Drew Locher | It Takes Energy From Leaders


Drew Locher brings several different perspectives to helping organizations improve.  He began his career in engineering.  He was introduced to quality management in a management development program which later lead to specializing in organizational behavior.

Today, he talks with us about several aspects of making and sustaining change in an organization.  The importance of energy and staying focused until new habits are formed.  The role of measurements, standards and understanding of the broader process to have the context for making adjustments.  And, how to shorten learning curves.

Throughout the conversation, we highlight the role of leaders:

  • To communicate a purpose that is meaningful to people
  • To insure plans carry forward to help workers sustain their improvements
  • To follow progress – adding energy to the system and spending time with people

And more.

Mentioned in This Episode:          cma4results.com

Drew’s YouTube Channel

Hello everyone, this is Michael Webb, and this is the Sales Process Excellence Podcast. Today I have a guest that I’ve been looking to for quite a while. My guest is Drew Locher, a management consultant par excellence. And I’ve been following Drew for quite a while. Drew, could you tell us about your background, introduce yourself and how you got into what you’re doing today.

Drew Locher:                     Thank you Michael. And thank you for having me on your podcast. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to speak to your colleagues and constituents. So a little bit of background. Basically I grew up in the 1980s in a corporate management development program at the General Electric company. And it was there that I got introduced to, what we called at the time, world-class enterprise and quality management concepts. And we were expected to apply those concepts in whatever management role that we had.

I was with GE for seven years. I left in 1990, went back to school for organizational behavioral science. Up to that point my background was in engineering, several engineering fields. And at the same time I went out and started working with different organizations in different industries trying to see how these world-class and quality management concepts applied in different environments. And that’s what I did throughout the 90s, working with typically smaller and medium size organizations. That kind of grew into working with larger organizations by the end of that decade.

So I’ve been working with all kinds of different industries over the last nearly 30 years on my own, including healthcare as well as manufacturing, financial service companies, even higher education. They’re currently trying to apply these concepts to their operations. And I’ve been kind of doing that for 29 years, 30 years. And wrote a few books, which kind of gets you some notoriety as you know, in the field. Mainly focusing on the application of the concepts, what we would now call lean concepts to non-production environments. Three out of my four books are on that topic. So how do we apply the concepts to finance and accounting, sales and marketing, designing, product development or any development really. And that’s what I’ve been doing for a long time now.

Michael Webb:                 Excellent. Excellent. Unlike me, you sort of started off in management and got introduced to this and have been in the quality and productivity sciences of management for almost your entire career. I started out in sales and I had to go to three different industries. So very interesting and a really deep background. And maybe that’s why you write such a good newsletter. I love following you.

Drew Locher:                     Oh, thank you.

Michael Webb:                 I’ve been following it for a while now. And in April you wrote about a topic, it caught my eye, The Science of Management. And you reflected on your training as an engineer and you observed that there’s principles or laws that explain how reality behaved, and that some of them also apply to management of organizations. I thought it was really insightful. So before we drill into them, I thought maybe I would just cover an overview of the ones that you introduced and then we’ll kind of dive into them.

The first one you used as the example was a Newton’s first law of motion, right? An object at rest stays at rest, an object in motion stays in motion. The second one was the second law of thermodynamics, right? That energy or order decreases without effort or work. And third, you introduced the idea of a system, that feedback is necessary to keep results in the desired range. And then fourth was a reference about learning in organizations, and that seemed to be more about the human mind than about a principle of physics. But we’ll get into that.

So these are fascinating topics. I promise you there are people in the audience who might think, “Oh my God, you’re talking about physical properties, this isn’t going to apply. How could this possibly apply?” But it really, really does in a fascinating way. So Drew, let’s start at the beginning. This first law of motion, an object at rest stays at rest. Tell us how that applies in the science of management.

Drew Locher:                     So I only chose four, I’m sure there’s more. But those are the four that came to mind when I wrote the piece. But that particular one, it dawned on me as soon as I went back to school in 1990 for organizational behavioral science because there was an expression they used, organizational inertia. And I’m like, “Oh, I know a little bit about inertia.” And so it caught my attention early on that one. And as organizational behavioral science folks have recognized, the application of that theory for a long time now, at least decades.

The second one, the second law of thermodynamics, that was something that sort of dawned on me as I was studying organizational behavioral sciences. And I’ve seen subsequently people also referring to it, entropy in particular, and not always applying it or citing it or referring to it properly. So that for the last few years has been in my mind thinking I need to write a little bit about this at some point just to kind of clarify things because I’ve seen people refer to it and not always correctly.

Michael Webb:                 So let’s take those two, right there. As it applies to management, what does management have to do as a result of the law of inertia?

Drew Locher:                     Well, they just can’t leave things be. They’ve got to inject energy into any system. And an organization is a system. A closed system. And we’ve seen evidence of that in any… pick a topic. I think in the newsletter, I refer to Five S. I often hear organizations or leaders of organizations kind of complain that it can’t sustain Five S. And I’ll talk to them about, “What is your sustain model?” And they kind of look at me puzzled and maybe they do periodic audits or maybe they used to and they got away from them, or maybe they did them, but they didn’t really do them properly. They didn’t engage people in participating in them, so it became like a police action when people did the Five S audits.

And it’s true really of any organizational change. You have to continue to follow up for various reasons, not just injecting energy but really making sure new habits are formed. One of the other things I studied in the early 90s was habit forming. What does it take to create habits or overwrite existing habits? And that all takes effort. It takes energy really on the part of leaders in particular.

Michael Webb:                 So you’re saying that management needs to recognize that in order for things to change, they can’t just issue an order or tell people what to do, they have to plan that people aren’t going to be able to keep it at that level or keep that change in place unless they have a plan that keeps it in place. What would be an example of something that managers and executives would need to put in place to keep a change in motion?

Drew Locher:                     Well, in lean terminology, it’s just go see. We always say go to the gumbos, as Toyota calls it. But you need to have a focus when you go see. So the focus could be on, are we sustaining Five S? And, oh, by the way, I should involve people from the area in that observation, that go see activity. And I can use it to reinforce the importance of it, I can use it to teach people more deeply of what that topic is, and what it’s not. And you can use, again, pick a topic, visual management, leaders have to go and use the visual management. They’ve got to go see how other people are using it if they want to sustain it over time. If they don’t, it sends a message that, oh, this is important, or this is just a flavor of the month kind of thing, with a beginning and an end. And people will make assumptions that, oh, leaders don’t find this important anymore, so we’ll just stop it.

Michael Webb:                 Okay. All right. So in operational excellence and lean, there’s this idea of standardized work, which a lot of salespeople just bristle, right? In fact there’s a lot of value of that in salespeople, but are you referring to something that managers have to do? Well, it means like something called management standard work. So what would be some of the things… I mean, there’s got to be some of the things that would be necessary to keep entropy from the order or the energy from declining. What would we be involved there?

Drew Locher:                     So you bring up the topic of standard work. So that would be a focal point or a focus of a go-see of a manager. They should go see existing and observe being performed, existing standard work in their area of responsibility, with a particular focus on standard work that was recently changed, is what I always suggest. So that’s another topic for go-see. And all of the go-see activities as well as other activities make up the lean management system, and a leader’s personal commitment to that system should be documented, I believe, in what we call today leader’s standard work, which is just really a multitasking version of regular standard work. It’s a leader’s plan of how they’re going to participate and support the lean management system on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

Michael Webb:                 So question, if I am the leader of a sales and marketing organization, and I’m interested in this idea of standard work and standard management work, and I want to try to figure out what that consists of and translate it into my world of selling marketing, servicing customers. Is there a good succinct description of what are the components of management standard work that I could use as a model to figure out how it applies to sales and marketing?

Drew Locher:                     Well, there’s a model. A matter of fact, I have a brief, I think a two part YouTube series on the topic of what leaders standard work is, what should be in it, and also the process of creating it that they’ve learned is helpful. But really, fundamentally, people have to recognize that what they do are processes, and that is not always apparent to people in the sales and marketing world. That they take great pride in the creative nature of what they do, the relation, the strong relationship management nature of what they do. And they don’t always recognize process because the leader standard work is created… It actually documents all of the different activities or processes a leader is expected to be involved in. Just like standard work is for a particular activity or process. So first and foremost, people have to recognize the processes they perform. And that’s usually where I start and say, “Well, tell me what your processes are?” And that’s not always a quick response to talk it through.

Michael Webb:                 Right. Interesting. Okay. We’ll put the link to your video, your two-part video on management standard work in the show notes page for everyone. Out of curiosity, I ran across a book a few years ago by Jim Lancaster, The Work of Management: A Daily Path to Sustainable Improvement. I thought that was very well done because he talks about starting at a state where management was just kind of by walking around without a lot of forethought and planning to it, and how his mind got changed by his experiences, and now he’s able to improve the order and the productivity of his managers by design, by the way he goes through it. So I thought that was possibly a good list. Are you familiar with that book?

Drew Locher:                     Oh, I’m familiar with Jim. He’s the real deal. His company LandTech, his father was an early adopter of lean concepts. Matter of fact, they were written up in the original lean thinking book from Jim Womack and Dan Jones. And Jim has taken over the business, the son. And he’s a deep system thinker. Great. He’s the whole package. I mean, he’s got the interpersonal skills. So it’s a book I highly recommend put out by the Lean Enterprise Institute.

Michael Webb:                 All right, cool. So then there was this third idea. So we have, if an organization is in a certain state, it’s in motion and it needs to change, you have to inject energy. And when you do inject the energy and change its direction or its momentum, you have to have a way to maintain it over time. Your third idea introduced the concept of a system, right?

Drew Locher:                     Yeah.

Michael Webb:                 And systems thinking. Let’s talk about that. And then you went from that to feedback. So tell us how those things apply to in a management context.

Drew Locher:                     Yeah. I was actually introduced to the concept of system thinking to organizations before I returned to my studies in the early 90s. And it was really Deming. If everyone knows Dr. Edwards Deming, he’s the father of quality management and all these principles were trying to encourage organizations to apply. And I was introduced to his concepts in the 1980s as part of my training at GE.

In one of the readings, I believe, there was a picture, a graphic of a system model, which really kind of struck me. And his whole thing is organizations are breathing, living organisms that have to adapt. They need inputs to tell them where they need to adapt. Things like voice of the customer. And that’s why the sales and marketing folks are so important to a lean enterprise at some point.

Michael Webb:                 Right.

Drew Locher:                     So then when I went to do my organization behavioral studies, then it really sunk in. I was like, “Oh, okay, I get this.” Because we were introduced to system theory thinking, which was taking hold in the early 90s, really late 80s, early 90s.

Michael Webb:                 Okay. And so systems thinking, the way I think about that, and I just bounce this off of you, I think about it, what it really is, is the law of cause and effect.

Drew Locher:                     Absolutely.

Michael Webb:                 Entities behave according to their nature. And so you can describe those in the physical world by the law of motion and thermodynamics. There’s mathematical that we’ve observed that entities behave in these ways that are predictable by mathematics. And so in an organization there’s cause and effect also, right? And so in a… We call them systems, but really it’s cascades of systems, right? Because the company exists in a market, the market exists in a political environment. Inside the company, there are functions and departments. Inside the departments are the people and the roles that they play. And there’s the systems, the software that dictates how they do their reporting. And then there’s the training that they have and how they’re compensated. All of these things make it a very complex environment that often behaves in counterintuitive ways. So tell us about the requirement for feedback and why is it necessary? What does it enable us to do?

Drew Locher:                     Well, it’s even a little more fundamental than that. You have to have a plan, a standard, a normal condition, whatever terminology you want to use, so that then you need sensors to tell you what the actual condition is to compare it to the two. So it’s no different than your thermostat in your home, right? You set it and then it’s constantly measuring the actual ambient temperature and adjusting accordingly. So it’s no different. But it starts with what is your standard or normal condition, so we can have something to compare it to and then adjust. And in lean terminology, that’s this whole plan versus actual concept, which is prevalent throughout lean thinking. Again, I can use Five S as an example. There’s visual standards, and when we go observe are we sustaining? We can see things are out of place or things aren’t being replenished like they should. That kind of stuff.

We can see those quickly and easily only because we have standard conditions to begin with. Measurement systems of any form, process measures, lean enterprises all have an abundance of… It’s not just the chart and the data, but we always say you have to have some sort of standard or goal. So we can see, are we hitting the standard or not? And if we’re not, then that stimulates a conversation in electronic and electrical systems. That conversation is more audit or can be automated. Again, much like your thermostat, it’ll automatically adjust. The key is to have the right sensors in your organization and measures help with that. But we’ve got to be timely measures. Your thermostat is operating in real time, and too often metrics or outcome metrics that are very backwards looking. And it’s particularly true in sales and marketing, but it doesn’t need to be these days.

Michael Webb:                 No.

Drew Locher:                     But it’s not just that, there’s quantitative, but there’s also qualitative. So we talk strongly, and have for decades, about voice of the customer and what are your processes for voice of the customer? What are your customer touch points, and have those processes developed standards so we can kind of keep feeding the feedback loop to see where we need to change or improve or even more strategically where’s the market going?

Michael Webb:                 Yeah. So in sales and marketing, in a lot of organizations, this term key performance indicator. And I have had companies I worked with and clients as well to say, “We’re going to go look out in the market, in the industry, and find the best key performance indicators and bring those best practices into our organization.” And that never seems to work. Could you speak to why?

Drew Locher:                     I think a lot of it is this lack of process thinking because if I don’t see a process, I don’t have to standardize on it. I don’t have to measure it. These are obstacles I’ve encountered quite often working in a sales and marketing area.

Michael Webb:                 Okay.

Drew Locher:                     So how do we get people to see process in what they do? That’s often the first step.

Michael Webb:                 I remember being in a conversation a number of years ago, and some executives of a pretty well-known company were talking around a big conference table, and we were talking about Deming’s management cycle, plan, do, check, act. Or plan, do study, act. And one man made the observation, “Well, a lot of the people in my team, they just don’t want to do that. They’re just not interested in that.” And the comment came back a little bit later, “That’s a management problem.” If your employees don’t want to do that, if they don’t want to follow a process, they don’t want to do PDCA, you have to find out why, and if you don’t, you’re not going to be able to create improvement. Would you say that’s fair?

Drew Locher:                     Oh, absolutely.

Michael Webb:                 So then why don’t executives, why don’t managers, excuse me, why don’t employees want to do process or PDCA? And what can managers and executives do to break through the barriers?

Drew Locher:                     So I don’t know if you’ve read the newsletter I wrote on Psychology of Learning. That was another one that came out, I think, earlier this year.

Michael Webb:                 Okay.

Drew Locher:                     The first thing you have to do for anyone, that you’re asking them to do something different, right? Measuring or just even seeing process, you have to give them a purpose. So why? Because if people don’t have a purpose for whatever you’re asking them to do, then they’re not going to even consider it. So leaders have to provide that purpose. So why we need to see process and sales and marketing? What are the problems that we’re having today that are not being met maybe due to our lack of process or really defined processes?

So sometimes things are going okay and everyone believes it’s going okay, and then leaders have to create a gap and say, “Okay, well we have to strive to improve or reach this new goal and here’s why.” Maybe something’s going on in the market and the competitive set that they’re dealing with. So a good example is… And I’ll use a specific sales and marketing one. We were going to map out the process of bringing on board a new sales person at a company, this was years ago, and before we mapped anything out and got the team assembled, I asked, “Why?”

They weren’t real clear, the VP of sales and marketing, or I think it was this title. I said, “Go gather some data.” High level data. And we talked about some possibilities. And he came back. And what he showed was that when they had a change in a salesperson in a region, he could show the economic impact of that. The negative economic impact of that in the transition. And it was millions of dollars. When you added it all up, it was several hundred thousand dollar impact per salesperson. And these guys were in the commodity business. A lot of salespeople working in the retail industry. And once he had that, now he was really clear on what the motivation was, and then he could articulate that to others. And that’s what we did when we kicked off the event. People were like, “Oh, we had no idea.” I was like, “No. No, you didn’t.”

We always had to get purpose for anything we’re asking people to do differently, and the purpose could be addressing existing problems, which are gaps, or leaders have to create a gap, forward looking gap of higher level of performance. But to have a reason why too, not just because, “Oh, we’ve got to get better.” Unfortunately, that’s not enough for most people. Well, everyone wants to improve, right? Well, no, not actually. It’s not the way humans were. They’re comfortable in their known and familiar environment, they don’t really want to change. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression comfort zone, right? People’s comfort zone.

Michael Webb:                 Well, and it’s even more than comfort zone. I mean, this story leaps to mind. I had this sales executive in a professional association here in Atlanta, and he was lamenting about how hard it was for his sales team to find qualified prospects because there were so many of them. And so they were just hitting the phones, doing prospecting calls, and they expected them to do 75 or 100 phone calls a day. And so I said, “Well, there might be some scientific kind of experimental ways to make that work a lot easier. Would you be interested?” “Oh sure.” “Great.” “So, tell me about the experiments that you do.” “Oh, we do experiments all the time.” “Oh, that’s really cool.” “So what kind of data did you have?” He said, “Excuse me.”

Drew Locher:                     Yeah.

Michael Webb:                 “Yeah, what kind of data?” “Oh well, just the standard data that’s in our CRM.” “Oh, okay. So what kind of improvements have you done?” “Well, our guys are all doing experiments every day.” Of course, it was on their own, it was completely unstructured, there was no baseline, there’s no cause and effect thought process, they’re just out working. And that’s what he thought experiments were. So a lot of sales managers they don’t even get the concept.

Drew Locher:                     Oh yeah. It’s amazing. Certain terms like an experiment can have a very different meaning in different people’s minds. It’s like the term problem. It can have very different meanings in people’s minds.

Michael Webb:                 And that has led me down a path, let me bounce this off of you also. Deming spoke and much of his work was brilliant illustration of the power of understanding variation. And in sales and marketing, we have almost no data in most organizations. Well, we used to have almost no data, now we got things people think are data, and there’s too much of it. Right? But if you don’t understand what that data means, how it ties to reality, if you don’t have operational definitions, if you don’t understand variation in terms of words and concepts, then your numbers are out of context. They don’t mean anything. So you have to understand variation in your operational definitions first. So to the point you just said, people don’t really… They have the word experiment. The word customer means different things to-

Drew Locher:                     Oh, yes.

Michael Webb:                 … the same company, right? So you have this system, you have these animals, wild animals, these human beings that are in the organization, and you’re trying to get them to improve. And as you pointed out, they have to have a purpose, so you as the executive need, you can’t just give them a purpose, right? You have to see what’s important to them too, right?

Drew Locher:                     Well, it should be an inspirational purpose. So people should be able to relate to it on a personal level, and be able to see how they can affect that purpose.

Michael Webb:                 Yeah. I remember working in a sales training company, and the inspirational purpose we were given, we’re going to be the best senior level sales training organization in the market. It was a great purpose because we had a great process, we had great skills.

Drew Locher:                     But what does that mean, what you just said?

Michael Webb:                 Exactly. What does it mean? What do we do differently?

Drew Locher:                     What is great?

Michael Webb:                 What are the executives going to do differently? It was like the same guys, our managers would go around and interview each of the sales trainers and take our feedback in, and then the company needed to make some important decision. So they heard what we said, and then they announced their decision, it had nothing to do with anything that the guys called them. It was like they were kind of doing the dance but not walking. They were, what do you say, talking the talk not walking the walk. And so this idea of a vulnerable… Not vulnerability. I guess it is vulnerability. Leaders have to understand what are the problems that are preventing the people in the organization from improving. And you have to kind of go back and forth with them to make agreements about where we’re going to prioritize and why we need you to try this for a while. I find that especially in sales organizations, I’m curious, have you seen that too?

Drew Locher:                     Oh yeah, absolutely. A lot of folks in the sales and marketing world, they’re very independent, they’re very individualistic, tend to be. And sometimes it’s the nature of that, just the traveling and things that they often do. Sometimes they lose connection with the organization because of that. I’ve seen that firsthand. And then couple that with there’s just lack of process thinking. It makes it for some formidable obstacles, but it can be overcome. Those obstacles can be overcome if we are properly motivated.

Michael Webb:                 Right. Okay. And so now let’s wrap up here on the fourth reference, which was about learning in organization.

Drew Locher:                     Yeah.

Michael Webb:                 That struck me because it wasn’t really a physical principle that applies. So speak to that a little bit.

Drew Locher:                     So the idea, and what I referred to in the piece is artificial intelligence, which I studied as part of my computer engineering degree studies. And within AI, in the 1980s, it was just kind of starting. Within AI, there was a thing called knowledge based management. And I learned that in the early 90s. And actually we had applied some of those concepts, I didn’t know that’s what they were called, in the late 80s in GE in our aircraft engine business. Where we were starting to kind of do predictive maintenance, where you could predict when you needed maintenance. This is different than preventative maintenance. Again, conditions of the aircraft engine would change and you would know that, okay, I’ve got to do some maintenance on that. Well that came from experience. And people a lot smarter than I in our aircraft engine group because I had a chance to work with them briefly on this project was they were developing software, which was drawing on those experiences.

So that’s kind of where I saw it, but then when I learned about AI in particular in school a little bit. Actually it was around the same time, now that I think of it. I was like, “Oh, okay, I get this.” And then when I went to study what does it take for people to learn and develop habit and skills, that’s when I started realizing, okay, this is all part and parcel of the same concept. It’s not physics per se, but control systems isn’t physics really either. It’s about taking information and reusing that, whether you can infer from it or just set up some simple rules that people can follow. It’s all part of that.

And there was a great book, if you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend it, even though it’s about 30 years old now, which is Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline. The art and practice of the learning organization. It was way ahead of its time. So when I read that in 1990 I was like, “Oh, wow.” What’s interesting in sales. For example the sales and marketing, oh, we do lots of experiments, but we’re not learning because we’re not doing it in a scientific way. We’re not capturing that learning for reuse. So that just people off on their own winging it, which is not really good learning.

Michael Webb:                 Right. And you have unarticulated assumption that sales is about what salespeople do, and it’s way more than that, right? The sales process doesn’t start when the customer calls a salesperson. The sales process starts by whatever caused the customer to call the salesperson. The market awareness. And today in particular, customer prospects don’t want to hear from salespeople. They want to do stuff that’s going to help them solve problems. And they’re looking on the internet. So if your company doesn’t have the right kinds of offers and assistance, the salespeople, their job’s getting tougher and tougher. Banging the phones, making calls, and that’s a sinking ship. But if you think about this… Your example of the engine is a great one, I think, because they have sensors and they detect subtle changes in the vibrations of the behavior of the engine and they’ve learned which ones are indicating that a bearing might be going bad, or the oil is losing its viscosity or whatever.

So they can detect that preventative maintenance needs to happen in organizations which are filled with physical systems, machines and software, and human systems, which have hearts and minds, right? Free will. We need to capture our learning in a manner that those hearts and minds can use it. And so in sales organizations, if you have properly defined your operational definitions of what makes a good prospect, it presents an opportunity to detect changes in the quality of the input of prospects to the sales process, which gives you a signal long before the market turns right, or a recession happens. So instead of your company floating along and when the tide comes in, we do great, and when there’s a recession, we do bad and you’re helpless, you have some forewarning. You have some ability to do counter measures, but that’s at a high systemic level. And it requires these people in the organization just like in the manufacturing side, to have a clear shared understanding of the causes and the effects and what’s value and what’s waste, so that senior executives can see signals that actually tie down to observable reality.

Drew Locher:                     The example you just gave where, let’s say, you found what makes for a good prospect, and I had not, for whatever reason, I’m a slow learner, I’m new to my job. Boy, if we could take what you learned and document that in some simple way and share that with others, we can have huge impact on ourselves and our organizations because people can get up to speed quicker.

We talked earlier about standard work, and I do a lot of lean in office environments and other environments where it’s more like knowledge workers. And I would always say sales and marketing people are knowledge workers. Engineers are knowledge workers. Even certain manufacturing environments are knowledge workers. Well, what does knowledge worker mean? It means what information I need, where do I get it, and what do I do with it in terms of what decisions or actions do I take. And if I can kind of standardize all of that, I can transfer that to others, shorten their learning curves, improve their performance in timely manners. I mean, that’s the essence of knowledge reuse.

Michael Webb:                 And the essence of a learning organization.

Drew Locher:                     And the tools that are available to do it, I’m describing it, they’re readily available. You mentioned CRM systems earlier, the capability that’s there is amazing if we use it. So I’ve got to take some time to put some notes or something in it so you could reuse it later maybe for that customer or we run some reports and things that show us trends or just having conversations of best practices

Michael Webb:                 Yes. To have so-called best practices that actually are proven by data that shows the cause and effect, right? And I’ve said for years, CRM systems is software, but if you don’t have the wetware, what goes on between people’s ears lined up and organized, the software is not going to do you much good. Right? At least in collecting data across a system. Now software can encourage people to capture the right kind of information. Now we’re back to the forethought and thinking of managers to identify what are the signals and what’s the noise, what are the important things and how do we change the behavior and keep that energy from dissipating in the organization.

So Drew, this has been a great conversation. It turned out exactly the way I hoped it would. So thank you very much for being here and your great examples and your really authentic way of  thinking about it and addressing it. If someone in the audience wants to start reading your newsletter or get ahold of you for a reason, how would they do that?

Drew Locher:                     You can go to my website and there’s on the front page, I think the homepage, there’s a place to sign up for the newsletter. I don’t put them out regularly, it’s just when the mood strikes me and I think I have something to say that people might benefit from. So I might put out four or five a year at the most. But people are welcome to sign up for that and they can do it through the website. You mentioned also some videos I’ve been putting out on YouTube. I have a YouTube channel and people can sign up for those so they get notice of when something’s been added. We mentioned earlier about leader standard work. I have a video I just put out on metrics, and kind of the process of figuring out how do you come up with metrics? Not specific to sales and marketing, but any process. How do you turn to determine a set of metrics that you want to start, outcome and process metrics. That might be of interest too.

Michael Webb:                 I want to leave all these links. So what is the URL for your website? Just so the audience will be able to find you.

Drew Locher:                     The letters CMA4results.com.

Michael Webb:                 CMA for Change Management Associates.

Drew Locher:                     Yep.

Michael Webb:                 Number 4.

Drew Locher:                    Results.com.

Michael Webb:                 Dot com. Okay, cool. Drew, this has been great fun. Thank you for being here and I would look forward to having you again sometime.

Drew Locher:                    All right, thank you for having,

 

 

 

Michael Webb

Michael Webb founded Sales Performance Consultants to create a data-driven alternative to the slogans and shallow impact offered by typical sales training, sales consulting, and CRM companies. Michael helped organize and delivered the keynote speeches for the first conferences ever held on applying Six Sigma to marketing and sales. Connect with me on LinkedIn.

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