Obstacles :
Business Excellence
(According to the post of Steven A. Rosen, MBA is the Founder of STAR
Results, a leading boutique sales management training and executive coaching
company. Steven is also the author of 52 Sales Management Tips – The Sales
Manager’s Success Guide.)
1. Business Execution Process
All important business endeavors require some type of process. An example of
a well-tuned process that successful companies utilize is the annual marketing
plan process. Execution is a full year process starting with the marketing plan,
building the execution plan, leading execution and keeping the plan on track.
What are the chances you don’t have a formal process? If you don’t, you will
fail to execute.
2. Clarity on What’s Critical for Success
Most companies try and do too much. If you try and do too many things you
can’t do them all well. My approach to success in business is figuring out the 3
most important things you need to do to achieve your goals and doing them
extremely well.
Execution is the discipline of getting the most important things done.
If you can clearly articulate the 3 things you and your team need to do to be
successful, then give yourself a point. If not, you are going to fail to execute
with excellence.
3. Team Alignment
Execution is a team sport. Excellence requires alignment of not only sales and
marketing but other support departments. You need operations, production,
business analytics, and all other support departments. The key is the need to be
aligned on the critical success factors. All departments need to know what their
CSFs are. They need to ensure that their departments have plans and can
support the commercial unit on their critical success factors.
You also need to be sure that your sales management teams are aligned with the
critical success factors.
4. Ownership of the Plan
Even with a plan in place and having your team aligned, without ownership of
the plan you are doomed. You are probably ready to give up at this point. Don’t
despair, getting ownership to any plan is not that difficult. No one wants to be
told what to do, but they do want to have input on the plan. All you need to do
is make them part of the process then they will have ownership. The key is
bringing all stakeholders to the planning process to make them the architects of
the plan.
5. Leading Execution
One of the final ingredients is having leadership from the front line to keep the
sales people focused on what is important. When salespeople tell you that they
are very busy the likelihood is that they are. Your front-line sales managers are
also very busy. It is incumbent on them to lead the way. Your sales managers
