He picked up the phone to call the customer and immediately threw out everything we’d just rehearsed.
We had sat down five minutes earlier and I walked him through the sales process step-by-step.
We ran a quick role-play and he nailed it.
Then he dialed the customer and went off-script in the first sentence.
Inside my head, I was thinking, “wtf, we just talked about this.”
Outside my head, I had a decision to make:
A) Do I rip the phone out of his hand and close the deal myself?
B) Do I let him finish, then ask him one question
I went with option two… “On a scale of 0 to 10, how closely did you follow the process we just walked through?”
If I had grabbed the phone, I would have saved the sale.
I also would’ve taught him that when things get hard, I take over.
The 0-to-10 question puts the work on him.
If he says “honestly, like a 3” he already knows what he did wrong and he’ll get it closer to right next time.
If he says “10 out of 10” I just learned he can’t listen or follow directions, which means he won’t last anyway. Either way, I get the information I need.
Every time I “just did it myself” I was solving a 5-minute problem and creating a 2-year one.
If your team isn’t executing, it’s one of two things. You hired the wrong people, or you trained them the wrong way.
Both are fixable. Neither gets fixed by ripping the phone out of someone’s hand.
Do you want help installing the exact systems I used to replace myself, so I had time to scale my business?
Cheers!
Brian
