What we can learn from Bear Bryant about sales
Bear Bryant was once asked by a team of academic researchers why Alabama football was so successful under his tenure.
Bear Bryant’s response: “Because I love my players and they love me.”
The researchers were skeptical.
Alabama football, like any team, was measured in wins and losses. The researchers theorized that the team’s win-loss record (or the amount of love they had for their coach) might not be the most useful measure or motivation for individual players. How do you measure, for example, the effectiveness of the kicker or the second tight end?
Investigators followed Bear Bryant, his coaching staff and his players for one season. This is what they discovered:
For each position on the team, Bear Bryant and his staff broke down the most important skills into their simplest steps. Each role had a hierarchy of skills. A lineman, for example, would have to execute a series of steps in a pass blocking scheme to get him into the correct position with the proper leverage. The number, size and speed of the steps were measured. Once a player mastered the basic abilities, they would be given a more advanced set of moves to master. If, after an appropriate amount of practice time, a player is still unable to execute a set of moves correctly, the coaching staff would record this on video. The staff would then show the player their own video of themselves and a video of a player executing the steps with no problem. The player’s focus, during the time he took, was to master that moveset.
Bear Bryant and his coaches had dozens of very specific skills for each position on a football team. And they used those specific skills as metrics to make sure each player had something to work on. Each player knew what he had to master to improve.
Everyone outside the Alabama football locker room defined success by the number of games won. And you might think that the reason Alabama football was so successful was because Bear Bryant loved his players and they loved him.
The researchers came to a different conclusion. Bear Bryant and his staff had great football teams because each player could achieve success for the day, or week, by mastering the next set of moves needed to get better. Wins and losses aside, they could see their own progress, and that was what motivated them to keep working. Individually, those improvements probably had little to do with Alabama winning or losing a game. But collectively, they made the team better every week. And when the team did not perform well, instead of guessing (and firing the kicker), the coaching staff had a better idea of the correct specific corrective actions to take.
For most marketers, measuring sales volume on a monthly basis is like evaluating an individual player by the team’s win-loss record.
Selling is a noisy process with many external factors you may have little control over, such as price, the strength of the relationships between your customer and your competitor, the personalities of the individual customers you work with, and how well your products perform. with a central customer need.
We pay attention to what we measure. And when we pay attention, we notice what makes the metric better and what makes it worse. We get ideas to improve what we are measuring.
So what do you measure?
Sales volume, of course, is an appropriate measure for the business as a whole, and ultimately for a salesperson, over time. The amount of time depends on the industry you are in and what you sell. If the life cycle of a sale in a company is nine months, the noise and static that influence the outcome of a sale make annual volume a poor measure of a salesperson’s performance. Don’t confuse what to measure in your sales process with what gets measured. A good commercial director, like a good coaching staff, should measure a vendor’s performance using different and more specific metrics than for the organization as a whole. If you determine that the leverage in your sales process is getting face-to-face meetings with new leads, measure that. Measurement is a form of reinforcement. Find out the small steps a salesperson must master to be more effective in their business and measure them. We get more than we reinforce.
Here is a series of questions to help you determine where the leverage is in your process:
1.what it is my sales process? How could I define all the steps in which I participate?
2. What are the levers and log jams in my sales process? What are the key things that are most likely to generate sales? (For example, doing a demo, getting a face-to-face meeting, qualifying a prospect, getting an application signed. Or conversely, what are the key things that derail or stop a sale or customer relationship?)
3. What specifically can I do better to influence those levers? (Or loosen log jams?)
4. What can I measure to track my progress in doing those things better?
If you don’t discover the leverage points in your sales process, you don’t know what to measure so you can improve. Oh, but don’t worry, when things go wrong and you’re 0-8, you can always fire the kicker.
The ideas in this post come from Tim’s book Never Be Closing. We hope you have found them useful.
