Episode 111: My Proven Framework For Stress Free Problem Solving!

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And engaged teams, stronger sales Teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. What a week it's been for us. Across our business, we have had huge numbers of programs being run over the last six weeks. In fact, that has culminated in the last 10 days we've had three programs roll out across our customers and boys as they get busy. When you start to roll out new programs, you're learning about customers, you're learning about what makes them tick, you're trying to understand about their problems. Right? Are there opportunities? Much as we do, much as we teach, we talk about needing to understand what the problems and opportunities are. We certainly go through that ourselves and our customers. But one thing that's really stood out is that when it comes to helping our customers, there are areas of their business that you are not able to get involved with, I. E. There are problems that you're not able to solve because they're out of your remit, they're out of your specialisation, or sometimes customers just don't want you to go down that path. And certainly for me, we need to be able to respect that. There are places, as external parties engaged to a business, where we can influence and there are certainly areas where we can absolutely make significant changes.

But sometimes there are things that are.

Beyond our control that we just can't get involved with. And for me, who's had really broad experience across businesses, I certainly spend a lot of time around sales strategy. But I've run businesses myself, I've had a number of startups, I've worked for, big corporates. Not getting involved in areas gets a little bit difficult because I love being able to add value and contribute wherever I can. But sometimes when it comes to our customers, we come across problems that we also find difficult to be able to solve for them. I'm certainly not immune in that respect, in that problems aren't always easy to get a great solution on. Sometimes they require a lot of effort and a lot of thinking. And for me, I'm often asked by my customers, how can I help provide for them a problem solving framework, right? A way that they can approach problems that when it comes in, it's not phone gets dropped or mic drop moment. It's like, oh, my God, what are we going to do? I have no idea how to approach this, but we can instead replace that with do you know what? I don't know what the solution is right now, but I'm confident that I'll be able to work through if I can follow my standard set process, right. My approach to solving problems, that I'm going to be able to work out what to do next. So today I'd love to talk through a problem solving framework that works for me and certainly works for a large number of people that we work with. I've seen it work for very simple, straightforward problems that are happening really regularly. But I've also seen it work for quite complex, complex, difficult to solve problems. And sometimes those problems actually involved creating a solution that hadn't been done before, right? I. E. Breaking new ground to solve a problem because no one else had been able to do so. So we're going to go through that framework today. It's really punchy, which I think for those that know me, know that's exactly how I like to talk and think about anything we do in the business world. And in fact, life in general, is trying to put together ways, practical approaches that. That actually help us work through problems so that we can solve them. Okay, so let's imagine we've got a problem that comes in to our team, and for example, we could say the problem is as simple as our close rates are not strong enough. Right? We are simply not closing enough deals. And we'll work with that as an example for perhaps this entire podcast today. So we are looking at our sales numbers. We're recognizing that, quite simply, we're not generating enough revenue. Not because we're not prospecting heavily enough, but because we're not closing enough of those deals that we've already quoted. So the first thing that I like to do when it comes down to solving a problem is try and have a look at all the triggers, all the things that could be going wrong in terms of those problems. We're not following up enough. Our pricing's wrong. We're not quick enough to get out to our customers, we're targeting the wrong customers. Our competitors have something that's more compelling out in the market. Our sales team are not engaging our customers. Right. We could do a really long list here around what is going wrong that could be causing this problem. For me, that's the most impactful place to start because it allows us to do the thinking around, okay, what could be going wrong? Rather than jumping to a conclusion that in this instance will often be our pricing's wrong. That for me is the most common place I see people go when close rates aren't there. But by writing down everything, and I mean, that list could be huge, right? It's how are we qualifying customers? Are we getting. Making sure we understand what they want, Right. There's lots and lots of things that could be in that list. So the first thing I like to look at to do here is to say, okay, let's get everything out on paper. The second thing I like to do is then classify these into controllables and uncontrollables. Right? So controllables are things that we can control. Are we qualifying our customers? Are we going after the right customers? Are we pricing? Right. And I'll argue that perhaps pricing can sit into uncontrollable as well. But certainly all the things that we know we can make an impact on if we're able to turn our eye to improving those. The second piece here are uncontrollables. These are the things that we can't control and in essence are the things that we shouldn't be worrying too much about. Right. For example, our competitors have a different feature than ours. Our lead times are too long. Right? Now, again, you'd argue that that could be a controllable that we bring forward our sales cycle, but certainly when we don't, when we're not able to provide in a quickly enough time. Right? And it could be an uncontrollable. Pricing could be an uncontrollable because our cost base is simply higher than where the customer would like us to be with price. Right? And then I'd argue there's some other pieces that come out of that. But I think what you see here is that we can try and classify those things that we can immediately make an impact on and those things that are not controllable within reason. Okay? So we've gone and ideated we've got a problem that's come in, our close rates are too low. We've ideated all the reasons it could be, and then we've broken them down into controllables and uncontrollables. All right? So from here, I like to look at uncontrollables first. So the first thing I like to do is look at those that we genuinely cannot control. For example, the economy's turned bad. For example, our competitors have a different product to us, right? They're the ones that we need to come to peace with and say, do you know what? We actually cannot control, that there is no point worrying about it right now. This rhetoric won't end here. I'll expand on it in a moment. But the first thing is when we generally cannot control something. Something to do with our close rates, right? Which is the example for today. We need to make sure we're taking the heat out of that. If we're worrying about things that we can't control, we are just going to become that nervous or edgy sales team that I talk about who isn't performing to its potential. And when you're not performing to potential, you're simply not going to win against your competitors, be it sport, be it life, be it business, whatever it may be. If we're not performing to our potential regularly, then we can't expect to be winning. So for me, on those controllables, we set aside those ones that we simply cannot change and we make peace that we can't change those. What can work really well here is we give ourselves a window of time to complain and whinge and carry on and do whatever we want to do about them, but then we close that window. For me, I'll often set myself depending on the problem, but at a personal level, I'll often set myself by the end of an exercise session or by the end of a day. Right? So I don't carry that problem to bed. If it's a big problem, I'll give myself a few days to work through it. Right? Sometimes you do need a bit of time to mourn what you can't control, but go through those stages of grief and get to the point where I'm comfortable to move forward. The second part of uncontrollables is to have a think about where we can influence but can't control. And this is important because we might look at our cost base as an uncontrollable. Right. We simply cannot match the pricing that our competitors offer. Right? So we're getting beaten on price. For me, though, here where the influence can come in is that we start to get really clear on the extra value. For example, the outcomes that we're providing and it allows us to go extra hard on saying, well, hang on, we can't control our pricing, but we can certainly influence the value perception. And that might mean that we start to target different customers. It might mean that we start to change our offer a little bit in terms of how we communicate it with customers. Right? But we can start to influence not what our pricing is, but, but how the market is perceiving it. When we talk about lead times, right, we can start, okay, well, our lead times aren't quick enough for this product. What can we do to fill that gap while they're waiting for that product or service? Are there other types of value that we can offer in that period? Can we be clearer at the start of our engagement with customers around what lead times will be so that they can adjust their decision making timeframes around it? Right. We certainly have uncontrollables that we just cannot change. Right. Interest rates, economy, currency exchanges, right. What our competitors are doing. But then we also do have parts of what we'd regard as uncontrollables that we can influence. So for me, the encouragement when it comes to uncontrollables is to start to look at what we can influence, if not necessarily control. And a final word here on the influencing piece around uncontrollables is that for me, I really like to set an end date by when we'll look at this again. So for me, we'll often have something that's uncontrollable that perhaps we could be influencing and we're out there trying to fix, but we're living it every day. So we're living every single day that our close rates are down and we're reporting every day and we're agonizing every morning we come in and we see the close rates haven't changed. For me, what I like to do here is give myself and give teams I work with a forward ramp to make their impact. Right. If we're April now and we know we've got to do a number of things and it's going to take some weeks, set ourselves that at the end of April or the end of May that we're going to revisit this, yes, we'll measure progress along the journey, but we're actually only going to go and assess our progress, right. Actually give ourselves a pass or fail at a certain date. And for me, what that stops us doing is living every single moment of the problem again and again and again and again, right? Give yourself some time or your team's time to get These sorted and then revisit it at the end date. My experience here is that end date often passes because we find the solution along the journey and we actually don't need to re persecute exactly what's been happening. But if you don't buy yourself some time, you will just live in the pain of the uncontrollable every single moment. And that's not a great way to live, right? So instead, when you see that you can influence something, set yourself a date to do it and then give yourself the freedom and space to go and make that happen. Last word I have here around uncontrollables is try to see where you can turn an uncontrollable negative into a positive. Ie, if our close rates are really low, let's turn that into an opportunity. If our close rates are sitting at 10% and we need to get to 20%, let's start to turn that into a really nice project with the team where we start to say, right, we're going to go from 10 to 20 and every time we go one point, we're going to celebrate like crazy, right? Or we're going to recognize progress or we're going to do things that are really going to engage us. They're going to drive our focus into closing, right? We're going to all take tasks. We've got 10 in the team and we're going to take 10 tasks each and we're all going to try and work on that one specific task to try and improve, right? Particularly if it's an uncontrollable, we'll see where we can influence it and really generate some excitement around turning that negative into a positive. I've seen so many teams where they are up against the wall and in particular crows rates. We had a team late last year where their close rates were really low. They managed to grow that close rate by 65% simply from changing two things in their sales process. Right? Speed to cost, contact customer and speed to quote. Right. And have done a terrific job and have certainly held that for a number of months, right? And then they turned that problem into an opportunity and away the team went. So for me, when we're looking at solving problems and we've listed all the potential issues, we've characterised them into controllables or uncontrollables. With our uncontrollables, we've either come to peace that we can't change it, or we've had a look at how we can influence it and started to think about ways we can do that and, and set ourselves from forward dates, right? But we're above everything else, we're turning these struggles or these negative problems into areas of opportunity. So that for me is how we go about approaching the uncontrollables. Now we flick across to the controllables. So our close rates are low. And one of the issues is, for example, that we're simply not understanding what our customers want enough, right? We're not qualifying what they need, or the quality of our sales materials isn't strong enough, or we're not prioritizing our time to follow up customers and really understand how we can move these potential projects for them through to a close. All these controllable pieces need an approach. And for me, the tried and tested method that I have used again and again and again and again with teams to great success is that we bring the teams in to solve the problems together. And that essentially steps down to understanding what the problem is, recognizing together, workshopping together what the potential solutions are, and then going about setting yourself some goals and actions to fix them. Okay, this doesn't mean that we solve all the problems on the spot, but it's all about bringing the team together to say, right, here are our issues, what are we going to do about it? And for example, the not qualifying customers properly might then be taken out, that we need to review our entire process, find our gaps in that sales process and work out what we're going to do to improve them. Or if we're not making enough time to contact customers after quotes have gone out, we might then and there, right? This might be one we solve on the spot where we agree that the first half an hour of every day is with customer follow up. And we all, as a team have entries into our diary. We all do it together, whether we be at home, whether we be in the office, whether we be out on the road before customer meetings. But that first 30 minutes of every day becomes all about customer follow up, right? But the powerful piece here is that by bringing the team in together and workshopping what the potential solutions are, how we could go about fixing them, and then setting who's responsible due dates and what success looks like. So what we measure as a tick, right, needs analysis, is far better than it used to be. Or tick. We're spending the time to follow up our customers, right? Or tick, we've upgraded our sales materials, what success looked like for those. So then when it comes time to measuring whether or not we've made that happen or not, we just simply have to look at the far column of our spreadsheet, for example, or whether we're using Confluence or even setting up tasks in Monday.com or whatever that system is, right? We know, bang, this is how we tick off success. So for me, when it comes down to solving controllables, again, it's all about getting the team in, getting really clear on what you need to do to solve it, assigning responsibilities, due dates, and then what success looks like. It's almost a form of mini strategic planning, if you like, to make things happen. So that, broadly speaking, is a framework that I use for solving problems. I have had three customers in the last week, so specifically, go through that framework with me and all three of them you could see writing. You know, you're on the money when they're writing copious notes, right? Salespeople writing notes, sales leaders writing notes. For me, it's a tick because generally, right. And I put myself in this camp. Administration's never our favorite thing. But for me to recap that, we find out what the problem is, right, we look at all the reasons that could be causing it and then classify them into controllables versus uncontrollables. For uncontrollables, we start to look at, okay, what are the ones we can't change? Let's get to peace with it. What are the things we can influence? And let's get to work trying to influence those and set some dates around when we're going to make those influences happen by. And most importantly, we start to find ways to turn those negatives into a positive. That's how we handle uncontrollables. And then for controllables, we bring everyone together, work out what the issues are, how we're going to solve them, set due dates, set who's responsible and what success looks like. So there's a fair bit in there, but for me, that is a terrific problem solving framework that just works, right? I've seen so many terrific results that I'd really encourage you to keep working on them yourself. Okay, so that's it for today. For those, as I've mentioned the last few weeks, we're week three of the road to Cairns. For me, who knows what it's going to look like when we get there. But the last week for me has been recognizing, and I like this because it applies to business as well, but it's been recognizing where my gross negatives are. And for me, someone who's done a fair bit of swimming, lots of water polo and running over my life, I generally feel that I can control those parts of the race. But bike riding, I have great long leg levers, but I am terrible on the bike. And one of my friends who's a Commonwealth Games gold medalist, I remember him saying to me about six months ago, he said, you're so fit and strong, but you are a terrible bike rider. Right? For me, I remember that. And this person knows who he is. I'm gonna send you the podcast to listen to, but I'm working so hard on getting my bike up and running. Been out 20, 30 odd days in a row or something very similar to that. I've almost lost count. But for me at the moment I'm focusing on my weaknesses, right. To bring them speed. And sometimes in business that's a good thing to do as well, right? Focus on those weaknesses or problems to get up to speed. But that's been my last week and no doubt, actually bike riding is going to be a theme for me over the coming weeks. So I'll keep you updated for those who are out there. Have you picked your goal yet that you have for personal health and fitness? And if you haven't, right, please have a think about it because I think it's a terrific way to live life, to have as a sales leader some goals that you're telling and talking to your team about. It really does bring everyone together. That's it from me today. Keep living in a world of possibility. You'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Who knows, maybe even an ironman at Cairns. Bye for now. Have a great week.

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