“But wait!” as he pushes his foot between the door and the frame so the couple can’t shut the door.
It’s a funny image but it does give the best example of what the foot in the door method can be like (albeit an extreme one). Recently I’ve been tasked with getting a certain metric to increase across all our locations nationwide. To give you an idea, our teams have generally anywhere from 7 to 10 metrics they push on monthly; focusing on an additional task isn’t the easiest for them to do.
Don’t get me wrong, coming from a sales background and having years of experience in this industry, the metrics we are tasked with are not hard or difficult to attain. We make it difficult to attain though.
There are a number of reasons our teams have trouble attaining their metrics:
- Staffing
- Goal setting
- Development (training)
- Coaching
- Resources
- and the list goes on
But as any of us in the sales field know, these are just excuses. They are excuses masking the underlying reasons. As Charles Duhigg mentions in his book The Power of Habit
- If you’re wondering, yes I like the book and definitely would recommend it to everyone, especially if you are interested in understanding your own habits. –
I bring up these reasons because of the calls I just finished this week. I spoke with all the directors of our markets and their district managers to see how everything is going, to find out any hurdles they are having, share best practices from other markets, get input from vendors who support our teams. There is a stark difference in what those who are leading the charge are doing in their day to day operations and those who are falling behind are doing. In one of the calls I had to jump in and cut the excuses right away. I could understand if this was an initiative we rolled out with a couple of weeks ago, but we’re going onto the 3rd month now.
No time for excuses!
I generally try to avoid doing this because I want to take in what the field is saying and get to the underlying reasons. I prefer the leadership focus on the actions their teams are doing to get ahead instead of focusing on why they can’t get ahead. Just as in life, nothing will be perfect, but we have to keep working at it.
To give you an idea of how “difficult” the new metric is… about 80% of the metric is based (and identical) to a metric our team does 90% of the time. THIS SHOULD NOT BE HARD! But we make it hard! Our team has built this huge obstacle when in fact it’s not that big to overcome, if even there. By noticing the language the field leadership is using I can see a couple of items that need to be addressed:
- Development
- Coaching
In that order as well (well not really, but sometimes its fun to have some kind of order). When I cut off the district manager to nip his issues in the bud, I used the example of our team knows 80% of what to do, stop taking/making excuses. The leaves in this case are that our team doesn’t know or feel comfortable approaching this metric. The reality is they haven’t been developed to look at the metric with perspective!
The second part is the coaching. Since they haven’t been developed properly with their training, they need to be coached properly. But from what I see, the leadership is lacking in how to coach their teams. I personally see this as the main issue, but I understand how the issue persists in the company’s culture. There has always been a great emphasis on wanting to change our training and development, but there has been no execution.
The root cause of what’s happening currently is there is our leadership isn’t versed on how to coach their teams properly to see results. Not just any results, but ever lasting results that become habit and stick!
This is where I come in. Part of what I am doing is pushing the fold to create a platform that will change not just how we attain this metric, but how we train our teams across the board nationwide. I’m wanting this to be one of many changes that occur throughout the company as we could easily see an increase of moral, employment retention, growth, revenue and all the fun stuff!
One my projects is introducing material that will help our teams attain knowledge to make them comfortable when approaching guests on this new metric, but really it’s just a foot in the door technique that will introduce the real material I will be moving forward with that will attack the root cause instead of the leaves: coaching!
Join me on my journey as I help push to make our company the next Enterprise of our industry ;).