Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] So one of the concepts that I talk about in the work that I do is really this concept of sales math. And this is another area. Execution, in my mind is another area of sales math. How we think about this is that all of the tactics, when added together, add up to achieve the strategy, and all of the strategies, when added together, add up to achieve the objective. And when the objectives are added together, they add up to achieve the goal. And so it's kind of the idea that adding these various steps of a particular sales process together is what moves us through that process to achieve that particular strategy.
[00:00:39] I'm Dennis Sorensen and this is the Think Big Win Bigger podcast. This is the podcast for sales leaders and salespeople who know they're capable of more and are looking for a system that is predictable, repeatable, scalable and forecastable for growth. It's not theories, it's not. It's not motivational speeches. It's an ambitious way to operate your business.
[00:01:02] Hello and welcome back to the Think Big Win Bigger podcast. I'm Dennis Snorenson, your host, and this is episode number 15.
[00:01:10] And today we're going to talk about the third discipline in the process driven system, and that being the discipline of execution.
[00:01:18] Before we dive into execution, I wanted to just kind of go back and review a little bit of what where we've been in the series of podcasts to this point. And so very early on we had our special guest, Mike Weinberg on and we talked about the beginning of really building the process driven sales life. And then we pivoted next into creating the winning sales culture. And we talked about the process driven sales framework, that being the four Ps of planning, preparation, practice and play. And then we went into the first of the three disciplines, that discipline being the discipline of ambition. And then next we moved into the discipline of strategy and we touched on the concept of the point of friction with our special guest, Blaine Sibby. And then pivoting into this episode or moving into this episode, we're going to talk about the third discipline, and that is the discipline of execution. When execution was really sort of started for me was we had a lot of really great account planning being done and even a lot of really great ambition planning. And then it was really about making sure that we didn't get lost in the chaos that can often happen in day to day life of a salesperson.
[00:02:30] So we wanted to make sure that we had a written execution plan that we could follow that makes sure that we had our eyes continually on day to day. Week to week on the things that we need to get done in order to keep our strategy in focus in the pursuit of our ambition with our accounts. And so we wanted to make sure that we put in place a process to do that. And so execution is that process. It is the ghost process. And execution is really the, the how we make it happen of the entire process. And so it's now taking that ambition plan, taking that ambition plan and creating a strategy for how we're going to go after that ambition. And then it's in the execution. It's really about then making sure that we have it written down such that we can keep sight of it day to day, week to week, as we go throughout our sales year. So execution is really where strategy becomes the action that we take day to day. And really the reason for this is that the lack of process or inconsistent process leaves us in a situation whereas as the job expands to fill the day of a salesperson, it can be very easy to fall into this trap of confusing activity with accomplishment. We want to make sure that the things that we're doing every day, every week are really moving us towards the accomplishment of the goals that we've set as part of our strategy. And then we want to make sure that we can focus on playing really one shot at a time and playing the hole that we're on. If we borrow a little bit of a golf metaphor here, we want to make sure that we really know what the next shot is and that's the shot that we're focused on playing and that we can be able to make the progress that we need again, day to day, week to week, against the goals that we've set. And so if you think about the process driven framework and where the execution discipline or the discipline of Ghost really comes in, it is that third discipline. And at this level, really what we're doing is we're talking about the sales motion and the steps and stages that we're going to go through in our sales motion in order to execute our plan.
[00:04:40] If you think about how this really breaks down into the full framework, the framework really starts at the system level. And the system is the four Ps, it's the plan, the prepare, the practice and the play. And then there's really our method level. And the method level is a lot of the foundational elements that we learn from Mike Weinberg or from various other methods that are taught in sales, in the challenger sale, in value based selling, all the different methods that people follow and all the different tools we have on our tool belt as sellers for really how we're going to go about doing this, how we're going to go about creating value for our customers. The motion level is really where we get into really the steps in the process to create, advance, and close our opportunities. And so it's really the steps and stages oftentimes found in a company's CRM system. It's the steps and stages that we go through in really that sales motion that we're executing. And so that's really where Ghost comes in and where the discipline of execution comes in for us. And when I first was working on this concept, because I was trying to make sure that we were focusing on delivering the things that we needed to the things that we said that we were going to do in terms of our strategy and our ambition plan, what I wanted to do was to make sure that. That we had a process to be able to do that. And so what we did was I went back and I mentioned, I think on this podcast previously, one of the books I had read is how champions think by Dr. Bob Rotella. That book really influenced my thinking about execution. But then another book that I had previously read that I went back and reread was a book called Execution. And that book really highlighted a couple, you know, really three key principles that are required for execution. Execution requires a commitment to a process, a commitment to a deadline where we're putting a stake in the ground and saying, this is when we're going to get it done. And it really requires accountability in order for somebody to take ownership and be accountable for getting that action done, that step in our process done. And so for me, it really formed into this framework that I call ghost.
[00:06:53] And GHOST is really goals, objectives, strategies, and tactics. So at the highest level, we're talking about our goals. And those goals can be big, broad aims. We can talk about being the number one provider of whatever our solution is to this particular customer. We don't have to really get as detailed on the goals as we do when we move down into the objectives level. Because what we're doing in the objectives level of GHOST is we're really defining exactly what has to get done, what has to be true in order for that goal to be achieved. And so if I say I want to be the number one technology provider to this customer for this particular type of technology, then it is in the objectives that I'm going to define how I will know that I am the number one technology provider to this particular customer. The objectives need to be specific. And measurable they need to be binary. They need to be like an on, off, switch on the light on the wall. There needs to be no, no room for debate about whether an objective has been achieved. And then when we think about the strategy level, the strategy level is really how we're going to achieve that particular objective. And then the tactics underneath that strategy are really the steps that we're going to take to execute that strategy. So at the top, goals, then objectives, then strategies, then tactics. When we think about that hierarchy of goals, objectives, strategies, tactics, we want to think about it as a parent child relationship where the goal owns every objective underneath it and the objective owns every strategy underneath it, and then the strategy owns every tactic underneath it. When we build a ghost plan, we don't want to build a list of goals, a list of objectives, a list of strategies, and a list of tactics. We want to build a structure that allows us to be able to see the relationship, the parent child relationship between this goal, these objectives, this objective, these strategies, this strategy, these tactics. Because that's really where we get the greatest value from doing this level of planning and then using that plan to guide our execution throughout the year. And the other key thing that's important when we think about this is that we want the minimum number of items that are required to achieve the parent.
[00:09:15] So in the case of a goal, we want the minimum number of objectives that we need to be able to achieve that goal. And when we, when we're talking about an objective, the minimum number of strategies, we don't want more strategies than we need, and we don't want more objectives than we need. We want the number that we need in order to achieve the particular objective or goal. And then the same is true of tactics. We only want the tactics that are absolutely required, the tactics that are key in order to execute that particular strategy. That sort of gives you the high level framework of what we're working with. And then I'll talk a little bit more about how to think about this. And so one of the concepts that I talk about in the work that I do is really this concept of sales math. And this is another area execution, in my mind is another area of sales math. How we think about this is that all of the tactics, when added together, add up to achieve the strategy, and all of the strategies, when added together, add up to achieve the objective. And when the objectives are added together, they add up to achieve the goal. And so it's kind of the, the idea that adding these various steps of a particular sales process together is what moves us through that process to achieve that particular strategy. So it's the tactical level, adding those together that gets to that strategy. Strategies to objective. Objective two, the goals.
[00:10:36] The other thing that is kind of important in this is really kind of the gap rule that I call it in that if we've gone through and we've executed a particular set of tactical steps, but we still haven't completely executed that strategy, the gap is that we need more tactics. When we're doing this planning from the very beginning, all we're trying to do is get to a place where we have a ghost plan or an execution plan that is directionally correct. It's never going to be perfect. And so we should expect that time after time we're going to see various gaps. And as we go through the sales process, we'll identify, oh, we need additional tactics here, or there's maybe an additional strategy that we need in order to truly get to that objective. Or there might be a particular new objective that we need to get to that goal. And so we'll learn that as we go through the process. But the key is that we have a plan, an execution plan that's written down and, and that we're able to follow really day to day, week to week, month to month as we go throughout our year. The other thing that's really important in really putting together a really good ghost plan is that we think about the dates, the dates that we're assigning, the deadlines that I said are required as part of execution, that we think about those dates. And so the goal date, let's just say that I set a goal and I'm going to have a goal date that it says that it's going to be accomplished by December 1st of this year.
[00:12:00] Well then what that means is that the objectives all must be accomplished on or before December 1st. I can't have objectives that are happening after December 1st because the goal date is December 1st. And so I'm essentially assigning my goal date. And then I'm sort of building backwards to assign my objective dates when they need to happen. And then the same rule is true when it comes to then the strategy. So if my objective has to be accomplished by October 15th, then all of my strategies need to be accomplished on or before October 15th. And so I'm essentially building backwards from the date that I said that I would from a ghost plan perspective. And so the child, or in this case say the tactic, its dates almost be happening before the parent strategy.
[00:12:51] And the strategy dates must all happen before the Parent objective. And the objective dates must happen before the parent goal. And so there's a logical flow of the dates and the due dates for the activities that we're going to perform in order to execute our sales motion. The other key thing is to just really think about it in terms of backward planning, because what we're doing is we're looking out to the future and saying, well, this is when I need to be able to accomplish this particular goal or this particular objective. And so we want to make sure that we're thinking about then and then building backwards from those dates all the way back to today to make sure that the goal that we're setting is realistic, that we want to be able to say, okay, if I build backwards, and then I realize when I get back to today that I really needed to start this work two months ago, well, then my goal date really needs to be moved out by two months. So that we. We need to make sure that when we're setting the dates and we're using this, this is part of a really helpful process to help us become much better at our ability to forecast our business as a seller and to forecast our region as, say, a regional director or our business as a CRO. It's really important that we be able to have a really good understanding of the true flow of the deal and when deals are going to be able to actually happen.
[00:14:09] One of the things that I've seen in the past and different teams that I've worked with is that we would go through, we'd be forecasting a particular deal to happen in a particular month or a particular quarter. And then we get to the point where that deal is supposed to be getting close to closing, and we realize that we've missed different aspects of the sale. Perhaps we didn't make the connection that we needed to the economic buyer, or we didn't accomplish certain steps that we needed to in terms of a technical evaluation that we needed to perform or other types of activities that we needed to do. And what that causes for us is then that deal is going to slip. It's either going to slip out of that month or out of that quarter or out of that year. And so part of the GOES process is really about helping us determine some accuracy when it comes to when we're calling the dates for particular deals. So another important aspect of the ghost process is to think about its relationship to our CRM system. So in our CRM or whatever we're doing to track our opportunities, the opportunities that we have to sell, we Want to think about that the opportunity is an objective in the ghost plan.
[00:15:20] Because the opportunity really fits the definition of objective in that either we're going to sell it or we're not and it's going to close or it's not. Every opportunity that we have in our CRM system is an objective in our ghost plan. So when we think about the things that we're going to sell, those are objectives.
[00:15:42] And so now if I've got a ghost plan build out or my salespeople have ghost plans built out, instead of asking my sales team to show me a close plan, what I'm looking for is I'm looking for the ghost plan, and I am looking at the specific objective that is the opportunity that we're trying to sell. And then I'm looking at the remaining strategies and tactics in order to close that particular deal. And that then is the close plan. Close plan, the remaining tactics and strategies to achieve a particular objective or an opportunity to close that particular opportunity related to that objective. And so the ghost structure is really just about a logical flow of how we're going to go about executing and getting things done. Ghost is really about the discipline of getting things done and the things that matter done. The other key aspect of this is, and this was the second element that was called out in the book, execution. And that is really the third aspect, which is the accountability. So it's ownership. Who owns each of those particular items in the ghost plan? In most cases, the individual seller is going to own the vast majority of all of the different items in the ghost plan. But there may be situations where somebody else in the organization is going to own something for the seller, perhaps the seller's manager or perhaps someone else in the organization is going to take ownership of getting something done in the plan. And so the other thing is ownership. And what we want to make sure is one of the key rules in the ownership area is that there's a single named owner for every item in our ghost plan. We don't want to assign items in our plan to a team or to a nebulous part of the organization, because then there's no single person who's taken ownership and is accountable for getting that particular item done by the date which we need it done. And so in our ghost plan, ownership is a key aspect.
[00:17:40] And so we want to make sure that we cover that. And so we want to think about again in the sales context that the ghost plan functions as something that we as sellers own and that we don't necessarily have to do. Everything in that ghost plan, but we have total ownership of it. And we're working with our teams to make sure that anybody that does own something in that plan is getting it done when they said they would get it done. And so the other thing that we want to think about in terms of it is how would we go about building a ghost plan to begin with? Through the experience that I've had in really putting this process in place across multiple organizations and multiple teams, the thing that I found is really critical is that we start at the top. We start with our goals. What are the goals? Which is why I say in the strategic account plan, it's very important that we define in writing what our goals are for the account.
[00:18:33] So if we carry our goals from our strategic account plan into the ghost plan, then we start with goals. In the case of an existing account, I might have one goal, I might have three goals, I might have five or six goals. One of the ways that I would implement this in, say, a new prospect territory is that the goal, there might only be one goal for a prospect, which is to make them a customer. And then I would define how I would achieve that goal through the various objectives related to that particular goal. But so we want to start with the goal level first.
[00:19:03] So define the goals first and define those in either our strategic account plan or strategic territory plan.
[00:19:10] And then we move on to the objectives. And we want to make sure that once we've defined our goals, we begin to work a single goal, and we define all the objectives for that goal. Then we move to the next goal and we define all the objectives for that goal, and we move to the next goal, and we define all of those objectives for that goal.
[00:19:25] Once we have our goals and our objectives, all the things that we think add up to achieve those goals, then we move to the strategy level and we take the same approach. We define strategy for each of the objectives that we've put into our plan before we move to the tactical level. And the reason that I learned to do this with my teams is that it's very easy to find yourself getting a little bit lost in the ghost plan. If you haven't clearly thought out, yes, these are the specific four objectives I need to achieve to achieve a particular goal. If I start to build strategy for a particular objective and then tactics for that, sometimes it's easy to miss objectives that are needed in order to achieve a particular goal. And so because my goal or my my goal for the ghost plan is that that it be directionally correct, it's important to me that we, we follow this process in terms of goals first, objectives next, strategies next, then the tactics and build at each level first before we move to the final level of tactics for each of the strategies, the source of our goals and even our objectives comes from our strategic account plan. So we want to make sure that they're written in our account plan or territory plan, and then we carry those into our execution plan so they match. That was the whole point of the ghost process, was to make sure that the work that we were doing day to day was related to the strategy that we laid out for our account we or accounts or sales territory. Another important consideration is really what I would call change expectations. So if you think about it, we don't want to be changing our goals week to week, month to month, because it's really just sort of starting over, starting over, starting over, starting over. And so what we want to be able to do is when we come through our planning process and we're getting ready for the coming year, we want to be setting our goals for that coming year for our account or for our territory. And so we don't want a lot of change in that. In fact, we want minimal to no change in our goals. And then once we define the objectives that are going to achieve those goals, we're also going to be looking to have minimal to no change in those objectives.
[00:21:33] When we move to the strategy and tactics level of the ghost planning, that's where we're going to see the greatest level of change is because as we go about executing our sales motions, we're going to find that we need additional tactics or something's going to happen and we're going to need to add another strategy to our to our plan. And so we want to be able to have the greatest flexibility at the strategy and tactic level of our ghost plan. And we want to be as solid as we can be and non changing, if you will, at the objective and at the goal level. How do we think about this in sales? What's its application? When we think about an execution plan, it really is, as I said before, the close plan for everything that I'm going to try to sell in a particular year. So I've essentially pre written my clothes plan. Oftentimes I would, you know, ask a seller for a clothes plan and if they've got a written close plan, they'd say, no, Dennis, my close plan is right up here. It's right up here in my head. And then I knew that the close plan wasn't real. Because I know if it's not written down, it's not real.
[00:22:38] It's far too variable. And so I want to have a written closed plan. In this case, it is my written ghost plan that is my close plan. The other thing that's important to think about from a sales perspective, as I mentioned earlier, is that this allows us to really map the things that we're doing day to day to the steps and stages that are defined in our sales motion and that sales motion that's defined perhaps in our CRM system. Again, the steps and stages that we need to move through, that the organization is asking us to move through on a consistent basis as sellers in order for us to be able to execute the create, advance and close process in our sales motion. And it's important that this level of sales motion is important in that we gain efficiency as sellers when we're following process. It's the whole idea of being process driven. The full integration of the system, the method and the motion is about gaining advantages and gaining efficiency as sellers so that we can essentially, as sellers, create more selling cycles. Cycles for ourselves. That's really one of the key benefits of being process driven and going through this process and having a written plan really enables us to be able to do that and enables us to have our eyes on making sure that we don't miss any important steps in the stages that we need to go through in our sales motion. The way that we would implement and execute a ghost plan is effectively using a spreadsheet template. And we have. We have developed a spreadsheet template that we use at Horizons west and that we work with, with our clients. And it's really just that laying out the goals, then the objectives, then the strategies, and then the tactics so we leverage a spreadsheet. The importance of this, again, is really about making sure that we're executing day to day, week to week, and we have eyes on the things that matter. I've had sellers who, you know, we'd have a multiple multitude of things that would occur during the week, and we would lose sight of the one or two things that need to happen that week in order for us to know that our motion's going. And so if you're a seller, no matter what else happens that week, the two things in your ghost plan that had to happen, those two things get done, you know, in spite of anything else that didn't get done that week, you know that your sales motion is moving forward. And that's really the key to the ghost plan is knowing what those Items are so that we're not confusing activity because we can feel really busy coming through a week and really not get a lot accomplished, particularly a lot that matters to us, actually executing our strategy. And so we want to be able to have eyes on those things so that we can, and back to my golf metaphor, just have eyes on the next shot and know what that shot is and be able to take that shot. And then, so we're playing, you know, the next shot and we're playing the hole that we're on. We're not worrying about future shots or future holes that we have to play. We're focused right where we are. We're in the moment, we're present in the moment, and we're playing that next important shot.
[00:25:45] And so execution is really the key. Third discipline.
[00:25:50] It is a discipline that takes work. It takes work to really build the sales muscle, the sales habits to be able to execute with that discipline. But once you do, it becomes a little bit like riding a bike. It becomes very easy.
[00:26:07] In the sessions that I teach now, in the different ambition workshops that we run, when the sellers are presenting out their ambition plans and kind of the high level framing of their strategy for the account, one of the things that starts to happen for me is I can begin to see, okay, there's their goal, there's their objective, there's their strategy. And so it becomes really a mindset shift, a paradigm shift, if you will, as part of this discipline. The other key advantage of Ghost is as you develop this discipline, you develop this paradigm, it is also something that is really important and useful to us in sales, in our discovery. Because when we're in discovery with a customer and a customer's talking about the things that matter to them, when they're talking about their goals, one of the things it allows us to do is to start to think about and then ask questions about with our customer, well, what has to be true for you to achieve that goal? We can begin to map the way that our customer is talking to us about their goals. We can begin to map it into our GOES framework in our mind. And we can begin to think about, okay, if they're telling me that's their goal, I'm not really hearing from them. The specific objectives that need to be true in order for them to achieve that goal. So that gives me an opportunity to begin asking questions about that. Because what I'm looking to do is to be able to understand the objectives that the customer is must achieve in order to achieve their goal. And the strategies that the Customer is going to implement to achieve those objectives. Because where I create the greatest value is being able to tie my solution to helping them achieve, either at the objective level or at the strategy level, the things that matter the most to them. And so that's what I'm trying to do in my discovery is I'm beginning to think about how I'm mapping what the customer's telling me into essentially a ghost plan for the customer. What is the customer's ghost plan? And that's what I'm doing in discovery as I go through this with the customer. And so the discipline of ghost, like I said, it's the third of the three pillars. It's the third discipline, ambition, strategy and execution. Execution using the ghost system that we talk about is really the key to being able to now complete that plan, prepare, practice, play, process.
[00:28:32] Because Ghost is about planning, Ghost is about preparation, Ghost is about practice. And Ghost is about the play. It's the on the field play that we do with the customer. And then it's about that cycle of feeding back everything that's happening from what's happening in our interactions on the field with the customer that's feeding back into our execution plan or into our ghost plan that makes it over time, richer and richer. The hardest part about ghost planning is really just starting and actually building the first one. Because once you've built a ghost plan that's a working ghost plan is a workable ghost plan. That ghost plan becomes a template to use for the next account or for the next sales motion that we're pursuing. It allows us again to gain efficiency and to be able to build once, to use many, not build many, to use once. So ghost plans allow us to be able to get better and better as sellers as we go through that process.
[00:29:30] The other thing that the ghost plan allows us to do is that if we've had a really successful sales campaign, we can learn from that ghost plan. We can learn from all the steps that we took throughout that ghost plan, all the tactics and strategies and objectives that we had to achieve in order to reach either our sale at the objective level or the goals that we had set for the account.
[00:29:54] It allows us to learn from that so that we can again build that sales muscle to gain more repeatability into our business as sellers. And it also allows us to learn from a situation where perhaps we weren't successful. And so it allows us to go back and really look at what we did and then ask ourselves, okay, well, what went well, what didn't go well? And if we could go back to the beginning of the Ghost plan and we could start all over again. What would we change? Because that's a great opportunity for us to learn to be able to think about how we might change our sales motion into the future.
[00:30:27] And so really thinking about Ghost is a really powerful system and tool for us in sales, if we'll just take the time and effort it takes to actually write down what it is that we need to do in order to execute our strategy. And so that really completes those three pillars. And in the next couple of episodes of the podcast, we're going to talk a little bit more about this whole concept of execution and concept of Ghost. But this sort of sets the table for that and allows you to have a point of view around the Ghost process.
[00:31:03] If you have questions about what I've talked about in this podcast, feel free to provide those in the comments or to email me just Dennis sorensenorizonswest.com and I'll be happy to engage to, to. To see if I can answer any questions you might have. Because again, this, this is, this is probably the most challenging concept that I teach, but it's also the most impactful in terms of delivering the results that we need and the outcomes that we need for ourselves as sellers and for the business that we work for.
[00:31:36] And so I thank you for joining me for this episode, and I look forward to having you back on on episode 16.
[00:31:43] Until next time, just win.
