Leadership Secrets From The Inside

Leadership is mercurial stuff – it’s very hard to put your finger on. Most of us think we know what good leadership looks like but the reality is that we struggle to appropriate it for ourselves. That’s because knowing the principles of leadership is very different from being the person needed to change our world. The human condition is a complex thing but here’s what we know for sure about great leaders – success is an inside job. To lead we must do so from the inside-out. Forget personas, we must be the real deal.

Poor leadership abounds and worse still, toxic leadership is often veiled in a cloak of transient success, sporting metaphors and bravado. Performance cultures where politics fester in every corner are common-place. Corporate bullies and psychopaths are all too common. Flame-thrower style management for short-term financial KPI achievement all to the detriment of sustained success. ‘Shareholder value’ touted as a euphemism for executive stock plan optimization. Lord Of The Flies meets Wall Street… it’s no way to live.

Real leadership, on the other hand, is precious because it’s rare. There are many in leadership positions but only a few are great. Most live lives of discomfort when it comes to leading, wondering when the day will come that they will be found-out. I have a confession to make; I’m one of them. I’ve been leading teams and companies for decades and I’m not a natural leader; it’s been hard yards, working on myself – building from the inside-out. What is leadership and how do we become one worth following?

Here is a great truth – leadership is an inside job. But within all of us is a labyrinth of complexity and we are the way we are for reasons we never fully understand. The first step on the road to success is to heed the advice of an ancient Greek aphorism: ‘Know thyself’. Here are my thoughts on the factors that contribute to the complexity of leadership and success.

First of all, we inherit our intelligence, personality and family of origin. None of us were able to choose our parents or genes – these are the cards we are dealt. But intelligence and personality can be enhanced and altered if we choose to do so. Any weaknesses in all three of these foundational elements must be managed as we strive to be the best possible person we are capable of becoming.

Upon the foundation of genetic IQ and personality our attitudes, beliefs and values build us into who we are. By the age of seven, our personality and values are largely formed and these are influenced heavily by our upbringing and environment (family and society). The Catholic Order of Jesuits is attributed with the saying: "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man". There is much truth in this assertion but we are not robots, nor mere animals. We are uniquely endowed with the ability to laugh and cry, to dream and create, to choose appalling evil or breathtaking beauty, to plumb the depths of hell or reach for the stars. The hope for us all is that we can break the shackles of our past and redefine our futures.

Attitudes, beliefs and values can therefore be rejected, adjusted or chosen. It is natural to question and challenge all three, especially as we grow through adolescence. My father was a committed atheist and I had no religious brainwashing as child at all; yet I chose faith as a teenager and I remain a believer today. Others are raised in loving religious homes and reject the values inculcated during their upbringing. Free will and free-thinking are what make us truly human.

But all of this is below the surface – not visible to an observer. For most, it is the unseen baggage being carried while running the race of life. We are rarely held back by external factors, it is instead our inability to let go of limiting beliefs and behaviors that stymies us. Consider the illustration below as we now discuss the factors above the line.

Here is the reality and the problem that most of us face in life. We can only have the outcomes, results and wealth we desire if we consistently and masterfully execute the right inputs, actions and behaviors. To have we must first do; but to do effectively we must be the person worthy of the success we seek. All of the factors ‘below the line’ in the illustration either enable or sabotage our efforts.

The biggest mistake people make is seeking to manage by results rather than inputs. Jason Jordan taught me that you cannot manage revenue and he instead illuminates the path of focusing on activities that achieve objectives, that in turn create results. The only thing we truly have control of is our behaviour and actions to execute the inputs that create success. We cannot manage outcomes, results and prosperity or wealth; we can only have them as goals. We should relentlessly focus on what we do and being the person capable of executing masterfully.

It’s not enough to project a persona, we need to actually be the authentic person worth following. Anthony Howard is a business mentor and he taught me that there is no such thing as authentic leaders, just authentic people in leadership roles. He coined the term ‘human-centered leadership’ and he is worth following. The very best motivation for leadership comes from changing the lives of people by believing in them. Service of a noble cause for the benefit of people (customers and staff) is what drives the very best leaders.

So as you consider what really drives you and what baggage you need to let go of to be truly successful, here is my list of ten elements for success.

1. IQ and EQ. Intelligence and self-awareness are both essential. One without the other is not enough. Read and be committed to life-long learning. Become an expert. Know your strengths and weaknesses.
2. Mission and purpose. In professional selling I teach people to lead with 'why?'… it is equally important for leadership. Your why, and the why of your organization must be meaningful. Money, trinkets, and status are not enough.
3. Passion and belief. Our why is what needs to drive us but we also need to be true believers in our cause and those with whom we work. The power of believing in another person is never to be under-estimated.
4. Values and culture. The culture of an organization is the behaviour of the leaders, plain and simple. Are you values worth following and to they drive the right behavior? Culture is the signature of the leader.
5. People and relationships. Nothing great can be achieved without the support of a team. Relationships with the right people are everything in any endeavor – people of integrity and genuine power.
6. Numbers and discipline. Never neglect profit or cash-flow. Holding people to account is essential for any leader, yet proactively manage the right numbers – the KPIs which create ultimate results.
7. Results and managing risk. This is language of leadership – delivering outcomes and navigating the challenges. Stay focused on the prize and be positively paranoid about what could blind-side you.
8. Activity and attitude. Work-ethic is essential for success. Work hard and smart but realize that attitude is the biggest differentiator.
9. Gravitas and humility. This may seem paradoxical but the combination is compelling. Powerful people listen much and talk little.
10. Legacy and philanthropy. We all want to make a lasting difference and the very best leaders care about doing something worthwhile and improving the lives of others, especially those denied the opportunities afforded to the privileged.

Do the difficult work on the inside in addressing all of these issues. Read, dream, and challenge your own assumptions about yourself. None of us lives long enough to learn all the necessary lessons from our own mistakes. It is therefore important to learn from others. Jim Collins’ book, Good To Great, remains a seminal work. There are many others and we must carefully choose who we follow. Who are they in your life? Here is another related article I wrote concerning what I've learned about personal leadership.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: MilitaryHealth

 

Overcoming Rejection

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." - Eleanor Roosevelt

Sales is a journey of failing forward, even at the most highly compensated levels. You need to make rejection a game and if you're mistreated, kill them with kindness. People having a bad day may take it out on you but it's never personal. Your attitude is one of the few things that you can control. As Jack Canfield puts it: "New responses create new outcomes."

One of the great challenges in a people-oriented profession is cultivating your love of people. When you interact with so many, you'll often experience the best and worst side of human nature. Seek to love them anyway, always seek to transform their business wholeheartedly. As a sales thought leader recently commented on my post: "Fall in love with your customers." Strong words, I know. It's because it's all about orienting your mind to the positive experiences you're having throughout your selling day.

The human memory is problematic in that what we tend to dwell-on and remember is predominantly trauma and bad luck; things with high emotional resonance. We all have war stories from the field about when everything went wrong. The time we flew to the client and they canceled last minute, we got sick or had a flat tire, or the slide projector melted down and sparked. Maybe the time we hit the send button too early. Ironically, much of humor and the joy of life owes itself to our negative experiences, the backdrop of pain in contrast to joy in the foreground. The opposite of pleasure is not pain, it's actually ennui. So a big part of this post is a call to align your professional purpose to your aspirations and goal setting in sales.

It's a self discipline to focus on the good. I promote that sales people start writing on LinkedIn Publisher and even that's an experience where your writing and viewpoints can be picked apart, dissected, disagreed with and occasionally subject to being trounced. I say this because it's a brave new world of self expression as we become micro-marketers who are sharpening our pen, experimenting with SME content and putting ourselves out there. But keep in mind that for years, you've been sharing your vision and value propositions directly with clients, writing reams of insightful emails, holding discovery calls and leaving thoughtful messages. All you're doing here is transitioning these enablement initiatives to a public forum. Yes, that is daunting! The payoff is so worth it because you can concretely move from servicing demand to creating it.

You may be thinking, how can I develop a thicker skin? We weren't all born at 11, Type A and immune. When management places you under severe revenue pressure, when a key sale in your pipeline goes to a competitor, when a customer doesn't like us and randomly complains or an outcome is suboptimal; my philosophy is that as long as you gave it your all with integrity as you strived for excellence in execution, you can feel good about yourself and your effort. Sleep well knowing that often, it's not you.

"Without courage all other virtues lose their meaning," is how Churchill explained this phenomenon of the valiant living of life to the fullest in all seasons. Maya Angelou explored the concept with: "Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage." And Mandela, "I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."

I chose the proud brave lion, king of the jungle as the photo for this post and also because of all the controversy in the LinkedIn-osphere lately around whether one should be a LinkedIn Open Networker. Love them or hate them, LIONs are a courageous bunch of trailblazers who have been putting themselves out there unabashedly for years in this forum, which I do respect. I have noticed a sea change from five years ago when executives would respond to an invite with "I only connect with people that I know" to the current state of LinkedIn where by dint of my writings, I pull in dozens of new connections every week. It will be interesting to see where these "open profile" trends take us this year and if some new acronym emerges like LAMA - LinkedIn Ambient Marketing Activator. I digress...

Courageousness and overcoming rejection are what being a successful seller is all about. Top sellers develop the strategic chuckle. This comes under the heading of Guy Kawasaki's "art of beguiling." They shrug it off with a wry smile because they're amused inwardly. They respond to harshness with self-deprecating wit and humble acceptance. Like water off a duck, the vibe they put out is that simple.

It's been said and studied that people buy on emotion and justify with pure logic but it's critical not to allow your passion to override your good sense. Being overly sensitive to friction and noise from the buyer or buying organization can become a severe impediment to positive momentum. There's no room for luggage on the sales superhighway so leave it at the door. If you are fully there and concentrating on them, your problems fall away and you will not accumulate psychological debris or jet-lag from the journey.

Ultimately, in strategic selling you're helping an organization change from the status quo. Change management is very painful so anticipate growing pains. There can often be political machinations and infighting rippling under the surface of the red taped glassy lake that is corporate bureaucracy. Sometimes people in the buying organization feel that they've been shown to be wrong or they've been exposed for a mistake in choosing a specific solution provider. Honestly, executives are frequently trying to cover their own back and not get fired. Many say that the role of procurement is simply to 'prevent a mistake'.

Can you be a loving, caring and empathetic person and still embody theChallenger persona that hiring managers seek? Yes, you can. Because challenging convention and teaching with new insight does not require any erosion of respect and integrity. Harness your inner confidence. Be certain in your solution and intent on helping and serving the customer and you won't go wrong. Even if you slightly miss the mark, that intention shines through. We all know the sellers who sell for monetary gain alone and their tenure is predestined to be short-lived. When you run into noxious or vexatious executives who treat you poorly or their subordinates, take the high road and set the tone of leadership. Integrity in the face of cruelty dissolves it like the sunlight. I would term this as strategic good karma. I read an article once about social aikido in which we're encouraged to harness any available energies and leverage them as a force for good in human interactions to stay Switzerland, above the fray. This supplies a novel definition of "empowerment" in sales strategy as, "drawing from all available power."

No one makes ten calls and closes ten sales. If you close three perhaps you are a hero. Though why not set a more realistic expectation? Enjoy peeling the onion, actively listening and collaboratively solving complex problems. Why not be amused by irritable people who are black clouds in the workplace? Chuckle inwardly at the circus of it all and feel grateful that's not you. If it is you, make the change right now. Take pride in uncovering the true problems lurking beneath the perceived symptoms that everyone is fussing about. Remember the thrilled customer who left you a wonderful testimonial or LinkedIn recommendation. Repeat that in your head as the mantra a hundred times a day. Do it for her! Don't sweat the small stuff or the small minded: we truly must not 'major in the minors'.

In new business development especially, if you're doing it right, you'll almost certainly turn up the volume to such a degree where you get a couple of complaints. An experienced manager will understand this and give you leeway, as long as you're carrying yourself with decorum. You can't just not prospect in order to avoid the inevitable bumping into of misanthropes that hate their job and are ecstatic to recoil and spit venom at you. Rejection is par for the course in B2B selling so embrace it and even learn to thrive on it. Many feel like a bull in a china shop when they are hunting for new business or hunting in named accounts. After decades in the field, it's still the natural order of paradise, creation spiked with destruction. Old ideas need fall away in a controlled burn to make way for the new. Get used to a bit of chaos, be the "solver" and ride that next wave.

A huge reason sales people hate cold calling is the pent up fear of rejection as well as the actual rejection itself. Most executives you call on are relatively gracious or will make sure to screen through an executive assistant. So there really isn't that much to be afraid of. Jack Canfield defines fear as: "Future Events Appearing Real." Much anxiety about nothing! Legend has it that one of Sir Winston Churchill's heroes died an extremely old man, and on his deathbed he divulged: "I didn't need to worry about 99% of the things I worried about because they didn't come to pass."

I can see the argument against cold calling with less than 3% resulting in anything positive; and it's just as bad for cold emailing. But fortune still favors the bold! You're going to need to reach out cold in social media channels if there is no-one in your network to provide a warm introduction. Do this boldly and confidently but with an informed insight that demonstrates you've taken the time to understand an executive's business. Even securing a referral takes courage and is not to be dismissed as 'easy'. Executives are "crazy busy" as Jill Konrath eloquently puts it so you're going to have to make an extremely relevant, compelling business case to even get a warm intro. Reciprocity will help you here – quid pro quo. We must inspire others to make time for us by making time for them.

Fear of rejection is really just a crisis of confidence. I think of the 'Emperor's New Clothes' and many a 'vapor-ware' startup company that really didn't help anyone. I think these folks do have a reason to fear rejection because perhaps they have something to hide, or nothing to really show. Here are four steps to building your confidence bedrock:

• Step one: Carefully select your employer by picking a solution, company, executive team, board members, and C-Suite you believe in. Hang your hat in an organization that embodies integrity that has a rock-solid engineering culture and places customers first with a world class suite of products you can stand behind fully.
• Step two: Familiarize yourself with the success stories, case studies and YouTube videos. These testimonials are your armor. Know how to personally tell the stories and bring them to life with passion and conviction. As Mike Weinberg shares in New Sales Simplified: "It's critical to develop your sales story." What I mean by story is not an exaggeration but the truth about how you're helping transform the lives of your customers and even more importantly, their customer. B to B to C! C for customer and C for Compelling. Most importantly, learn to lead with 'why?'
• Step three: I do believe in the idea of practicing, drilling and rehearsing. We've all sat through endless mind-numbing sales kickoff role-plays and often retained little. An ongoing scenario that does work is to meet with a mentor or colleague and run through a warm email outreach, discovery call, pitch deck or presentation and let them critique you. I've been in several meeting that started with a CXO arriving late, arms crossed alerting me that I have "ten minutes" that have gone on for an hour and a half after practicing active listening and delivering "unexpected value." Repetition is the mother of skill as preparation is the father of execution so being prepared having read their annual report, a book they wrote or watched a set of YouTube videos from conference keynotes they gave, made the difference. The selling experience itself becomes the core differentiator.
• Step four: Some folks will dive about ten feet deep, it's your opportunity to dive to the bottom of the ocean to know everything about the people you're going to be working with. God gave us two ears and one mouth and I would even endorse talking 25% of the time.

It's difficult to worry about something or feel rejected by it, when you've planned for the full spectrum of eventualities that can occur. Preparation overcomes fear.

We weren't all immaculately conceived as sports stars or born into this world as kings, outgoing and blissfully winning. Many of us are struggling for a seat on the bench. Lord knows many a confident soul is simply masking insecurities, so don't automatically envy number one. We will never know the internal struggle and prejudging people is a dangerous business. Ian Maclaren put it best, "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."

The best way to become a champion is to get out of your own shell and take positive risks. I guarantee you, changing your attitude is the biggest X factor that can change the rest of your life and improve your chances of a sustainable and successful sales career. There are comments that sting, they sting for life, they ring in your ears... if we allow them to. But search yourself for the grain of truth and love yourself because only you can let those in.

We train and condition our customers how to treat us and we can only be hurt by behavior that we allow to affect us. I'll close in saying that some of the most reclusive, introverted and sensitive people in the world have become top sellers, visionary founders, CEOs and multimillionaires. They drew it out of themselves with sheer will! This whole notion of needing to be "born with it" is balderdash. Give me someone willing to learn with a good attitude and I'll turn them into a sales champion much faster than an eagle who "knows it all."

There's a part in the hero's journey where she goes through a rites of passage, comes into her own and believes in herself. Once you make this transformation silkworm to butterfly, once you truly believe strongly enough in yourself, others will too and you will become an unstoppable life-enhancing force, carving through rock like water to realize your vision. And your vision is realized paradoxically by focusing on the customer's. I call this the Ziglar paradox, "You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want." It's a profound secret: selflessness.

You may be selling someone else's vision and that's okay. That is a distinction worthy of calling out. Because some sellers are so incredibly entrepreneurial, they can't stand being number two. If this is the case, I suggest you go start your own company and sell from the helm.

If product ideation is something you're comfortable in handing off to a technical team and you love helping companies build strategic business solutions, leading a sales team or being a part of a high growth sales function may be a fit for you. When helping powerful minds solve pressing problems and diagnosing / prescribing innovative solutions are highly enjoyable facets of the diamond life, welcome to a mission beyond money. Focus on authenticity in your leadership and helping customers; profitable revenue will follow.

I've spoken often in these posts about mastering yourself. Accepting and loving yourself for your strengths, playing to your greatest gifts and focusing on them in your fostering direct reports (as Marcus Buckingham endorses in coaching) requires coming to terms with your weaknesses. Acceptance is a powerful jumping off point for both personal and professional growth. This is how you can make yourself bullet proof in the field from rejection – a super duck swimming up river against the current of mediocrity toward vast hidden opportunities. Public speaking becomes an open door, presentation is facile and political navigation, negotiation and conflict resolution become second nature. Thoreau believed, "If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." Sun Tzu believed, "Opportunities multiply as they are seized."

So what are you waiting for? Wouldn't right now be a good time to get outside of your comfort zone, carpe diem "seize the day." Go reach out to that contact just out of reach. Here are 13 totally unorthodox out-of-the box ways to "open" with C-Suite executives and get in. Request a referral to penetrate that account that would at last change your stars. Go network at that event where you know you can rub elbows with whom you seek. Perhaps she is seeking you and your solution! If you don't take the risk, how will you ever know? Gretzky it - "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

If it were easy, it would not be rewarding – it all starts and ends with you.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Tambako The Jaguar

Before Challenging – Focus On Ideation

The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson from the Corporate Executive Board has been with us for a few years now. It’s a great book and recommended reading for anyone in complex B2B selling. It’s been controversial not only because it claims to be new and groundbreaking, but because it pushes sales people to provocatively challenge customers. I’ve reviewed Challenger Selling and I think the book is brilliant but the concepts are extremely difficult to implement.

Matt and Brent are to be applauded rather than criticized and anyone who thinks that Challenger is about the ‘hard sell’ is missing the point. Hard selling, push selling, arrogant selling, telling is selling; all fails, especially in Asia where I am as I write this. Causing your prospective customer to lose face as you tell them that they could be doing things better in Asia is kamikaze sales behavior. So is bullishly breaking china with your peacock-chested lecturing; it may be a winning persona at the sales kickoff but it alienates old school CXOs everywhere else. Instead, humility with gravitas goes a long way in all cultures.

The concepts of Challenger Selling are not new. For proof, see page 82 of The Challenger Sale book and you’ll find Neil Rackham’s SAFE:BOLD framework. Challenger is an iteration of Insight Selling which was built on Value Selling which was built on Solution Selling. Lots of great minds evolving strategic B2B selling practice over the years and kudos to Neil Rackham, Jim Holden, Keith Eades, Bob Miller, Steve Heiman and many others. In some ways the strategic selling labels are just semantics – engage and develop the right relationships by leading with insight, then focus on value and build trust. In the background; have a strategy, overcome the competition, map the political power-base, and understand their evaluation, selection and procurement processes. My meta-framework for strategic selling is exactly this and I published before Challenger.

Don’t misunderstand me, there is huge value in The Challenger concepts but in the hands of the naïve it can manifest as pushy 1980s ‘telling is selling’ behavior in the eyes of prospective clients. For Challenger to work, you must go deep, bottom of the ocean deep, and that’s not easy or cheap. Challenger goes beyond a sales persona, it’s an organizational capability. Sales, marketing and management must all come together and be 100% committed to transformational change in the way you define customer value and go to market. It’s scary stuff; do your research and don't under-invest. For most sales organizations Challenger will be another transient fad – ‘yeah, we tried that but our sales people weren’t able to execute.’

However, if you would like to adopt a practical and pragmatic approach and take the best concepts from Challenger Selling, here is my advice. Focus on ideationand innovation for your clients. Stop thinking about what you can sell them and instead obsess about their markets and their barriers to faster revenue growth and profitability. There is real magic in going beyond B2B and instead thinking B2B2C. How can you help your clients better serve their markets and customers? This approach allows the value of your content to be the basis of attraction and engagement, rather than betting everything on the caliber of your ‘challenger super-heroes’ within the sales team.

Here’s why ideation is so important. At the end of the day, in professional selling, it’s all about the conversations that sales people have with the right people inside the customer organization – conversations that create or progress opportunities. We must obsess about what the conversation is going to be about? There is no point securing a meeting and then failing to engage and progress. Relentlessly ask yourself and your team: ‘What is it that can earn a meeting and drive a conversation to create an opportunity based on value for the customer?’ The approach sure as hell must not be about you and what you do…. no-one cares! They care about themselves, their problems and their customers, staff and stakeholders.

We need a big idea, a reason to meet, something worthwhile and intriguing to discuss. This is where the concept of ideation and Design Thinking delivers in a practical way. Design Thinking is a framework for ideation and has been with us for years. It’s an excellent way of harnessing a team’s creative juices to brainstorm and develop ideas and strategies for value and differentiation. Create a cross-functional team of your best minds and ensure the group is heavily weighted with those who know your customers intimately… why not include some of your best customer contacts in the team? Run a process where youidentify their thorniest problems, the wicked ones that stymie them. Incorporate the following steps:

1. Identify and define the issues, then prioritize them and agree who in the customer organization is impacted most and who really cares about resolution. Who owns the problem and the budget internally and will need to approve the investment?
2. Research, research, research. How has this been tackled in the past? Why is it important? What has worked and what has failed? What do analysts and thought leaders think? Create a body of data from which you will be able to draw insights and evidence.
3. Brainstorm and ideate. Generate as many ideas as possible. Don't judge, debate or dive down rabbit holes. Have one conversation at a time and record all ideas. Nothing should be rejected or criticized.
4. Agree and then develop a short-list of ideas. Refine and test assumptions. Create working models, mock-ups, process-flows… anything that creates tangible representation of your ideas. Seek feedback and refine, adjust and keep going.
5. Select the best. Rapidly iterate, refine and evolve. Assess against the problem-solving or solutioning objective. Collaborate but avoid group-think to select the most powerful ideas. Everyone must be committed to the cause of the group, rather than being wedded to their own ideas.
6. Execute and implement. Transition to project management mode. Assign task owners, dates and KPIs. Have deliverables with deadlines. How will you communicate the concepts and evidence the rationale and approach?
7. Review and learn. Debrief and seek feedback. Document everything. Push it through a new iteration cycle if appropriate. Celebrate success, learn from failure. How can you improve or innovate further?

When all of this is done, then think like a publisher. Create provocative headlines and editorial content. Also create white papers and videos. Your marketing team can execute as a thought leader, exactly as recommended in The Challenger Sale without risk because they are not confronting an individual prospective customer. But remember that people are best motivated by reasons that they themselves discover… help your clients on their journey of discovery rather than preach at them. Quality content-meets-context based marketing is the key in a Social Selling 3.0 world, and the face of the content should be the person who will be executing the meetings with customer CXOs. Lock those individuals in to your company and build their brand as industry experts – it’s a brave new world for employers.

Never forget that for a sales person to execute Challenger concepts they must know what the conversation is going to be about, and it must something deeply and provocatively relevant for the customer and their world. This is why it’s so vital that you segment your business based on verticals. Challenger sales people must, by definition, be [customer] industry domain experts.

With all this in place, here is a way of leading and securing meaningful engagements with customers. The most senior people within your potential customers care about evidence-based research that identifies the trends driving change within their industry and markets. This is what you need to make the conversation about! You have something they don’t… you work with their competitors and maybe some of their customers, and you know what ‘best practice’ looks like in their industry. Or perhaps you have seen how technology or innovation is being applied in other industries and how they could adapt it to gain competitive advantage? Never divulge a customer’s secrets to their competitor; that’s a huge breach of trust. Be the sage oracle – the trusted advisor, not the gimmicky provocateur.

I believe in Challenger with a twist – do all the work suggested by The Corporate Executive Board, Matt and Brent; but then go to market with attraction rather than projection, insight rather than provocation. The content and insight should be provocative, not the sales person. There is an English proverb: You catch more flies with honey than vinegar. Attraction selling, based on insight and value, is the best approach to early engagement in complex B2B enterprises. Bring a perspective that makes you intriguing and never forget that people buy from those they know, like and trust, and who continuously create value. Understand the way that CEOs think and talk their language. Understand the customer’s mode of business and remember that only the customer is qualified to define value.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Please purchase the book at this link: The Challenger Sale 

Main Image Photo © 2015 Matt Dixon & Brent Adamson

Quest for The Holy Grail of Sales Enablement

There I was, standing in a large corner office on the 42nd floor of a city high-rise waiting for my weekly Monday morning ‘proctology examination’… euphemistically described by the CEO as the forecast review. I had all my CRM reports, key opportunity summaries and various notes ready to discuss any number of issues within the sales organization. I was ready but as I looked out the window at the city below I reflected on what my flying instructor taught me concerning the word confidence: “The feeling you have just before you understand the situation.”

I was Sales Director for a public corporation and the CEO was typical of others in his role – frustrated with his ‘black box’ sales division. In his opinion, no-one really knew how it worked but he poured huge sums of money into the sales machine only to have it deliver unpredictable results. Forecast dates were a crap-shoot with large deals often slipping. By contrast, the finance department ran with predictability and so did support, service, marketing and operations. Manufacturing could deliver predictably even with the complex inter-dependencies of the supply chain – but why was this not the case with many sales operations?

We sold high-end complex software solutions to large enterprise and government markets. Long sales cycles, marginal business cases built on compliance and productivity, many stakeholders to cover and in a market sector that was rapidly commoditizing. It was in this environment that he hired me to 'sort out the sales operation' with the right strategies focused on differentiated value while driving disciplined execution. He imparted great wisdom in our first meeting: “Instead of employing sales magicians, build a great machine – good execution is usually the best strategy.” He was right.

This situation was very real and in my 30 years of selling and leading sales teams, and then companies, I’ve come to understand what it takes to be successful in complex business-to-business (B2B) selling. Even though professional selling is evolving faster than ever before, there are universal and timeless truths that can guide us through turbulent and changing times.

Buyers today are better equipped than ever to drive suppliers toward commoditization. Information is no longer power – it’s freely available. Insight is the new currency of differentiation and sellers need to elevate their conversations and their level of business acumen and professionalism. Instead of being clichés, 'strategy' and 'value' need to become the obsessive focus of the sales and marketing teams, recognizing that relationships alone are no longer enough.

The cost of making the sale is rising, margins are shrinking, and value is being defined differently. The era of the ‘professional visitor’ is passing and more than one-third of B2B field sales people won’t have jobs five years from now… relationship sales people need to evolve or they will become extinct. Relationships PLUS insight, value and partnership are what's needed today in complex enterprise selling.

In 1955 the average lifespan of Fortune 500 corporations was 80 years, nearly 60 years later the average life is just 18 years! Professor Richard Foster from Yale University estimates that by 2020 more than three-quarters of the S&P 500 will be companies that we haven’t heard of yet.

The barrier to entry for new competitors has never been lower; and the process of switching suppliers for customers has never been easier. What’s the secret to prosperity in rapidly changing markets and a globally competitive economy? It’s the same as it always been – innovation and great customer service combined with flawless execution of well-conceived strategy, driven by leaders with good values.

Most businesses do a good job in segmenting their markets, customers and products but what is often missed is the insidious impact of commoditization. Every product or service becomes a commodity over time as features that once differentiated drift back to parity as competitors catch up. According to Corporate Executive Board research, 86% of the time that sellers pitch their ‘compelling value,’ buyers perceive it as neither unique or compelling but merely features also offered by other suppliers. Every business needs to look at itself from the outside – how do customers really view us comparatively? If you sell a commodity, then face the awful truth rather than cling to expensive sales models where customers are unwilling to pay for the low value and high costs associated with a field sales force.

Sales people need to fund themselves from the value they create rather than from the margins that the product or service delivers. There is no such thing as a high margin commodity and the value they offer must stem from insight and wisdom rather than mere information and service. The first law of selling is that people buy from those they like and trust. They then seek best value and lowest risk. The key for every seller is to understand that‘value’ and ‘risk’ are all defined by the customer. In selling, we are delegated down to people we sound like and this means that salespeople need to learn the language of leadership if they want to engage at senior levels. They need to be equipped to discuss the business case, delivering outcomes and managing risk.

If a product or service is a commodity then the sales model should be engineered accordingly; make it easy for the customer to obtain information, become convinced and then transact in a way that’s easiest for them including web, phone or channels. For products and services that actually are high value solutions then force the field sales team toward value through insight. Support them in developing domain expertise, genuine insights and business acumen to enable them to operate at a higher level. Product marketing needs to focus on differentiating what is being sold; and sales people need to differentiate by how they sell.

With all this in mind, what are the critical elements of sales enablement? How do you create a framework for effective sales execution? There are three essential ingredients plus the catalyst of sales management leadership. The three ingredients are sales methodology, sales process and technology platform.

Few people can articulate the difference between methodologies and process yet these elements are distinctly different in complex B2B selling.

Methodology is the framework for formulating strategy and tactics to win; it’s also how you create your competitive deal strategy, identify risks, cover the political power base within the relationship map, and identify the best way to create compelling value for the buyer. But which methodology should you use? There are a number of well-proven methodologies including TAS, Miller Heiman, RSVPselling, and others. Success with methodology does not depend on which one you select but simply on how well you use it for opportunity coaching with the team.

Process is how you build a sales funnel and execute the sale; it’s how you qualify opportunities and progress through the deal stages with discovery, proposal, demonstration, closing, contracting, on-boarding and then doing win/loss reviews and case studies. Process steps need to be supported by the right tools such as a call planner, qualification tool, discovery questionnaire, proposal templates, win/loss review forms, and territory and account plan templates.

Platform is the technology you use to enable and automate your sales methodology and sales process. It is where you have a single source of truth about customers and opportunities. It must also be your coaching platform where there is transparency concerning pipeline depth and opportunity quality. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is the ideal platform but CRM needs to be a strategy, not just a technology and reporting tool. To be implemented successfully, it must go beyond the mere functions of accounts, opportunities, pipeline and forecasting; it must instead enable the mapping of relationships and force discipline in deal stage progression with qualification scoring and action tracking. It must also include close plans with customer validation of critical dates. Finally, CRM needs to incorporate tight integration with both marketing, social (such as LinkedIn) and after sales support to provide a single view of the entire customer lifecycle from targeting, marketing, lead nurturing and selling through to account management, support, service, satisfaction and upselling.

This approach uses CRM to place customers at the heart of everything you do and provides the platform for being truly customer-centric. It also delivers transparency with deal quality and revenue predictability. It’s where sales people manage their opportunities and the tool that sales managers use to coach their people. This approach is designed to serve the sales people in improving their efficiency and effectiveness. Because it provides them with value and enables their manager to coach for improved win rates, they actually populate the systems with accurate and useful information.

When CRM is implemented with customers and sales people as the priority, and when it’s the platform for deal coaching and the enabler for sales process; then system success is assured. The synergistic outcome for management is accurate reporting and revenue predictability. The corollary of this is that CRM failurecomes from implementing it as a reporting tool with poor alignment to sales methodology and sales processes. Many CRM implementation fail and it has nothing to do with the technology provider; here are the critical success factors for successful CRM:

• Obsessively focus on the system serving sales and customer support staff
• Integrate with social platforms such as LinkedIn and InsideView (for easy sales research and insight into Trigger Events)
• Integrate with marketing for lead nurturing (to build sales pipeline)
• Create a single view of customers and prospects (to be informed)
• Embed methodology and process coaching (qualify, call plan, close plan, etc.)
• Simplify reports and KPIs which can actually be managed (activities)
• Support customer lifecycle post sale (cases, complaints, renewals, etc.)

With accurate data in a CRM the next issue to decide is what metrics provide meaningful reporting. A common mistake made by management at all levels is to seek to manage by results. Jason Jordan writes insightfully on this topic in his book, Cracking The Sales Management Code, highlighting that only 17% of the 300+ possible sales metrics measured are actually manageable. As an example,you cannot manage revenue, but you can manage the activities that create it. Rather than command sales people to bring in more revenue, they need to be guided in which activities are most likely to create the type of revenue you are seeking. Managing activities is the key to delivering the right results and this leads us to the catalyst that brings methodology, process and platform technology together for successful sales enablement – the sales manager.

Sales management is without doubt the most important link in the revenue chain for any organization. The right sales manager creates emotional commitment and belief within their team, they coach and mentor for sales success, they develop the right strategies to focus effort where the team can competitively win and they drive the right conversations with the right roles within the right targeted prospects. They also create organizational alignment with upstream marketing and downstream delivery, support and service to build a business with quality customers.

Sales management leadership is the catalyst that brings it all together: people, process and technology within the right strategy and a culture of excellence in execution. The type of person capable of delivering all this is an engineer rather than a warrior, they have empathy yet hold people to account. But the best sales manager in the world cannot be successful if their boss has them endlessly in internal meetings and reporting up. The sales manager needs to be a coach rather than an administrator. She needs to spend more time in the field than in the office, and more time strategizing and reviewing opportunities with sales people than managing reports. A great coach does not jump in and take over, nor do they do the sales person’s job for them. They don’t feel the need to rescue people and instead understand that people are best motivated by reasons they themselves discover. They focus on planning and debriefing to create constant improvement.

Here are the seven sins of sales management to be avoided:
1. Hiring or retaining the wrong people
2. Managing by results rather than activities
3. Failing to utilize the right methodology and driving sales process
4. CRM implemented as a reporting tool to manage up
5. Lack of strategy and a disconnect from marketing
6. Allowing field sales people to transact commodities rather than sell value
7. Failing to invest the majority of their time in the field with their sales team, coaching and mentoring

The Holy Grail of sales enablement is the seamless integration of the right methodology, efficient sales process, all enabled by Social Selling 3.0 and CRM technology used to coach sales people by an effective sales leader focused on strategy, execution and building a positive team culture.

The very best sales operations bring people, process and technology together to be obsessively customer-centric. The truth about CRM is that you cannot be efficient or customer-centric without one, yet implementing CRM is one of the most difficult projects an organization can undertake.

Choose the right partner, appoint the right leader internally, and consider the whole picture – technology is the easy stuff! CRM is a business application rather than IT infrastructure and therefore needs to be owned and controlled by the sales leadership in partnership with marketing and customer service to support the entire customer life-cycle and drive all aspects of the sales machine.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: CucombreLibre

Why Market Leaders Lose Deals – Case Study

In my last corporate role I was the regional Managing Director of a global CRM software company and I inherited a wonderful customer who had bought from my predecessor about a year earlier. I quickly took the time to understand why they selected us. Many wrongly focus on loss reviews but I’m a big believer in win reviews because they are the key to identifying trigger events to help drive new business revenue. More on this later but first let me tell you a true story, a case study if you will, about why being the market leader can hurt you.

The customer is in the financial services sector with offices in more than 50 countries. They wanted to buy Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software and had a well-defined set of requirements and selection criteria. The CIO himself was the project manager and he personally led the evaluation and selection process. He had done all the right things to successfully implement a CRM initiative including an absolute focus on customer experience, strong buy-in from internal stakeholders and users, and the commitment of the CEO. They knew why they were implementing and adopted a ‘less is more’ approach. The CRM was to be the single source of truth about their end-customers and partner agents. The CIO subscribed very much to the principles of CRM success and was addressing change management with a simple phased approach to role-based functionality designed to enable their customer-centric processes.

The CIO did his homework and invited three vendors to participate in a closed tender process. It was completely transparent and fair. There was however a preference (there always is) and for one of the parties it was their deal to lose, but not for us – we were neither incumbent nor the favoured solution. But we weren't just making up the numbers either. We had been invited for good reason. The CIO and his team had researched online and they had talked to a number of organizations who had already implemented various CRM solutions – with mixed results. The CIO was wise and humble enough to learn from the failure and success of others. This highlights why Social Selling 3.0 is so important – when buyers do their research, you want them to find you for all the right reasons.

Each of the shortlisted providers was very different in their philosophy to software development and delivery (open source, proprietary, cloud, hosted, on-premise, etc.). The correct assumption from the customer was that all of the providers could meet the product feature and function requirements. The issue was who could differentiate for best value and lowest risk in their eyes. CRM projects can be high risk and many fail – not on this CIOs watch, he knew exactly what he was looking for and what was needed to best manage risk.

The CIO provided unfettered access to people and information for all who were competing. He understood that risk comes from not knowing what you don't know, and although he had researched thoroughly, he was very open to new information and ideas from the various sellers. But here is where he was rigid: “Don't try to expand the scope of what we’re doing. Phase one and phase two are very clear. In your demonstration to the stakeholders you will have 2 hours only and you must stick to the script.” All providers were given as much time as they needed to prepare their live software demo.

The vendor who self-immolated themselves in the deal shall remain nameless and they have a fine CRM product which is a market leader, but here is where they went wrong. They made the assumption that the client viewed vendors in the top right corner of the Gartner Magic Quadrant (IT industry analyst report) as being lowest risk. This analyst quadrant rated vendors on their ‘ability to execute’ on one axis and ‘visionary’ on the other. The vendor told their prospective customer that their ranking made them lowest risk and it seems a reasonable assertion. But ‘telling is not selling’ and only the customer is really qualified to define and assess value and risk.

To contrast this, the person leading the sale on our side took the time to ask the CIO where he saw the risks in implementation and long-term success for the initiative. He asked what was important beyond the information in the tender document: What were they seeking to achieve and what business results needed to be delivered? Here’s the surprising piece of information that helped earn the business. The customer saw risk in dealing with a monolithic market leader where they [the customer] would have no real influence in product development or in the escalation of any issues during implementation and ongoing support.

We therefore positioned as being ‘in the Goldilocks zone’ – big enough to deliver but small enough for them to be an important customer. We introduced our Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to their CIO and they built a positive relationship. We also built trust by ensuring that we listened and responded exactly as they requested – no arrogance, no seeking to change the rules or agenda, no circumventing their process. We were the good guys, the ones who were easy to work with, the ones who were transparent and could fit in with their culture and be trusted to deliver on time and on budget. When presentation day came, we made it all about the customer and what they were seeking to achieve. We worked on helping them fall in love with our people, rather than our software. We explained how our solution could work for them and how we would work with them to manage risk and deliver – it was about cultural fit.

The self-destructive vendor, on the other hand, turned up to the presentation phase with people from another country who were flown in just for the demo. They then took almost an hour, half their allotted time, to present numerous slides about themselves and why they thought they were market leader. Then they proceeded to demo in a way that ignored the script and instead diverted attention to other ‘joys and wonders’ within their feature-rich system. The CIO stopped them and suspended the demo. He asked them to come back 4 hours later with a demo that was “as per the script”… they couldn’t do it – game over. Then there were two.

Here is the unintended message they sent to the potential customer. 1) We know better than you and that’s why we’re showing you what you really need to see… all these features that will confuse your staff and not enable your business objectives. 2) We don't have anyone here locally who knows how to demo the product so we’ve had to fly people in from another country... good luck with local support during implementation. 3) We have no idea what’s really important to you in your evaluation and selection process so we’ll just bang on about ourselves for half of the time we’ve got available in the hope that something resonates. 4) We don’t respect you or really care and that’s why we didn't listen to you or ask the right questions; it’s also why we chose to ignore your process. The vendor did not consciously think any of these things, perhaps they thought they were ‘challenging’ the client, resetting the agenda, elevating the vision for what could be achieved.

There is a time for challenging and there is a time for working within the customer’s process. Challenger Selling is valid but just as with any strategic selling framework, it usually requires early engagement to execute successfully. This deal required sellers to respect and work with the buyers' well-conceived and thoroughly researched process.

In selling enterprise software solutions, you take your life into your hands every time you demo. Software can hang or be slow. Too many features and functions can confuse or create concerns about price or complexity of implementation and support. The context of what’s being shown can be lost and the evaluators in the room can easily become confused. In my opinion, anyone who leads with demos to create interest is making a huge mistake in complex B2B enterprise software sales. Instead focus on the problems you’re solving for the customer and the specific use-cases for defined roles.

My predecessor, the person who won this account, was Doug Erickson. He did a masterful job and built a genuine enduring relationship with the CIO that extended beyond working their professional contact. Doug understands that people buy from those they know, like and trust. He seeks alignment with buyers – people he likes and he took the time to listen carefully, to confirm his understanding, and then to provide a solution that exactly met their needs. He also made sure that his team rehearsed the demo and that it followed their script while also highlighting important strengths. Responsive, flexible, genuine, professional – selling really is that simple.

Winning is more about great execution than strategy but Doug also did something very smart. He positioned as being in the Goldilocks zone – big enough to deliver, small enough for them to be important. Even if you're a huge multi-national market leader, position your division as being nimble, or your reseller or partner as being local and agile. Noone wants to be a tiny, unimportant customer. They instead want to know that they will have a voice and that you’ll be there when there are problems or challenges. Many companies do an excellent job of this, make sure you do too.

But I promised you more on why win reviews are more important than loss reviews. My friends Craig Elias and Tibor Shanto wrote a brilliant book, Shift, and it’s about trigger event selling. Here is an incredible insight they reveal: Most companies focus on loss reviews to figure out why they didn’t win, and it helps improve win rates when competing in future deals. That’s fair enough and loss reviews are not a waste of time. But win reviews uncover something much more valuable. They help you understand why the customer went to market to buy something in the first place, what happened inside their organization or market that drove them to purchase. Yes, they’ll share why you were comparatively better and why they bought from you over the competition; but the real gold is in knowing what trigger events caused them to buy anything at all. Now you have something to look for in the marketplace as indicators of opportunity. Now you understand what problem or circumstance actually creates opportunity.

Know what an ideal customer looks like. What are their organizational characteristics, technical attributes, market dynamics, and what do they need to believe to fit your ideal profile? Seek alignment in how you build a pipeline and sell – it’s much more efficient and effective than being an evangelist or pioneer. When you find the right prospective customer, build a relationship of trust and value that earns the right to challenge and set an agenda.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Nic Redhead

Natural Born Sales Talent Is A Myth

Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's Maybelline. It's been said that we come into this world endowed with 'talents' and 'gifts'. Talents are something we apply our blood, sweat and tears to in order to become excellent and achieve self-mastery. It's hard, so we go for it. We crave the challenge that makes the endeavor attractive. In contrast, God-given gifts are so second-nature that we often overlook them for an entire lifetime because we fail to recognize or cherish them hiding in plain sight.

Are we a product of our selling environment; is it sales nature or lead nurture? (Pun intended!)

Nobody starts at the top although most Gen-Y people expect to. Nobody enters the world invincible with all their faculties fully developed. There's a myth that's worthy of Snopes.com that you must hire natural born sales leaders, born with that champion DNA, the inherent attitude and aptitude, the will to win and the thrill of the hunt.

But I just would like to debunk that myth with a series of empirical stories and archetypes of sales legends I have witnessed that broke the mold. Please keep in mind, I'm not endorsing all these behaviors as many are counter-intuitive and may cause collateral damage. I'm simply sharing these stories because I find them to be amusing archetypes that many of you may relate to who manage people or work in a lively salesforce. I share them to prove a simple point about the core factor governing sales ability:

• The strong, silent type: This person doesn't say much. Often a former star athlete, they're extremely focused on the catch and pass or block and tackle aspects of sales. They're often laser focused on managing KPIs. They listen more than they talk and they manage a massive book of business or wide open, greenfield frontier territories with aplomb. Dressed in a humble yet ubiquitous beige twill blazer, their explanation is simple: "You think too much. Keep it simple, look them in the eye and simply say, we're going to transform your business."
• The sweet, sensitive empathetic relator: Omnipresent at company events, church functions, community gatherings, Instagram blaring, culture committee; this person lives to be around others and thrives in seeing them do well and win. This is a 'relationship builder' who breaks the mold, that sells the lights out regardless of becoming out of vogue with the advent of The Challenger Sale.
• The radically funny, loud-mouth uncouth non-PC practical joker:He cracks inappropriate jokes in front of your largest client making you cringe but executives absolutely love him. Riddle me that! He's easy going, a family man and makes it all look easy with a wry sense of humor. Working remotely, he's fixing a tile floor by hand at his son's school gym, while you're on a conference call for a client hand-off or internal knowledge transfer session. He doesn't care and he is a disarming force to be reckoned with because he has non-hunger in front of customers and it attracts people. Non-hunger and humor are his irresistible, innate weapons!
• The complete techno head introvert who never picks up the phone: This rep has mastered LinkedIn and Twitter and built networks of 50,000+. She blogs, ghostwrites, lives on multiple time-zones and is constantly teeing up qualification discovery calls. She has huge social mediagame, she's a one-woman-marketing-machine, supporting the entire company with fresh pipeline based on trigger event research, leveraging various listening platforms and marketing automation. Because of her, you don't even need a CMO. She's a bookworm who writes and reads voraciously, kind of shy, and blows peoples' minds in social. Social media extrovert, phone introvert. But she's the best of old school writing meets new schoolsSocial Selling 3.0.
• The delegator manager: Comfortable making less income than the best in her salesforce, she always asks: 'How's life?' But she actually means it so it cuts-through. She naturally delegates to such an extent she's in at 9 and out at 5 and got more presentations out than you (and tailored); massively productive, rarely ever getting stuck with busy work. She rapidly moves up through management with her ability to organize and apply the 80/20 principle. Yep, she's now the COO because she doesn't care who gets then credit so long as the great results are achieved.
• The engineer who now sells: Buried in a Kindle, he's rapidly building flow-charts and Gantt charts, beautiful Tableau Domo dashboards (there's one within the linked post) on an iPad while listening intently, challenging CTOs and CIOs and constantly in demand. Nicknamed "The Professor," dressed in Trunk Club hipster outfits, he's always one step ahead of the technology curve. Not necessarily likeable or personal, but he's the backbone, lifeblood of the company. Everyone wants to bring him in on sales calls because he nails it in product demos and is indefatigable in his ability to execute as a sales engineer. You can stand him up at the head of a twelve executive RFI gauntlet and he'll school the entire group. Several people will surreptitiously attempt to hire him after the lunch workshop adjourns.
• The awesome parent who whittles wood and is hyper-active on Chatter & Yammer: This guy is the group oracle, helps everyone, multi-tasks like crazy (is always spending quality time with his kids I might add), is flown-in with all key clients, existing clients and gets dialed by the CEO. Yep, the one with bodyguards nobody has met yet. He boomeranged back from a small start-up and now appears to be everywhere at once. Constantly closing seven figure deals, loves his job, is amiable and helps everyone with a grin to match his permanent unassuming plaid.
• The whiz kid party animal: Showed up late to the QBR during the on-site in Vegas. Built a PowerPoint so rock solid, it floored the regional VP with its precision, even built screenshots of software only hypothetically developed that in-turn floored the VP of Engineering. Woozy in presenting, made it look all too easy. The kicker is, he reduces friction and anxiety over implementation risk and makes it 'look easy' for the customers, too. Yahtzee! But don't let him sell vaporware to clients, it will come back to bite you!
• The disciplined anal-retentive former restaurant manager: Process, process, process. Salesforce dashboards and accountability are his stock in trade. He walks the halls with a putter and shakes your hand with a wry smile, reminding you that your numbers ought to be better in the far territory. He's always wise-cracking and throwing popcorn to try to land it in another executive's mouth. He has managed hundreds if people over the years and watches everyone like a hawk. His ability to micro-manage inspires fear and loyalty. The team can't wait to execute for him meticulously. He can rely on his team for execution and set for auto-pilot while his generals drive massive success. He's your best friend when compensation plans get recalibrated and territories redrawn.
• The fitness pro turned mattress salesman turned club promoter turned top sales person three years running: He sends the paperwork confidently so the customer can fill it out. Years later, colleagues are still wondering how he can close the biggest deals without ever leveraging a presentation deck. It seems like an impossible breach of sales-cycle protocol but clients trust his unorthodox method and it simply works. He's so good at his job, his largest retail or dot.com client is at the bar with him and his colleagues are asking who the new team member is? That's how embedded he is in the client's business. Ultra-conservative banking clients love him, go figure.
• The old school phone magician: She's rarely on a computer, still uses a day-timer, may even have a "brick phone" or pager, prefers face-to-face, phone calls and on-sites over doodads and gadgetry and doesn't even use Facebook. She's carrying the team number quarter over quarter. An iconoclast by being so old school, she talks to people, builds trust and moves the most contracts, generating impressive new bookings.
• The anger case: Literally takes offense when customers don't buy but they ironically appreciate the heat of passion and typically don't mind a bit of positive sales pressure because everyone else is trying to win them over with smarmy charm. This is a paradoxical character that gets offended when customers don't buy. Emails from her often read: "Status report." She is a Challenger persona and loves tension, especially with those who get in her way internally.
• The air traffic controller, monotone, emotionless: Talks to clients as if he's guiding an Airbus A380 in a crisis. Quiet and devoid of emotion, this matter of fact, Department of Motor Vehicles mumbler, sends a signal of urgency and causes a magnetic pull to buy. The anti-sellers can't figure-out why these sales assassins get chased by elephants. It's a Bermuda Triangle effect similar to dogs smelling fear.
• The loud one with the boisterous cackle [could even be sinister], blustering, breathing heavily and causes clients to turn down the volume on conference calls: Incredibly confident, speaking loudly, always getting up to do karaoke at the company party. Sweats his collar and unravels the tie. He tends to hang-out with key customers, even go on international flights with them. He watches boxing and is a sports fanatic, a shouter; this person is gregarious and the volume goes up to 11. Oddly, they have the ability to whistle in a half dozen ways and it's always the loudest ones. No fingers even needed! Annoying but amazing.
• The organizational analyst: Risk-averse, this planner grows existing business with aplomb. They have a deep affinity for the Excel spreadsheet, pivot tables, macros and chart fireworks. Softly spoken, she'll listen for forty minutes on a forty-five minute call without saying a word, taking crystalline Evernotes in presentation-quality. She most likely won an award in college for organizational management excellence and will do everything possible to go deeper in fewer accounts. Clients love her attention to detail and the outputs she produces, always right on the money.
• The Project Manager who sees everything in selling as Project Management: This unique breed of seller builds ingenious account planning maps and locks-in clients for every appointment all weeks in advance and has all the QBRs set six-months out. They approach sales like building software and bring the respective technology and executives teams to the table to get sign-off early. They leverage spreadsheets, calendar software and even virtual assistants to run their diary like a Swiss watch with meticulous pre-planned closes. They love to talk Six Sigma and rave about how easy it all is. They buy you a book on Project Management and suggest you become a PMP. Their close-plans can be trusted, their forecast accuracy is phenomenal.
• The prognosticator of doom: Reading passages from their prospect's annual report they've printed out, he warns that "things look grim" if you don't change from the status quo. Every insight they share supports a thesis of 'dinosaur thinking' and being obsoleted by competition. "It's clear your numbers are down and your business may be facing extinction." Extremes of black and white, full suit, they show you how your competitors are lapping you. Frankly, they scare the crap out of any prospect that will listen, and CEOs love it because it's the first sales person in ages to truly give a wake-up call which is what inspired them to take the job and turnaround the company with disruptive thinking. They embrace Challenger thinking so persistently it's to such an extent that customers actually start to agree it's high time for sea change.
• The yes man who references Pumping Iron, Generation Iron and Navy Seal Training: A political genius, everyone could get canned and he'd still get promoted. This manager makes everyone feel like gold, apologizes easily, forgives, is the ultimate repository of 80's movie trivia and writes in acronyms he seems to magically make up as opposed to well known ones. He creates sales awards out of kitchen items and is a mensch. Glengarry Glen Ross DVDs are distributed at sales kickoffs and awards abound for pure irony. He will invest in a major laugh and always lifts spirits.
• The spiritual guru: Quotes Coach John Wooden or Coach Wayne Bennett after meditation; is "mostly into" positive psychology, Wayne Dyer meets Deepak Chopra, high fives Tony Robbins in the aisle at Dreamforce and spends all day visualizing 'the close' and doing affirmations. He's at a TEDx conference giving an ad-hoc slam poetry speech when he meets his counterpart in the buying organization, invites him to indoor rock climbing followed by yum-cha in China Town and almost always magically closes a deal through his socially conscious network in the eleventh hour.
• The most competitive human ever: Constantly casting FUD on competitors, she hosts a FUD social stream in the company chatter. "Crushing it" is the cornerstone of her vocabulary, "failure is not an option." This sales giant is so fiercely competitive she'll relish losing a deal just to ensure her competitor lost it too. Fantasy sports champion, she will have a dance-off in the hallway and challenge clients to a rousing game of tennis, even armwrestling on the spot. Instant camaraderie and rapport is built and customers know if she'll fight this hard in all areas of life, she'll do the same to drive success of her solution within the buying organization.
• Story-time: She been to 50 countries with 50 stories a piece, regales colleagues and clientele with her (mis)-adventures and weaves them back into a business lesson gestalt triggering the right hemisphere of the brain which executives emotionally relate to. She needs her own publishing company to keep up with the volume of content she generates, starting most sentences with "Remember that time when..." even on the second time you've met her.
• The den mother group therapist: Asking how you're 'really doing,' getting to the bottom of the issues, holding court at the water cooler, mediating arguments, airing out the space. He's even solving inter-office politics within the customer's company. Loves to listen with the patience of a doctor, gets to the root of the problems and grows key deals.

So witness this motley crew of top performers and the diversity of personalities and profiles. What is the through-line to all these idiosyncratic styles? It's further proof that sales people are not necessarily born with 'it'. There's no 'it' factor or even X factor. Almost like anthropomorphism, we'd all love to proclaim and endow those we choose for winning, even by luck or chance, with these lofty traits.People that are authentically themselves, confident and comfortable in their own skin, sell better.

Customers relate to the humanizing qualities of your corporation and they build trusted advisor relationships with those stakeholders that are even quaintly flawed. Each of these archetypes, typically all did something remarkable in their own right. Echoing what they are most passionate about, they cut through the hype and the formality. Many hated their job and may even be searching for a new one as we speak, hopping around in that nether region of sales leader attrition circa 18 months... but that's beside the point.

Much like psychological learning styles, a seasoned manager must learn to pull out the best in her people. The one area you can coach consistently is bringing out each individual contributor's signature style. Help your people become the best version of themselves and come into their own. Create a constructive agile learning environment where each team member can thrive in their own sweet way. Some may be visual learners or present with amazing SlideShare imagery. Others are skeptical, analytical, cynical, rebellious, humorous, gregarious or even super negative. Teach them all to play to their strengths, flatten your organization and learn as much from them as they can from you.

Do you believe that sales talent is innate or that it's a function of environment? Who are some of the bizarre and outrageous personalities you've encountered in your selling journey that may not even be house broken or even manageable? Please leave some comments with your amusing stories from the field. I personally advocate one hundred percent integrity in sales. Authenticity is the new litmus test for success. As the jazz standard goes: There'll never be another you. May we all achieve greatness by being truly us because... we can. Food for thought!

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Francisco Osorio

Love Versus Greed. What's Your Corporate Culture?

Within every person is an innate desire to go beyond making a living to make a difference. We should all seek meaning and purpose in what we do but can a career also be a calling? Can we do well and also do good? Do nice people always come last? Are most rich and successful people crooked in some way? Can an organization’s culture go beyond the posters espousing mission, vision and values; to instead be the living behaviors of the leaders, cascading down throughout the entire enterprise? I’ll answer all these questions with two contrasting case studies that will blow your mind.

If within our lifetime, the average lifespan of a class of people in society had dropped from 80 years to 18 years, we would think there was something seriously wrong... yet this is exactly what has happened in the USA. In 1955 the average lifespan of Fortune 500 corporations was 80 years, nearly 60 years later the average life is just 18 years! Professor Richard Foster from Yale University estimates that by 2020 more than three-quarters of the S&P 500 will be companies that we haven’t heard of yet.

Here are some other interesting facts: Average tenure of employees is dropping dramatically and only 7 of the top 500 public companies in America have average tenure of more than 10 years! When you consider that it costs between $15,000 and $25,000 per employee every time there is churn, it’s a massive issue. But not at Google and Amazon; right? Google’s average tenure is just 1 year and Amazon is not much better at 1.1 years.

Today in the workplace we face the rise of narcissism – from Gen-Y (all about me) to Millenials (instant everything). Millenials are 30% of workforce and 81% think they should set their own schedule and almost one-third would leave their job if they got a better offer. ‘Loyalty’ and ‘values’ seem to be ill-defined commodities for many.

So what’s needed? What should organizations do to overcome this problem? Every organization needs fully engaged employees and they should have documented vision, mission and values to set the tone.

But statements up on the wall are not enough. I’m reminded of the manager who catches his employee wandering into work late again for the third time in a single week and collars him as they stand in the office foyer. He says to the employee: “Is it ignorance or apathy that’s the reason for you turning up for work late almost every day?” The response was laconic: “I don’t know; and I don’t care.”

I help companies create these leadership documents and I often see that the concepts are poorly understood. Here’s my take on what they should mean:

• Vision for our aspirational place in the world and markets within which we operate.
• Mission for the difference we want to make in the lives of others – our purpose and cause.
• Values for how we operate – the behaviors we expect from everyone in our team.

A recent client I worked with had these as their values in an employment contract: Zest for people, inspirational customer experience, thirst for knowledge. I’m not sure what you think about these but let me tell you a true story of a company that changed the world. Their four values were chiseled into marble in the main lobby of HQ: Communication, Excellence, Respect, Integrity.

This company impacted the lives of almost everyone in the USA and many others around the globe – yet they didn’t manufacture technology and they weren’t a media company. The chairman was Ken Lay and his company’s vision was “To be the world’s leading company; achieved by the relentless pursuit of shareholder value through free markets and innovation.” The company was hailed as a ‘leader of the new economy’. On their way to this lofty goal they became the 7th largest corporation in America with a market capitalization of $70 billion.

It took the company 16 years to grow from $10 billion in assets to $65 billion but it took just 24 days for them to go bankrupt. It was the largest ever corporate collapse globally... the corporation was Enron and they were on a quest to become the dominant ‘new economy energy company’. We’re going to contrast two corporate cultures and the positive case study is breathtakingly counter-intuitive; but let’s consider Enron first.

Enron was unbelievable. Pure fraud at many levels and they also applied an obscure and dubious accounting practice called ‘marked to market.’ The concept was to book future hypothetical revenues based on ideas they had with unproven contracts to recognize it in their books as profit and, believe it or not, cash-flow without the actual money being generated!

For one contract with Blockbuster Video, they signed a 20-year agreement to introduce on-demand entertainment to various U.S. cities by year-end. After several pilot projects, Enron recognized estimated profits of more than $110 million from the deal, even though analysts questioned the technical viability and market demand of the service. When the network failed to work, Blockbuster withdrew from the contract but Enron continued to recognize future profits even though the deal resulted in a loss.

Enron ended-up buying the electricity assets from The State of California, and then created a futures trading exchange that they manipulated to make hundreds of millions of dollars by ordering power stations to go off-line for ‘unscheduled maintenance’ to deliberately create black-outs and panic. The Governor of California lost the next election and Arnold Schwarzenegger came to power (note that ‘Arnie’ was not complicit with Enron’s activities).

Here are some of the staggering facts:

• $1 billion ($1,000,000,000) was pulled out by executives using insider trading and just as it went bankrupt, top executives were paid bonuses totaling $55 million and also cashed-in $116 million in stock options.
• 20,000 Enron employees lost their jobs and medical insurance.
• $2 billion in pension / superannuation funds instantly disappeared.
• The biggest accounting firm in the world, Arthur Anderson (also America’s oldest) was put out of business and 29,000 people also lost their jobs. Shareholders sued for $20 billion.

So what was Enron’s leadership model and who did they look for inspiration and guidance? The CEO, Jeff Skilling, reported to Ken Lay and he was a big fan of Richard Dawkins’, The Selfish Gene. They subscribed to evolutionary greed and competition – survival of the smartest. The words chiseled into marble in the main lobby (Communication, Excellence, Respect, Integrity) were meaningless and mere marketing spin. Whether you’ve seen the movie Wolf of Wall Street or watched the movie Margin Call, they both show the real life consequences of failing to be anchored to the right values.

Culture in any organization boils down to just one thing…. the behavior of the leaders. Culture is how we treat each other, it’s how be behave and it’s what we do. Leadership is not a position, it’s who we are. How we behave matters and we’ve seen the devastating consequences of poor values from leaders in business, sport (Lance Armstrong), politics and even churches. Make no mistake, when people in positions of power lose their moral authority, it’s over for them even if they remain in their role for awhile – it’s just a matter of time before the fall.

Enron was a precursor to the 2008 GFC and in my opinion it wasn’t a financialcrisis, it was instead a values crisis resulting in financial carnage – it should have been called the GVC. You might think that these kinds of things don’t happen today… oh, yes they do. The human condition is an ever-present problem. We’re all wired for addictions, fear and greed, and to lie and cheat. It’s our commitment to the right values that insulates us from the worst of ourselves.

Enough negativity; you probably already know about Enron, so what’s the corollary and how can we positively lead? I want to tell you an amazing true story about a company that did something completely ‘out there’, the opposite of Enron. They ended-up being featured on the television program Undercover Boss and the episode garnered the highest rating of the year with 18 million people watching it.

The company is Herschend Family Entertainment (HFC) and Joel Manby is the CEO. He had much in common with Ken Lay from Enron. They both had very poor childhoods and were raised in religious Christian homes. Ken Lay’s father was in fact a Baptist Minister. Both saw education as the way to create better futures and both went to Harvard Business School. But they made very different choices concerning their values.

Joel had a brilliant career. He took over Saab in North American and did a spectacular turn-around. The reward was that they added South America and Asia-Pacific to his workload. He was in Australia on a trip well into his new expanded global role when he had a tough call with his wife. He was away for two-thirds of the year; their marriage was struggling, his kids hardly knew him, he was stressed and tired most of the time; and he didn’t like who he was becoming. He asked his boss if he could pull-back to just running North America… the answer was a resounding ‘no’.

He quit to join a technology start-up but then the dot.com bust came… he had 90 days to save the company and that meant firing a lot of people. He went through very difficult times; his work was defining him in ways he didn’t like and he wasn’t happy – professionally or personally.

It was then that he was asked to apply for the CEO role at Herschend Family Entertainment (HFE), the world’s largest private theme park operator with 10,000 employees in 26 locations.

Imagine being in a boardroom of a company with 10,000 employees and you ask the question of the chairman of the board: “How would you define the culture here?”

The answer from the founder’s of HFE, Jack and Peter Herschend, was difficult to fathom: “Love; and leadership by being a servant of others.”

Joel understood what was behind the words. He writes in his book, Love Works: “I wanted to work somewhere that rejected the false dichotomy between profit and people, or profit and principles. I wanted, in short, to be the same person all the time: at work, with my family, at my church, and when I was alone.”

He joined HFE and embraced their culture. He had been in the role for a few years when the GFC hit and here is an astounding fact. Although they had to retrench many staff, they received the highest ever employee satisfaction ratings during and after the down-sizing process! This is because junior, middle and senior managers all decided to defer capital programs to buy time, supervisors and managers alike also asked if they could take pay cuts to fund staffing levels. Even those who were ‘let go’ were given 3 months on full pay to find another job and had all of the company’s resources available to help them transition.

The culture of HFE is encapsulated by two principles: 1) Servant-based leadership, and 2) Love as defined by patience, kindness, trust, unselfishness, truthfulness, forgiveness, and dedication. It’s their paraphrase of I Corinthians 13:4-8 in The Bible. You may be thinking WTF and I agree… Wow, That’s Fantastic! But it’s delivered for them in amazingly positive ways, both with profit and people. Their staff have purpose in what they do and are truly engaged at every level.

Television is a cynical place and HFE took a big risk allowing Undercover Boss to make an episode with hundreds of hours of footage that was edited down to what the producers thought would pull the biggest ratings.

Joel says in his book, Love Works: “When your personal values match your work values, you stand the best chance of being content.” He’s been head-hunted many times but loves who he works with and the opportunity to live an authentic life.

HFE is not the first company to create this kind of culture. 250 years ago a company was started by an Irish man who wanted to help people having their lives ruined by potato-based spirits which were rotting stomachs and causing terrible alcoholism. His name was Arthur Guinness and his drink was brewed for high nutrition and relatively low alcohol content…. He showed you can make money and make a difference, that you can do well and do good, that you can even serve humanity being a factory worker brewing beer. 100 years ago Guinness was providing free medical and dental care for employees, they paid for funerals, helped employees with housing, gave huge sums away to charity… and free beer every day! Unlike modern companies who offer some of these perks to attract the best talent, they did it because it was how they could live their values.

Values are everything in leadership and for managing people and teams. Values-alignment is usually labelled as ‘cultural fit’ but HFE measure values together with performance. Great results are not rewarded unless accompanied with the right behaviours. Their managers must consistently live in accordance with the organization’s values. Personas and facades don't cut it at HFE. Only competent, authentic people can sustain leadership positions. Everyone’s performance appraisal process is based on the tool below (adapted from the matrix in Love Works, page 158).

HFE understand an important truth: We must be the person worthy of the success we seek. Our behavior matters in achieving results and that’s because people matter, both customers and staff.

The greatest risk to any business is not on the balance sheet, it’s the values within the people of power inside the organization and those who represent the brand. Do you really know what your values are? Do you know what you stand for? Are you and your team truly driven by your mission and purpose, personally and corporately?

Leadership is an inside job. We cannot achieve and possess wealth unless we do, and we can’t do unless we are. We need to be the person worthy of the success we seek, otherwise success will be temporary or a mere illusion. The opposite of love is not hate, it is fear. Are you brave enough to love your staff and customers?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Chris van Dyck

The Tao of Vietnamese Selling

I write this at 30,000 feet heading back to Sydney from Vietnam. I’ve had two weeks with my family on a wonderful vacation. What an amazing country with beautiful people. Vietnam is a nation with an incredible past – relentless war and bombing by the French, Chinese, Japanese and the Americans (with Australia). They secured their independence about 40 years ago but almost three times more bombs were dropped on Indochina (Vietnam , Laos and Cambodia) in the 60's and 70's than during all of World War II. Millions dead, millions more suffering from post war land mine explosions, Agent Orange poisoning, cancer and birth defects – it’s still leaking into their ground water supplies near multiple ex-US Air Force bases. Kudos to Hillary Clinton for visiting and driving support to clean it up.

They have a form of communist capitalism that works well for them. They vote, freely surf the internet, can own real estate and go into business. There is a huge middle class and they have a safe and peaceful society – all religions are accepted so long as they are not violent or seek to meddle in affairs of state. Their only blight is corruption.

The central government in North Vietnam has sought to revise history and all the guides in Hanoi were very keen to educate us about “The American War.” We visited the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison where US airmen were kept prisoner until the end of the war in the mid 1970's. Early in my selling career in the 1980's I’d seenCaptain Gerald Coffee speak at a conference and I bought his book and tapes – he is an inspiration. He was flying a reconnaissance mission from the Kittyhawk and was shot down. He managed to survive in a tiny concrete cell barely big enough to lay straight. To see the prison he had been kept in was sobering. I also saw photos of John McCain when he was captured, imprisoned and then of him returning many years later as a ‘tourist’. Vietnam and the USA are now friends despite the horrendous atrocities and carnage of the past – the world changes.

Here’s what a learned in the land where traffic lights are mere suggestions and the road extends to embrace all of the footpath; where lane markings serve as runway centre-lines for drivers to straddle; where riders don't look as they enter traffic, where the horn is used for Morse code rather than abuse. Where an elegant chaos seems to just work – everyone assertively pushing in and taking the path of least resistance while avoiding collisions. Crossing the road as a pedestrian was always an adventure – just step out in faith, advancing with predicable cadence, never taking a backward step and never running – everyone on wheels seems to avoid killing you; amazing. Boarding a plane is a similar experience… I think everyone is worried the plane will depart without them or that someone will steal their seat.

There were not many dogs and I they never chase cars or show aggression to humans; they instead just look nervous – dinner maybe. Much like the New Zealand farmer’s favourite sheep – same-same, different. I think only Kiwis will get the joke. I eventually worked-up the courage to go and get a massage to deal with a neck and back that spends too much time with my computer. I seek inflicted pain rather than a happy ending but communication is always a challenge in Asian countries. Vietnam is a moral place; I need not have been concerned. No overt prostitution or immorality anywhere. This is a family destination and highly recommended. It’s especially a ‘must see’ for Western first-world teenagers to understand the evils of war and the power of a forward-looking demeanour – no hatred, no bitterness, just tolerance. But they never forget their past; their nationhood came at a price possibly higher than any other nation on the face of the planet.

It’s the people that define the experience in visiting any destination. Sandy beaches with resorts are a dime a dozen all over the world, Vietnam included. Differentiation is all about the experience created for customers through people. Here is what I learned about the Tao (way) of selling in Vietnam.

Mash-ups rule. They embrace all religions with harmony and everyone is free to practice their faith without restriction. The only thing they do not tolerate is any religion with violent intolerance. They’ve also blended communism with capitalism but with far greater freedom than China and with local representatives elected through open and ethical voting. Social Selling 3.0 is all about mash-ups, taking the best within your own meta-framework for selling.

Same, same, different. They know they need to differentiate and it’s incredibly difficult in a market where everyone seems to be selling the same stuff. They do their best with how they sell rather than what they sell. This is another important ingredient for the best sellers in the west – focus on how you sell rather that what you sell. Leading with insight, building trust and creating value remain important for winning in competitive markets.

Build a relationship. Vietnam is filled with push sellers. Everywhere you go you are confronted or coerced. The smartest sellers however engage you in conversation to build rapport. Relationships are the basis of all sales success – we buy from those we like and trust.

Provide value. On several occasions people started offering assistance with directions and provide helpful advice. You feel obligated to buy something when they’ve helped you. In Social Selling 3.0, quality content is king, queen, president and prime minister. Provide insight and helpful information; be a thought leader and people will come to you. At the very least they will respond to your approach once they’ve done their homework on you.

Genuine service. A genuine smile and sincere friendliness goes a long way and in Vietnam a tip is usually not expected. Be wholeheartedly generous of spirit in how you serve others – they will notice and show their appreciation.

Impeccable manners. Politeness overcomes language barriers and often manners serve as the best communication. We know what please and thank you are even when we don't know the language – good manners is the beginning of overcoming any cultural difference. We should show good manners when we engage in social; don't let volume kill quality or shorthand create the wrong impression. Never forget the importance of old school as you engage in new school mediums.

Provide a great experience. Our tour operator was focused on providing a customer experience that created wonderful memories. They confirmed every pick-up and flight and removed any uncertainty or stress. We all need to focus on the customer experience rather than ourselves and what we do. We need to obsess about their needs and timing rather than our own.

Have a world-view that creates a successful life. My sister and her husband happened to be holidaying in Indochina around the same time as us and in e-mail exchanges we both commented on how happy people can be with so little. Western society can learn much from the east concerning contentment. She shared with me the seven rules for a happy life that their guide bestowed upon them:

1. Never hate
2. Don't worry
3. Live simple
4. Expect a little
5. Give a lot
6. Always smile
7. Have good friends

Thanks Tracy Hughes for contribution.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Lucas Jans

10 Anti-Social Selling Antidotes

Recently, I was a bit stunned to read a statistic from an InsideView survey cited in Harvard Business Review. It stated that 90% of C-level executives said they ‘never’ respond to cold calls or e-mail blasts. Yet I have experience with the best enterprise inside sales outfits, and some outsource operations, that still get excellent results. InsideView is a compelling market intelligence company because the core idea is based on tracking and leveraging Trigger Events which is why they also facilitate great results.

So what does work for establishing connection and interest with a prospective client? And a second question, I have consistently been asked not just by sales pundits is: “What if my target segment is not in social media yet?” I did write a post that referenced a Domo survey that found that 68% of CEOs have no social presence at all on the top five social platforms, and of those who are on social, 73% are solely on LinkedIn.

The problem here is a bit like a tiger chasing its tail. If you cannot reach them live by phone (voicemail is the new PA/EA screening obstacle) and if they’re not onsocial across all verticals, how do you meaningfully connect? Waiting for 100% adoption of LinkedIn, Twitter and such is really not an option. We need to close business now – yesterday.

So here are some non-sequitur ideas that may work. Think ‘back to the future’ with social and technology as mere channels and tools:

1. Advertise in industry trade publications and professional journals targeting verticals and/or roles. It's become so unpopular, your creative, edgy ad will stand out! Or, lend your subject matter expertise with a good old fashioned article.
2. Host plenary sessions on the hottest topics and facilitated by independent draw-card, thought-leaders at conferences in your industry.
3. Network at oblique conferences where C-Levels actually attend. Yes, the ones where you have to fly to an exclusive alpine destination to rub elbows. Typical tech conferences are filled with enthusiastic people trying to ‘sell you’ and CXOs send their agents. It’s quite comical when thousands are mingling to meet potential buyers and none of the decision-makers are actually there – it’s an intelligence gathering exercise, not effective selling.
4. There’s been an amazing focus on social selling and that’s brilliant but this assumes the audience is in the network (social channel). Why not write a letter and deliver it via a plain, hand-addressed envelope VITO style? Leverage pith, whimsy and eloquence in a well-researched business case to set an appointment between both your executive teams. How refreshing!
5. Mailing lists are often inaccurate and e-mail open rates are dwindling. There’s rarely time for executives to read them which is why I’ve placed a rare focus on my LinkedIn Publisher contributions as the focal point to my strategy. This being the case and in order to catch a broader niche market, I also speak at conferences and sales kickoffs. This gives me analog reach that exceeds social.
6. Referrals - Digital referrals via LinkedIn are extremely powerful. But what about calling your clients and asking them if they know any “nice people” who could also avail themselves of your solution. But only those who may have problems you can solve. You’d be amazed at how far you can grow your business nonchalantly calling up everyone your organization has ever sold to, meeting with them, listening intently and prospecting at the close. While you’re there, find out / reaffirm why they bought your solution. What problem did they have? What triggered the need to finally do something? How's your solution working out for them? Win reviews with the right focus are very powerful.
7. Thoughtfulness in handwritten notes, a paperless post or a meaningful postcard. Send someone an article with an intriguing or funny e-mail title that pops, that catches them off guard. Print a unique article out and mail it to them, writing a cover letter of why it pertains to their business or a discussion you had. These analog activities will paradoxically stand way out. The way you engage is what sets you apart rather than what you want to discuss.
8. CRM oddities, bits and pieces: Remembering someone’s name is huge as is their birthday but now a digital birthday is just Facebook wall public spam. Everyone you’ve never met congratulates you. Make a birthday count by personalizing a card. Build a universal field in your CRM to jot down peculiar things about each customer contact: ‘Loves to juggle, collects stamps, spends summers in Denmark, is a polyglot who does Shakespeare in the park, Rugby enthusiast, committed atheist and loves The Selfish Gene, won't hire amiable people, big fan of Jim Collins on leadership.’
9. Good ol' coffee or tea still cuts through. Just happen to show up in their geo in the afternoon; you’d be surprised how many senior executives would love to pop out for coffee because they do already. I’ve heard of a salesperson who literally showed up in offices and was able to catch executives off guard to grab coffee in a non-threatening way. There's still something to be said for spontaneity.
10. Please understand the enduring hierarchy of human communication that will never change. A money manager of a multi hundred million dollar fund once told me: “Never do anything in business that’s important if you’re not face to face.” E-mail is 1/10th as viable and social (anything that whirs, buzzes, bings and dings) completely devalues a relationship if it's a crutch. To be effective, it must be supplementary even tertiary. Be the person who makes the time to meet rather than lazily send a major contract by e-mail. Also, always send concise e-mails with relevant headings, context before details, a logical flow and a clear request concerning what you want them to do. Stand out in how you respect their time!

To speed up, we must first slow down. In 2015, in a sea of social media noise and confusion, the prevailing winds will seek to push our sales onto the rocks. I’ve written favorably of social selling but it is no panacea. If you are to engage with it, I want to empower you with the top flight tool-set and strategic selling underpinnings. That being said, a return to the rock solid approach of SPIN with a sprinkle of Challenger Selling, face to face, socially, civilly, e.g. in front of a real human being is the rub, because 'seeing the whites of their eyes' trumps everything else in a mad mad world gone batty over digital by hectares. You don't need to fuel executive ADD, nano-second attention spans and the daunting immediacy of the 'instant gratification of everything' movement.

A growing group of us seeks a return to the "social" before social networks. Call it nostalgia or necessity. I think of Neil Young and his high end Pono player for a return to high quality music; audiophiles everywhere rejoice and shell out top dollar. Witness the bizarre comeback that vinyl records have made over piped in digital music. Once Elon Musk gets us to Mars, there will still be pods where you can talk with a ‘real live human’ or play a game of chess rather than battle IBM's Watson supercomputer. Why? Because it’s romantic and nostalgic like a street lamp lit jaunt down the Seine in Paris. It’s like watching The Trip movie, gallivanting with your best friend through Europe ever so Sancho Panza, cycling through the French Alps or following the Giro d'Italia, eating amazing food and cracking wise with your best Michael Caine impression.

We use an incredibly small portion of our brain, and we’re fundamentally gregarious creatures. I think extroverts have truly suffered from the 'always on' mobile revolution. Sales goliaths are sitting around writing blog content, keeping up with an onslaught of notifications, e-mails and tweets (heads buried in digital devices) and their lives are cluttered with the productivity-focus interruptor slings and arrows that are laptops, phablets and the new appendage (boat anchor, ball-in-chain) that is the smartphone. The bottom line, you're seldom servicing your best customer with your head down in a screen and even if you're interacting with them that way because they're approaching 90% of completion of the buy-cycle, wouldn't they and you much rather personally interact vis-a-vis one of the methods laid out above? We must focus on empathy, EQ, understanding customer’s problems, consoling them, creating a synergistic ‘thinking’ environment to brainstorm with them and pushing the envelope of just how transformational our share ideas, experience and solutions can be.

When was the last time you sat down with a CXO and had a meaningful conversation? How's that for simplicity in a quarterly KPI transcending your dashboard? How many did you meet at the last tech conference – truly? Are you scanning badges in the front or getting to know someone's business soup to nuts? Are you generating real success in social media? How often are you on site? How many of your key clients who spend over $100K with you annually are you meeting with, brainstorming with and investing quality time in to add unexpected value? Social selling can be fructose or real organic fruit. As beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it's up to you - the choice is yours on how you choose to leverage the technology for good or evil. It can be very unhealthy, spike your insulin sending you from a sugar rush to a crash or a life affirming juice infusion giving you energy throughout the day. It's supplemental to a healthy diet of connecting in all platforms but the greatest platform is still you.

Crawl out from behind your computer, get some fresh air, go bond with the great people you serve and then return with something even more compelling to write about. You won't gain much real world experience being the top ranked social influencer in the world: yes anecdotal... maybe. I try to bring real world advice from years in the trenches and I remind myself each day to tune-out and take social selling with a grain of salt. They said e-mail would be the magic bullet, then ERP, then CRM, then marketing automation, then mobile, then social, then cloud and bid data, now wearables. I don't believe that hard dollar ROI with any of these is fully measurable, certainly not in social. Yet they are all indispensable mandatory investments, tactics part of a cogent overall go-to-market strategy, for any serious enterprise.

But amidst the array of technology automation and platforms, analytics and algorithms, blasting and bedazzling; never forget that it's unwise to attempt to close six and seven figure deals with enterprise elongated sales cycles solely in social. The secret to social selling is really about engagement rather than broadcasting and selling. The best sellers in any medium connect meaningfully with clients and work side-by-side as trusted advisors creating something bigger than both of the entities. It's a mastermind. It's a journey of discovery and beyond the realm of what neuroscience or business can fully understand.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Susanne Nilsson

20 Humorous Leadership Lessons. Aviation Wisdom

My flying days are well behind me but back in the 1980's I was a pioneer in the ultralight movement, the poor cousin grass roots segment of sport aviation. I recently found this document on my computer from back in that era. It brought a smile and some wonderful memories. There are lessons here for leaders in every walk of life. Enjoy as you read and think about how these can be applied within your profession.

20 RULES OF THE AIR (also for leadership on the ground and in the boardroom)

1. Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make all of them yourself.
2. Good judgment comes from experience. Unfortunately, most experience usually comes from bad judgment.
3. You start with a bag full of luck and an empty bag of experience. The trick is to fill the bag of experience before you empty the bag of luck.
4. Confidence is usually the feeling you have just before you understand the situation.
5. Keep looking around. There's always something you've missed – inside and outside.
6. Every take-off is optional. Every landing is mandatory. It's always better to be down here wishing you were up there, than up there wishing you were down here. You cannot control prevailing conditions.
7. Never let an aircraft take you somewhere your brain didn't get to five minutes earlier.
8. The ONLY time you have too much fuel is when you're on fire.
9. Both the altitude above you and the runway behind you are of no use at all.
10. Stay out of clouds. The silver lining everyone keeps talking about might be another airplane. Reliable sources also report that mountains have been known to hide in clouds.
11. When in doubt, maintain your altitude. No one has ever collided with the sky.
12. The probability of survival is inversely proportional to the angle of arrival. Large angle of arrival, small probability of survival and vice-versa.
13. A 'good' landing is one from which you can walk away. A 'great' landing is one after which they can use the plane again.
14. There are three simple rules for making a smooth landing. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.
15. Helicopters can't fly; they're just so ugly that the earth repels them. The dictionary should define the word ‘helicopter’ as ‘mechanical contradiction’.
16. If all you can see out of the window is ground that's going round and round and all you can hear is commotion coming from the passenger compartment, things are not at all as they should be.
17. Always try to keep the number of landings you make equal to the number of take offs you've made.
18. In the ongoing battle between objects made of aluminum going hundreds of miles per hour and the ground going zero miles per hour, the ground has yet to lose.
19. Remember, gravity is not just a good idea – it's the law, and not subject to repeal.
20. There are old pilots and there are bold pilots. There are however no old bold pilots.

I survived a plane crash in my aerobatic biplane and several of the key lessons, the things that saved my life, were in this top 20 list. We tend to remember things through repetition or emotional impact. Humor is therefore a good way to create emotional connection to ideas you wish to retain in yourselves or others. Make work a fun place to be but also one where commitment and competence are the hallmarks of execution.

QANTAS is one of the world’s great airlines and my article about flight QF32 has had approximately 200,00 people read it in LinkedIn Publisher. The leadership of Captain Richard de Crespigny and the teamwork on the flight deck is truly inspiring. If you haven’t already done so, read the QF32 article here. It highlights how genuine leadership averted an Airbus A380 disaster.

Back in the 1980's, these were reportedly true exchanges between QANTAS pilots and ground crew engineers. Back then, pilots would log notes concerning problems or concerns for maintenance engineers to address after a flight. These exchanges were generally known as squawks and after attending to the issue, maintenance crews were required to log the details of the action taken. These are from a bygone era with propeller aircraft servicing regional routes but never let it be said that engineers lack a sense of humour. P = The problem logged by the pilot, and S = The solution and action logged by the engineers.

P - Left inside main tyre almost needs replacement. S - Almost replaced left inside main tyre.

P - Something loose in cockpit. S - Something tightened in cockpit.

P - Dead bugs on windshield. S - Live bugs on backorder.

P - Autopilot in altitude-hold mode produces a 200-fpm descent. S - Cannot reproduce problem on ground.

P - Evidence of leak on right main landing gear. S - Evidence removed.

P - DME volume unbelievably loud. S - Volume set to more believable level.

P - Friction locks cause throttle levers to stick. S - That's what they are there for!

P - IFF inoperative. S - IFF always inoperative in OFF mode.

P - Number 3 engine missing. S - Engine found on right wing after brief search.

P - Aircraft handles funny. S - Aircraft warned to "Straighten up, Fly Right, and Be Serious."

Be relentlessly inquisitive and competent, stay humble and maintain a sense of humor – these traits will take you a long way in life.

Now it's your turn: When have you leveraged humor in your career? Who were the most humorous people you worked with? When did humor diffuse a business problem? Please share below.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Philo Nordlund

How To Drive An Outrageous Amount Of New Business

“THE NEW SALES DRIVER

A. Select targets. 
B. Create and deploy weapons. 
C. Plan and execute the attack.”

-- Mike Weinberg, New Sales. Simplified. --

I'm a big fan of Mike Weinberg's blunt, back-to-basics new business development approach so I share his core strategy here with this stipulation – please go and buy his book at the above link, ASAP. It's truly worth your while and features one of the simplest, most effective and efficient of all models for driving new revenue. It will revolutionize your process and bring fresh consistent, new-business pipeline creation back into focus. For many organizations this has gotten very blurry with an obfuscated (or nonexistent) sales process mucking things up and more stages in the funnel than chocolates in Willy Wonka's proverbial factory.

My process for winning new business is RSVPselling and it's aligned o opening up business in disruptive new markets and I would add the following ancillary supplements as you roll it out this year to capture latent buying intent in the marketplace:

A. Laser focus on what constitutes a prospect - Hone your definition
B. What are the sub-verticals?
C. Who are the top 10 companies in each of those segments?
D. Research on LinkedIn, target customers well with tailored, trigger-event based outreach
E. Sell to VITO - the Very Important Top Officer (Remember, strategic selling is about engaging early, upstream at the highest levels, knowing their business, leading with insight and talking their language.)

Caveats & Nuances:

• Avoid the 'busy fool syndrome' - work smarter not harder; the 'it's a numbers game' mentality can paralyze forward momentum with endless lateral churn. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step but you must put one foot in front of the other. Move towards the target – deeper over wider – endless criss-crossing of the horizon is not only exhaustive, it will never allow you to ride into the gloriously fulfilling sunset of CLOSURE.
• Anchor with your CEO or Sales Manager: If you're forecasting several million dollar deals this year in the plan, account for your historical sales cycle and level-set that the majority of them may fall at back end of the year. It's unlikely you'll be dropping a symmetrical million per quarter. Like any organic system, there's irregularity. I have written about the flaw in forecasting and 'predictable revenue'. Year over year consistent growth is possible but only with peaks and troughs. Do it right, don't rush it! You can't get blood from a stone and if you pull the line too hard you'll snap the marlin right off. Remember to drive even harder when in peak times to buffer performance during valleys that will ultimately exist in even the best executed sales system.
• The only way you’ll fail is if you’re targeting organizations that weren’t going to be able to buy from you in the first place, so ask yourself daily, 'Where do I invest my time?' Are you a top gun at opportunity qualification?
• Go deep into research, deep into the context of the account.
• Understand the politics and power base within the account, some of these power bases are hidden or situational (forming for the duration of the buying cycle). Adding everyone in the decision making team on LinkedIn is dangerous, you may have frenemies in the bunch that will block you or secretly favor the incumbent supplier.
• Only do this for the most important opportunities and go deep, spend huge amounts of time figuring out who you’re going to target. Imagine Lincoln as an Account Executive, "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."
• TARGET THE RIGHT ORGANIZATIONS AND ROLE.
• Build a business case, provocative insight and close them catalyzing "mobilizer" (Challenger Selling) advocates who will establish a consensus within the power base - avoid 'talkers and blockers'.
• Obsess about how you will find the right organizations and the right lists of people to try and target. LinkedIn has huge tectonic shift value here. Hours of due diligence and research here is not wasted time if you can leverage it for targeted outreach to stakeholders who will grant you access in respect of the time you've invested. By knowing every aspect inside and out, you'll develop a sixth sense, an intuition compass for where to navigate strategically. Blue ocean strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand, so what's yours as a seller or organization in your go-to-market?

We must take back control of our calendars, stop allowing others to put work on our desks, and selfishly guard our selling time. - Mike Weinberg

Weinberg hits the nail on the head with this dictum; it's a constant battle to manage your own time. I hear horror stories of fundamentally flawed cultures where sellers are only selling 25% of the time. This is backward. The overarching trick of mastering new business sales and new business development is moving your process from reactive to proactive new business hunting. The best sales people are always hunting, even in named accounts. Farmers then are really wolves in sheep's clothing.

There is no magic bullet, never will be! Old fashioned honest work ethic coupled with thinking differently (and acting more conscientiously) will set you apart, signal in the noise. Here are ten action-based strategies, tactics and critical success factors that will turbocharge your progress and work phenomenally well in the field in 2015. My goal is to multiply the effectiveness of what you're currently doing.

Remember not doing the wrong things is worlds better than continuing with Einstein's definition of insanity, "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." After all, revenue is a static "lag measure" and can't be managed in a CRM. Fuggedaboudit! So we must stay hyper-focused on the sales activities we can achieve daily to actually move the needle and lever the boulder up the hill. Don't get me wrong, the byproduct of well-executed daily sales activity and effective strategy is avalanches of new business bookings. It takes patience to position the odds in your favor: a greater number of better qualified opportunities. Remember, "Pipeline cures all ills!" The secret to success in sales is "action." Daily! Consistency meets persistency. I don't mean to fill this treatise with platitudes but Einstein's, "Genius is 1% talent and 99% percent hard work" comes to mind or Edison's, "Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration."

I've consulted companies that have a "no-meeting Monday" policy. This should never apply to a vibrant sales function! We ultimately are judged by our revenue results to the top and bottom line in a battle royale for preservation of margin against the forces of procurement commoditization, so procrastination, leaning on only digital as a crutch, capitulating with price concessions or just being asleep at the switch as if the fish will swim up to you and jump into the boat, will catch-up to you. So here are those 10 with one bonus for good measure:

1. Add an unexpected UVP to the subject lines of your emails - "Something YOU have never heard before." It features WIFM: what's in it for them. Recently, I monitored my own LinkedIn inbox and waded through hundreds of messages. Most sounded akin to "Opportunity, Partnership, Checking-in, Let's Touch Base, Ideas." Very generic outreach like this disappoints me when I open the email to double check it, as it's a super generic message... delete. Anything remarkable in the title or pertinent to how they could help me increase business or drive efficiency would have caused them to stand out. What's your unique value or better yet, how can you continuously create value? This is what I call 'unique value creation'. (The V in my RSVPselling Methodology) – Customize communication in all media.
2. Simplify your sales process: There are many enterprise level sales systems like SPIN, TAS, Solution, Strategic and Challenger. The bottom line is you need to have one and apply it religiously. Consistent sales processes applied over time create cut-through. Managers must hold sales people accountable and there must be a single source of the truth in a CRM systemto bring all the moving parts together.
3. E-mail, call, social, e-mail, call, social. 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact. Staying power is everything in sales success and consistent quota attainment and it's rare. We must stick in deals and push through the resistance inherent in change management away from the status quo. Think of your channels like a cyclical wheel; it's important to cross-train your touch points and you want to get yourself into that hot zone of 5 - 12 touches. If you emailed, then call, then leave a meaningful message. Follow up by liking or commenting on something in their LinkedIn stream, then a relevant outreach based on what you read. Retweet an article, then call. What I call the "new sales mix" is key. 'Like' and also comment on content as only 20% of people even read an entire LinkedIn Publisher update while 80% simply like it. If you read the entire thing and comment about some of the subtleties in it, the author (your customer) will very much appreciate it. That could be the differentiator to gain access right then and there.
4. Leverage your internal connections to breakthrough external silos- If your CXOs are connected via an alumni network, previous role or are close with someone at the target company, don't hesitate to get a referral. They'll often even make the call or write a personal email for you. Invite them to the discovery call or first meeting on-site; LinkedIn referrals are not enough. If you've properly qualified the prospect or opportunity and done your due diligence in advance, these internal C-Level relationships are extremely valuable and they will be onboard to help you, massively.
5. Track and leverage trigger events, all of them are not created equal: "Changes and transitions" are Craig Elias' (Trigger Event Selling) top choice here out of the three buckets that include "bad supplier" and "awareness." In the first 90 days, CXOs will often spend six or seven figures on disruptive technology: be there and be first. The majority of marketers focus on awareness, or ROI. The problem with this strategy is it's ubiquitous so it's very hard to stand out. 'Bad supplier' comes down to human nature, many of us put up with a suboptimal situation in our lives because it's just comfortable to do so or we're procrastinating aka 'lazy'. In an organization this is the status quo rearing its seven headed hydra of complacency. If you're going to try to drive awareness or remind people their current provider is tanking, you'll usually get nowhere. Ironic, I know! There needs to be a substantive compelling event and a pain-point. Pinpoint the major pain and locate changes and transitions like: promotion, role-change, division-change, new job, etc. Watch for your existing or past customers moving into positions of influence at your target company. Many software platforms track this including InsideView, Avention, Gagein and now LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It's also helpful to understand the mode of the business, and I highlight three: growth, stasis and crisis mode. Very little will occur in the sales cycle in cryostasis mode.
6. Nurture prospects and walk them up the ladder of engagement.Steve Richard of Vorsight shares, "At any given time, only 3% of the market you're prospecting to is going to be actively looking for your solutions, products, and services. But 40% more are open and are 'susceptible' to getting into the 'looking mode.' That's why we prospect within our target market – that 43% – we find those ready, and we nurture the upcoming opportunities by building trust over time and by adding insight to help educate our buyers."

1. Think about demand like this – wouldn't you rather create it than service it? (Jim Holden Stage IV Customer Advisor) – When it comes to building a complex solution to solve a complex problem rather than being a prosaic commodity seller, you're moving up the value chain to creating "elasticity of demand," a construct that preserves margin as it bakes in acceptable "consultancy fees."
2. Group participation on LinkedIn: Be active in customer groups on LinkedIn. Ask provocative questions and share insights but don't sell. If someone leaves a thoughtful comment, send them a relevant private message to engage. Provoke with knowledge and insight before trying to book an appointment or move to the target. Finesse selling is key in LinkedIn. The hard sell will typically fail.
3. Become best friends with Executive Assistants, treat them like gold. Never call once, let the phone ring out and then ring again, only thenleave a short relevant message. Realize that the purpose of the first line of an e-mail is to get to the second line so think like a copyrighter or journalist in any exchange, in any medium. The purpose of the first sentence is to attract them to the second and this thinking even pertains to sales processes: 'The purpose of the first step is to get to the NEXT.'
4. Neighborhood techniques and investing in on-sites: Weinberg takes a contrarian stance on this in that he advocates getting on-site a ton, in fact he calls Southwest Saleswest. He also doesn't believe in show-up and throw-up sales presentations. I frequently talk about a great meeting being one in which I speak 25% of the time. God gave us two ears and one mouth, as the old saying goes. Get on that flight to meet with qualified prospects based on the qualification elements of the "Caveats & Nuances" section I laid out above. Provide therapy; I'm reminded of the Dale Carnegie story where he shows up to a major interview never says a word and the executive says, "you're the best conversationalist I've ever met." Show-up in their vicinity and spend time actively listening, take masterful Evernotes. Prepare your questions; print out annual reports; research; Gartner, Forrester, analysis from thought leaders. Be prepared.
5. Leverage calendar alerts in your CRM: The only way you're going to remember to e-mail, call and socially connect at a manageable frequency is to keep calendar alerts automated like a Swiss Watch. Very few people will send a targeted personalized email they wrote to a key executive, follow up in 3 day increments and then follow up in one week, then a week after that. Creating this cadence of accountability in CRM or Google Calendar can be the major difference in success or failure. As Jill Konrath writes in SNAP Selling, “Don’t wait around for your prospect to get in touch with you. Keep thinking of fresh reasons you can get in front of them, bringing them more ideas, insights, and information to help them achieve their desired business outcomes.” Yesware is a very powerful tool here as you can track them reading your emails in real time. It gives you a peak into the crystal ball as you develop the busines. Often, you'll notice a prospect open an email a few times so this is a great data-driven biz dev moment to leverage by giving them a call at that moment. I had a client call that out and buy just because he was so impressed by that tracking capability.
6. BONUS: Always anchor the deal: Budget, timeline, compelling event and I'll throw in success criteria. It's critical to anchor the ship and anchor the deal early. Get these 800 pound gorillas addressed early. You can create your own personalized qualification document that serves as an anchor. 'Sell the dream' and stay focused on the business benefits rather than diving into the weeds and granular details or technical side, depending on whom you're presenting to. Here's a recent post by Tim Ferriss on How to Think Like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. "How do they create maximum leverage? How do they think differently?" Your customers are in the hot seat and they aspire to greatness. Psychologically anchoring the deal to tangible business value is going to be critical in how you present and the difference between prospects taking the bid to RFP for reverse auction, kicking the tires on a pilot (or POC)versus the coveted Production Volume - Purchase Order or Annual Commit. You want to leverage a sales story, testimonials, referrals and highlight your key differentiators. It should be second nature to you exactly how you're driving sound ROI for very similar customers and how to effectively communicate that. Open with a confident: "Here are the challenges we solve for customers like you." Know exactly why the conversation is important with the outcomes you can deliver for them and the risks you will mange.

Critical themes to remember:

• Map the political power base - white board it out, leverage LinkedIn or solutions such and TAS Dealmaker, Pipeline Manager, or Pipeliner to map out the organizational chart.
• Leverage the assumptive close, as Konrath's paradox states, "To be consultative, be assumptive."
• Focus on the wildly important goals (WIGS) weekly with your manager, quarterly and in helping clients 'transform their business'.
• Military strategy - Understand there are always competitors in the deal including the biggest enemy - 'do nothing'. No deals are bilateral, it's always triangulated.
• Be careful not to challenge before you've built rapport and trust - this can be disastrous. You can come off as condescending and holier than The Pope.
• Boots on the ground is critical at key conferences but overbook key meetings in advance of this. Ultimately some people will flake or get caught up in unforeseen travel logistics.
• Close plans are powerful so if you are a manager reading this, make sure to ensure your team is building rock solids ones and you're collaborating on these.
• InMails - Many of us have Premium LinkedIn accounts. Managers need to make this a KPI that all InMails are used each month. They reversed the system so you're actually rewarded now with credits when recipients respond. This not only incents the correct behaviors in the system but most importantly to you as a salesperson, InMails are exponentially more powerful than a telephone or traditional email as they're so infrequently even exploited, not to mention correctly with high value strategic messaging. Use it or lose it!

The number one reason sales people miss quota is the gap in prospecting. Mind the gap!

It takes massive self-discipline to carve out a couple hours each day to close a door, turn off everything with a circuit board and solely focus on driving warm prospects into the funnel. I would add, failure to segment and target the right prospects with a relevant, provocative message that triggers meaningful response is the second problem. It looks like Brainshark agrees. The most popular reason why reps fail to reach their numbers? Inability to articulate value in their sales conversations. We can't put the cart before the horse and say it's the 'sales story' if sales people are procrastinating and literally not selling or the organizational culture is so broken, the powers that be aren't absolutely prioritizing sales activity at the fore.

The above strategies should greatly augment your forward momentum as you look to crush your Q1 goals and surface through the cloud cover in Q2 to jet toward the stratosphere. Hard work pays-off and smart work reigns supreme. Big bold, daily action is not for the faint of heart and if you love sales, you probably enjoy it like I do. Go pick up a few really big rocks before lunch and then rest easy knowing the revenue is on its way. Nothing is certain but consistent, massive action invigorates you as the crucible of unlimited selling power, a life-enhancing force. Where do you get all the energy? How does one stay motivated and avoid burn-out? One word: 'results.' Results are energizing, the fuel to your fire, and results you will achieve if you start on this explosion of proactive to-do's today. When you start getting traction in your sector, it's a morale producing adrenaline rush. As you set key appointments and on-sites with your dream clients, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Success breeds more success and win-rates spiral upward and cause you to, you guessed it: win even more! There's been a bizarre emphasis on closing and I'll go into that in future post. This post is about opening often with the right prospects, the ones that will help you make and exceed your number this quarter.

What new business strategies and tactics work best for you? What books, blogs, white papers and authors are you reading on the subject? Which technology platforms, processes or advanced automations are you leveraging to boost results? Who is driving the most new business on your team and how are they doing it? What works for you? What are you putting off doing that you know would help you breakthrough? What are your challenges in new business sales? What's blocking you? Please share below.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: U.S. Pacific Air Forces

Message To CEO – Change Your Job Description

Have you ever looked at the management team sitting around the boardroom table and wondered, who are the most important people here? If you’ve had the privilege of being a father, you’ll be familiar with the question: ‘Am I your favorite?’ We love all of our children to the same degree but in different ways because they’re unique. Later in life, most little girls grow up to be women, marry and then ask: ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ I’ve come to learn that there is no good answer to that question even if you respond with: ‘For me, you are the most beautiful woman in the whole world.’ Yeah – right; it’s the dog-house for you.

As a leader, it’s always a mistake to play favorites or comment on the size of someone’s rear-end; instead we must value difference in building balanced teams. All of us in leadership roles stand or fall on our values, competence, and the team we which we surrounded ourselves. IQ and EQ are both essential – intelligence and wisdom, energy and discipline, inner strength and humility, financial management and people skills.

Success is a team sport and it’s amazing what can be accomplished if you always pass the credit to others but accept responsibility for failure yourself. The desire to be the smartest person in the room stifles collaboration and crushes the creativity of others. Hiring people just like you creates terrible blind-spots in perspective and weaknesses in execution – the best leaders hire complementary traits, experience and personalities.

But there is another side to great leadership – the willingness to face the awful truth and accept that the biggest problem and opportunity for your business is in the mirror. Your personal values and behaviors are the culture of the organization. Even if the problem is with others, they are your responsibility because you either haven’t fired them or failed to get beside them and support them in overcoming the issues.

Forgive me for the generic assertion but I’m right most of the time – sales management is the weak link in your revenue chain. You don't really understand the sales machine and so much about it frustrates you. The results should be predictable, the reports should be trustworthy, the forecast should be accurate, the pipeline real – but selling is a mysterious black box to you and the people feeding you with information seem to be flaky. You are part of the problem because you don't understand complex selling, yet you wrongly regard it as being like every other direct reporting line. You can't lead that way – The Board will eat you alive, the market will punish you. Worse still, you or those within your team could succumb to the temptation to make bad decisions driven by desperation to hit the numbers.

Here’s the reality of business. One problem, above all others, is terminal – lack of revenue. Every other problem can be managed, massaged, resolved; but shrinking revenues are fatal. For some enterprises cost-cutting is strategic but for most it is a mere tactic and all it usually does is stall the inevitable. It’s rarely a winning strategy to engage in a ‘race to the bottom’.

Revenue, on the other hand, is like air-speed – it creates lift. You can have the most beautifully engineered aircraft in the world but without airspeed it will never fly. Sales is the thrust that creates forward momentum, and with enough speed you can lift-off, climb and soar into the wild blue yonder. Your sales and marketing team is the engine that creates thrust, their commitment and passion is the fuel – prospects and customers are the wind beneath your wings. In proper aeronautical terms, they are the low pressure area above the wing that sucks you upward.

But as you survey your generals [I swear this is true: Word somehow changed ‘generals' to ‘genitals’… funniest autocorrect I’ve experienced and very happy I caught it on the proof-read!] sitting around the boardroom table, do you see commanders of fiefdoms acting in their own best interests? Or do you see a unified team, willing to sacrifice themselves for each other and act in best interests of the greater good? Are sales, marketing, customer support and service disjointed? These are the most important roles around the management table and they need to be united in their vision and commitment. You are their common leader, the catalyst to bring them together. But you need to create the right focus and set the right agenda.

Sales and marketing must especially be an integrated function; simmering hostility or finger-pointing cannot be allowed to prevail. They must come together to define and map customer engagement lifecycle. Everything from social media thought leadership, brand building, website education, differentiating video content, reasons to contact and then the entire sales cycle, on-boarding and retention through to case studies and upselling. Beyond your product, service or solution; what’s the customer experience you can create that sets you apart? How can you be the most insightful, helpful and the easiest supplier to deal with in the eyes of your customers?

You must take personal control – it’s too important to delegate. You need to become Chief Revenue Officer with sales, marketing, support and service all reporting directly to you. Set a vision for the customer experience you want to create that will outshine your competitors. Facilitate workshops to brainstorm the future-state of your company. Gag anyone who wants to talk about technology. Force them all to first define and then workflow the end-to-end customer experience your clients deserve. What is your customer relationship management strategy and what are the metrics and KPIs that guide you on the path?

Don't approve any investment request that comes to you for technology; CRM, social, and marketing automation included, unless they can clearly articulate where it fits within the end-to-end strategy. You need to drive a culture of customer success though best possible customer experience with every touch-point providing consistent high levels of service. Maybe you will appoint a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) in the future but for now you will grasp the role yourself. It’s a terrifying role because you cannot manage revenue or results; you can only manage activities and inputs. That’s the very reason why these next two roles must also be assumed by you personally to instil the vision, unity and discipline in your team and throughout the entire organization.

CEO should really stand for: Chief Example Officer.

CEO and Chief Customer Experience Officer. Align the business for buyer engagement. Create retention strategies based on irresistible value and service. Love your people and customers. Delight them, inspire them, and show them a better way. Create emotional connections to the way you do business.

CEO and Chief Culture Officer. Love your staff and serve them with all you have. Be Chief Encouragement Office. Take your vision, mission and values statements off the wall and write them on everyone’s mind and heart. Bring it all to life in the way you live and lead. Be authentic – ditch the persona and instead be human in how you operate. It will cascade down through the organization and the market will notice. You’ll be ‘the good guys’ in your industry and partners and customers will want to do business with you over anyone else. Are you brave enough? This case study can show you how it can work.

CEO/CRO/CCEO/CCO… it has a ring to it, doesn't it. Seriously, no need to put this inane mind-boggling acronym string on your business card or LinkedIn profile but ensure no-one is in doubt about your obsession. Customer intimacy combined with innovation to create the best market-leading customer experience is the most powerful form of differentiation. This, combined with a motivated and competent sales team is what creates profitable revenue, the life-blood of any enterprise.

How many business out there already have a CRO or similar role that brings sales, marketing, service and customer support all together under a single leader? What are the barriers you see to breaking down fiefdoms for the benefit of customers and the prosperity of the business?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: John Taylor

Lost In Translation. Funny True Miscommunication

The world is wired for miscommunication and it’s especially problematic when we cross cultures or use shorthand social media and e-mail to communicate. But this is not a new problem created by digital communication. Every time we met someone and every time we talk or write, we must ensure we communicate positive intent to build trust and understanding.

Effective communication and language translation involves far more than converting words and phrases from one language to another. We must convey intent. In the early 1980s, computer programmers were developing some innovative translation software but came up with some peculiar results:

• From English to Russian, back to English: ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ ended up: ‘Invisible idiot’.
• From English to Japanese, back to English: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’ (from Hamlet) ended up: ‘It is, it is not, what is it?’

In the 1990s, international marketers had some monumental cross-cultural miscommunication blunders concerning brand names and slogans:

• Swedish vacuum-cleaner manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American advertising campaign: ‘Nothing sucks like an Electrolux’.
• Australian brewer, Castlemaine launched it's XXXX (‘four-ex’) beer in the USA using their trademarked jingle ‘I can feel a four-ex coming on’ which had proved so successful in the Australian market. Unfortunately the company was unaware that XXXX was the brand name of a successful American condom manufacturer!
• The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the Coke company did not discover, until after thousands of signs had been printed, that the phrase means: ‘Bite the wax tadpole’. Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, ‘ko-kou-ko-le,’ which can be loosely translated as: ‘Happiness in the mouth’.
• Also in Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan: 'Finger-lickin’ good' came out as: 'Eat your fingers off’.
• In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan: ‘Come alive with the Pepsi Generation’ came out as: ‘Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead’.
• Ford had a similar problem in Brazil when the Pinto flopped. The company found out that Pinto was Brazilian slang for ‘tiny male genitals’. Ford pried all the nameplates off and substituted Corcel, which means horse.
• When Parker Pen marketed a ballpoint pen in Mexico, its advertisements were supposed to say: ‘It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you’. However, the company mistakenly thought the Spanish word ‘embarazar’ meant embarrass. Instead the advertisement said: ‘It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant’.
• In Italy, Schweppes Tonic Water was wrongly translated into Schweppes Toilet Water.
• An American t-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the Spanish market which promoted the Pope's visit. Instead of the desired: ‘I Saw the Pope’ in Spanish, the shirts proclaimed: ‘I Saw the Potato’.
• And the funniest; American chicken-man Frank Perdue's slogan: ‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken’, got terribly mangled in another Spanish translation. A photo of Perdue with one of his birds appeared on billboards all over Mexico with a caption saying: ‘It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused’.

I swear this is true. I was once in Asia and had a meal in a restaurant with a client. At the end of dinner I paid the bill and as we left I thanked the waitress who had served us. She responded with broken English: “We like to pleasure you.” We both burst into laughter as we got outside.

If you want to bridge any communication gap and build rapport, here are my ten tips.

1. Have a firm, warm and friendly handshake. Sounds obvious but one-third of people I meet have a crap handshake. The most common problem is breaking eye-contact while still shaking my hand. The second-biggest problem is either limp-fish or gorilla grip – both are bad. Be aware that for some Muslim women, they cannot have physical contact with a man in public who is not their husband.
2. Positive eye contact, especially for men who should keep their eyes above the shoulders. But don't drill a hole through the other person’s skull with your laser-like intimidating glare. The only time you should break eye contact is to take notes. Note that in some cultures in Asia, and also for traditional Aboriginal people in Australia, averting eye contact is not rudeness, and is instead a sign of respect.
3. Talk with appropriate pace and tone. Don't gabble; don’t drone. Lower your voice if you’re a ‘high talker’. Avoid talking in an Irish, Scottish or Australian accent – no one has a clue what you’re saying!
4. Be thoughtful in your manner and accurate with your language. This is especially important in dealing with senior people.
5. Dress like them and, especially for ladies, wear nothing that is distracting. By all means be feminine but not sexual in any way – you’re better than that. Your value is in who you are, not in how you look.
6. Smile and ensure congruent body language. If you’re excited, tell your face about it. Your body-language should match your words.
7. Paint word pictures and give real examples – relevant true stories that draw your audience into what you can do for them.
8. Actively listen to understand and ask open insightful questions
9. Focus on the other person’s needs and personal agendas. It’s all about them and all they really care about concerning you, is what you can potentially do for them.
10. Display good manners and treat business cards with respect. This is especially important when dealing with those from another country. I once sat in a meeting and the sales rep for the potential supplier started picking his teeth with my boss’ business card – true story.

If you embrace these ten tips when you meet people for the first time, they won’t be able to do anything other than like you – you’ll now have the chance to earn their trust and build a relationship. But before they meet you in the flesh, they see you online – probably on LinkedIn. What’s your photo and persona like in digital and social? It’s important, first impressions stick. Make no mistake; LinkedIn is the new business card, but it’s exchanged in advance of meeting face-to-face. Your LinkedIn profile needs to highlight what you’re all about, not your title, qualifications and work history. It will show social proximity and credibility – whether you’re a person worthy of their time.

I have a collection of funny miscommunication clips on my website here. You can also see some very funny ‘lost in translation’ signs from Asia, click here. This is a classic Monty Python miscommunication clip.

Now it’s over to you. What are the funniest miscommunications you’ve experienced as you’ve operated cross-culture? What techniques do you use to ensure you connect and avoid miscommunication?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Sébastien Bertrand

Industry Gobbledygook Makes You Look Fowl

Okay, we’re all guilty. Every industry has acronyms coming out the wazoo and in the quest to look different in competitive markets, we craft wordy statements that we think make us stand out. But the reality is that a lot of what we say, especially in the technology sector, just washes right over customers – no cut-through at all.

Worse still, acronyms can confuse people or create the impression that we’re disconnected from the real world. This video about Flutter, the new Twitter, could easily be regarded as similar to the pitch of a real tech start-up.

As an example of the problem, consider this internal announcement. I won't blame you if you skip forward as you read but this could also be a case in point.

New Dimensions In Executive & Shareholder Value: Social Mobility Cloud Content Life-cycle Optimization Strategy

San Francisco, 22 January 2018 – The global imperative to unravel the allegory of the Social Content Life-cycle enigma has dominated our strategic thinking for some time and resulted in our resolve to fulfill and transcend our collective thinking in the context of significant geographic constraints and the unlimited potential of markets we are unable to address.

In this paradigm it is imperative that we digitize our intellectual capital, dominate the white-space and maximize the opportunities in the cloud and mobile, all at the speed of thought. With this in mind, and in the context of virtual reverse-teaming, we are embarking on a bold adventure though initiatives that will fundamentally redefine new economy engagement and optimize shareholder value through a strategic paradigm shift in business sustainability.

We are committed to thought leadership and cognizant of the requirement for delivering to the bottom-line and it is within this framework that our revolutionary unique customer value proposition will dominate social, mobile and cloud platforms of the ether. We fully expect our alliances and initiatives to deliver unprecedented click-through revenue streams derived from multi-faceted collaborative utilization across both vertical and horizontal markets, not to mention the power of niche diagonals yet to be harvested. This unprecedented innovative orientation toward customer interoperability will drive blockbusting market value through virtual interactions in target verticals to facilitate the realization of best outcomes for the corporate community via a ubiquitous intimate one-to-one social web enabled execution model, unfettered by the reality of real world relationships.

Our value-add solutions will turn every click into an ‘internet transaction’ and achieve unparalleled customer connection, loyalty, value and revenue which will be captured via our revolutionary cyber-tolling engine. These synergistic yet mercurial technologies will combine to drive down costs, drive up revenue and profits, drive up value and most importantly, drive the competition – like a herd of hapless lemmings – over the precipice of the old-economy paradigm into the abyss of the Luddites to be dashed to oblivion on the jagged rocks of physical business reality.

At the heart of this visionary business model is a holistic commitment to redefining value with a consistent, flexible, unique and often surprising experience that will truly inspire our target markets and some customers. These show-stopping initiatives are not just hollow bullish announcements; our patented Web Application Network Knowledge Enabled Repository (WANKER™) will differentiate our offerings from the current dross that dominates the incumbent landscape of mediocrity. Unlike our competitors, we will deliver on the vision for cloud enabled mobility with sell-side, buy-side and back-side integration.

Furthermore, our unique and ground-breaking Share-Holder Optimized Value Implementation Technology(SHOVIT™) will drive the strategic Customer Third-Party Outsourcing (C3PO™) of our profitable customer relationships to viable horizontal competitors, therefore liberating precious internal customer-facing resources and enabling the pursuit of executive team ROI and shareholder value-spiking initiatives. We are committed to breaking the shackles of logic and facts that have constrained others, to instead transcend reality with a paradigm shift toward the convergence of technology, market ignorance, unbridled capitalism and self-optimization.

Our commitment to executive ‘shareholder value’ and liberal fiscal abandonment will manifest itself during these turbulent times through innovation. Vociferous analyst and vertical press focus will make it increasingly important for you, our valued team members, to display positive intent and resilient commitment in the face of our new customer-centric paradigm shift which will serve as the catalyst for focussing on our core mission, vision and values as we embrace the future together in a dis-intermediated, self-outsourced environment.

In summary, confluence of our objectives is paramount as we drive relentlessly toward accelerated ubiquitous obviation. It is therefore imperative that we adopt as our mantra this innovative message of enhanced synergistic co-operative diversity, delivering optimized and measurable quality outcomes.

We sincerely care about you, our valued team members, so as we execute this equitable exit strategy, we are providing you with the Self Help Information Tele-System (SHITS™) which you can call 24x7 to dispel erroneous myths and soothe any fears or distress that you may be experiencing as a direct result of your personal failure to embrace pervasive change and evolve into the new paradigm.

Finally; synchronized execution and ubiquity is everything, so share the vision, dominate with thought leadership and be empowered through teamwork, passion and commitment.

————————————

The scary thing is that this nonsense is not that far removed from some of the content created by companies on a regular basis. Here is a website that auto-generates Dilbert mission statements based on clichés. Here's one I just randomly generated for your amusement. For fun, read some of these out loud seriously to colleagues; you'll be shocked they think you're serious. Bob, I was thinking about this for my next pitch deck:

It is our mission to continue to continually negotiate ethical catalysts for change to allow us to endeavor to efficiently operationalize quality deliverables.

David Meerman Scott did research which highlighted how terms such as ground breaking, industry standard, scalable, cutting-edge, best of breed, mission critical, and many others simply make you sound like everyone else in your industry. Kawasaki and Konrath have also advocated extensively to eliminate those revolutionary, curve jumping and paradigm shifting banalities from your vocabulary. But worse than that problem, you sound disconnected from their world and the reality of the business problems they face.

The last thing you want is for your potential customer to look at you and think: He would probably describe a paperclip as a ‘paper consolidation management solution’.

Politicians seem to be masters at saying a lot that means nothing spouting enough hot air to restore the Zeppelin industry. George Orwell in Politics and the English Language wrote: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." Here is a classic from The BBC’s Yes Minister.

Megan Hills writes: “Listen to the words your client uses and build an explanation bridge from their terms to yours. Don’t use acronyms unless they really are common knowledge.” She also recommends testing your message with a friend or relative not in your industry. Here are the three big things to avoid:

Buzzwords: Best practice, market-leading, revolutionary, cloud enabled, coopetition, disruptive, game changing – all these types of terms and phrases are to be avoided whenever possible. Here’s a draft list of the top buzzwords of 2014. The occasional buzz word is okay but don't overdo it. Plain language is always best.

Techspeak: Instead of saying “cloud enabled”, say: “Everyone will be able use it with just a web browser.” Simply use plain English. If you’re worried about the language and terms, use this gobbledygook generator, and if anything appears similar, rethink what you’re saying or writing. Here's a taste, "We need a more contemporary reimagining of our global reciprocal flexibility."

Acronyms: The list is endless but as an example, what does CMS mean to you? Depending on who you’re talking with it could mean: Content Management System, Customer Management System, Corporate Management System, Contact Management System, or Code Management System. Don’t use an acronym in a room with others unless you’re sure everyone is on the same page. If anyone uses one that you’re not sure about, then ask them what they mean.

True story, I worked for in SAP at the turn of the century – wow that makes me sound old. They launched SAP-SFA (Sales Force Automation). The problem here in Australia is that SFA means ‘Sweet F*#k All’ which, coincidentally, is exactly what most sales people thought the system did for them to assist in their sales efforts. At the time, it was very much a manage-up reporting tool like Siebel.

In managing technology divisions, I've been on the receiving end of this classic level of verbal diarrhea all too many times. This is not just a Millennial love affair with tech-speak problem, it's endemic and epidemic in many high technology sectors. Can you relate?

Now it’s over to you. What are the acronyms that create confusion in your world? What negative impact have you seen from Gobbledygook and buzz words? Which buzzwords drive you particularly nuts in the communications you receive?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Holly Occhipinti

10 Superhuman Strategic Moonshot Methodologies to 10X Sales Revenue

1. Challenger Sale

“If everyone’s saying they offer the 'leading solution,' what’s the customer to think? We can tell you what their response will be: 'Great—give me 10 percent off." - Matt Dixon

2. Power Base Selling (eFox)

“Know this about yourself: there is only one reason professional salespeople lose orders-- they are outsold.” - Jim Holden

3. SPIN Selling

“I believe there is a special place in hell reserved for wicked salespeople where they sit for all eternity being forced to answer their own situation questions.” - Neil Rackham

4. RSVPselling

(Full disclosure, this one is mine!). These are the four elements for winning the complex sale and the framework is intuitive. It's delivered huge enterprise wins. in countries around the world.

"The RSVPselling methodology was instrumental in us winning a contract in excess of $100 million and provided clarity amidst the complexity of pursuing a large international enterprise opportunity. — Kevin Griffen, Managing Director - Orange Business Services.

5. Solution Selling

“Solution Selling is designed to help sellers understand and align with how buyers buy.” - Keith Eades

6. Strategic Selling - Miller Heiman

"I took Strategic Selling over 20 years ago and I'm glad to see that it hasn't changed which is a good indicator of a quality solution." - Sales representative - Business Services

7. Trigger Event Selling

“The number one metric I think more sales leaders should measure is how often they are the first vendor into an opportunity – aka first in.” - Craig Elias

8. SNAP Selling

"To be consultative, be assumptive." - Jill Konrath

9. Insight Selling

“Sales winners educate with new ideas and perspectives almost three times more often than second-place finishers. Of 42 factors studied, the greatest difference between winners and second-place finishers was their propensity to educate.” - Mike Schultz

10. The Prime Process: Diagnostic Business Development

“We’ve ingrained the Prime Process in our culture around the globe and it’s clearly a sustainable competitive advantage. I write this endorsement with some reluctance as I don’t want my competitors to have this advantage. In 30 years of reading books and attending seminars to continue my professional growth, there are only a handful that I can say made a difference. Jeff Thull’s Mastering the Complex Sale is one of them.” —Jim Clauser, President and COO, IBA Technology Group—Belgium

11. Target Account Selling (TAS) - Honorable Mention

"Donal uncovers vast advantages of Account Planning done right." - Patricia Elizondo SVP, XEROX

12. BONUS: Consultative Selling

"A 'challenging' insight can be used to drive to the value the salesperson can provide through a consultative dialogue, not replace it." - Linda Richardson

By popular demand and to "switch it up" after over 100 posts, this post is incredibly concise and visual. In my honest opinion, this is the complex selling pantheon as far as strategic frameworks and methodologies are concerned – Which ones did I miss? What's in your pipeline???!!!

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main photo by: Victor Valor – Please click the title links above to buy and apply all these remarkable books creating your own almagamation! (Yes, all of them are a MUST to truly understand the evolution of professional selling, over the last thirty years.)

Sorry you lost that big deal...

Dear Joshua,

So sorry to hear you lost the big deal… 'Internal options' and 'do nothing' are without a doubt the biggest competition for B2B enterprise selling… yet we’re all wired to emotionally obsess about our market competitors.

The key to winning against both of these is two-fold:

1. Understand and manage the internal politics… but did you have someone in the power-base working with you or manipulating the situation for you because they wanted you to win?
2. Use ‘risk as a weapon’. It's important for them to see the danger of being left behind in the market, plus their lack of experience in your area, as two massive risks. They need a specialist expert which is you.

I can’t tell you how many times I had the support of the project team and recommenders only to lose the deal at the final hurdle… so painful! It’s so frustrating when the CXO level engages but then says: “Phil is who I defer to as our expert in these matters.” Yet Phil wouldn’t know if his own hair was on fire, or as we say in Australia, “whether a bus was parked up his arse.”

But many times, it’s just something you cannot change. I've seen many deals blow-up because we went above someone’s head and pissed them off… they became an enemy and white-anted us from within. It's like this crazy contradictory strategy has to be executed:

• Engage high with a stake in the ground at C-level
• Work with their project team / recommenders / evaluators to get them on board without feeling threatened

The senior decision maker says “I’m not an expert in this so talk with my people.” Then his people think: "Hmmm, if we recommend this new solution, it undermines us and some of us could lose our jobs! Certainly the boss will be thinking, why weren’t you guys already doing this?"

As sexy as it sounds, software as a service is still a tough value prop to sell, especially with regular bad press on failed implementations and fly-by-night operators pushing 'vapourware.'

Not easy, but you’ve got to tell the CXO early that his team won’t like this, they’ll feel threatened, and they’ll say they can do it better and cheaper internally. Then ask him/her: "What will you do when they come to you with that message after we’ve educated them?”

I had someone e-mail me last week from one of these posts [they really did] asking for my advice on selling professional services… I regard it as the toughest of selling. Not just because it's an ‘intangible’ product but because you're taking on internal politics and the law of self-interest lurking within everyone down the chain — smiling assassins, politely absorbing all of your information and then knifing you in the back when you’ve left the premises.

Regards,

Damien Drost, Sales Mentor

Damien and Joshua are from my book, The Joshua Principle. If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Joe Hunt

A 12-Step Program to Exceed Quota

Sales is broken, it's sick. It's time to kick the social crack pipe! Doug Davidoffrecently posed the question, "To Sell or Not to Sell" in this ingenious post rebuking a CEO that's eschewing ever hiring another salesperson??!!

Anthony Iannarino's take down of this post was so classic I must lift this paragraph here to share with my audience. I let out a cheer! "This CEO has replaced salespeople with a 'customer success team' that he believes offers a different experience because of their consultative approach and because their intentions are pure. This CEO doesn’t understand that salespeople lead when it comes to customer success, and that most take a consultative approach. Mistakenly, he believes his customer success team is more dedicated to his customer’s success than a salesperson who would stand to gain financially for making a sale. I defy you to find me anyone outside of the salesperson who is more concerned about their customer getting the outcome they paid for than the salesperson. But it’s not about their commission; it’s abouttheir word."

There's a phenomenal amount of bad information masking the good and endless consternation about enterprise sales people being replaced by AI. Have you used SIRI? Have no fear, if that thing can't get my auto-corrects right without generating something hysterical and profane, the singularity is not too near and you're not going to be replaced any time soon. Failure to get back to basics and pick up a phone could be the bigger risk, insidious and lurking. I'll get into why below but I want to first console you that you do have job security. The bigger risk is falling in love with the easy, hacked and shortcut approach which bankrupts achievement of excellence in any chosen field.

There's a stigma that 'sales people' are the laziest people in the world. Want to get a sales rep to stop working? Put a phone in front of them. Better yet, put a list of customers ready to buy in front of them. Isn't it ironic? Why is that? The mystery confounds me to this day. The truth is that Sellers are some of the hardest working, block and tackle, ruck and maul, kick and punt, roll up the sleeves and deal with daily insanity 'people', I've ever met. It's a few rotten eggs giving selling a foul smell. Social selling has become the new panacea, or clever opiate of our age. It 'supplements', it does not replace good old fashioned work-ethic. If you wish to avoid the aforementioned scarlet letters on your forehead, be one of the few, the proud and the bold: wear a headset and actually have hard, edgy conversations about real issues with customers – there's no shame in that game! Social media is incredibly addictive and addictive behaviors are reactive by nature. Let's get addicted to proactive sales success!

Yes, e-mail and phone contact and conversion rates are down but it doesn't mean they're extinct. Your sales career may be if you don't generate fresh, qualified and high quality sales opportunities to your pipeline each and every selling day. The amount of sales days in a quarter keeps shrinking faster than executives' attention spans.

By the time you've had the sales kick-off, personality strengths-finding tests, remedial training and endless internal meetings, you start to realize something horrifying: You're probably talking with actual customers less than a third of all your working hours. Rather than figuring out where you're strong, don't you think it's a strength to sell things to people? It's a pathetic state of the industry I'd dub 'over-solutioning' or 'analysis paralysis' and it's a leading contributor to why SVPs of Sales have such short tenure and untold millions of dollars are invested in sales processes, programs, trainings, shiny objects and the latest craze. Corporations spend exponentially on sales than all marketing. According to Business Insider, "Salesforce has grown its sales and marketing cost every year, and it still accounts for more than half of its total revenue. [Box] sales and marketing costs... at one point were higher than its total revenue." Sales forces retain a fraction of what they learn despite these pricey enablement efforts cutting into valuable selling time where they could actually move the needle for your business. This is not to say training is not valuable if it's instituted year round as anorganizational competency.

Those 57% Challenger surveys that purport that buyers are much further in the decision making process are only so accurate because just like a science experiment, it's very very hard to factor for 'controls' in human systems, especially something as Black Swan volatile as the vicissitudes of key business decision makers, that can be fickle like the wind. After all, we're talking about a process that is highly subjective, emotionally driven and governed by market factors, pressure, internal politics and risk. This is a highly dynamic, explosive system not unlike an unstable super giant star ready to go supernova sending your deal into a black hole. Don't bank on it!

Buying processes may change but human nature will not. "Crazy busy prospects" [Jill Konrath] are even busier and what do you do when you're far too busy? Something's got to give. You filter out the white noise, you star e-mails, you bookmark articles you'll never read and save files to review in the circular file. You thin slice, you cope, you filter out... hard. And this is a smart high integrity thing: You can't be a thousand places at once and you seek a balanced life in order to enjoy the journey and spend time with your family. As a prospect yourself, once you've been "rationally drowned" [Challenger Selling] with enough data, discovery calls and emails to make you blue in the face, you'll probably just call a lifeline, a friend, or someone you trust who is a subject matter expert in the space and can point you at the right solution removing the guesswork. You don't want to make a mistake and everyone is painting on the roses for how 'game-changing' their solution will be. Empty promises and hot wind.

There are just too many variables in the web-enabled information age and too much chaos; I can't tell you how many top officers I still reach on a Friday after 5pm working late, exasperated who exclaim, "I've heard this before! How are you different?" True story. Demand generation with unique compelling value is all the rage. B2B sales is still en vogue but mainly ways to not sell with 'look a squirrel!' automata. Insight selling, consultative selling, solution selling, and strategic selling are all still working in the field, although the new guard shouts from mountain tops that it's the "Death of X-type of Selling." Well that's great, if you sell sales widgets. Nice job Wile E. Coyote, this Road Runner got away!

News flash: Selling is alive and well despite the dystopian prediction it risks full blown Minority Report automation by 2020. Is insight selling with the exact same insights your competitors are using useful? No, it creates static white noise. The top vendors in the magic quadrant all download and read each others white papers and take that same insight to the market in their go-to-market strategy. Translation? Self-commoditization. How insightful is a statistic you just heard from both competing vendors? Diluted – information is not insight.

I talk a great deal about Steve Jobs in these selling articles. Why is that? He figured out that customers don't always know what they've always wanted. The same is true in enterprise sales. Although the consumerization of IT is a huge trend in B2B, '90% of the buying cycle is done before buyers speak with sales people' or 'today's customer can easily research an entire marketplace in minutes', as Brian de Haaf so boldly proclaims in his quippy link bait, are patently erroneous musings. Certainty around these statistics is about as certain as Amazon was with their phone and Google was with the first generation of Glass. If you build solutions derivative of what came before, you'll often fail to truly innovate. A return to "first principles" thinking is the Socratic way that Elon Musk leverages in building reusable rockets at 2% of the typical price. Something the space powers that be said was impossible, by the way. You need to break down your solution into fundamental parts and rebuild new unique insight by putting yourself into the shoes, hearts and minds of your dream clients. Understanding them better than competitors do will trump better Challenger decks and chart porn. Yawn!

Focus on the WHY, but which why?

You must do something very different to stand out from the chorus of similar voices. The only difference in modern selling, is the executive buyer is often more informed (or more cynical) and will often reluctantly show up to a first call or meeting with a 'tell me something I haven't heard' crossed-armed mentality. More frequently, they'll delegate you down to who you sound like. Dealing with suppliers and vendors is often a chore. Part of getting to the C-Suite is not only earning the luxury of a corner office but the right to deploy your generals to go do this for you in a flurry of delegation. What I see most frequently is a junior strategists compiling pricing grids from four or five form fills from suppliers ranking on page one of Google. When you call them, they say: 'Well that extra value is all well and good but I just have to put these cost estimates in a spreadsheet to show my manager'. This is not a good place to be: this is a live 'reverse auction', you will be commoditized and priced out at the speed of a daily real-time RFP that Google has become. If all competing solutions look identical, claim to offer the same features and the price is the only differentiator, why wouldn't an executive just choose the lowest one?

YOU are the differentiator. It's not what you sell, it's how you sell it. We've all heard that for decades and I've gone in to great detail about building rapport, achieving trusted advisor status in relationships and how to be an extension of the buyer's team. People do still buy from those they know, like and trust. But that's not really the problem, if you can't get the right meeting in the first place. So this would pose a bigger existential question? How can you compel the actual decision maker to talk to you or meet with you when they are fed up with your ilk? How can you engage early at the most senior levels by speaking 'CXO'? What is that language that cuts through? The insights alone sound like marketing pabulum, fluff for template drip e-mails, gated white papers with a form fill and as specific as they seem with 'mind-blowing' industry trends, it's not personalized enough or tailored to their actual business. Every vendor is showing double-digit ROI and promising the world. I recently saw a slide deck where 3,000% ROI had been achieved. How can you trust that statistic? How can you trust sellers in high technology markets where sensationalized statistics run rampant? I can't help but feel manipulated by this. It repels business: Too good to be true? It probably is!

We have to challenge ourselves to be consultative. We must go deeper into understanding the actual nuances and subtleties of what each customer is facing. It's extremely time consuming but well worth it. So when we engage more deeply with fewer clients - the right clients - we do make progress and sit in the signal while the white noise crashes against the force field created in a quality sales exchange. As Linda Richardson so eloquently puts it: "The [Challenger Sale]missing link is validation of the customer’s perspective through questioning and dialogue." Parachuting in to condescend or 'teach' executives that have three decades of experience and even created the industries you're selling into, will surely backfire as fast as trying to help Jackie Chan get a white belt. A little humility goes a long way!

The Challenger Sale book says get in early, upstream and teach with new insight. Easier said than done. How do we do this? Despite numerous best sellers on Insight Selling, it's still murky how we generate said insight when our target is such an august subject matter expert (SME). We need a big idea, a reason to meet, something worthwhile and intriguing to discuss. This is where the concept of ideation and Design Thinking delivers in a practical way. Design Thinking is a framework for ideation and has been with us for years. It’s an excellent way of harnessing a team’s creative juices to brainstorm and develop ideas and strategies for value and differentiation.

These are the critical success factors as I see them, the daily sales activities and the strategies meets tactics you'll need to win in 2015. I'm familiar with the inner workings of the enterprise software and many times the goal posts get moved on top sales people and teams. It's frustrating to need to make 30% more in annual contract value at the drop of a hat. You won't be affected by this if you maintain the drive and 'will to win', and engage in proactive versus reactive daily activities that will put you into the driver's seat to your own sales destiny. Only you can hold yourself accountable. You need to analyze what works and do more of that each day.

This is how you'll meet your number and even exceed it. Happy manager, happy life. Revenue = happy CEO and many times: a promotion for you or your manager. That's also good for you. Sales is the life blood of the economy and a thriving, growing business and an entire industry can rise and fall on the backs of quality sales people winning and gaining market share. So your role is vastly more important than you may have been lead to believe. Even in a flush funding climate: 'Did somebody say bubble? - pop goes the weasel'. It's still the businesses that consistently retain clients and preserve margins that are immune to market fluctuations. If the bubble bursts, it will be competent sales teams who embody these ideals that continue to keep the best firms thriving.

We do this job not only because we're outgoing, gregarious and love helping people solve complex problems. We do this job because it's high risk, high reward. We each have a commission driven opportunity to advance our careers, take home a fat paycheck and live a life less ordinary, changing our own stars. Maybe I'll see you in plush 5 star holiday destination. Perhaps you'll go on a mission to Haiti and give back. That choice is yours, whatever floats your boat my friend but here's how you'll get there and create momentum:

1. Acknowledge you have a very real sales problem. Ignorance is not always bliss. Show up 2 hours early and actually use a telephone,every day. It won't kill you but you'll kill your number! I know it's not fashionable and even the most expensive headset ever made still has a Spok-like goofiness but I'd rather be wearing the headset any day. Why? Because peace and quiet, aka: 'Time to think on your feet', and a phone collectively become your best friend. Don't get buried in a reactive avalanche of emails or have your dual flat-screens filled with streaming Twitter feeds. The reps clicking the mouse all day, fail. The loquacious chatter boxes hammering phones still win. Make those calls to your dream clients before your colleagues even show up. This will always be an edge. You can still make all the clicks later on that day. Keep social selling to a minimum just like you would trash TV or candy. We'd all love to believe chocolate bonbons will keep us fit!
2. A pad and paper or white board are still the world's best self organizing tools. Write down numbers 1 - 20 and then fill in twenty target accounts. Ensure you make 1 - 3 meaningful prospecting touches that day: could be a call, v-mail, e-mail, social outreach, e-mail response, like, share or retweet. Make the touches and write down the names. Burn them into your brain. This will help you know the accounts 10,000 feet deep rather than the shallow end of the kiddie-pool.
3. Prioritize face to face meetings; actually fly out there. Get on the flights! Bring executive sponsors to the big 'opening' meetings and don't present a 55 slide deck. Showing up and throwing up is a defense mechanism for the weak and insecure. Bring your listening and thinking cap, be adaptive to the real-time feedback client prospects are giving you. Listen listen and then listen more. SPIN selling is key but you ideally need to be in front of a human first. If you're an individual contributor and this collaboration is not realistic, operate with the gravitas and business acumen commensurate with delivering key insight in a consultative fashion as your best CEO would.
4. Get buy-in from your own executive team. This means access. This means referrals from their LinkedIn. This means tracking down your boss or boss's boss in the hallway and saying: "Look, I see you went to school with the CMO of Acme Corporation. There's a real pain point we can immediately solve and strategic fit with this initiative they've talked about in the press. Could you please help me get introduced?" 99% of people will not rock the boat because they think they have to do it all themselves. That executive will give you one shot at this, so make sure to qualify the hell out of the opportunity. It's a bit of dare to do this, I would be shocked if they said 'no'. They're looking at the revenue reports every day too and want to close business. Be assertive about actually getting referrals through your network. Hold people accountable when they tell you they'll refer. I literally put the referral on my calendar to ask them again, one week later - especially internally!
5. Read and listen to books on tape like a maniac and apply what you learn. I recently approached a sales person who was dying to move from existing to new business. I gave him a quick list of books to master it, phone tactics and such. His response was: "Well reading books is your thing. I'm more of an action guy." Where do you think I learned how to act? Another amusing rep explained, he was a fan of creating 'strategic spreadsheets' in the back room. Good luck! I'm not saying introverts can't win – they make epic sales engineers and solution consultants who go on to become CTOs. What I am saying is that 'success leaves clues' and the all time "greats" luckily wrote a lot of things down! Mel Brooks: "I have 15 commandments – oops, I have ten commandments!" Their collective knowledge applied represents a quantum leap. Take that leap and try new tactics daily. Honestly, every advance I've made has been about humbling myself, a willingness to learn and study, honing and applying the craft of sales and being extremely curious. Keep asking why! Relentless strategy is developed by filling your quiver with arrows of wisdom from all of those who work beside us in global sales, came before us and further the trade. Sales training is an oft under-appreciated, exhaustive and highly altruistic pursuit. Ignorance is sheer bliss. Readers are leaders and writers are closers. If you're hungry enough to win, you'll be hungry enough to make time. Audible, eBooks on your phone, I hear so so many excuses. It's just like exercise of the mental muscle. The fastest way to accelerate your career is to turn off the TV!
6. Positive attitude is everything to keep you going. It's a marathon to crush revenue, never a sprint. The hare switches companies every year. The tortoise is now the CEO, firing the impetuous hare! When you're ready to throw in the towel and go home, make one more call. An attitude of gratitude, your attitude determines your altitude, attitude is everything. We hear these platitudes of personal development in a drone but that's because they're so true. You'll never withstand the degree of rejection that it really takes if you're a pessimist or complainer. You're going to work for three to six months, even up to eighteen months on a seven figure opportunity only to have your dreams dashed by an incumbent supplier, status quo or just something Act of God completely out of your control. You can't get down on yourself. You can't sell angry. You can't emotionally react to the headwinds or tempestuous customers. They are always right, ultimately... even when they're dead wrong. We are here to serve them, lead them and be lead; let's be tenacious to help them create change.
7. Leverage the 10X Rule. These ideas have been sent my way from around the world. I'm familiar with the 10X Moonshot ideals of the Google Way. I've also seen this book in airports. My takeaway is it's highly freeing to your mind to take a goal and multiply it by 10, take a tactic and multiply it by 10. The caveat here is 'more is not more'. But we often are limited by our own small thinking. Go big! If you set a reasonable goal you'll often miss that. As the old adage goes, I'd rather reach for the stars and hit a mountain. Check out this eye opening new research from Velocify and Harvard Business Review which both highlight:
   • "High-performing sales organizations set higher quotas and expect fewer sales reps to meet their quota
   • Mediocre sales organizations were slower to fire under-performing sales reps
   • The best-performing sales teams were more likely to describe themselves as a "cohesive group"
   • High-performing sales organizations put more emphasis on structured sales processes and monitoring than average or under-performing organizations
   • Seventy-five percent of high-performing sales organizations raised 2014 annual quotas more than 10% over 2013 quotas," Steve W. Martin wrote in an HBR.org article.
   • And a full 40% of those top teams increased quotas by a quarter or more.
   • On the other hand, 65% of low-performing organizations and 48% of average teams either kept quota the same or decreased it."
8. Never eat alone, eat with your clients. This was a great book and great concept. Ironically, once I was reading it alone at a restaurant before meeting with a client and a sly waiter remarked: "Hey, why are you eating alone?" Jill Rowley talks about the ABCs: always be connecting, and that applies here. Coffee, tea and meals are a great chance to commune with clients, prospects and to network. Be consistent, don't take other people's opinions too seriously. You need to follow your own internal compass. Consistency every day: sales is a full contact sport. Consistency of sales process. H2H is a process. Nurture your people internally and externally. "According to multiple, peer-reviewed studies, simply being in an open network instead of a closed one is the best predictor of career success."
9. Protect your time and book conference rooms to prospect. Remember, it's a verb. Your internal bureaucracy even in a start-up will fight you to the teeth to intercede so you have absolutely 'zero selling time' during business hours. Block out your calendar and put a do not disturb sign on the door. A hilarious riff on this would be a sign that says Top Secret. Once the CEO breaks down the door, she'll find you startled, actually talking to people that can buy from you. 'Sorry, I was busy selling.' In the modern sales team, the entire organization is constructed to eat into your selling time. Mandatory meetings, eLearning training, HR summits, touchy-feely off-sites, group calls. It's like trying to drive a speed boat into constant white caps - water buffeted by wind – and once the quarter closes you've capsized the boat in a back-flip with an engine fire – and management wonders why the team is so far off the board-level revenue target? Maintain a serene calm, protect your calendar and run your day; don't let it run you. Be the water, fluid carving rock. The things we own, begin to own us if we're not careful so don't let your territory master you. Canvas effectively, leaving no stone unturned. You could almost argue sellers had an edge before computers were invented. As an experiment I'd like to take two President's Club reps and pin them against each other. One with only a computer and tablet and one with just a phone, pager and car. Go! Allez allez! Who do you think would win? The smart money is on the one with zero technology.
10. Think differently with out-of-the-box sales strategies. I've outlined 13 that are base-jump wing-suit worthy here. I'd rather be remembered than beloved and forgettable, wouldn't you? [Here is the entire secret to networking and why 99% of networking is total waste of time. Read this superb article before you attend any conference to network about anything!] You'll love these maneuvers because they're scary to implement but they can actually work. You'll get noticed, and memorable people get called back. Take personal responsibility for your results as hard as it may be. Blaming the organization is like blaming your golf clubs. Ultimately, you can only affect the things that are under your control – your own actions and responses to things that happen as a result. Blaming the pay plan, a toxic boss or 'corrupt' leadership swimming in the money-pool of avarice is a cop-out. They're probably just trying to figure out the things plainly laid out in this article. You want to impress VCs with your sales results. Do this! It's about accurate predictions, not just growth. Also remember, early wins accelerate growth.Anchor deals but be willing to prove and move, land and expand.
11. What gets measured gets managed so measure every action each day in a CRM, even on a handwritten scoreboard. This isn't rocket science. Do more of the things that produce concrete results. Qualify every opportunity harder. Don't put crap in your pipeline. If you're a manager, meet with your sales people to double-qualify every opportunity over $10K. Wouldn't you rather have a more accurate pipe than an inflated one where 'happy ears' and wishful thinking cause you to fail. A 3.5X pipeline is not the answer - accuracy and transparency is.
12. Become a student of Trigger Events, the most important one: changes and transitions. A bad supplier is not enough. You're ingenious PowerPoint deck hitting on the true pain, is not enough. They got funding – great, everyone of your competitors called them expecting the sale. That's not how business works. It's an indicator of change but not a certainty. SPIN Selling will only work once you're in. You need to connect with change agents in accounts who can usher in the new paradigm, who have that shining moment in the first 90 days to actually get budget authority to topple the status quo and invest in the NEW. It's the one moment where the organization is aligned with sellers, expecting an incoming executive to shake things up and do things differently. You need to be there with insight and your disruptive solution to help them do just that.

Now it's your turn: What are the daily habits and routines that get you over the line? What's helping you to consistently open and close deals? Do you agree with the above? What did I miss? When have you exceeded quota and how did you do it? How do you think sales prospecting is fundamentally changing in 2015 and how are you adapting to it? Why do you think you keep missing quota? What changes are within your control?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Tax Credits

How To Become A Bestselling Author Using LinkedIn

The number one obstacle to success as a writer in is obscurity. If a bear tweets in the woods in a flash of brilliance, will a publisher give him an advance making him an overnight sensation? There are 3 million blogs put out every day – you do the math – how on Earth will your content stick out?

I share this wisdom from Michael Hyatt's book Platform: "Two respected agents have told me they loved my book and proposal and are willing to represent it, but not until I have social media followers numbering in the thousands. I find this bewildering: Doesn’t a good book stand on its own anymore? Are writers now doomed to spend the bulk of our workdays trawling for blog subscribers?

The answer to the first question is no. A good product does not stand on its own anymore. It is foundational but it is not enough. The answer to the second question is yes. You will need to be proactive about creating the who part of the equation. In order for you to be successful in today’s business environment, you need two things: a compelling product and a significant platform."

Your platform trumps your content. Period. You can build that crucial audience directly on LinkedIn where the network effects are the greatest (especially as a business author.)

Michael Hyatt's book, Platform encourages bringing a massively engaged 'follower audience' of tens of thousands to Publishers. This approach has already generated lucrative speaking gigs and book sales for me as a byproduct. I'm following Hyatt's blueprint advice to a tee in order to build this tribe of true fans so I can break into the US and European markets with a "built audience." 

Content alone is folly as everyone has it, I'm focused on that foundational step of audience. Content is King but audience is Ace and in order to position RSVPselling alongside SPIN, Challenger and Cracking the Sales Management Code, (as I humbly believe it holds up in the field having road tested it on deals above $100 million), it will require building power bases in the publishing industry, the sales thought leader intelligentsia and the end users: front-line sales managers, sales people and those CXOs interested in growing profitable revenue in their business.

The topic of Leadership (my next book) is an even more competitive field with the likes of Jim Collins, I can only hope to enter the fray with engagement statistics that justify the investment for the publisher. A major inspiration for this book has been my mentor Anthony Howard and his lighthouse principles of Human-Centred Leadership.

I very deliberately don't take people to my website or do short posts with links to long version articles behind a form where people must provide their details. That's what I think causes people to click away and I'm not interested in spamming or e-mail blasting people.

I had a call from America last week. It was with a potential publishing agent for my next book. She believes in what I’m all about but it’s a crowded market and she asked me a straight-forward question – I’m embarrassed to confess I stumbled.

Five simple words: ‘What Really Makes You Different?’

In every company I’ve run, in every sales team I’ve led, in every sales role I’ve held – I’ve had a solid response to that question. When I ran a CRM company, the answer was: “We help you improve revenue and reduce customer churn by providing a system that puts customers at the heart of everything you do. What’s makes us different is our approach, our people, our ability to deliver the results you need and manage implementation risk.” When I ran an Enterprise Content Management (document management) company, the answer was: “We reduce the costs and risks associated with all of your unstructured content – all those sensitive files on people’s hard drives, uncontrolled and unsecure. Our software is great but what really makes us different is our people, our project methodology, and the experience we bring from doing this for others just like you.”

Two years ago I left the corporate world and went out on my own with what I regard as the world’s best sales methodology which I’d developed and honed towin hundreds of millions of dollars of business selling to large corporations and government at all levels. But I quickly learned that the world does not need another sales methodology; most companies already have a few – they’re not looking for yet another one. And they’re right – it doesn't really matter what the methodology is; just use something well. There are so many great approaches to selling out there and here are ten of the best frameworks and methodologies ever constructed. Full disclosure, after 30 years of success in the field working with teams, I humbly list RSVP in there alongside SPIN, TAS, Challenger, Solution, Strategic, etc.

So what was my answer for the literary agent? She was patient and gracious and I eventually arrived at this: “I’m everything that needs to happen before and afterRackham’s SPIN – everything else is a fad. What makes me unique is that I’ve been doing it in the real world for thirty years and I’ve embraced social – old school meets new school, digital and physical, tactical and strategic.” It wasn’t a great answer and I shouldn’t have been negative about others.

But it was beyond being ‘not great’; it was plain crap because it failed to address the needs of my audience – book publishers. Book publishing has changed, the industry is in turmoil, bookshops are going broke, publishers are being forced to redefine their business models. There’s a new set of rules and great content is no longer enough if you’re an author – you must bring the publisher an audience! Unless you’ve got a solid following, it just represents too much risk for a publisher to gamble on you being a surprise hit.

Here is a statistic that may shock you and it was told to me by a past Australian regional manager for a major publisher. He confided that only 3% of books published in the world sell more than 500 copies – and it’s impossible to make money from a book unless you sell at least that many copies. Less than 1% of authors make any real money from their published work. If you’re in the publishing industry and can point me to other statistics or provide additional insight, please comment on this post.

Making enough money to earn a good living from writing is the same as being a musician – there are very few Bonos and JK Rowlings out there. We live in a world where there are a thousand channels and no-one is listening. Browsing, clicking, liking, cursory comments – but very few truly engage. They merely do the gardening online a few times a week, just enough to maintain the hedge and stop weeds taking hold – dipping-in and paddling around in social, just enough not to be left behind.

In a year in which we celebrate Martin Luther King with a new brilliant movie, we should think about what made him a world-changer. In my mind, the answer is clear – he had purpose and passion in his vision, mission and values.

MLK articulated The Joshua Principle: Although our actions and behaviors define us; it's who we become that determines the real value of everything we pursue.

This video by Ruckus is brilliant in its humor and clarity. They obviously understand that transferring belief in what you offer is the key to influencing someone in their buying decision! Ruckus has no problem in explaining how they’re different and why it matters.

How I wish we all had this passion and ability to create cut-through in our message but here is a confession. For my entire career I’ve been able to differentiate and link to business value in my conversations. But now out on my own with no brand to hide behind, just me and my ideas, it’s been a challenge. In the age of social selling 3.0 we all sell naked because LinkedIn reveals social proximity and relevance. LinkedIn Publisher also reveals whether we have any insights, and the exact number of followers and their level of engagement – you can't fake a persona on this platform. I say it regularly: The way we sell is more important than what we sell; and the way you engage on LinkedIn and within other social media platforms is more important than retweets and ‘likes’.

In Australia I’ve found two kindred spirits, John Smibert who runs the brilliantly engaging Strategic Selling Group and Bernadette McClelland who provides endless engagement and support. Anthony Iannarino is another from the USA and he’s been incredibly generous in his support of me; also Gerhard from Selling Power. These people are social ninjas with generosity of spirit and all are committed to making professional selling everything it needs to be. Genuine goodwill, the kind that promotes you with no expectation for anything in return, goes a very long way in a cynical world.

I want you to ask yourself a question that will change the way you sell: “Why you; and what really makes you different from all the other voices out there?” When I was asked this question about myself and my ideas in the context of book publishing, I wasn’t ready – I deserved to be shot! I’ve carved a career being able to answer that questions but there I was – deer in the headlights.

One of my clients in the professional services industry is someone I respect greatly. His name is Ian Sharpe and he helped my find clarity. I had previously shared these questions with him and he was a mirror in playing the questions back to me in my quest to improve the way I position myself in the world, especially on LinkedIn. In addition to the big question in the paragraph above, here are the three questions we used to help each other and they can help you transform your message to attract the opportunities you deserve. If you can answer these questions in the form of your story, you’ll knock it right out the park and stand out for all the right reasons:

1. What’s the most important problem I solve for people?
2. Why is it important?
3. How can I help them and what should they do about it?

But back to what I should have said when I was asked the question by the publishing agent. My first book is a bestseller in Australia and is in its 6th printing; and I'm rapidly building a strong LinkedIn following. I’ve achieved this by being committed to publishing quality content daily. It’s been a huge challenge on many levels and a commitment that could not be possible without the support of my wife as I disappear every night to write. I’ve had only one ‘rock-thrower’ in that time but luckily he scampered back under his rock. The huge level of support I’ve received and the results I’ve achieved have astounded me. There’s a reason I’m doing it and it’s not narcissism; it’s the need to build a following for my next books. This is what I later sent in an e-mail to salvage and refocus our dialogue:

I’ve been thinking about your question: “What really makes you different.” The answer is that I’m a proven writer with an existing best seller and I can bring the publisher an audience. I’ve had 300,000 reads of my blog posts in just 8 weeks and among my thousands of LinkedIn connections they rank me #5, in front of the legendary Koka Sexton and Jill Rowley, and right behind Brian Tracy. But I’m not naïve enough to think that unique visitor page views equates to readership engagement – I know the publisher needs someone who can generate sales due to the following they’ve earned. For me, everyone who is a potential buyer of my books lives in LinkedIn. I’m obsessively and diligently earning a following that the publisher will be able to leverage. The new rules say quality content is king, queen, prime minister and Pope; but I know that audience is Ace – it trumps everything else. Both together is what brings the most possible value to a publisher. That’s what really makes me different.

Your family, your community, your church or club, your employer – they all need you to lead. I had a later conversation with Ian Sharpe about why he thought leadership mattered and why there is such an absence of it. Here is what he wrote back to me:

Leaders change things for the better and we live in a world in dire need of change. No one is born to lead – they learned it. Almost two thirds of Executive respondents identified leadership development as their number one concern – yet only 43 percent of CEOs are confident that their training investments in leadership will bear fruit (McKinsey 2014). The reason is that they’re focusing on the wrong developmental actions for leaders – which must be attitudinal and experience-based, and not just skills-based. A lack of leadership stunts company and career growth. There are no technical failures…they are all ultimately people failures; leading people is therefore crucial for avoiding disasters. Thriving in the 21st Century requires effective leadership, otherwise time, attention and money will continue to be wasted. Leadership is required for sustainable change and growth, it is the key competitive differentiator.

I’ve been doing my best to improve my LinkedIn profile for some time now and I think I’m close but I would welcome your feedback. Now it’s over to you. What makes a great LinkedIn profile and what questions do you ask to sharpen your focus on the why, rather than the who, what and how? If you've recently had success as a publisher, could you please share insight into effective strategies that have helped you cut through?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: CollegeDegrees360

10 Reasons Why Salespeople Will Always Be Absolutely Essential

Just a little history repeating... I fully respect a CEO's prerogative to never hire sales people again and go fully automated. I will say, in thirty years I've candidlynever met a CEO who said this before much less pulled the trigger on it; only hundreds with an intention to improve or expand their sales team who desperately needed my counsel. It made for a phenomenal LinkedIn publicity stunt which rapidly drove an egregious amount of traffic self-servingly to his website, the most obvious manipulative sales tactic of all by which he employed – in diametric opposition to his customer-centric message. Notwithstanding the hypocrisy, my question is, does this leave a favorable brand impression for the 500,000 viewers? Unlikely. It was the first time many readers, including myself had ever heard of his company. The best part is rather than show some class and apologize for insulting 18 million people's livelihoods (as I advised for brand reputation) he nailed in the coffin with this megalomaniacal self-aggrandizement:

"Your main question would have been akin to asking software development teams to quantify the impact of 'agile' methodologies when 99.9% of teams followed a traditional, waterfall approach. There was no data, just early pioneers who thought that there had to be a better way and were willing to try a new approach themselves. New ideas are often considered ludicrous because they break the norm. That also makes them frightening for many people too."

My pithy retort: "The erasure of the human element of an entire industry isn't really akin to Galileo's heliocentric theory for which he was locked in a tower. Equating agile development to the elimination of salespeople globally is a stretch."

Even salesperson-less Amazon has superb customer service when wires get crossed, which they rarely do. My issue is the sweeping generality that salespeople are unnecessary, superfluous or scum. The future will not be televised. No matter how much advanced technology gets unleashed, the future of our global economy will always rest within the hearts and minds of the greatest salespeople in the world. Salespeople are some of the finest people I've ever had the pleasure of working with and here's why:

1. Sales people are the greatest single engine of the global economy.One name for a salesperson is: entrepreneur. Without successful sales people a business goes broke and all those wonderful employees who design, build, service, support, account, manage and lead... just would not have jobs. Nothing good happens in business until someone sells something. In a recent post to CEOs, I make the point that revenue is airspeed and it's created by sales people.
2. Sales people feed their families feast or famine even in times of economic uncertainty and keep a positive attitude when the chips are down, pay plans change moving the goal posts or the product itself doesn't work and they have to eat the claw-back commission on the deal.
3. Sales people are resilient, optimistic, humorous and caring. The best ones love people and love to help them solve extremely challenging problems with their acumen. They actually provide a public service which goes beyond money. Humble altruism is their secret true intent and that's how they become trusted advisors and inspire enough confidence to liaise the flow of hundreds of millions of dollars in sales across a constellation of vertical industries.
4. Sales people are CEOs, Founders, CTOs and have often worn every hat in the company to build something great that generates thousands of jobs and stimulates a stronger country and GDP despite brutal taxation, unfavorable government policy toward small business, over-regulation headwinds and every other challenge imaginable.
5. Sales people are genuinely invested in their companies' doing well.There is a camaraderie, a fellowship and bond that builds with a team going out to create a marketplace that fundamentally disrupts the status quo challenging monolithic legacy incumbents.
6. Sales people are helping world leaders navigate the near infinite complexity of technology acceleration. There are so many solutions cropping up every day, it's almost impossible to navigate those waters via the web alone when it comes to enterprise solutions.
7. Sales people actually interact with the customers and are able to provide unique feedback to the business in order to improve it.Thereby, sales people impact product development and innovation itself. Without sales people, many of the greatest technologies would never have proliferated, even the supercomputer you're reading this on right now in the palm of your hand.
8. Sales people love what they do, are self-actualized and highly motivated to interact and engage with stakeholders within every department of their own company as well as the customer's. Sales leaders create cultures that inspire, delight and retain customers. They add to the happiness and quality of life of the engineers, managers and staff.
9. Sales people are fearless, courageous and push sticktoitiveness to the nth degree. Winston Churchill sold his vision of a tyrant free Europe to the people and many believe he single-handedly saved the world. Martin Luther King did the same thing for racial equality and we must never give-up.
10. Sales people are relentlessly focused on self-improvement, bettering themselves beyond a degree through life-long learning, the pursuit of real world knowledge and enablement of new skill-sets. They even make their countries more competitive in a fierce global marketplace, preventing commoditization by delivering tangible value day after day.

And in addition to all of this, here is something controversial. Free enterprise selling makes the world a safer and more tolerant place. It was the sellers and traders who risked their lives crossing dangerous seas, selling their spices and wares. Obviously slave traders were evil but even some of them saved their own souls. Did you know that the most recorded and performed song in the history of the world was written by a slave trader... Amazing Grace by John Newton.

Selling connects people, exchanges ideas and improves the way everything is done in the world. Selling causes us to understand other people and their cultures, values and beliefs, but in a way where we have empathy rather than judgment. An idea on its own is a waste unless someone finds it a market and convinces others to try a better way. Selling is commercial evangelism – not the nutty religious type where prospects are beheaded unless they buy. But America was founded on religious freedom and prospered on an ethos of free enterprise and salesmanship – like John Newton, she also must not lose Her soul.

Sell proudly because you're making the lives of people better if you do it with integrity. Sell proudly because you're providing employment for those who scoff at what you do. Sell proudly because you're a true believer in what you do. Treat selling as the highest of all professions – deliver exceptional value for customer and employer alike.

I'll close with an inspiring quote from the sage Doug Davidoff, "The world our customers live in is simply too complex for even the best salesperson to attack on their own. We need to be relevant earlier in the process - and marketing has a critical role in that area. When both functions are aligned and functioning - it's a triple win; for the customer, the organization and the salesperson."

It's our national day, Australia Day, here as I write but now it's your turn no matter where you are in the world: Do you really think there will ever be a day that sales people aren't necessary? What would you say to a CEO who is on the fence about staffing up a talented salesforce to rely solely on customer service and marketing? What inspires you daily as a sales person to reach your level best? What is the impact you think that great sales people have on your country's economy?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Andrew Fysh

3 Total Failures Who Succeeded Wildly

Failure is the key to success. Failure is an event, it’s not a person and it should never define you. Those who learn from failure, their own and the failures of others, are best equipped for success and even greatness. We’re all familiar with the statistics of Babe Ruth and Michael Jordan – the number of strike-outs and missed shots; yet they are Hall Of Fame legends. We all know that you have to be willing to fail to succeed. They also knew it but they went beyond the ten thousand hours it takes to become ‘unconsciously competent’ at something to be committed to a winning attitude. They hard-wiring successful habits to break though losing streaks, ignoring the doubters, believing in themselves and earning the success they so passionately pursued.

But I’m not a big fan of sporting metaphors for business. I instead believe that the military and political spheres are more relevant domains for inspiration in professional selling and leadership. Winning in business is about strategy and execution, people and numbers, attitude and skill, EQ and IQ, work ethic and effectiveness. Allow me to share three true stories – two of politicians with Lazarus style resurrections and one of the richest man in China. There are great lessons here in the role of failure in creating success.

This first leader came for humble beginnings, born into poverty with his family forced out of their home. At a young age he had to work to support them and his mother died. Plans to take over the family store went nowhere and the business disappeared. He studied and worked to improve himself as best he could before deciding to run for State Legislature and lost. He then lost his job and applied for law school but was rejected. He borrowed money from a friend to start a business which failed within a year. He was a bankrupt and spent seventeen years repaying debt.

He then ran for state legislature again and won. Life seemed on the up and he fell in love and became engaged but his fiancée died tragically. He was broken-hearted, suffered from depression and had a breakdown. He barely lived – existing with deep dark depression – ‘the black dog’ as Winston Churchill later described. Luckily at that time there was no Fox News or social media to ‘out him’ as wasting tax payer money and he recovered to emerge after six months and later sought to become speaker of the State Legislature but was defeated. He then sought to become Elector and was defeated again. He then ran for Congress and lost. Undeterred, and despite advice not to, he ran for Congress again and this time he won.

He went to Washington and performed well enough – but not in the minds of voters. He lost as a sitting congressman but was committed to public service. He sought the job of Land Officer in his home state but his application was rejected. A few years later he ran for The Senate and lost. But his passion for politics remained – he wanted to make a difference. A few years later he sought the Vice-Presidential nomination at his party’s national convention and attracted less than 100 votes. He then ran for Senate again and lost.

Many would have looked at him and said: ‘Washed-up has-been, mediocre life, failure.’ If you were his friend at the time you could have easily given him some salient advice: “If the horse is dead, get off. Go find another one – maybe you should go back to business. You’d be pretty unlucky to go bankrupt twice in your life.”

But he knew that he could never make the kind of difference America needed running a store. He ran for public office again. Failure had not worn him down – it had not blunted his resolve. Instead it had shaped his character and made him more determined than ever. He was stoic and surrounded himself with people he trusted – positive, solid, reliable, insightful, supportive, true believers in his cause to rid the world of self-destructive ideology and evil. He faced the awful truth head-on and had a vision to unite a broken people. Abraham Lincoln became 16th President Of The United States, leading through to the end of the Civil War and abolishing the blight of slavery on the soul of a great nation. He never gave up and was committed to his vision for a just and moral America, and his mission to lead and heal a nation.

The second leader will be less known to most of my readers. He was called ‘the Lazarus of Australian politics’. His father owned a small gas station in the suburbs of Sydney and he was the youngest of four sons. He grew up to go to university and graduate in law before becoming solicitor. He joined a political party in university and eventually ran for public office winning a Federal Parliament seat and rose to the position of Treasurer of Australia. His party then lost the next election and he unsuccessfully contested the party’s leadership but lost. He contested again before the next election and won the role of Opposition Leader but led his party to defeat at the poles. He was challenged following the defeat in the general election and then lost the leadership within his party when challenged in the fall-out.

He served as a low level shadow minister under three successive Opposition Leaders but he never lost his aspiration to lead. Six years after being dethroned as Opposition Leader within his party he won the leadership again – he was back. In March 1996 he won a sweeping election victory and John Howard became Australia’s 25th Prime Minister. His Government was returned at three consecutive elections; he became the second longest-serving Australian Prime Minister, after Robert Menzies. His prime ministership achieved a long period of economic prosperity, historically low interest rates and unemployment levels, huge budget surpluses and significant economic reforms that positioned the country to sail through the GFC when it hit being one of the strongest economies in the world.

He is the first international leader to pledge support to the USA after the 9/11 attacks. He was in America at the time and spoke in congress just days later to a standing ovation. He led through terrorism attacks of Australian and other country’s citizens in Bali. He took the initiative following the Port Arthur massacre, the biggest in Australian history, to successfully pass gun laws that prohibited citizens owning semi-automatic weapons at all or hand-guns without strict controls. It’s rare for a political leader to lose their position but come back to win at the highest levels. Normally, once you’ve had your go you get tipped on the scrap heap – been there, done that, tried him – didn't work… ‘next!’ Howard made a difference and left a positive legacy. He was no Abraham Lincoln or Mandela but he came back, won and made a positive difference.

Just like John Howard, Mitt Romney can come back as well – it will be a very interesting Presidential race and then election. Bill Clinton was the nicknamed ‘the comeback kid’ and maybe Hilary can come back too? The 2016 election could be a Lazarus battle of Biblical proportions!

My third example is Jack Ma, the Executive Chairman of Alibaba. He is the richest man in China and personally made more money in 90 days than Amazon Corporation made in 20 years. Alibaba was the biggest IPO in Wall Street history. Yet Jack Ma was trained to be a teacher and he is not a technology geek. Instead he is focused on what technology can do for people, what problems it can solve, what markets it can create.

Alibaba is staggering and here are some of the numbers: 100 million buyers shopping on their site every day and 60 million actual transactions every day. They’ve created 14 million jobs in China and have gown from 18 people to 30,000 staff in just 15 years. Yahoo invested $1 billion in the business. 800 million people use Alipay; the sister financial transaction system. Alibaba has a bigger market capitalization than Wallmart and IBM… wow! The average age of their staff is 28.

Jack’s life is however one of overcoming rejection. He applied to 3 colleges to study teaching and he was rejected by all of them. He then gained acceptance on his fourth choice and secured his teaching qualifications. He applied for school teaching roles and failed the exams. He applied for a job with KFC and 24 people applied for roles and 23 were accepted…except Jack. He applied for job with the police with 5 other people and 4 were accepted but not Jack. After he began to be successful in business he applied for Harvard and has been rejected ten times.

He learned English by offering to be a guide to Westerners for free. This became the education that changed his life. His Chinese name was too difficult to pronounce and a tourist gave him the name ‘Jack’ – he adopted it.

Jack Ma is genuinely humble and here is some of Jack’s advice:

• “The most important thing in commerce is TRUST. Everything I’ve done is to build up trust.”
• “Leadership is about responsibility.” He is absolutely committed to integrity, ethically and legally.
• “Never rely on the government for eCommerce.”
• “If we want to change the world, change yourself first.”
• “My job is making sure my team is happy. If the team is happy, it makes my customers happy.”
• “The secret sauce for Alibaba's success is that we have a lot of women.”
• “If someone says no, it’s just the beginning.”
• “Be inspired and work as a team. It’s all about how you see the world – find Inspiration in movies such as Forest Gump. Life really is like a box of chocolates.”

Here is an amazing and masterful interview with Jack Ma. Enjoy and learn – you’re watching the world’s commercial future.

What this means for salespeople and entrepreneurs alike is simple – press on;take the road less traveled. March to the beat of your own drum and be willing to fail forward. Hold your to the vision and the dream. In sales, 'it ain't over 'til it's over.' I can't tell you how many deals were deemed 'closed-lost' that went to the most persistent party that hung in there to get to the 'closed won' finish line. But that's not the finish line: executing on the project is. Delivery of value and retention. Keep an eye on them with Client Services and ensure they receive more than the outcome they were sold. That's integrity!

Be the change you wish to see in the world and steel yourself to opposing forces. Take inspiration from these true stories; if you can dream it, anything is possible! I've worked for many companies in my career and it's important to know that you can be the success particle to effect change in the system. The grass is always greener and jumping around laterally can build backward momentum. You don't need to be the CEO to lead. Start leading today in how you comport yourself, your positivity and work with the passion of a champion. When you set the stage the world is clay for your intent.

Failure, tragedy and rejection have shaped my life but that’s a story for another time. Now it’s over to you. How has failure and rejection shaped your success?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Doug Kline