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I’ve never been in sales, but I’m a passionate believer in the importance of good sales people.

Perhaps the single biggest indicator that your sales approach isn’t working is if your team is doing what I like to refer to as “aggressively waiting”. That is, instead of getting out there, generating opportunities, networking, and so on, they’re sitting in the office waiting for the phone to ring. As Alec Baldwin would say, they don’t deserve the Glengarry leads.

But it doesn’t just apply to sales. All of us are guilty of too much reticence, at work and elsewhere in our lives. I often say to the team at C&D that many businesses don’t succeed simply because people are unwilling to be clear about the things they need others to do. As the saying goes, you rarely get things for which you don’t ask, which means that unless you do ask your staff won’t magically translate your clever business plan into concrete actions, your customers won’t tell you what they really think and your suppliers’ best prices won’t materialize.

There is of course the issue of how you ask, something on which I certainly need to work (understatement alert!). But assuming you’ve taken care of step one (knowing what you want, of course), perhaps the single most important quality shared by good leaders is an ability to translate this knowledge into action. And funnily enough, a big part of knowing what you want is actually having the conviction to say it, stick to it and follow through.

So I’m saying that you should pick a course and stick to it regardless, right? Well, not really. Very often you don’t get the results you anticipated, to which the correct answer is not to carry on blindly. But my point is that at some point you’ve got to turn theory into action and get started. The more quickly and confidently you can do so, the sooner you’ll get the only kind of validation that matters: the reaction from the market.