Here's you solution. Have you got the balls to do it?

July 11, 2012 - PRLog -- Membership sales in the health club industry is a funny old game.

To the outsider looking in, it could be presumed an easy process: Prospect walks into the club > Salesperson shows the club > Prospect becomes a member.

It's when you're at the coalface it begins to become an intriguing conundrum of possibilities. A slight shift in one area of process will generally lead to an improvement or a regression in output.

The variables are many. Common-sense tells us that additional telephone calls will produce additional sales, and that the more appointments we have booked into our CRM, the more likely we are to achieve our sales targets.

This is all very well and good, and the common-sense approach has been adopted by operators worldwide for a number of years to varied level of success.

The reality however, is somewhat different. A one dimensional focus on calling/booking volume leads to a pressure-cooker environment whereby the salesperson no longer focuses on her result, but on satisying the ever-hungry KPI machine that is her manager.

Ex-customer calls, 'missed opportunities' (from the last quarter), two year-old leads, and unfortunate falsification of data are regular activity interventions in most sales offices and call centres. As the pressure builds, the dark cloud of underperformance envelopes the once motivated sales team, and individual team-members become unreliable, crestfallen and eventually move to pastures new.

ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) changes all of this. You no longer require a fixed schedule, 'do it or else' KPI's, number-crunching conference calls, and you are not measured upon how late you stay at your desk each evening.

In a ROWE, you're measured upon what you get done and delivering the kind of results that you were hired to deliver. It is a management strategy that fosters trust, instrinsic motivation and a greater work-life balance.

The manager is 'forced' into becoming a better manager. In a ROWE, he becomes a mentor, a friend, a coach and a facilitator. He empowers and trusts his team to deliver the results they have agreed amonst themselves.

You control when, where and how long you work. So long as you achieve your targets, how you spend your time is entirely up to you.

The biggest obstacle leadership face is to take a leap of faith, and that only comes from believing in your employees.

Organisations such as Gap Outlet and Best Buy have already taken the jump... isn't it time you did the same?