Accelerating Business Growth

Monday, September 25, 2006

“Are you catching your team and yourself doing it RIGHT or doing it wrong?”

A thought provoking question isn’t it!

Are you catching your team, yourself and the people close to you doing it right or are you catching them doing it wrong?

When I’m speaking at conferences or running a Pti workshop I use the following example in order to demonstrate this point:

I turn to one of the delegates who I know has a sales team – and say the following:

“Imagine it’s Monday and one of your team phones you up at 4.30 in the afternoon. As you answer the phone you can sense the excitement in their voice – you know the voice – the one which comes out when they have good news for you.

With enthusiasm they launch into telling you how they’ve been to two meetings today and have landed two new customers. A great result – particularly considering they’ve not converted any new clients for over a month!

What do you say?

The delegate looks at me and says, “Well I’d probably congratulate them and say well done, or something to that affect!”

“Ok” is my response. “Now let’s imagine its Thursday that week. The same sales person has been on two new appointments. It’s 5.00 and you’ve not heard from them, so you decide to give them a call. The phone rings a few times – they pick up and you hear their tones – definitely not the same enthusiastic voice as on Monday! You ask how their day has gone.”

“They reply, Well alright I guess”.

“You follow with How were the two appointments today?”

“Well, (it’s a great word well isn’t it!) they weren’t very good.”

“What do you say?”

“Well I would ask them why not?”

“The first one was not interested and the second one only gave me 10 minutes with them”

“What do you say next?”

“I’d ask them why they were not interested.”

“How do they know?”

“How far into the meeting did they detect that?”

“What did they do about it?”

I’m sure you’re picking up the thread of where I’m going with this.

Are you catching your people doing it right or doing it wrong?

On the Monday after converting two new clients they’re given a token well done, and on the Thursday when they’ve not converted any new clients the post mortem begins!


Are you catching your people doing it right or doing it wrong?

Let’s run a different scenario on the Monday call.

The sales person has just told you about their success. You congratulate them, and then start to ask some thought provoking questions:

“So, tell me why do you think it went so well?”

“What can you learn from today which you can build into your personal success formula?”

“How are you going to replicate this next time?”

“Tell me how are you feeling right now?”

All the time praising and giving words of encouragement as they answer your questions – future pacing their success and encouraging them to think what a difference it will would make if they could replicate their successes today - again. Anchoring and wiring their successes so it becomes consistently who they are!


Catch them doing it right!

Perhaps the Thursday call could have ran the course of a coaching session – anchoring back to successes experienced earlier in the week – exploring possibilities of what was different to the positive outcomes achieved on Monday. What could they do next time to make sure their next two appointments are more like the Monday experience than the Thursday?


Catch them doing it right!

And the same principle applies to us. We get so caught up working ‘in’ our busy lives, thinking about all the things we still have to do as opposed to the great things you’ve achieved during the course of the day. Catch yourself doing it right as well!

Sometimes if I catch myself running negative thoughts or programmes at the end of a day, I simply write a heading on the top of the right hand page in my daytimer saying:

“Today’s Achievements”

I then make a list of all the days’ achievements. Somehow my ‘To Do List’ never seems quite so bad once I’ve done this.

Perhaps you can try it some time!

Catch your team and yourself doing it right. Life is so much more fun when we’re in a positive zone and… your people will thank you for it!

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