Selling and Politics Have Something in Common

Earlier this year we introduced Dave Seah’s Goal Tracking System.

You should read the full post to get a good appreciation for it, but in essence his system is based on awarding points to good, revenue generating activities and creating your own arbitrary, minimally required number of points for the day.

When you meet or exceed that level, you then know you had a good, productive day’s work.

It’s pretty useful stuff for us in sales. It’s hard enough to not wasting your day putting our fires and administrative tasks that don’t make you a bit more successful. Dave’s system can help you stay focused on the activities that matter most.

It seems that Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign came to a similar conclusion. From Obama’s community blog:

Today, we’re proud to roll out an updated points system called the Activity Tracker. The basic idea is the same: the Activity Tracker helps Obama supporters measure the work they’re doing on behalf of the campaign. Whereas before, the points system tried to measure lots of different activities down to a “point value,” the new Activity Tracker simply displays up front exactly what activity users have been engaged in.

So when you make calls, knock on doors, organize or attend a campaign event or raise money for the campaign, you earn points. It helps reward the tasks that are critical for Obama’s run for the White House.

And then, there’s nothing like a bit of visibility of your results, combined with some peer pressure.

Finally, and maybe most importantly, the source of a given user’s points is now visible to everyone in the My.BarackObama community. Before, all a user could see when looking at another person’s dashboard was a total point value. Now, the full extent of the person’s campaign-related activity is available for other activists to see.

It works for millions of sales people and obviously also for a political campaign.

Here’s our post on Dave’s Goal Tracker again. For more information and resources, here’s Dave’s own site.