312: Hope Is Not A Strategy In Sales

<p>When you are told that “hope is not a strategy” you get the point.  You also know that actually there is a fair bit of hope built into your strategy.  Every sales organisation comes up with targets and often these are based on hope more than science.  There is imperfect information floating around and we use this as the basis of our assumptions.  There is incomplete data and we have to extrapolate based on those numbers.  Things can change quickly and the ramifications can be completely unexpected.  January 15th, 2020 was the first case of Covid in Japan.  February 23rd, 2022 was the start of the war in Ukraine.  You couldn’t predict these events and there is a huge amount of hope that both situations will resolve themselves and we can all get back to some version of normality.</p> <p> </p> <p>We say things like, “let’s focus on what we can control”.  That is jolly heart warming but it isn’t much help.  There are numbers which have to be generated and these have to be produced regardless of external factors, most of which we cannot control.  This whole ensemble of difficulties can be very discombobulating in sales.  If we are set targets too high, we mentally check out and give up.  We don't make any declarations to the boss that we have given up, but our activities are such that we are not doing all we can to get the numbers, because we don’t believe in the fairness of the process.</p> <p> </p> <p>If you are the boss, the management of the sales operation gets more and more difficult in the work from home or hybrid arrangement.  Keeping track of what people are up to gets harder. Our expectations have to be tempered by the external environment, be that Covid or the global downturn.  The numbers get harder to reach.  If we push too hard, people will quit and they will have little issue with finding another job, if they decide they don’t like this one.  The whole process becomes more delicate and complex at the same time.</p> <p> </p> <p>If we take a long hard look at our strategy and we realise there is a fair