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Innovation and the Law of Averages

Guest post by: Jim Clemmer

Article Overview: Early in my sales career I was introduced to the Law of Averages. It's been a key concept of direct sales for many decades. The Law of Averages basically teaches salespeople that if you want to double or triple your sales, you need to double or triple the cold calls and sales presentations you make. I found that if I made ten cold calls to interest people in home water treatment equipment, I generally got one appointment for a sales presentation. Three appointments usually gave me one sale.

Innovation and the Law of Averages

"If at first you don't succeed you're running about average." Early in my sales career I was introduced to the Law of Averages. It's been a key concept of direct sales for many decades. The Law of Averages basically teaches salespeople that if you want to double or triple your sales, you need to double or triple the cold calls and sales presentations you make. I found that if I made ten cold calls to interest people in home water treatment equipment, I generally got one appointment for a sales presentation. Three appointments usually gave me one sale.

So to get one sale, I needed to make about 30 cold calls. As I got better at prospecting, choosing prospects to call on (such as new home buyers), and increased my sales presentation skills, I improved those averages.

A vital - and painful - lesson I learned was that I would always get more no's then yeses. To increase my yeses, I had to increase my no's. Of course, averages never play out in smooth and even increments. Some days I could get 15 or 20 no's in a row before hitting a yes. The difficult discipline to develop was not quitting at the end of the 14th no. Some of my toughest sales involved convincing myself to get excited about a long string of cold no's because it meant I was getting closer to a clump of warm yeses.

Later, at The Achieve Group (my first consulting company) we developed a number of marketing approaches that eliminated the need for cold calls. But, thankfully, the Law of Averages was burned deep into my psyche. As I started studying innovation and trying to apply what I was learning to Achieve's product, service, and market development, the Law of Averages came back into play. It became a key part of the reason Achieve eventually discovered a few pathways to a strong leadership position in a few key training and consulting services and markets.

I first saw the Law of Averages applied to innovation in 1983 when Zenger-Miller and Achieve worked with Tom Peters to develop the Toward Excellence process based on the lessons of In Search of Excellence. It made so much sense. To double your innovation success rate, double your failure rate. Clearly, effective managers don't want to fail. The goal is not failure; it's success. But since innovation is so unpredictable, we have to "fail our way to success."

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Article Tags: leadership
Referred by: http://www.searchengineworkshops.com



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