Every season, sports professionals state with supreme confidence that they will be the champions by the end of their respective seasons. Of course, there can be only one champion. No way around it.
Pundits will forever analyze and evaluate what produced the winning team. They will weigh the merits of savvy owners, smart managers, tough coaches, and great players. They will rarely talk about the most important ingredient for success—confidence. Confidence on the part of the executives who set the team in motion; confidence on the part of the coaches who believe in their team’s ability to win; most critical of all, confidence the players have in their skills to get out on the field and produce a winning season.
Like sports, business also needs the right combination of planning, management direction, resources, and allocation of key personnel to implement and execute at the highest possible level.
Business success also requires the highest degree of confidence to accomplish the primary objective of winning over customers.
Getting to the top
Want to get to or remain on top? Of course you do. Let’s look at the critical elements necessary to win new customers or sway your competitors’ customers over to your company to gain market share. A sports analogy will hopefully make this topic more relevant. After all, we all know what it feels like to be successful in a sport. It’s exhilarating to be the winner—in sports as well as in business.
“Team PLUS” generates confidence
To achieve your goals and gain market share, apply the Team PLUS concept…
• Professionals in sales, management and staff
• Long range planning and execution
• Underlying reputation for quality customer service
• Savvy ownership with passion for the game
The sales team or business development team cannot do it alone. It needs all the support it can get from the entire organization. The combination of elements creates the confidence needed to win the game and gain market share.
To be successful each and every time you play the game, your entire company must have Team PLUS in perfect alignment. Every player must be headed in the same direction and be operating with the same goals.
The essence of Team PLUS
In addition to these core elements, team members must have a real passion for the game—regardless of their job position. There are too many organizations whose players get suited up every morning and go through the motions throughout the day. They don’t enjoy what they are doing and they ultimately don’t care what happens to the customers or to the organization.
You have seen this for yourself when walking into a construction rental or building supply store where no one greets you or for that matter, even looks your way. Clearly, the store’s staff does not care if you move on to the next place and become someone else’s customer.
Evaluating the key players in sales
The coaches and players are ultimately responsible for successfully executing and implementing the team’s vision and strategic plans.
The biggest worry (resulting in many sleepless nights) for owners and upper management is determining which coaches and players they need to fill the right positions to bring home the trophy. Many team owners have great vision and plans, but lack experienced coaches and skilled players necessary to get the job done.
In business, our challenges are not unlike those of any sports team. We need to make sure we have management that has the skill sets required to execute and implement the company’s vision and plans to gain marketshare.
Determining strengths and weaknesses
Owners and upper managers need to determine their organization’s strengths and weaknesses at every level. Do they have coaches that share their philosophies on commitment, preparation, and winning?
Is there is a weak link in the coaching staff? Can a specific coach be trained to achieve to reach the level of the others?
Management must also continually evaluate their professional sales team to determine the players inherent weaknesses and strengths. Each team member makes a unique contribution. Does it enhance the team? Which players need to be replaced (or repositioned) to build a stronger team that can win over new customers?
In evaluating players, managers need to determine which players best fit which positions. Where are they strongest and where do they need the most improvement? To paraphrase an old saying, a team is only as strong as its weakest player. Ongoing effort is necessary to reassess the team and ensure there are no weak links within the organization. You can’t afford to have even one single player who is not dedicated to playing the game to win and helping you to gain market share.
Team PLUS—Point #1
A great example of how the evaluation process works is apparent in the Stanford University football team of 2010/2011. Five years ago, their record was 1-12. After hiring a new head coach and support staff, they began recruiting key players to fill their weak spots.
The result was steady improvement until this season when they went 12-1 and won the 2011 Orange Bowl. They had a complete reversal from failure to success in just five years. The upper management, new coaches and players were all focused on the same goal—become a national winning football program. And they did just that.
Keeping the process going to gain market share
Many times, company owners will become stagnant in evaluating their management team and professional sales staff. In sports, instant results on your field performance are quantified by your team’s record of winning and losing. In the sales world, especially with the goal of actively going out and capturing your competitor’s customers, success is often measured in months or years. How do you know, when results take so long to achieve if your management and sales team are doing an effective job?
For some businesses, a response cycle is shorter than for others.
For example, a retailer can dramatically increase store traffic with creative advertising and in-store promotions. They can turn shoppers into buyers faster than an organization that sells business to business.
Setting milestones to measure success
Nevertheless, all businesses need to set milestones (targeted success goals) with specific time frames to help measure the progress of techniques being used to gain market share. You simply cannot wait, in today’s market, for one more dinner meeting or the tenth proposal to know if the prospect is going to become a customer. Management ownership needs to take a tougher stance and make sure the sales team knows that the time for conversion is now…not in two years.
As you begin to close in on winning new customers, successfully converting your competitors’ customers to your company to gain market share, what was once a blurred vision will become a better-defined picture.
When you look back, you will see the path your organization took was full of unplanned twists and turns. Re-evaluate what has been achieved within specific incremental phases. Honestly look at where you are going and determine if success is still realistic.
Find out what has worked and what has failed, who has progressed, and who continues to lag behind. Adapt your plans and strategies to fit the latest information available. In sports, teams make necessary changes to their game plans during half time. Make your necessary changes during milestone reviews. This will ensure that the effort given by everyone in the company stays productive and focused.
Team PLUS—Point #2
The University of Connecticut’s Women’s Basketball team broke a record that no one thought was possible. They successfully won 89 straight games to break the record held by UCLA Basketball Coach John Wooden from decades earlier. How do you win 89 straight games when you have not had the same players throughout that entire streak? It simply comes down to a great coach who made sure he replaced the players who left with ones of equal or greater talent. He found players that had the same commitment to win, comparable philosophy, and the desire to keep improving their skills and talent. Do you feel your company has demonstrated this level of commitment to ensuring you have the best sales team on the field?
Developing the strategy for long range vision, planning, and execution
Vision, planning, and execution are the foundation for a successful long-term business plan. The major direction for corporate vision and planning will come from ownership and upper management. Based on markets, current finances, and the economy, the owners/management will define the framework for the company’s future. Management will also contribute their input to vision and planning, with their focus more on fine tuning the planning to fit their current and future desires for gaining market share and increasing profitability.
Clarifying the vision
Sometimes, the proposed vision does not work. Just look at the losing NFL football teams that have hired the best college coaches.
There have been a few like Bill Walsh, moving from Stanford to the San Francisco 49rs who achieved success at both levels. But the majority of the college coaches who have moved to the NFL have eventually been fired or left—most going back to college football.
The vision sounds right. Get a high-impact college coach who has won a College National Championship; he should make a great NFL coach, right? All too often, the answer is no. There is too much of a gap between college and pro ball.
A college team is made up of students who don’t get paid directly and are still trying to make a name for themselves in order to advance to the next level. Coaches at the college level are mentors, teaching young athletes to become better in the sport and grow as a person.
Professional football teams have high paid, top performing college athletes who are hand-picked to play for the team that drafts them. Being a coach of professional athletes (all of whom have their own agents) changes from mentor and teacher to leader and boss.
Professional coaching is the antithesis of college coaching and takes a special personality. Many college coaches simply cannot adjust to this new environment and their chance for success diminishes rapidly.
Executing a great game to gain market share
One hears a great deal about the execution of the overall game plan and success an individual plays in sports, especially football. If a player, after the game, comments that the team executed well, they usually won the game. If they talk about poor execution, they typically lost.
Good or bad execution makes or breaks the game. In business, it is not as obvious because there is no “game day” and there is a lag between selling effort and customer response. While the corporate team may believe that it did well in executing the plan, the truth only comes out with the customer’s feedback. In winning new customers and gaining marketshare, there will be many stages of execution over an extended period of time. This is where establishing and evaluating performance at milestones becomes so important in accurately defining success.
Determining the outcome
In sports, when the team does well, it scores on the play and eventually wins the game. In business, there is no reliable instant feedback to determine how well the effort was made. Many times, sales professionals will come away from a presentation feeling they could have done much better. They think they lost the business. Later, the customer tells them they did a great job and the business is secure.
Conversely, there are those who think they did well only to find out that the customer chose another supplier. In fact, it is tough to read a customer, no matter how seasoned or experienced the sales person might be.
Fine-tuning the execution strategy is critical to capturing your competitors’ customers, while keeping your own. Make sure you prepare well, know your vision and plan, and clearly communicate your strategy for success with your team.
Quality customer service ensures customer retention
Behind every successful sports team, there is a support staff to keep the organization running at optimum capacity. There are people in the front office, public relations, equipment management, medical support, event planning, travel arranging, among others. Without this support, teams would not be able to operate successfully.
Team Plus—Point #3
The most visible support staff in sports is a pit crew at a NASCAR race. They literally make the difference between winning and losing. For example, in the current NASCAR season, Jimmy Johnson was in an unusual position in the last half of the season.
He was not the leader of the points race; he was chasing the field. In the last half of the season, he changed pit crews and steadily worked his way back up. In the final race of the season, he won his 5th straight NASCAR Championship. Yes, Jimmy Johnson is a great driver, but he needed the right pit crew to ensure he had the fastest stops and least time lost.
In business, we also have many support people who make sure the business runs well. The most visible (and I would venture to say the most important) is the Customer Service area. It provides direct support and service to customers to help win over new customers but also keep the ones you have.
They are the internal sales team that has direct contact with every customer. Some companies have invested years to gain market share and win-over a competitors’ customer. In a short period of time, they can lose those customers as a result of poor, unresponsive customer service.
In the sports world, direct support teams show their value week by week. In the business world, we may go a year before we know we have a customer service problem. Until we have a stack of complaints or an exodus of major customers, we may be completely unaware. So how do we ensure that we can keep a closer watch on Customer Service?
Keeping tabs on customer service
First, the Customer Service staff must internalize the strategic plan (vision, planning, and execution) that has been established throughout the company. Since they are the internal sales side of the organization, they need to be joined at the hip to the Sales Department. To ensure this continuity, they should ideally report to the sales management team.
For example, what if the NASCAR pit crew did not report directly to the driver and pit crew boss? One might hear, “It’s not my fault it took 20 seconds longer on that pit stop. I’m not responsible for making sure all the tires and gas are ready to go when the driver comes in.” In other words, “you’re not the boss of me.”
Therefore, the reporting system must be very clear. Sales must oversee all aspects of customer service and be able to make any necessary changes to ensure the best possible customer care and gain market share.
All customers are created equal
Ensure your Customer Service treats every customer as though they were just won-over from a major competitor. Your level of customer service should never change because of who a customer is. Large, small, new, old…it should always be the same. You never know when a small customer will become a bigger customer or what influence the customer has on others. Be fair and be consistent.
To ensure the highest level of service, document every complaint. Hold weekly Customer Service meetings to talk about how to better serve customers and be proactive in preventing complaints. Document the plan of action to correct any problems or miscommunications that exist. These issues need to be resolved—if not immediately, in the very near future.
Always end sales or business development team and Customer Service meetings with a pep talk. The staff needs to know that you realize how hard their jobs are and that they are appreciated for what they do. One good word will reap rewards.
The dynamics of customer retention
Ask yourself these questions: Are you losing any customers due to incorrect practices or attitudes within Customer Service? Are there any disconnects between the Professional Sales Team and Customer Service?
Establish a Quality Control Program for Customer Service and create easy, clear-cut guidelines to follow. Clarify the role each team member must play and the performance level expected. This is an ideal time to bring in a trainer to help establish guidelines for excellent service. Often, management is too close to the situation and may balk at some necessary customer service changes, especially if the changes involve a time-honored tradition or spending additional money. Hear from the expert what is needed and what should be implemented. The sooner you improve customer service, the better equipped your team will be to retain current customers, win new customers, and gain marketshare.
Savvy Ownership and Management with passion for the game
In an organization where staff is eager to perform, there is undoubtedly a top-notch management/ownership team that knows how to plan and execute the company mission and has maintained a passion for the business at hand.
There is a trickle-down effect when the ownership and upper management reinforce all aspects of the company’s strategy and implementation. Those companies where there is a winning attitude, unconditional support, and a financial commitment to add resources as they are needed will move to the top of the game list.
In the NFL, the winning teams in the Super Bowl are those whose ownership and upper management motivate and train the coaches and players to perform at their optimum levels. More importantly, they let their coaches and players do their jobs—without unnecessary interference. Even if they are “Type-A” personalities (and many are), the owners stay in the background.
The rule of “no interference”
We all know owners who are very hands-on—in the media almost every day and on the sidelines during games. In essence, this ”micromanaging” can “unbalance” the coaches and players. It can also diminish the authority of the head coach and cause players to work to please the owner, not the coach—often with devastating consequences.
In business, it’s the same. If owners and upper management “micromanage” their organization, it will lead to confusion and diminish the authority the management team and their players have in implementing the company’s business plan. This confusion can cause mixed signals—jeopardizing the key strategic plans, including capturing your competitor’s customers and keeping your own.
Ownership and upper management always want to hire the best people for their management and professional sales positions. These people need to be allowed the opportunity to do their jobs.
Passion overcome obstacles
Drive and passion are the fuels that light the flames in any successful venture. No one has trekked across South America or climbed Everest without an abiding passion for the effort.
It is the passion for the game that brings on the winners. It motivates, stimulates, and drives others around them. It lays the groundwork for the positive attitude that is essential for going forward with confidence.
Having a vision (or dream if you will) and implementing the plan takes the strength of a positive attitude and almost ensures success. It is what keeps someone going even if the odds are against him or her—to survive even when the circumstances are dire. It helps filter out the negative thoughts that make people feel inadequate or incapable of achieving their goals.
Passion begets a positive attitude
Passion is vital to winning new customers and capturing our competitors’ customers. It is the engine that never stops moving you forward no matter how great the challenges you face. Passion gets you back up the hill when you experience a valley of disappointment. Passion helps drive you to overcome any odds when others swear that you have little hope of succeeding. Passion is the insatiable fuel that keeps you moving forward in the right direction no matter what roadblock comes your way.
Passion cannot be purchased or attained by reading a book or an article. It is an inner drive that is ignited deep within us, proving we believe as much in our mission as we do in ourselves. Passion is the one intangible that drives individuals to succeed.
Team PLUS—Point #4
In a recent NFL season, the wild card game between the New Orleans Saints playing at the Seattle Seahawks was the epitome of positive attitude and passion. The New Orleans Saints were the defending Super Bowl Champions. Their 11-5 record made them the wild card team behind the Atlanta Falcons who won the South Division of the NFC. The Seattle Seahawks won the West Division of the NFC with a record of 7-9, the worst record of any wild card team in NFL playoff history. Because Seattle won their division, the game was played in Seattle.
New Orleans was an 11 point favorite, even though the game was played in Seattle. No one gave Seattle a chance of beating the reigning Super Bowl champs. In the end, Seattle won the game and dominated most of the play. It is still considered one of the most unbelievable upsets in NFL playoff history. With each play you saw the passion Seattle resonated; they were the only ones who believed in themselves…and that was all that mattered.
A positive attitude and the passion to perform can give your company the edge to overcome any odds, win new customers and gain market share, even if no one else thinks it is possible.
Attitude with passion enhances your self-confidence and your certainty of success among those with whom you work and the new customers you need to gain market share. For the customer to believe in you and your superior product and service, you must demonstrate confidence. Customers go with the stronger, not the weaker player.
They are betting on your ability to achieve what you believe.
©Copyright, 2011 Christine Corelli & Associates, Inc.
About Christine Corelli
