We live in a in a society that measures success by results. Talk is cheap, show me the
money, the proof is in the pudding; we’ve all heard these phrases before. They all mean the same thing: show me the results, the final outcome. So what’s the major flaw with this? Most success is born from activities in the past and the ability to learn from previous outcomes; we can’t solely judge a course of action based on their initial results as results come last.
Have you wondered why some companies put so much emphasis on doing procedures vs. actual sales revenue? It’s simple, sales results come last. Focusing only on current sales numbers is like traveling to a destination by car and only looking in the rearview mirror; today’s sales numbers reflect yesterday’s efforts and are helpful only if we learn from efforts we put in that were successful and those that were not. A perfect example is a new product we launched a few years ago. When we launched the new product we ran spiffs and focused of boxes sold. What we learned was people were loading accounts, selling a box here and there to get off “the list,” and not doing the right things to grow the business. We learned from this failure and we started focusing on finding the right accounts who had a passion for the product and the programs we were offering. We have now have grown this business from $100K a quarter in 2009 to $1 Million a quarter!!! So this is the reason we are so focused on doing procedures with the right surgeons in the right accounts, because we learned from our challenges of a past product launch.
Our success will always be a progressive realization where by the time the results are in, the outcome has for the most part been predetermined. We cannot wait for sales results to judge our actions. Like building a house, we cannot wait to see if we built our evolving company on a new product before we judged whether built it on a strong foundation.
