We are watching a very fundamental sales management problem played out in Florida elections (this is not political!). It's called BLAME and it can destroy our sales organization from within.

When we affix blame, we immediately stop progress. We can often look at our job descriptions to see problem. In an election, job of elections supervisor is to observe rules and protect rule of law. As a result, when they find tens of thousands of bad ballots, they don't see it as a problem. In fact, they see it as a success. Their job was to set aside bad ballots. It says so in their job description! As a result, finding bad ballots equals doing their job.

But what if job description was changed. What if their job was to ensure that elections accurately reflected will of voters? In that case, bad ballots would be seen as a bad situation and any system that created too many bad ballots would immediately be fixed. In that case, Palm Beach County would have replaced their voting system four years ago when 14,000 bad ballots were discovered.

On other hand, you know how to identify bad customers, too. The poor fits, bad credit risks, and demanding QA departments. The ones that ask for expensive prototypes with little probability of a significant purchase. Unfortunately, we book these either because they are easy sales or because we don't have enough good business ready to close. As a result, we waste valuable personal time and company resources on clients that will never show a significant return on investment.

Open up your Daytimer? right now and identify three clients that you know, in your heart of hearts, are bad fits for your company. Take this list to your sales manager and operations director and see if they agree. Now comes hard part. Fire bad clients!