We all love the people who solve a problem quickly with a tangible result right?
There is a downside to quick problem solving. Some company heroes keep solving the same problem over and over again, without a structural solution being implemented.
You probably recognise the way people talk: hey Joe i have a problem with process x in the CRM, do you know what to do? Sure we frequently have that problem. You have to go to Lisa. She is a real hero on this subject and solves this problem very quickly.
Question you should ask yourself. Why is this problem not solved so Lisa can do her job instead of answering the same question over and over again?
Answer:
Lisa loves to feel important and appreciated by her colleagues. Solving this problem over and over again keeps that feeling alive.
The colleagues who refer to Lisa are actually delegating the same problem over and over again so they don’t have to take ownership.
There is an informal structure for solving problems. This leads to poor insights for the company to see what problems need to be solved.
We all love taking shortcuts, and by doing that keeping our heroes alive.
How to change this?
Have a formal system for reporting problems or challenges with company wide access. Make sure that everyone can see how many times a certain problem or challenge was reported. Make sure that you follow-up and communicate about how it’s going to be solved and if it’s solved how to prevent it from happening again.
People who learn and prevent future problems are the invisible heroes in your company.
Do not make the same mistakes over and over again. Think long term!
So what has this to do with sales?
If you don’t have a formal learning, onboarding, training and coaching structure you are ready to scale problems. So create a formal way of learning, training, coaching, analysing and documenting. Begin small, but start documenting.
Get your tooling in place to help you out. LMS, Conversational Intelligence, Resource Drives. Make a success library for certain situations and challenges. Example calls, questions, objection handling, how to use sales tooling etc.
Ready to scale?