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Hey, it’s easy to be confused about what needs to change in order to improve your team’s sales productivity. Most managers, when we first begin working with them, spend too much time locked up in strategies and tactics rather than improving the fundamentals of their team members each day. But, how do you know what’s a tactic and what’s fundamental?

Every good coach has plays. They may get them from watching tape of the competition. They may go to clinics where experts share the latest and greatest plays they ran last year. They read books. No different than in business. This is what you get when you go to industry events or tradeshows, or even the business section at the bookstore – you get a view of other company’s or individual’s winning plays.

However, if you listen to any of the all-time great coaches, they’ll tell you they could hand you their playbook and you would never beat them. You would have their strategies and tactics, but you wouldn’t win. How is that? There are basic fundamentals that don’t change and, done well, practiced and drilled, are the factors that allow you to perform these plays with excellence. This is the secret to success.

The Fundamentals You Need to Work on Now.

Simply put, great managers help their people do the work well. They help people get focused on what matters by making it crystal clear and prioritizing it. They get their people to agree to do the work so they immediately start moving forward. And they follow up quickly with them to ensure execution and provide more help just when their people need it. These three things are as fundamental to management as dribbling is to basketball.

We see a lot of chatter around strategy and tactics: do more of this, less of that, make this happen, run better tracking reports, introduce a new product and capture better customer data. We see all those plays. What we rarely see is managers making sure their people are calling the right customers, delivering value and delighting them.

Too often we make the mistake of thinking that fundamentals are so basic that they don’t need much attention. They are basic, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to do. Most of us are looking for shortcuts. If we would just execute these fundamentals, we would profoundly change productivity.

Give it a try. You will be shocked at the outcome.