What to learn before you change anything

Dana became head of sales on a Monday. By Wednesday she had a list of eleven things to fix: the CRM stages, the price list, the slow replies, the weekly meeting nobody liked. By Friday she had changed three of them, and two sellers had stopped telling her what was going on.

Nothing on her list was wrong. The order was. She changed rules before she knew which ones protected a deal and which only protected a habit. And she had written nothing down before she started, so she had no way to tell whether anything got better.

In week one you cannot yet tell a rule that protects a deal from one that only protects a habit. From the outside they look alike. A seller who copies every inquiry into a spreadsheet may be wasting an hour a day, or may be the reason the team never loses a lead. You cannot tell from your desk.

Write the answers down word for word. Your paraphrase already contains your opinion. Keep one page per person with one question at the top: where do your deals stall?

• Listen to real calls before you give any feedback.
• Ask each seller where their deals stall and write the answer down word for word.
• Note what the CRM cannot tell you.

Pick three open deals from different sellers, on purpose: one that is moving, one that has stalled and one nobody can explain. Sit with the seller, open the deal and read it from the first message. Do not fix anything. Ask what happened next, and then what happened after that.

For each one, find out what should be true by now, what is true today and the one step that would move it. Three real deals will teach you more about the process than any report. You hear how the seller actually talks to a customer, and you see the step the process skips and what the CRM never records.

Agree what should be true on day 30 and on day 90 before you start changing things. The owner hired you to change something, so find out what. Ask for the one result that would make them say the first three months went well, and write it in their words.

The next chapter is entirely about this conversation. The free First-week talk with the owner gives you 15 questions for it.

Keep one sheet for the whole week: one row per live deal, what should be true by now, what is true today and the next step. Nobody else needs to see it. It keeps your impressions apart from the facts, and in week three you will want to know what you thought in week one.

• Listen to two real calls from two different sellers.
• Follow three live deals from the first message.
• Book the first talk with the owner and bring the 15 questions.

The whole first month in one kit: a 51-page guide, worksheets with filled examples, five Word templates and six spreadsheets.