Next, look at what you did wrong. Don’t adopt the zero defect mentality over these errors. Figure out what you need to do to keep from doing it again the next time. No phase of any business venture goes perfectly. Some mistakes may not have had any impact this time, but it doesn’t mean that they may not hurt you the next time.

Take the time to establish a process for reviewing your business successes and losses. Be objective and be honest in your critiques. Leave your egos out of it too. That is the only way to get better. And in the long run, doing a hot wash will pay big dividends.

Happy New Year to you all and our wish is for much success for you in 2015!

We want to hear what you think. Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Copyright © 2015 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

The One That Got Away

In the second year of my first sales job with a major IT company I was working the biggest deal I had in my pipeline to that date. 

It was going to be $8.5M over a five year period. The math was easy and even back then it would have been half of my annual quota for the next five years (assuming no yearly increases – yeah, right!). And with a deal that size I had a lot of help from upper management.

I was in tight with the customer. It was a small group and they were all of the decision makers. 

Fairly fresh out of many sales training courses, I applied all of that knowledge to every aspect of my capture plan for that deal. I met with the customer often, and a lot of those were at his request. 

I knew the requirements inside and out and we had a solution that answered it, and then some. The customer verified that our solution was a great fit, too.

Then, as often happens in government sales, the program was put on hold. The customer didn’t know for how long but felt that it was most likely till the end of the government fiscal year. 

I wasn’t too worried. That was 6 months away and I had two things in my favor – the first month of the next government fiscal year was also the last month of my company’s fiscal year so I thought it would be a great close out for that year and, secondly, I had a great pipeline that would take me over my quota if that deal happened to slip even further.

I told that customer that I would check in periodically and asked that if things changed to please let me know as well. 

I called about 3 months later and discovered that only weeks prior they had gotten their money and went with a competitor. I asked why they chose the competition and, in so many words, he told me that my competitor stayed engaged and sold them on their solution. 

I was mad at myself (and so was my management) for making such a rookie mistake – I quit selling!

From then on, I made sure that I never quit selling to any customer, even if a program was cancelled. 

That discipline paid off two years later when I closed the biggest software sale of my career, and the biggest one that company had that year – all because I stayed engaged with a customer that had another competitor’s solution selected and their customer didn’t like it. 

Because I was in contact on a frequent basis even after we weren't selected, they called me back and 19 months later I closed the deal.

As I learned more about the trade of selling I have made many other mistakes since ‘the one that got away’. I learned the hard way that in the field of sales 

– Never Quit Selling!

For more information about how The Cobalt Group can help you with your sales force, or with any business or leadership challenges you are facing, Contact us.

We want to hear what you think. Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Copyright © 2013 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.