Closing the knowing doing gap

We have spoken before about the fact that “What gets inspected gets respected”. Being at half year, June is a good moment to dig out the January kick-off / Strategy documents, and see how you are doing against them.
This should be done publically for several reasons. Number one is that, assuming the strategy made sense in January, it still makes sense now and deserves another push to give it life. Number two is that if you don’t follow up on public pronouncements of strategy, you will automatically lose credibility as an unintended consequence. Sales forces are not stupid, and if you don’t follow up on initiatives, next time around they will nod positively, knowing that no action is required on their part, because it will be a “flavour of the month”. For this reason, flavour of this month should be following up the flavours of previous months to make sure they are being tasted in the market!
Habits of excellence are installed by continual focus, follow up and inspection. It is not enough to “know” the strategy, we need to make sure people “do” the strategy. So June is a good month for “closing the knowing doing gap”.

Posted on June 18, 2012 | By siladmin | Leave a response | Posted in Sales management | Tags: closing knowing doing gap, sales strategy execution