CHAPTER 4 Culture of Performance
loading process so you can see exactly when things start to load on each
page, and when the page completes. Sometimes this can even be a little
more dramatic than a video.Baking Performance into the Process
When I was in my early twenties, I took a job at RadioShack. This wasn’t
a great gig for me. Sure, RadioShack had a lot of gadgets to play with —
that part was fun. But I was never a great sales person, and this was a role
where I needed to be. I worked with someone who was good at it. Made for
it, even. He would literally push me aside at times to get to someone eyeing
up a cellphone — easily the quickest way to earn a few extra bucks on our
checks.
You see, we got a minimum wage, but the only way you made any
money was through commission and what they called SPIFs (special per-
formance incentive fund). SPIFs were incentives you received for selling
certain items. Sell a cellphone, you got a SPIF. You also got SPIFs for selling
service plans. In my opinion, our service plans were frequently good value
— particularly for certain items.
Service plans were also the one thing I could sell and sell well. I was
consistently in the top five or six in the district for service plan sales. The
reason was simple. I thought it was important, and as a result, I made it
part of the process.
Most people wouldn’t mention the service plan. They would focus
on the phone itself — what features it had and, more importantly, what it
didn’t have that would make you buy the next model up. They’d come up
to the cash register and after scanning the item, the point-of-sale system
would pop up a little alert asking if the customer wanted the service plan.
They’d look up from the screen and ask “Do you want to buy a service
plan for that? It’s $8 for two years and covers any issues.”
The customer wouldn’t buy. Why would they? This plan hadn’t been
mentioned at all during the sales conversation and most customers