After the first month, £1,000,000 of new business felt a mile away.
Everyone stared at the sales report in front of them.
No one wanted to speak. As the team’s leader, I searched for a positive to get the conversation going.
“Well, 25 new accounts are open, that’s a good start.” I began with.
Naz named the elephant in the room; such was his brash manner. “Yeah, but only 5 placed an order with us — and that’s not going to get us to our £1,000,000 target.”
It was clear our approach to getting these new accounts to spend wasn’t working, but why not?
Throughout that meeting, we talked through many different ideas. A first-order discount, or a rewrite of the welcome pack we sent out, was among them. These were good ideas, but I still felt we were missing something.
It came to me in the shower of all places.
We were asking why the 20 hadn’t placed an order. We hadn’t asked why the 5 did.
I was trying to fix the problem by studying failure. The breakthrough came when I studied success.
In the shower, these alternative questions popped into my head.
‘Why had the five spent?’
‘Did we do something differently with these customers that we didn’t do with the others?’
Inverted thinking breaks tunnel-vision thinking.
And that’s what we’d missed.
As we looked at each account that had spent with us, one pattern emerged. They had all been visited by a sales rep within a week of opening the account.
This was our ‘golden hour’.
We didn’t need a discount. We didn’t need a fancy welcome letter.
All we needed to do was focus on the timeframe where the magic happened.
Your challenge this week:
Write the default question, then write its opposite. Decide based on the opposite question.
You’ll find new insights with new thinking.
