Words:
Duality: a situation or nature that has two states or parts, that are complementary or opposed to each other
Complementary: interdependent and produce their effect only when present together
Opposed: to act against or provide resistance
Unity: the combining or joining of separate things or entities to form one….the state or condition of being one
Scenario: an imagined sequence of possible events, or an imagined set of circumstances
LESSON 50
Last week was a big week for my thinking for 2 reasons….. firstly, it is the last thought in our first e-book and secondly, I got the most feedback of any lesson. It seems to have stirred up a lot of, “Oh John…. too complex”, “You will lose humans with that level of complexity” and “Break it down into bite-size thinking”. The whole point of last week was complexity. It was showing the simple-to- complex in business decision-making scenarios.
Thank you for that feedback!
It gave “ME” the way to bring Book 1 to an end point by telling a real story of an experience I had whilst consulting to a business. Like Hollywood, I will change the names, embellish the story to protect the innocent and make the story bigger than life itself.
168 of a Business
Day 1:
My story starts with the Company weekly ritual. Every Monday, the whole group/team of Company X get together for an hour and review:
1. Where they are at in their targets for each department
2. What worked for their department the previous week
3. How could they improve on the previous week
4. When the improvements would be made
5. Who they would target this week to increase sales
6. Why improvement was wanted inside the company, and most importantly;
7. How the team or group is feeling right now!
Meeting Starts……
Sales Manager: “Okay people…. let’s get focused”.
The meeting gets started with 1 question; “What do you feel like saying?” This ritual has simple rules:
1. Don’t interrupt the person when they are talking
2. Say what you feel like saying
3. Then pass it on to the person next to you by asking, “What do you feeling saying?”
4. That person then will thank you, as will the whole group thank you
5. That person will proceed by saying, “What I feel like saying is….”.
It is a way of getting everyone focused in the room.
Having done the “What I feel like saying”, the real weekly meeting will start. Like every business, this is a meeting that focuses all the elements of a business:
1. Accounts
2. Agreements
3. Education
4. Branding
5. Marketing
6. Selling
No business can exist without the 6 elements. It is the relationship of the elements that will determine the week’s success.
The meeting itself serves as an education platform for the business. It really is an information session to bring all of the business’s departments together to bring clarity at the start of the week. It really is a matter of closing off the previous week to start fresh the new week.
Business departments at this company meeting:
1. Accounting Department
2. Legal Department
3. Human resources
4. Administration
5. Training Department
6. New product design: “Including costings and pricing”
7. I.T. “Computers, hardware and software”
8. P.R. Department
9. Marketing Department
10. Sales Team
11. Customer Complaints
12. Warehouse
All the departments must co-ordinate their energy into a working whole to provide the customer with a product/service that will ADD VALUE, COVER ALL COSTS and ULTIMATELY MAKE A PROFIT to pay everyone so that on a weekly basis, the business can function. All businesses must co-ordinate the business elements with their working departments.
What makes businesses fun and psychotic is this……as individual humans, we can do all the elements and have responsibilities for all the departments at the same time. And I get in my weekly feedback that, “I’m too complex”. Step inside the Brain/Mind of a human!
Oh, for all of you…… 168 are the hours in a week. My belief is that this is the minimum time frame to plan from or create designs systems/processes from. You drive from a day’s activities and you monitor and make changes from a week’s activities.
After the hour meeting, the Sales Team meets for 15 more minutes to set the:
- TARGETS FOR THE COMING WEEK
- Review the previous week
- Look at where the team is month-to-date
- Look at all the year-to-date numbers.
This is really a motivational session to get the Sales Team geared up for all the rejection and obstacles that could occur for the week. The real essence of the session:
1. A- Always
2. B- Be
3. C- Closing
If you are not selling the potential customer (lead) to buy and making a sale, then the customer/lead is selling you. Who’s going to win? You or them? “Be Relentless”. I think that is a Hollywood movie scenario.
Sales Manager: “Great news this week….. the first sale made by a Human can have this”. The Sales Manager pins up a crisp $100 bill on the white board. Here are the rules to get the $100:
1. It has to be a sale in our new line products
2. The sale must be completed, the product must be delivered and paid for
3. Normal commission will be paid in addition to the $100 prize on the white board
4. And there is only one winner!
Now all the Sales Team is busting with excitement. All the sales people are on small retainers plus large commissions on sales made.
The qualification is…. “human-made” sale. The company-run website sells to the greater world. Most of the time, the website sales are at a lower price than the Sales Team can sell for.
= A real bone of contention
“Don’t worry…… higher commissions will sort that out!”
“Oh… and the lead/customer will never find out about the website pricing”.
The fact that our Marketing Department scripts head the sales traffic to the website seems to be disconnected from the Sales Team strategies. The Sales Team find it hard to come to terms with the close of a sales call being…….
“Please visit our website for all the product information”.
The Sales Team is really simple and the team motto is “We eat what we kill”.
In other words… no sale = no money. The Sales Team doesn’t include the above marketing script at the end of each call….. “How stupid do you think we are?”
The Marketing Team is looking for an increase of traffic on the company website. The Marketing Team can’t work out why with 25 commissioned sales people, this well thought-out strategy is not working? After all, we go over the thinking every week and everyone agrees (by not saying a thing) when we put forward the idea at the weekly meeting. At the end of each weekly meeting as we walk out the meeting room, I hear all the different departments talk about the meeting……
What I hear most is laughter and …. “Great meeting. I feel great”…… and “Oh, how stupid were those ideas? They will not work” (always said under their breath).
The levels of agreement are always not what was thought in the meeting. Mostly because at these meetings, a leader/dictator is not looking for human agreement……the leader is looking for Human compliance. The illusion is that you have a choice in where the business is heading. The deception on all parties involved is that there is a choice on company direction.
The commission sales people are always on the hunt for more money and have commission sales breath.
They hit the streets or phones running. They must be the first to make the sale of the new product.
What the Sales Manager understands is this….. All commission sales people
“ARE COIN OPERATED!”
Bingo…. the first leads agrees to buy!
Sales person is now in the running for the $100 on the white board.
Part one on the agreement is now met = interest to buy new product at the set price.
Great news…. the customer issued a Purchase Order Number and on the P.O., there is an agreement to pay cash-on-delivery (C.O.D.) Sales Person got the agreement for C.O.D. because of point 2 of the $ 100 bonus rules.
Following the above, the Sales Person stops calling or making any more sales…..”What, with the commission and bonus that I will receive, the day’s work is done. Time for lunch and what a lunch it will be! No one else has got what I have now…… I know because I asked and they all told me so. And after all, sales people tell the truth”.
The Sales Person spends the commission and bonus and says, “I can make more sales tomorrow” and all is well in Stupidville!!
Day 1 of Company X’s activities are completed.
Day 2:
Sales Person comes in ready to collect the $ 100 winnings, only to find out that the sale is not completed. “Not to worry…. no one else has completed the task and I know I’m first on the list to complete sales. Talk around the water cooler confirms my thought”. Sales Person listens to all the departmental gossip and finally gets down to making more sales, with all the company psychoses going on, being:
1. People getting fired
2. Commission sales people finding it hard to live off what they kill
3. Customer complaints double over the last month on poor delivery
4. Product quality rating is down
5. Company morale is down
6. Denial is strong and invisible by the lies that are held in each person’s thinking.
Sales Person thinks: “Never mind….. all my problems will be fixed by making 2 more sales. Get the “rolodex” out…. let’s make sales or another appointment. After all, this is one of the best branded companies in its field and we have a P.R. machine that meets every day with the Marketing Department. You know this by the fact that we win awards for what we do…. just ask the light bulbs brighter than me”.
Sales Person: “When in doubt, call someone and make a sale. Yeah baby…. you still got it!”
Day 3:
Sales Person: “This really is my day …the $ 100 bill is mine!!!!! Just as well…. I need the cash. I have been burning the commission and bonus money. No worries… it’s my money… it’s “IN THE BAG”. Just is well I have a bag…. I burnt a hole in my pocket!”
Sales Manager: “I can’t confirm the sale is made, let alone if you won the prize. Sorry…. no-one has completed a sale, not even you”.
Sales Person starts to argue the point: “Look here…. I have a P.O.”
Sales Manager: “I can see you showing me the P.O.. I can even see you have on it C.O.D.. I know it looks to you like you are the winner”.
Sales Person: “Dam right I’m the winner”.
Sales Manager: “You are the third person with the same story. I have checked my sales record on the company sales system. There are no sales showing up”.
Sales Person: “Impossible….. I made the sale on Monday and took it straight to dispatch. I was told that I was the first person to lodge the sale at product dispatch”.
Sales Manager: “Okay…. Enough. You are the third person with the same story……Let’s talk to the Dispatch Manager”.
Sales Manager to Dispatch Manager: “I have been running a sales competition this week. I have 3 different people claiming victory. I can’t see the completed sales in my company reports. Is there something wrong with my computer?”
Dispatch Manager: “No…. we only lodge in-person made sales on Wednesday afternoons. The rest of the week, we are processing website sales. You know…. we make 10 times more sales on the website than in person. I don’t know why the sales team works so hard”.
The Sales Manager is now red in the face and looking like a dork, because 3 sales people are there with him, each looking to claim the $ 100 prize.
Dispatch Manager: (Before the Sales Manager can say a thing) “I have great news…. My department will enter all the sales orders this afternoon and by this afternoon, all the orders will be placed and the warehouse will have them on the way to your customers by tomorrow night. You will have your winner by mid-day Friday!”
The Sales Manager has egg on his face and he thinks fast…don’t worry…. I will double the prize from $100 to $200 to keep “THE COIN OPERATED SALES TEAM ON TASK”….or so he thinks!! Now the Sales Manager must go to the General Manager, who has to talk to CFO (Chief Financial Officer), who has to talk to the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) and then the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) gets involved. All the while, the Sales Manager is sweating on…..”I hope it doesn’t come out of my pocket!!” The Level 2 Managers have to go to the Level 3 Managers and the game continues. All parts made important by the non-connected departments.
Meanwhile, the water cooler conversation lasts longer and by the time the bitching and carry-on is finished, it’s too late to make any more sales! The Sales Team says…”We will get on it first thing in the morning”.
Day 4:
Now the sales team is all worried about who will win the $200. It turns out that most of the team was in line to win. What was a blood sport of winners and losers turns into a lottery of luck.
Whose customer will get the product first and when will the sale be processed as completed? Whose customer with have their payment processed first?
We are in the hands of G.O.D.!
Another Sales Person who was the first to lodge his form with dispatch is a clever mouse after all…. he is a keen reader of all the latest business trends. He was reading, “Who Moved My Cheese?”. He thinks to himself, “I will quietly check to see if my sale is ready to leave from the warehouse. I will get the tracking number”. The first Sales Person heads home so pissed-off, nothing will console what he is feeling. He had asked the question of the Dispatch Clerk: “Was my order lodged?”.
Dispatch Clerk: “Sorry mate…. you should have told me. We had such a run on orders this Wednesday, we didn’t get them all in the system. We will get to your sale next Wednesday… I promise your sale will be first. You know the story….. we are under-staffed and these cheap Dorks don’t pay over-time and we are one person short”.
All day 4 is spent tracking the sale. No one is at the cooler. No one wants to talk…. morale is at the week’s lowest point.
Day 5:
Someone will win the prize and be a winner of the week. That Sales Person will be all the talk of the day…… “ONE WINNER AND THE REST LOSERS”.
What is the cost to the business?
Will we ever know whilst we play Winner and Losers?
********************************
I study loads of businesses all over the world and this story is not unique. Loads of companies pretend openness and then play the game of “need to know”. This story is a very tame lesson compared to what really happened. The weekend seems always to create amnesia dust, like the good fairy’s gold fairy sprinkles and next week, the 168 starts again. Or is it just the pure human design that picks itself up and dusts itself off and starts all over again?
Last week, I wrote a very complex lesson…. And yet, it was nothing in comparison to real life. I love business and doing what I do. What I like more is experiencing life in all of its GREAT, BAD, UGLY, and GOOD, (GBUG).
This will be the last lesson in “DESIGNING A BUSINESS”.
I will now work out how to create a book to sell and make some money.
Next week, I will start Book Number 2.
“CREATING EVERYTHING YOU WANT FROM NOTHING”
JDS OUT
