Changes on the Sales Force – Bragging is Inconsistent

I spoke to a group of CEO’s in Buffalo today where one of the attendees (not a CEO) was bragging about everything his company has accomplished.  It’s great to see companies making changes for the better!  I’ll bet that this person wasn’t the one who drove those changes though.  Somebody else or a team of managers probably strategized the changes and he may have been on the team that executed.  He was too proud of his accomplishments to be a person who looks at things and asks”what’s wrong? or “how can we do this better?”  The people who look at results and ask how things could be better don’t usually brag about the last thing they changed.  They’re off to the next bottleneck, issue or crisis asking that question again.

It’s not unusual for an executive to want to evaluate the sales force, just to see if they can do any better.  But it is not a compelling reason to evaluate and those executives need to be careful because they might get what they wished for.  Usually those are the very executives who are the least prepared for bad news and when they evaluate the sales force they learn about everything that needs to change, rather than findings limited to things they can do better.