Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about the value of your office furniture.
The desks in question are your Sales Desks (if you work in marketing or production, don’t stop reading yet).
These are the spots, real or virtual, within your company occupied by salespeople.
How much should each be worth to your business?
£250,000 per year? £400,000? £1M?
The value you attach will vary depending on the business and industry in which it operates.
It should also depend on the desk occupier’s experience.
Knowing these values is one of the keys to successful hiring and sales management.
Expected value provides one of the hiring benchmarks.
It should guide the brief for the role and the experience you need to bring to the role.
Alternatively, it highlights the skills you need to develop in an underperforming occupier.
If you are in Sales, do you evaluate your performance based on the revenue you deliver to the business?
Where in the league table of other desks do you stand?
If you are at the lower end, think about what you need to do to improve performance.
Think about the qualities a top performer brings to their work, and start building them into your way of working.
This approach can apply to managers who don’t work in sales.
As in the sales example, you can evaluate team, department, or individual performance levels based on outputs.
And whichever kind of desk we occupy, we can apply value thinking to ourselves.
Is the desk you occupy providing the value it should to the business you work for or own?
If it isn’t, find the gaps in your skills and get to work on improving them.