Problem-Solving: ...Of Hotdogs and Solutions

ComBliss, a business company was having a dilemma as clients have been leaving left and right. To manage the wildfire of customer attrition, the management tapped into their best sales trainer, Shawn,so he can deep dive into what was going on with their numbers. The company knew that Shawn will deliver given that he is a seasoned veteran with tons of experience and he is a decorated employee with many accolades. Shawn was no stranger in identifying issues and finding the root cause, he knew how to use his business shovel to dig deep into the heart of the problem. During the meeting with management, he found out that the goal was simple and that was to increase the retention rate from a measly 10% to a whopping 90%.With his acquired wisdom, he voiced out that getting to the goal would not be a walk in the park but rather a steep climb as there are a lot of factors to consider. With a confident flare, management gave the wheels to Shawn knowing that he is fully competent to handle it. After the meeting, Shawn wasted no time, he took his business shovel and did what he does best:dig deep. He used different ways to formulate an analysis. First, he spoke with the employees' leaders to try and check what they might have gathered from their people. One of the leaders said that there people are not equipped to sell a solution, another leader second the motion that the employees do not have the set of skills to make clients see the value of the company's offering. Shawn collected all of these feedback and proceeded to talk with the employees themselves. All 20 people from the team confidently said that they can put a client into a conversation that will make them realize the value of staying with ComBliss versus going to a new company but obviously the numbers that these employee deliver are not adding up to it . Shawn, then decided to do an acid test and gave each employee a customer objection. Each objection was different and everytime he gave them a different piece they were all stumped. In the end, all of them admitted that they need help in terms of creating a conversation. Shawn then told management that by the looks of it, this is indeed a skill issue. So he went on training these employees, he gave them different drills, told them how likeability sells and gave them creative ideas that will make a client think twice about leaving ComBliss. Since these concepts were completely new to the employees, they were all still adjusting to it. To aid their learning Shawn made sure that he spoke with each one of them and talk about their client interactions. He did this everyday, for 2 weeks. When he got the results, he was expecting some baby-steps of improvement with the numbers. But lo and behold it did not. The leader told Shawn that out of 100 interactions only 2 clients were retained. And this was after intensive coaching and the employees promising him after each session that they will do better as their skills have been sharpened. So Shawn did another 2 weeks of monitoring and coaching, with the belief that it takes 4 weeks to create a habit but the people were still not delivering nor are they trying to sell the value of ComBliss.Simply put, it was the same shitty results. Frustrated, he then went on to seek advice from her leader, Nelly and all she said was "Throw the shovel for the meantime, take a step back and look at a bigger view". Shawn took a step back and realized that while he made sure that all employees understood the main goal of the company he miss the part where he had to set a goal for them to keep track on their progress, he failed to introduce scarcity for them to effectively realize their shortcomings and do better next time. Lastly, he was not able to set the goal for them to triumphantly celebrate their milestone and spike up their motivation. All this,because he did not step back. He realized that instead of asking himself questions like "What additional skills could I give for them to be better?" He could have stepped back and asked "What was missing in the program?" "What kind of goals could I set for them to hit so they are aware of what success look like?" By doing this, he could have redefined the problem and could have formulated a completely different solution.

See, most of the time we know what we are doing. We are experts in our field of work, but there are times wherein we all get caught up in this fast-paced business world and we forget to step back. Stepping back and redefining the problem is powerful, take it from former hotdog eating champion, Takeru Kobayashi, who set a world record of eating 50 hotdogs in 12 minutes beating the former world record of 25 and 1/8 this was back in the early 2000s. A lot of competitors have beaten his record since then. But to this day his feat is renowned not just because he gobble down meat as fast as he could but also the manner on how he did it. Instead of asking himself "How could I eat hotdogs faster?" he asked " How could I make it easy for myself to eat hotdogs?" By doing this, he was able to come up with different ways on eating a hotdog. These ways were completely different from the conventional way of eating the food. He was even able to come up with a technique called "Kobayashi Shake" where he wiggles his body to force food down his esophagus and so it will settle easily in his stomach. He veered away from the norm, and he ate the hotdogs by splitting it in half , dipping it into the water and then stuffing both parts in his mouth. All this because he asked himself an entirely different question to redefine the problem