Ideally, you want to avoid adding cost to fund excess activity if you are able to shift expenses from one bucket to another it’s a zero-sum game with no impact on overall operating margins. Shift some planned spending on technology projects to more people-centric functions as a way to fund new initiatives. Gather customer feedback on any self-serve applications you have in the sales organization.Īre they being used? Do they meet customer expectations? This information is invaluable for setting priorities for sales operation areas where change is immediately required - must do’s - as opposed to the action that can be taken later when resources permit. With this action, it won’t take long to send the message that the winds of change are coming. Change starts with new decision makers don’t expect a right angle turn to happen with the leadership team that sponsored a “do less” culture.Īppoint new leaders in those areas where excess thinking is required be guided by customer feedback. These 5 actions will give your journey to move from minimalist to overkill a kickstart: Sales leadership They expect leadership to go figure it out!Īs an aside, organizations that can’t deliver excess service and still have attractive margins are not giving their customers strong enough reasons to do business with them. They don’t care that a company may have a cost problem. Consumers will naturally gravitate to those that provide MORE - not less - of what they want. Smart organizations will accept that unless they get on the overkill train their performance and long-term profitability is at risk. When rising consumer expectations for more and better treatment meet the organizational minimalist mentality, something has to give. And the situation is exacerbated by the fact that it is virtually impossible to create a self serve algorithms that define the variety of questions people have when they engage with an organization. It seems that despite attempts to substitute higher cost people based processes with technology, consumers are slow to adapt and accept self serve. In fact, many technology-intensive companies offer sophisticated self serve applications to their customers but there STILL is a huge wait problem on their traditional people-based queues. Self serve technologies are being introduced to try and shift demand away from people-intensive activities in an effort to solve this problem as well as to reduce operating costs.īut they won’t solve the entire problem. We relentlessly search the floor of our favorite retail store to find a sales clerk that can help us.Īnd we waste much of our precious time wandering around the voice answering system of the businesses we engage with trying to talk to the right person. We call our airline or financial institution and we wait in the call queue for 20-30 minutes for a service rep to take our call. And it’s a concept that should be employed by sales people wanting to enrich their careers and lives.Īs consumers though, we face a business environment where excess isn’t employed but deficiency - by minimalist organizations - is. In my experience leading sales teams, it has immense rewards to people and sales organizations.Įxcess is the notion that organizations need to apply in order to stand apart from their competitors and gain long-term competitiveness. “being excessive” as an individual is an undesirable trait if you’re not “spot on” with what everyone expects, you’re weird and are avoided.to do anything in excess is essentially a squandering of resources wasting time and money.appropriate sales solutions do only what is required and no more.thinking in volume rather than increments is unproductive.creating an enormous sales solution to a simple problem is wrong.going above and beyond what is required is wrong.Overkill takes a bad rap It suggests that:

Of course, the definition is silent on what is excess and more to the point, who gets to decide on what the “reasonably expected” solution is. It subtly implies that to solve a problem with a solution that is more than is required is wrong - is inappropriate. The definition of overkill seems to answer the question of whether there is anything wrong with it. An excess of something beyond what is required or suitable for a given purpose.” - definition of overkill. In gross excess of what is reasonably expected.

Overkill definition