How KPI's can hurt your business

Yesterday a contact showed me a list of recommendations from a Senior Business Consultant (from a well established firm) given to the company he worked for. It was basically a list of KPI's for the sales staff & managers, things like make more calls, book more meetings, do more reporting etc. I couldn't help but think, is that it? That's all you gave them? You rotten dinosaur.

While there is certainly validity in the numbers game, it's just one ingredient to the recipe of a successful sales person. There was nothing about how to make the calls more effective, or what information you need in order to properly qualify prospects. Anything on how to have more effective meetings? Nope. Nothing about strategy, psychology, training or anything that would actually make anyone better, it was just a crap load more work for everyone, and they all had to do it regardless of performance.

This advice may as well have been etched on a stone tablet it was so old school. The immediate result was the staff were annoyed they had to do all this extra work & some were talking about leaving because of it, likely the good ones. Were they just lazy? No, they felt undermined, didn't believe in the initiative & thought the guy was a scammer. He just didn't understand them properly.

If people aren't performing or there is an essential reason for KPI's, then sure implement them with caution. But if you have 30 or so people at various levels of success & think that a one size fits all approach is going to magically make them all step it up, well bad news my friend, it won't.

Times change & so should your approach. Yes a process everyone follows is good, & standards that people should live up to are good too, but people are individuals with their own unique pros & cons, so improvement initiatives should be tailored towards the person. You'll get better results by leveraging individual strengths, identifying areas of improvement & motivating sufficiently to get by-in.

If you are going to pay for a consultant like me, make sure they identify the problem before they sell you a solution. Make sure they ask the right questions before giving you the answers & make sure they learn what you & your company is all about before telling you how to move forward.

Good luck!

Why Recruiters don't consistently hit their target & 3 ways to fix it.

It’s nearing the end of the quarter, you look at the numbers board & get an uneasy feeling in your stomach. You know you aren’t going to hit your target. The anxiety builds & you start rehearsing the excuses in your head, they need to be different from last quarters but just as believable. You know you have what it takes to be a good consultant but can’t quite figure out where you’re going wrong.

What can you do?

There are many factors involved in being a successful consultant, but one thing that often gets overlooked is “pipeline”. It’s so simple, yet so common that people get to the end of the month & realise they don’t have enough requirements to work on. Even if they do have a good month, the following month is likely to be a failure without a good pipeline.

While I don’t fully subscribe to the “it’s a numbers game” adage, I do believe it has a large part to play in consistent billing. I promote quality over quantity, you should try and convert as many of your roles as possible, otherwise what’s the point in having them? The reality though is you can’t win them all & that’s ok, as long as you know your average success rate & calculate how many requirements you need in order to hit your average.

For example, if you usually work 10 roles per month & place 4 on average, logic suggests you need to have 10 live roles the following month in order to make another 4 placements. Pretty easy right, well in principle yes, but don’t fool yourself by thinking that just because you have the numbers you’re guaranteed the placements. There are other factors to consider, such as the quality of the roles, time to fill, the fee etc. Connecting the dots will come with experience, but having a solid pipeline will at least ensure you have an important piece of the puzzle covered. 

So how do you ensure you have a strong pipeline? Here are the basics:

1. Set reminders throughout the month to do a health check on your workload, try establish when your placements will land so you can plan ahead.

2. When you make a placement, also make a note that you need to replace that role & set time aside for business development. 

3. De-prioritise roles that aren’t moving, focus on the ones that are & replace lost opportunities to keep your pipeline full.

These three things alone should help you prioritise & start being more conscious about your pipeline. In the world of recruitment (or any sales role really), one thing that separates the good from the great is consistent billing. Not everyone needs to be a big biller & many recruitment companies would be happy to have a mid-range biller who is consistent & reliable. So if you are struggling with consistency try the above & see the difference it makes. 

Stop competing with your competition & start competing with yourself.

When I first started in Sales, I was told to keep a close eye on my competition, watch what they are doing & find out who their clients are. The reasons made sense, you can learn who is who in your market, find out who their clients are & monitor the activity. So I did, I read their adverts, monitored their social media output & kept an eye on their movements by pulling leads and gathering info. All very valid activities to a point, and while these things did help me figure out who was who in the zoo, they didn’t necessarily help me get any better at what I did. I was spending so much time looking over the fence at the neighbours garden, I was forgetting to water my own. 

What if your competition isn’t actually that good? What if your benchmark on quality is mediocre & you don’t know it. Most people spend their time trying to beat their competition, doing the same things they do while professing their version is better. From a client perspective it’s all much of a muchness, they don’t see it like you do. Even if you are better than your neighbour, if you are saying & doing the same sorts of things as them it’s going to be really hard for a client to differentiate between the two, or three or four etc. 

Now, of course there are going to be similarities in your industry, if you sell carpet & so does your competition, you can’t really get away from that fact. But you can change how you go about it, your message, your approach, your delivery, the way you do what you do, question yourself how can I make this better. If you compete against your own standards rather than the industry standards you can push yourself further. If you are already number one, then you have no choice but compete against yourself and try beat your personal best, because if you rest on your laurels the competition will sneak up behind you and overtake you without you even realising it.

It’s actually fun to see how far you can go, you’ll be surprised. Once you start achieving things you didn’t think you could, your confidence grows & you start wondering if you could take it up a notch, then another & another, before long you get a thirst for it & it becomes like a game. All that time and energy you used to spend watching what your competition did, is now spent improving what you do, then everyone starts watching you. I’m not saying ignore your competition completely, just flip the percentage so you get more air time than they do.

When & why you should drop your client.

In a target driven industry it’s easy to get stuck working with clients that take up large amounts of your time for little return. We often think that if we just persevere, it will pay off in the end. Well, unfortunately that isn’t always the case, sometimes you have to be brave & politely kick them to the kerb. So how do you know when is the right time to make the call? Firstly, it’s important to establish why things aren’t moving and to be honest with yourself. Consultants are all too quick to blame a client for not buying, when in fact it’s them who are not providing what the client really wants. 

We think they are being too fussy or have unrealistic expectations, a lot of the time they do, in fact quite a lot of the time they do, but sometimes we just haven’t grasped what it is they actually want and we present them with the wrong thing. It’s hard putting the blame on yourself & bruising your pride, how could it be me?, I’m good at what I do, but this is exactly why you should question yourself first before blaming the client. To do this you have to remove your emotions from the picture to get a clear & honest view of the situation. The more you do this, the better you will get at being accountable for your outcomes, which in turn will make you a better consultant, because you’ll stop passing the blame when things don’t go your way and find solutions instead of complaints.

If you do this however & you are still confident that you have understood the brief correctly and delivered what was asked, then feel free to throw that ball back over the net. Now is the time to educate your client & be the expert you said you were when you first pitched them. Be clear in your message by explaining exactly why they are not getting what they want & suggest how they can if they follow your advice. By the way “suggest” is the key word here, don’t tell people what to do, you’re not here to tell them off, you’re here to guide them & make them feel like it’s still their decision.

If you have done all but draw them a picture & they still don’t get it, maybe it’s time to walk away. Maybe it’s time to move your focus to another client & let them become someone else’s problem. I’m not saying burn the bridge, I’m saying stop trading your time for no benefit. You don’t need to be rude about it or divorce them, you’re just going to hang out with some other friends for a while. There is always opportunity elsewhere, you just need to find it & that takes time. It’s a very grey area & decisions like this are hard to make, but if your input is outweighing the return it might be time to consider your options. If you are unsure, ask someone you trust what they would do, outside perspective can be helpful, especially because the emotion is removed.