Two important tasks in sales management revolve around commitment. On the one hand, it is about demanding and enforcing a commitment with regard to the planning and, on the other hand, also about organizing binding cooperation between the various sales units, essentially the generalists and the specialists.
But what actually is liability and what are the prerequisites for courtesy?
Without becoming too semantic now, almost everyone understands courtesy to mean compliance with concluded contracts and agreements and at the same time compliance with agreed or generally applicable „rules of the game“.
When I was writing I hesitated whether I should add the word “agreement” to the word “contract”; In the end, I did this because I want to show that there is no natural relevance limit in the binding, i.e. it does not only become binding when it becomes important or when someone believes that it will be serious.
In principle, it can be assumed that most people, when they make an agreement, definitely intend to comply with it in a binding manner. Often the experience afterwards is a little different; not that agreements do not apply at all, but rather that they are interpreted creatively or that they are dealt with according to the situation.
In the vast majority of cases, this is due to the fact that both parties to this agreement have a different perception of the meaning of this agreement and the associated environmental and framework parameters. Almost everyone has probably not been able to keep a promise in the way it was originally made (in terms of time or content) – and it was definitely not an intention and it was “the circumstances” that were to blame.
In order for a liability to endure at all, i.e. a validity beyond the immediate date of the agreement, the following five points are important:
- Consistency in the definition and description of the facts, the initial situation, the subject matter of the agreement
- the goal that is to be achieved with the binding agreement must be identical or at least aligned (= in the sense that both sides want it)
- There must be a common understanding of the path or possible paths to the goal
- Both sides need a similar and equally weighted urgency
- and of course the agreement must have been made sincerely.
These five elements form the foundation and thus also the resilience of the binding nature of an agreement. If even one element from the basis of the commitment is missing or weakened, the commitment is vulnerable and will sooner or later disintegrate.
So if you want to promote and demand commitment, you must first of all deal with these five basic components of binding agreements and work on them. Transparency helps a lot here!
Vertriebsmanagement 