Would your whole team give the same answer?

Hi Nik,

Ask a commercial team what they're working towards and you'll often get a different answer from each person. This week's finding is one sentence, about ten minutes, and it's how you make sure the answer is the same.

This week in the field

Purpose gets communicated once and assumed from then on. It sits in onboarding decks and strategy slides, but it rarely gets translated into the calls a team makes every day. So two reps qualify the same deal differently, and managers give different answers to the same question. It's a pattern leaders tend to inherit, not one they cause.

What it means in practice

Without a shared answer, performance conversations turn into opinion against opinion. With one, decisions can be checked against it, so there's less escalating and more executing.

One thing to try

I created the CODE Performance System™ to give you clarity, and the tools to make it happen. From Playbook 1.1 of the CODE Performance System™, answer the question in one plain sentence: "Our commercial team exists to…". Cover who you sell to, the problem you're paid to solve, and how that drives revenue. Then check it: would a new joiner understand it in their first week? If not, cut it until they would.

Takes about 10 minutes. You'll notice it gets easier to explain why one priority comes before another.

The question to sit with

What would your team say you're working towards, if you weren't in the room?

Curious where you'd score on this? Take the free CODE Leadership Scorecard, five minutes, free.