WE NEED TO START WORKING HARDER

Today I was talking to a Field Sales Manager I know and we were discussing his sales reps. He was not completely satisfied with their performance but wasn’t exactly unhappy either. He was telling me about each of his reps and what he thought of them. One by one he told me about how this one prospects, another one closes and another probes. He gave me a pretty good insight to each rep and what he felt their greatest strengths are and their greatest weakness. He ended the talk about his reps with a statement that I have come to absolutely hate. He said that with all their faults his reps all worked Smart!

These words were as bad as running your fingernails over a blackboard to me. I cringed and shut my eyes trying not to explode. My friend saw my reaction and asked me what was wrong. I said to him in as mocking a voice as I could, “Don’t tell me, your reps work smarter not harder, right?” He glared at me, I actually thought for a second he was going to take a swing at me. He snapped back, “That’s right, they DO work SMARTER not HARDER, what’s the problem with that?”

Anyone think they know what I said?

Well here is what I said, “The problem is if your reps aren’t performing to the levels you want them to and EXPECT them to then maybe they should dumb down and work harder!”

My take on this entire WORK SMART NOT HARD is that it doesn’t matter how smart you work without effort nothing happens! A rep needs to be smart in today’s sales field. Our competition is getting smarter so we need to at the very least keep pace. But along with working smart, we need to work hard. Here is where we can leave the competition behind. While the competition is focusing on smart, we can shift some of our focus too HARD and do more for the customer than anyone else is doing. SERVICE and VALUE are what makes sales. It takes hard work to out-service a competitor and your service will be viewed as VALUE!

The saying you have to work smarter not harder is a great saying, and I can remember when it actually was a true saying, but today it doesn’t hold water anymore. What it does is breed a sales force that is lazy, a sales force that tries to take short cuts, and a sales force that stops putting the customer first!

The great Vince Lombardi once made a speech about winning. The following is an excerpt from that speech;

"Every time a football player goes to play his trade he's got to play from the ground up — from the soles of his feet right up to his head. Every inch of him has to play. Some guys play with their heads. That's O.K. You've got to be smart to be number one in any business. But more importantly, you've got to play with your heart, with every fiber of your body.”

As my friend and I finished our “chat” I could tell he wasn’t real happy with me, but I could also tell he understood what I was saying. As a matter of fact, I think the reason he was upset with me is he knew I made a good point. He knew that he was one of the causes of his reps not being on top of their games. He knew that I just created a lot of work for him and that if he wanted to have his team on the top of the company sales lists, he needed to make some drastic changes.

If you have been focusing on working smarter not harder, maybe you need to take another look at your strategy and make some changes that will help you work a LOT harder AND a little smarter.

Lorin