Joe Greeley here, for Nimlok Minnesota.
Hey, who’s keeping score?
When was the last time you went to a youth sporting event and had to ask around what the score was? ‘Cause you get there, and there’s no big scoreboard, right, and there’s no real scorecard…it’s just the parents. Then you probably get three to four varying answers – it’s 14 – 10, oh it’s 7- 4, or whatever it might be. Nobody really knows, right, because there is no scoreboard and half the time they’re not paying attention to it, and they’re not really even sure, right?
Well, what if we did this in the business world? Actually, a lot of times it happens. There is no scorecard, specifically when you get to events. Nobody’s really measuring some of the behaviors and some of the things that we want to have happen.
Now I get it, scorecards are tough, right? Scorecards create accountability. Scorecards also create that you have to come up with a plan, which is hard work, and hard to figure out what are some of the things we should be measuring, right? But here’s the thing – the scorecard is also the road map to success and improvement. So how do you know if you’re doing well or not?
What if you got to the end of the year, your youth soccer game, and went, “Hey, we got no idea what the score is!” That’d be hard, wouldn’t it? However, it is soccer, so it’s probably 0-0 or 1-0. So maybe that’s a bad example.
But what if you got done with your golf round and you didn’t have a scorecard and you had to kind of, “Well I think I played pretty well…”, and “I think I shot this…”, right? No, you need a scorecard, or at the minimum you need a scoreboard, right? Nothing worse than getting done and going, “I thought we won! I thought I played pretty well!”
So, let’s get rid of the vagueness. Let’s come up with a scorecard. Now, what I’m suggesting here, is a scorecard on the show floor – day to day. Now, I know you’re rolling your eyes, “Oh there’s more work…”, and again, it’s the accountability deal, isn’t it? But it gets everybody on the same page.
What if you started to figure out ahead of time what are some of the milestones we want to hit? Now everybody’s different, but maybe there’s some behaviors you want. Well, we want these types of meetings, and we want “x” amount of them. Or we want to do this many types of demos. Or we want this type of interaction, or we want “x” amount of qualified leads. That’s great, but are you getting there on a day-to-day basis?
Get your team involved in this, especially on the front end. Talk about what you want to do, and then review it at the end of the day. Figure out what went well, what didn’t, and can we actually meet our show goal? Are we 20% there, 30% there on day one? Are we halfway there, did we really hit it out of the park?
Get these people motivated too – this is a company goal, not an individual goal. Get them motivated around these things. The other thing it does, too, is it gets them talking about what worked that day and what didn’t. “Oh, I had success over here,” or “I didn’t have success over here,” or “This was a challenge.” It lets some of the senior people help some of the newbies. And they start to talk more – they start to blend more, also, just as a team.
The last part about this too, is pick out a booth captain. I know that sounds a little cheesy, but all great teams have a captain. They have somebody. Yeah, they have a coach, but they have a captain – they have somebody that’s in the trenches. Somebody that’s encouraging, somebody that’s giving advice, somebody that’s helping them out, and somebody that’s pushing them. It’s not a bad idea, sometimes, to have somebody that’s constantly motivating your people on the show floor.
Lastly, there’s a link in the body of this email that if you find helpful, great – it’s to our resource page. There are a lot of articles, a lot of tips, and a lot of downloads there that might help you navigate through some of these things and a lot of other topics.
You can also feel free just to give us a call. We’re here to help, so feel free to give us a call. We’re happy, happy to walk you through any questions that you might have.
Anyway, that’s what was on my mind today. Let us know how we can help.
Thanks!
