“ You make sales management sound like dropping a food pellet to a mouse so it will run a maze,” countered Harold as he reined in the more critical comments that came to mind.“ But let’ s come back to the sales issues a little later. Now that we’ ve discussed employees who are within a system, we need to discuss the employees whose outcomes aren’ t within the system. These are called‘ special cases.’ Star employees who dramatically outperform the average employee are‘ special cases,’ but the employees who are very far below the average are‘ special cases’ too.‘ Special case’ just means that the employee’ s output is so far above or below average that it gives us statistical proof that the individual’ s skill, work ethic or abilities are the source of the difference.
“ I will keep the statistics and math to a minimum, but a certain amount is unavoidable,” admitted Harold.“ I absolutely will guarantee that once you get through this little bit of math, you will be very glad that you did.” He opened Scherkenbach’ s book and said,“ I am going to refer to this book to keep my explanation on track, but I will need to alter the examples a bit. The book is based on examples that track employees’ mistakes. Tracking employees’ successes illustrates special cases just as well as tracking their mistakes, and will translate better when you go to work on sales problems, because in a sales environment you concentrate on number of wins just like we look at the quantity of goods we manufacture. Let’ s look at the output of nine workers in the factory.”( See Figure 1.)
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“ Wait a minute,” said Jim.“ As long as we’ re looking at a sales problem, couldn’ t we call these nine salespeople and call the output their annual sales?”
“ OK, Jim,” Harold said,“ let’ s go ahead and do it that way, but we should do a little more than just change the headings. In the plant, we look at a daily cycle, because any one manufacturing employee’ s input into our product can easily be completed in a day. I know that salespeople don’ t go from sales lead to closed sale in a day, so a one-day cycle would be too short.”
“ Darned right,” Jim piped up.“ When we receive a sales lead, we spend quite a bit of time trying to convince the engineer that our parts are superior. Once that is done, we have to wait to sell our flanges until the engineer’ s next project goes from drawing board to manufacturing. With everything we have to go through, our sales cycle is about a year.”“ Then a year is the period that is statistically significant,” Harold replied,“ so we will use annual sales in our example.( See Figure 2.)