Busy is not producing

I have never met a rep who admitted to being idle.

Ask somebody at the bottom of the board how the week went and you will hear about how slammed he has been. Follow ups, paperwork, a supplement, a customer who keeps calling. All of it real. None of it sold anything.

Motion is the most convincing thing a struggling person can produce, because it is visible and it looks like effort. Production is the only part that is not optional.

The admin matters. I am not saying it does not. I am saying it expands to fill whatever room you give it, and for a rep who is afraid of the next appointment it is a very comfortable place to hide. The paperwork is never going to tell him no.

The way I got at this was boring. I stopped asking how the week went and started asking three questions with numbers in them. How many did you run. How many did you sell. What happened in the ones you did not.

That last question is where the coaching lives, and you cannot get to it while the conversation is about how busy everyone has been.

There is a version of this at the management level and I have been guilty of it. A manager who builds a new tracker instead of going on a ride along is doing what his worst rep is doing. It feels like work. It looks good in a meeting. It moves nothing.