“Consistency is good for you.” I’ve lost count the number of times my teachers told me or yelled at me for not submitting my homework. Also remember the pride I took in ducking the pieces of chalk that flew my way due to this, but that’s a story for another day.
I have a confession to make. I’m Inconsistent.
With January ‘22 coming to an end, my new year resolution of exercising consistently this year is out of the window (and it’s only 25th of January). I’d like to believe I’m a rational person. So if I had data on why consistency works, maybe I would stick to my resolution.
But I am in the business of making sales reps become more consistent at what they do (thanks to the power of Behavior science and Nudges). So I decided to try to apply some of those insights in my personal life.
This is about the insights I found (so for those of you looking for a from-fat-to-fit story, there isn’t any. My personal fitness story is stuck at the “Before” picture). But back to insights around consistency…
Insight
worxogo’s Nudge coach helps thousands of sales reps build better work habits. Our Behavior labs frequently publishes insights on the impact of behavior on team productivity and manager effectiveness.
This month we see how consistent sales reps do as compared to the not-so-consistent reps. This is real life data, over many quarters. It compares sales reps across Lead KPIs (like activities performed – e.g. customer visits, customer calls, pitching the right products etc) and the Outcome KPIs (i.e sales).
The Reps were evaluated for consistency (or how many 3-day streaks did they achieve in a month). In other words, how many consecutive 3 day periods did they perform their tasks diligently. And we found 3 distinct groups – the inconsistent, slightly consistent and mostly consistent.
And the results are astounding, to say the least.
As is amply clear from the figure, Slightly consistent Reps (i.e. those who had at least 2 consistent 3-day streaks) did 1.5 times better than the Inconsistent group i.e. the reps who maintained a steady rhythm at least twice in a month.
Even more interesting, was the Reps who were consistent at least 4 times in a month (i.e. 4 3-day streaks in a month) did 1.65 times better than the inconsistent reps!
The So-What
For sales managers, it would be easier to see how many of their reps have 3-day streaks. Just getting your Reps to be consistent at least once a month will significantly up their productivity.
So rather than asking your team how they did, maybe you could help them be consistent 3 days in a row and see how their productivity ramps up?
How’s that for an insight!
worxogo’s Nudge coach helps Reps maintain their consistency streaks and assists managers to help build more consistent performing teams.
