This is a short spoken highlight reel by Mark Dinolo (SalesGlobe Sage) that probes how teams begin projects—criticizing rote problem statements that may mislead teams into solving the wrong problem—and argues for better questions, creative problem solving, and data-informed benchmarking. The speaker also discusses aligning sales compensation to defined sales roles, combining numbers with storytelling to improve impact, and briefly raises pay-transparency laws as they relate to performance. An anecdote about a car breakdown and a mechanic is used to illustrate diagnosing the real problem versus surface symptoms.
Chapters
So does anybody start with a problem statement in their projects? Nobody. Nobody has a problem statement. What are you doing? You got to start with something, right? Yeah. You got problem statements. Right. The problem with a problem statement is what? It's this thing. It's like you put the problem statement down and it begs you to solve it. But what if you're solving the wrong problem? Hey, it's Mark Dinolo. Hey, it's Mark Dinolo. Hey, it's Mark Dinolo at Sales Globe. And today is free Ative Friday. And this week we asked the question, who is Rosie? I like questions. Questions are more thought provoking. They're more provocative. If I ask you a question, your mind works differently than if I'm just giving you a statement. Right. So it goes to reason. If I have better questions, I'm going to probably come up with better answers. You've confirmed and validated your current sales roles. Maybe you've even defined some new sales roles for the business. Now it's time to take a look at how sales compensation aligns to those roles inundated by the data, by the numbers, by the analytics. Maybe you were fogging out. Maybe the people around you were fogging out. How effective was that at getting the message across? Probably not very effective. Numbers are powerful, but when you combine them with storytelling, it becomes even more impactful. Dad? Dad. And I said, what's going on? She said, I'm on the side of the road. I was going down I40, and my car just stopped running. And I pulled off to the side of the road and I'm not sure what to do. I'm like, are you okay? She goes, yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Just pulled off the side of the road. My boyfriend Alex is with me. I'm like, that guy? And she goes, well, yeah, you know, he's really sensitive. Daddy. He's crying a little bit. And I'm like, okay, all right. So I said, jimmy, I've got a problem. I'm trying to get an engine. He goes, ah, an engine. What do you need an engine for? I said, well, my daughter's car, you know, she broke down. I need an engine. He goes, tell me the story of the car. Next morning, I'm at the office, it's quiet, and the phone rings and. And I pick up and I go, I hear, Mark. Mark, you sitting down? And I'm like, hey, Jimmy. Yeah, you sitting down? I'm like, yeah, sitting down. We opened up the engine. You're not gonna believe what we found. And I'm like, what we found a rag in the oil pan, and sure enough, there was a rag that was in the oil pan, and they traced it back to the prior shop, and the insurance company ended up paying for the entire engine. And Jimmy got another great review. And this week we asked the question, how transparent is your pay and what are you getting for it? We're going to be talking about the new pay transparency laws and how they relate to performance. And what we do is we end up recreating old things and we leave ourselves vulnerable to competition. Right? So we're not actually solving the real problem. That's been my big frustration for years, is we don't solve the real problem. And so that's what I'm going to talk about today is how do we get into some more problem solving so we can go a little in some other directions and use some logic behind doing that and look at the benchmarks, look at the best practices as a starting point, right? That's insight, that's information. That's what we're using to start our creative thinking, our creative process.
