Do more with less! Any company, any department, any day… that seems to be the universal mandate. Just about every business seems to be in corner cutting mode.
This may look good to analysts and investors, but there’s a trap.
Keep cutting and cutting away at the corners and soon enough, you hit the heart of your company. Everything that makes your people effective.
What makes people effective?
Effectiveness, as this blog on Salesforce.com points out, refers to how successfully you do your job.
The concept began to come to the fore almost 50 years ago, when Peter Drucker published The Effective Executive.
The book stresses that effectiveness can be learned. In managing your time and yourself, you focus on results. You look at what needs to be done, write an action plan and do it.
Not so oddly enough, you get the same direction in sales training. Executives and salespeople both need to be productive self-starters.
The challenge of efficiency.
While we’re trying to be effective, economic and shareholder pressures of the past couple of decades have moved the focus to efficiency. How much can we do how fast?
This has led to fewer checks and balances. Weaker support.
You can build a system to efficiently track customer communications through Salesforce. But the system fails when salespeople move too quickly and neglect to schedule a follow-up.
Efficiency’s price is often effectiveness.
We’re all executives now.
Drucker’s book originally focused on top management. People who made decisions.
Now, everybody makes decisions. Everybody has to be The Effective Executive.
The effective salesperson is out there selling and closing deals. But they have to do it without the support that executives in Drucker’s era had.
They’re doing a data entry clerk’s job on their CRM when they could be selling.
Budgets are too tight to give salespeople assistants, but you can give them Rollio. The app uses artificial intelligence to fill salesforce.com fields from the rep’s verbal or texted instructions.
With Rollio, you combine an effective, CRM-using, deal-making salesforce with an efficient process for getting work done.
Click here for a demo.
COMMENTS