Why These Noticeable Details Will Lead You To Greater Success
Attention to detail is the thread running through this whole story – the phrase that stuck with me long after the sales manager who first said it moved on.
We’ve more than likely had people in our lives offer us advice or have given feedback that sticks in our mind. Possibly because it was repeated enough times that we had no choice but to remember it, or probably because there was an element of truth behind the message.
In my case it was a sales manager who would use the phrase, ‘Attention to Detail’ quite regularly. Now this had two angles – either he was a perfectionist who had to cross every t and dot every i, or I made mistakes that had the potential to cost both the company and my reputation. If the truth be known, it was probably a bit of both.
And today, in this competitive arena we play in, every little nuance, every tiny detail and distinction, every minute shift in shade, tone and gradation leads us closer to our goal, or further from our goal.
We just need to remember the market research, or lack of, done by Coke in introducing the ‘new coke’ by omitting noticeable details such as not letting tasters know that only one product would be marketed and letting the tasters think that taste was the deciding factor in the blind test. To add insult to injury the company clearly had paid no attention to the emotional impact that Coke (the original) had on people. This cost the company billions of dollars.
Even the controversial ‘Brexit’ decision demonstrated that so many people had no idea of why they were voting or even anticipated the impact the campaign’s lack of ‘attention to detail’ would have on everyone.
So how do you measure your ‘attention to detail’ (ATD) and how do you leverage it to get the edge and experience success even more?
Here are a few examples that have come up in my discussions and/or coaching that might give you some food for thought:
Funnily enough, writing this article transported me back in time to when my husband and I were renovating an old house. “You mean I have to sugar soap the walls, fill in the holes, prepare with undercoat plus do two coats of paint?” I asked.
I guess if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing noticeably well.
Making Attention to Detail a Daily Habit
Attention to detail isn’t a one-off effort – it’s a habit you build the same way you build any other skill: by noticing the small stuff on purpose, repeatedly, until it becomes automatic. The best salespeople and leaders I work with treat attention to detail as a competitive edge, not a chore.
If you want to sharpen your own attention to detail and turn it into a genuine advantage, Bernadette McClelland’s keynote presentations dig into exactly this – the small, noticeable things that separate good from great.
Where Attention to Detail Shows Up in Sales
I see attention to detail show up in the smallest moments of a sales process: the follow-up email sent within the hour instead of the next day, the proposal formatted for the client’s brand instead of yours, the meeting invite that already has the agenda attached. None of these are hard. All of them get skipped when attention to detail isn’t a habit yet.
Buyers notice. They might not be able to name what tipped their decision, but attention to detail is very often the quiet reason one proposal feels more trustworthy than another, even when the numbers are close.
And it compounds. A team that practises attention to detail in small things – replying promptly, proofreading, remembering a client’s preferences – builds a reputation for attention to detail in the big things too: delivery, follow-through, doing what you said you’d do.
I’m Bernadette – founder of the Decision-Led Revenue™ Operating System and The Revenue Leader of Influence™, where I work with CEOs and sales leaders to build a sales team they can rely on to think, make the call, tell the truth about pipeline and own the result.
If any of this resonated – or if you’re staring at a revenue problem that feels like it should have been solved by now – I’d love a conversation.
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And if you’d rather join the discussion, you can also join me on Substack. That’s where the Revenue Leader of Influence community is starting to have these conversations in real time.
