Relying on government intervention to achieve targets encourages laziness among staff. file photo | nmg
Leaning on regulatory intervention to boost sales exacerbates intellectual laziness and dampens the entrepreneurial spirit.
Four
Thursdays ago we posited that Telkom taking on culturally entrenched
M-Pesa head on with T-kash would be labourious even with 20,000 agents
in play, a no-costs barred marketing campaign and its value-adds.
Possibly,
we observed, a flank attack, like Equitel’s, would offer a better
chance of success. It’s still early days, so the verdict is still out on
this one.
The verdict that is already in, however, is
that interoperability and regulatory intervention won’t change the
fortunes of the underdogs for the better. Here’s why.
First, struggling salespeople usually complain of not having
anyone to sell to (prospects) as the reason for their dismal sales. And
yet, even the sales manager giving them a list of ready-to-buy prospects
-hot leads, to use sales jargon- only makes the situation worse.
They
sit on the list like a hen on eggs. Only, the list doesn’t hatch.
Further, any effort by them to get it to ‘hatch’ is half-hearted at
best, and rarely yields an ‘egg’. In fact, the once hot leads quickly
grow cold. You see, the problem wasn’t the lack of leads in the first
place.
It was the salesperson’s debilitating demeanour, which he unconsciously projects to the prospects who then don’t buy.
Putting
food in his mouth, won’t get him to chew, let alone swallow, it. Giving
him ‘ripe’ prospects won’t get him to sell. Nor will it give him any
undue advantage.
Addressing the underlying issue is a
better bet at seeing him jumpstart his sales. As wisdom has it, “If all
the wealth in the world were divided up equally, in a short time, its
distribution would conform to patterns almost identical with those that
had previously prevailed.”
Second,
it may sound simplistic to extrapolate, but this principle translates
itself to business. The more in these times of rapid change we live in
that are triggered by technology and accelerated by the internet.
As
argued in the article, dominance is becoming the new normal. Forward
thinking regulators are wary of tinkering with inherently innovative
business behemoths.
That’s a significant reason why
Facebook is still on its feet despite the mounting challenges it is
contending with in the face of the Cambridge Analytica privacy abuse
scandal.
In addition, these giants themselves thrive
because they disrupted the ‘old normal’ and live in a state of near
paranoia of being disrupted themselves.
For instance,
the “Red Book” given by Facebook to all its employees ends by saying:
“If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. “
That kind of cultural thinking and entrepreneurial spirit doesn’t get
levelled out by regulation.
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