Your LinkedIn War Room

We’ve all seen the situation room at the movies – Martin Sheen in West Wing as President Bartlet down in the White House basement or Bill Pullman as President Thomas Whitmore in Independence Day. It’s an impressive scene with multiple screens displaying data on command. Profiles of the bad guys, enemy analysis and everything available at the click of a mouse to make the big calls based on the best available intel and ‘on balance’ probabilities.

Enterprise solution selling needs the same paradigm because complex selling is more analogous to war than sport. We need to defeat the enemy by navigating complexity. We need the very best intelligence about individual players, organizational drivers, industry trends, financial profile, political power, competitor incumbency, SWOT analysis, data about the customer’s customers, the consultants who influence them, their weighted decision criteria, approval gates, business case… we need it all and more. This is because a strategy is only as good as the intelligence and thinking that leads to it. Fact-based decision-making without supposition, ignorance or blind hope is essential.

Here's a secret weapon for your sales arsenal: Make the investment in your LinkedIn War Room and here’s why it’s a must. I’ve won massive deals as the lead salesperson selling to IBM at 70% higher prices than the competition. As the Managing Director of a software company, we won the whole of a government license deal after we’d been told that we were eliminated but managed to get back into their process. As the external deal coach, I recently helped a client win a $100M contract selling to a client with the power-base distributed across three countries. These career-making deals are earned with strategy, teamwork and excellence in execution.

Imagine this scene. A dedicated War Room in your company with screens on every wall; think Salesforce Social Media Command Center meets LinkedIn Navigator on steroids. There is a boardroom style table in the middle but higher than normal and with no chairs. People do their best thinking on their feet and meetings are faster and more productive when participants are not reclining. There is a big sign on the wall: If you’re here – be here! Turn your phone off and focus on the task at hand – how will we win? Every screen has a purpose. Skype or video conferencing for face-to-face interaction with customers and team members in other offices. See their eyes to ensure they are focused and engaged – human to human (H2H) interactions without distractions. According to Citrix case studies, video-conferencing can increase close rates by 34%.

Collaboration deal room software is displayed on one screen. Another screen is a Gantt chart building the win plan, capturing all of the interdependencies, milestones, events and dates; aligning with the buyers own internal process highlighting what has been validated. Everyone is side-by-side, collaborating with this Tiger Team of 5 or more with Social Selling Index (SSI) scores of 70+, scouring the contextual web for something that can make a difference: news, job changes, promotions, innovation, new product launches, funding, thought leadership content, tweets, curation, shares, comments and likes. Another screen shows the opportunity snapshot. CRM screens abound capturing every detail as the single source of truth for the account, opportunity, players and action-tracking.

In between the various big screens, the walls are glass white boards full of relationship maps, color-coded to highlight power players, supporters, enemies, competitors, and external influencers. Post-it notes are everywhere. The whole room is a living three-dimensional account and opportunity plan. Strategic maneuvers and purposeful tactics are played-out. On other screens, the constellation of social apps are provided on heads-up displays Minority Report style. Key targets stream down a screen, Lead Lists tracked passively in Navigator.

Twitter: Like stock tickers, lists representing all the players show who they follow and what they’re talking about in Social.

LinkedIn: For profiling and seeing social proximity, and for tracking human trigger events. Of all the screens in the room, the LinkedIn ones are most important to leverage 2nd and 3rd degree TeamLinking and networked intelligence.

LinkedInPublisher: Sales people become micro-marketers sharing subject matter expertise (SME) content based on business challenges universal to your sector on a daily basis back-linking to Forrester and Gartner reports.

Blogs: Anyone in the customer organization who blogs is monitored. Grass roots early signs of what’s going on inside, behind the barricades.

Facebook: Who are the key people connected to, personally and professionally? Competitors, consultants, influential players in their industry? And you thought Facebook had no role in B2B selling.

Annual Reports: The team is trained to read and understand them, they sit on iPads at the ready for mission critical intel to reflect CXO insight.

ROI calculators: A dedicated technical member of the team is at the ready to help collaboratively build the business case, making and proving out a value hypothesis, quantitatively not just qualitative.

Join all the dots, crack the code by managing this room with leading measure KPIs, know what you don't know and set tasks for further intelligence gathering. Develop a cunning winning plan based on best value and lowest risk for the customer. Everyone who enters the LinkedIn War Room leaves his or her ego at the door. Their job is simply to play their role and contribute where they add the most value. Regardless of your corporate methodology (Challenger, SPIN, TAS), apply the RSVP meta-framework for creating clarity amidst all the complexity. It represents a quantum leap for your social sales force. Do it simply by relentlessly asking these sets of questions to govern your metaphorical laser-guided tactical assault:

R)elationships: Do we have the right relationships? Followed by: Are we selling at the right level? Do they have genuine political and economic power? Do our relationships provide differentiating intelligence, insight and genuine influence?

S)trategy: Do we have an effective strategy for managing relationships and competitive threats? Followed by: Do we understand the power-base and have we identified the competition (external and internal including the risk of them doing nothing)? What's our strategy for winning while engineering a positive bias in the customer's requirements toward us?

V)alue: Are we leading with insight and uniquely creating compelling business value in the eyes of the customer? Followed by: Why will they buy anything at all and is there a risk of the status quo prevailing? How are we differentiating and evidencing our credentials as lowest risk and best value?

P)rocess: Are we aligned and do we truly understand the customer’s process for evaluation, selection, approval and procurement? Followed by: Do we understand how they define and assess risk with suppliers and solutions? Do we have a close plan validated by the customer?

I named it RSVP because 80% of success is simply showing up and being fully there. In Social, you can always be ready, listening proactively; real-time reconnaissance of your dream clients is finally possible. Be ready to make a relevant entrance to their conversation which they will find maximally refreshing.

It's a brave new world! Make the investment in your War Room and bring Social Selling 3.0 alive where tried and true selling methodologies are super-charged by social platforms and collaborative technologies. But make it exclusive by prioritizing for your best people and most strategic deals. Salespeople should compete with each other for access to it. Is their deal truly qualified? Have they earned the right to use it with enough base-level information and intelligence? Is the opportunity big and strategic enough?

How will you know that you are winning beyond any single KPI, even revenue? One word, one key metric: INTERACTIVITY

An ode to the Social Selling 3.0 War Room (The world's first LinkedIn Poem?)

Everyone who has ever bought from your firm

Every SOW engaged, tactically short or strategically long-term

Relationships and strategy trump technology for technology's sake

Listen closely to the leaders you seek, work a process and records shall you break

The dawn of true sales leadership, victory over shiny object syndrome

The customer is the star in this quirky B2B poem

The insightful message at the right time accelerates the deal

Pipeline explodes with qualified prospects in your zeal

Selling is social helping in the cloud, no spam allowed

Social Selling 3.0, shout it out loud!

Authentic connections and KPIs that lead rather than lag

Cracking the sales management code, the right activities mean it’s in the bag

This room is a place of active listening and engagement,

Of strategic thinking and quota attainment

Understanding the political power-base with fresh intel from LinkedIn

Provides the knowledge that’s needed to engage and win

Intelligent conversations fill the air, collaborative ideas tantamount

Disruptive selling at its finest, top gun mavericks, micro-content marketing is paramount

Challenging the status quo with insight selling aplomb

Strategies and tactics are iterated just like an agile software dev team in the era of dot com

Technology will never outpace human ingenuity, this human selling innovation will shine

Behold, the LinkedIn War Room a modern construct of our changing times

In the eyes of customers, we all look pretty much the same. It's not what we sell, it's how we sell it. Reinvent the way you manage complex strategic opportunities. Your CEO will be stunned by the quantum leap in execution through the Social Selling 3.0 War Room paradigm. She could even use it for M & A activity! There's been a chorus of management talk about driving 3.5X pipeline and this is a great insurance policy. What if you could drastically increase conversion rate by making said pipeline exponentially stronger filling the funnel via social omnipresence? Impressive revenue and margin will follow but remember, there is no magic bullet. Could this radically transform the face of B2B inside sales, further reducing cost of sales (COS) and accelerating sales cycles on six and seven-figure closes fully inside? Will the world's first SVP of Social Selling be hired this year? Yes, I believe it will happen. You read it here first! As Marc Benioff puts it best as a mantra, "Become a customer company."

I predict it will all be trending this way, freeing up sales executives' time for innovation and more meaningful interaction lower in the funnel where it counts the most. Closer to the customer, closer to the deal flow; a shift to service and fulfillment. You will have more time to nurture and grow your existing business explosively and in venture-backed companies this solves an age-old Achilles heel: too great a focus placed on net new logos, cutting off the nose to spite the face. After all, Gartner reports 80% of revenue comes from 20% of existing accounts. The coveted sales job of the future will somewhat paradoxically be Sales Writer/Researcher, once a soft skill transmuted into a hard skill. So perhaps Shakespeare himself would be a top sales performer if transported in a time machine to 2045?

Technology acceleration has implications on enterprise field selling as well and I'll be touching on that in greater detail in future posts. This may be 2020 but imagine an Account Executive wearing Google Glass or a SmartWatch getting real-time updates synced to CRM & Social Streams from the corner of a smart contact lens corresponding with a manager on another continent (sitting in the LinkedIn War Room no doubt!) advising her on the meeting agenda and strategic talking points at every crossroads. Imagine the implications on training and ramping reps if you can ride along with a rep digitally through wearable tech? Benioff is already running the whole company off a smartphone and CRM will at last be fully mobile, as every rep is equipped with a supercomputer tied to the cloud with more computing power than a warehouse mainframe mere decades ago, at there disposal with one tap.

Remember that selling is serving and you can be at peace in the war room, if you follow elements of this blueprint and make it your own. To quote Jill Rowley, "Your sales force is on the brink of EXTINCTION. They are being replaced by search engines and social networks. It’s time to adapt or die."

More on How to Build Your LinkedIn Center at this link. Inspirational credit is due to the following authors for concepts in this poem: Craig Elias and Tibor Shanto, Shift!, Cracking the Sales Management Code, Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana, Jill Rowley #SocialSelling, The Challenger Sale by Brent Adamson & Matt Dixon, Jim Holden's Power-Base Selling, David Meerman Scott's New Rules of Sales & Service & Marketing & PR, Reid Hoffman, The Start-Up of You, Jeff Thull's Mastering The Complex Sale. Special recognition to Neil Rackham, SPIN Selling and Donal Daly, Account Planning in Salesforce.

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: Robert Raines

Your Team Culture Is In The Mirror

The culture of an organization is defined and imbued by the leader; plain and simple. To identify and understand the culture, simply get to know the values and operating style of the leader. If you are the leader and seek transformation in your people then you need a mirror, not a manual to begin the process of change management. Vision, mission and values statements are not enough – you must be the change you seek in your organisation, especially when it comes to being customer-centric and market driven.

Although the leader sets the tone and defines the organization’s culture, people rather than vision and mission statements are the manifestation of culture and it is therefore essential to hire only those with the right attitudes and values. One of the leader’s most important roles is hiring for cultural fit but the problem with most hiring processes and job descriptions is that the focus is on skills, experience and qualifications. These are important prerequisites for hiring but rarely the reasons for firing. Instead, the rationale for dismissing an employee is most often ‘poor cultural fit’ and this can be a point of contention when seeking to manage an employee out.

Latent brand risk resides in any employee who is a cultural misfit or emotionally disconnected from positive values. For this reason, one of the most expensive mistakes an organization can make is to hire or retain misaligned staff. It is important to manage this commercial and brand risk by understanding that skills are easy to measure and evidenced but values often live behind a façade of salesmanship. Know what you are looking for beneath the surface of a resume and understand how to penetrate the persona being projected during an interview. Here are characteristics that the best leaders seek in a senior team member:

• Guided by solid moral values. They treat others as they wish to be treated and place the well-being of the corporation, team members and customers above personal interests. They never bully or undermine others through gossip, negative politics or passive-aggressive behaviour. They clearly understand what is right and wrong and have the courage to always act with integrity.
• Committed to being part of the team. They ensure everyone has a clear understanding of their role. They believe their personal value comes from the timely results they deliver and their positive influence; not from their position, knowledge or qualifications.
• Cares about quality in everything they do. They actively listen and ensure understanding before jumping to solutions. Proposals are well written and follow the brief or address the problems articulated. They proof-read everything, including e-mail, before sending.
• Driven to achieve results. They focus on what needs to happen daily to achieve the right outcomes. They have a bias toward action and focus on delighting customers. They focus on business-case and managing risk.
• Strategic thinker. They gather intelligence to create insight before making decisions. They consider the politics within an organisation and the various self-interests at play in complex decision-making.
• Strong work ethic. They work intelligently but also know there is no substitute for a strong work ethic.

All this begs the question: how do you hire for cultural fit and discover the truth about a person’s character? The psychometric tools that measure intelligence and identify dominant personality traits do not address the issues of values and attitudes. To minimise hiring risks it is essential to understand all the relevant factors, including how candidates think and operate. The best employers focus on the following elements:

• Past performance is an indication of likely future performance. Reject any candidate with a resume that fails to document high performance against targets or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
• Use candidate skills, experience and qualifications to screen individuals out of the process and then obsessively focus on cultural fit with the remaining applicants.
• Thoroughly research candidates and use social media tools such as LinkedIn to find connections within your network to further eliminate or validate someone in advance of an interview.
• Challenge claimed achievements and be weary of people who claim to have achieved great things with past employers yet regularly move on within eighteen months.
• Ensure the candidate evidences claimed traits with examples of difficult situations they faced and the challenges they overcame. Ask them about their most difficult situations and failures, then what they specifically learned.
• Use reference-checking early in the process, not as mere validation at the end. Most importantly, you select and request the referees you want to talk to.

Even with the right employees in place, the leader’s actions set the tone and define the culture that cascades throughout the organisation. So what defines a healthy culture in the context of business? Here is some food for thought. Jim Collins in his book, Good to Great, chronicles what he describes as ‘level 5 leadership’. His research identified the attributes of the very best leaders who possess the following:

• Face the awful truth in acknowledging realities.
• Accept personal responsibility when things go wrong.
• Attribute success to others when things go well (genuine humility).
• Have quiet yet unbreakable determination in achieving success.
• ‘Hedgehog Principle’ for developing unassailable market position.

Interestingly, the first four elements are attitudes and only the last item on the list is a skill. 80% of what Jim Collins identifies as essential attributes for sustained leadership are difficult to measure and not usually evident in a traditional resume or catered for in the job application process.

Use a Mirror not a Manual to Create a Customer Centric Culture. Everyone within the organization represents the brand and the leader needs to enthusiastically embody and live the culture of the organisation and make all values, vision and mission statements real and meaningful for everyone in the team.

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: Gavin Llewellyn

Let's Simplify Sales Before We Reimagine It

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein

Futurism rules the day and predictions abound including my own on how we can reimagine the salesforce in the digital age. Some human beings will be replaced by smart AI robots that sift through huge amounts of data to automate administrative processes... even automate our campaigns, parse our emails and deliver us warm leads.

Wow, maybe they can even close the deals for us. I hope not! A few lucky managers will work the largest select opportunities from inside. So is it time to hang up your suit?

I think there's a great deal of forward thinking among the sales intelligentsia. I am not convinced access to vast data, social insight and mobility has fostered deeper engagement or connected our world in a better way. This is why I truly enjoy thought leaders that promote the channel as a means to deeply build awareness, meaningful engagement; that stop and read. I see a preponderance of endless self-promotion, clicks, feed clogging and meaningless curation where quantity is winning a silent victory over quality.

The hardest part of this new paradigm is just to slow down. You can search a Twitter feed and find dozens of amazing articles to read but where is the time left in the day to produce? Shouldn't we still be spending most of our time communicating powerfully with our dream clients?

I would call for a return to the basics before going after all the cutting edge technology advancements in 2015. Excellence in sales requires excellence in sales process so you need a good one. I am a proponent of SPIN, TAS, eFox, Solution, Strategic and Challenger Selling. I even built a meta-framework of my own called RSVP. I feel it's valuable to learn many frameworks and methodologies, to then simplify them into something that you can always remember no matter how much pressure in your sales situation. You can make your own process and embrace your natural personality while selling.

One can take any system and make it simpler. Einstein's quote rings true. If you're going to leverage Twitter, why not know who every follower is? Why not pair it down to just an essential list of contacts that's manageable. If that seems impossible as you've already built out your strategy in an older era of Web 2.0, then at least build hyper focused lists by genre to segment your thought leaders so you can truly listen to them and engage in context.

As managers, let's ride along with our team members this year, joining our account executives on-site in the field. Let's challenge them to build a concise agenda. We should meet with them beforehand to talk strategy and afterwards for a debrief. What are the politics in the account? Who is in the power-base? Which competitors are in the deal placing it at risk, the biggest of which is usually "do nothing?" What is the strategy we will engineer to win the deal?

Each sales person should be paired up with a mentor and that mentor could be you. In the old world, apprenticeship was how sales was passed down. Great sellers taught the next generation how to read people, how to weave a strong story line, how to digest an annual report and how to diagnose problems, prescribing solutions.

Get on site with existing clients in 2015, hold quarterly business reviews, bring your insights on a giant poster-board and leave it behind to show you truly care. White board out the lifecycle with customers, let the customer show you in their own words and pictures, their own short-hand. Record it, reflect on it, get to know the accounts inside-out to foster explosive pipeline growth.

Could 2015 be the year of retention or will massive sales organizations hire 10 lemmings to send 6 off the cliff? I'm talking about retention of our sales talent and retention of our best customers in tandem here.

Why not take each complicated system we use in the enterprise sales force and simplify it. You will want to read Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan and build a new dashboard in Salesforce that reflects the sales activities that you can actually influence, this could be connected calls, WebEx's and GoTo's held with Challenger demos, opportunities qualified or proposals sent out. Start to take a look at the Pareto Principle also called the 80/20 rule, the power law of distribution that governs your day in order to prioritize your opportunities. Step back with your manager and analyze the cause and effect relationship with your actions to outcomes.

Time management will be everything in 2015 with the onslaught of notifications buzzing in your pocket, updates from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Google+, [insert the next buzzy social craze network] in a dissonant cacophony of chaos, keeping you from those five inbound leads you need to call back or taking twenty precious minutes to read the updates from the CIO you're about to call on who just spoke at the tech conference. We rob Peter to pay Paul when we rush through our day, when we click too fast, when we act before thinking.

Take all your tools and give them a New Year's pruning; simplify them to their essence. White board out what your CRM needs to show, the key insight your marketing campaigns must convey, the one key metric by which you're measuring progress, the key clients you seek to grow and visit with. How can you move from value proposition to continuous value creation? Try to hold every meeting as a video conference to see your people face-to-face, rather than a voice on the phone.

Start to write LinkedIn Publisher posts once per week as a summary of the key insights you're learning from visiting with companies in the industry verticals you serve. Practice thought leadership and share your subject matter expertise. Pause for 10 minutes when you arrive to work each day to simply think and map the day, to organize your time. Build agendas prior to every meeting on your calendar. Be open to sharing those agendas with prospects and clients to get buy in. Send them snippets from something they wrote on Twitter or a mention before the meeting to show them you are listening. Send them a white-paper directly pertinent to their greatest objectives the night before. Mastering the details takes just a bit more time so create it.

There's a simplicity to what motivates people. They tend to move toward pleasure or away from pain. Most people don't change from the status quo until there's no other choice, the organization is literally burning down, hemorrhaging revenue. Look at what is happening with cloud computing eroding the hardware based on-premise enterprise tradition. “Software truly is eating the world”, as Marc Anddreessen said best.

The vast majority of marketing messages are focused on revenue growth, ROI and all the benefits customers can realize. But this makes all marketing messages sound the same. If you can move your campaign toward risk mitigation and away from pain, it's a very powerful differentiated message. It's a simple message. Executives are walking around with a major problem they need to solve. If they're seasoned, they've prioritized their biggest pain-point. They're obsessing on how to fix it. They've got a 10X moonshot in their head too. When you understand them and speak to these burning issues, you are instantly sent up the food chain. She will re-arrange her schedule to talk with you now.

So that's my advice. Climb out of the endless meetings with management and colleagues and focus the majority of time looking actual customers in the eye over Skype or if highly qualified, hop on a plane, train or ride your bike over there for coffee. Get off social media as a crutch, leverage it supplementally to make your real world interaction more meaningful. Fix your overcomplicated CRM, reducing the amount of stages to reflect a dead simple sales process. Collaborate with your team members in the field, in the arena. Get out from behind the desk, the flat screens, a manager's spreadsheet jockey comfort zone. Let's move from reactive to proactive management in sales and prioritize every action and system at our disposal.

Einstein also profoundly said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Let's iterate, test and fine tune our approach before we reinvent the wheel. When we do reinvent the wheel let's make sure to temper that discovery with a healthy dose of respect and understanding for what still rolls down the road as history tends to repeat itself and it's critical to factor in time tested wisdom and road-tested knowledge into the equation. Humanity remains a communications grid network so logarithmic technology tectonic shifts every ten years tend to have little effect on trend lines measured by tens of thousands. Are we clay or obsidian rock?

Infinite new sales inventions may come out but building trust and leading with new insight could remain the E = mc2, the constant or fundamental part which any future complex selling system can be distilled down into. Virtual reality, AI, wearables, holography, smart contacts, flying cars, interstellar sales, the singularity is near? The more technology, the greater the need for humanization. When you span your imagination out 1,000 years, it becomes evident that building trusted advisor relationships will still be the silver lining guaranteeing your success in any new medium. I predict Charles H. Green's books will be even more relevant in the year 3,000.

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: Bill David Brooks

How To Create Customer Centric Culture?

Everyone who touches a customer needs to be a steward of the brand and seek opportunities to deliver value and create revenue. Everyone else in the organisation ultimately supports people who interact with customers – back office and technical staff therefore have frontline employees as their internal customers. Customer service is the new sales model in a world where social media gives every consumer the ability to instantly damage or build a supplier’s brand. Unhappy customers tell everyone who will listen and they can do real damage to your brand. Your website, other digital points of presence and social media strategies must be used to empower staff to engage customers and stakeholders in meaningful conversations, not just to project your sales and marketing messages.

Rather than restricting staff in their internet and social media activities, consider thoughtfully implementing programs that educate and empower staff to be transparent and responsive to customers through any channel. Be clear with your employees that with freedom comes responsibility and accountability. Also be transparent and communicate openly to staff and customers that when mistakes are made you always seek to rectify the problem to the complete satisfaction of the customer.

To ensure productivity and control, provide tools to staff such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems with embedded social media feeds delivering a ‘single source of the truth’ about customers. Implement ‘web to lead’ systems so that when a customer interacts with your website you have a system to capture their interest or complaint. Especially reward staff who listen in social channels and convert unhappy customers into advocates – every complaint or negative Tweet about your brand is a sales opportunity! Reward staff who refer new business regardless of whether they work in the sales department. Most importantly, acknowledge staff who go above and beyond their job description or market expectations in delivering exceptional customer service.

Vision, mission and values statements are meaningless without validation through the actions and behaviours of employees. Personal attitudes and values must be aligned with the corporate ethos and connected with emotion. To achieve this consider your vision, mission and values statements and then write something new: ‘Here at our company we believe …’ Then define how these beliefs should manifest in the attitudes and actions of you and the team. Make it real with examples and acknowledge those who exemplify the culture and values. Consider the effectiveness of Richard Branson who personifies the Virgin brand. It can be argued that Richard Branson is the Virgin brand and he ensures that every Virgin business obsessively hires based on cultural fit. This is because they know they can train skills but it is very difficult to alter attitudes and values.

Conversely, look at the disaster of Enron where the appalling values within the leadership drove recklessness and greed that spread like a cancer to eventually destroy the corporation and harm hundreds of thousands of lives. Enron’s caustic culture was their biggest commercial risk and it festered behind a paper-thin facade of clichéd mission, vision and values statements.

The leader is the culture and poor hiring, especially within senior ranks, introduces significant brand and business risk. Corporate and individual reputations take years to build and can be lost in an instant through the misbehaviour of an individual. Because the foundation of positive culture is values, authentic leaders are committed to a solid moral framework regardless of whether anyone is watching. Anthony Howard is a thought leader on moral leadership and his white paper, It’s Time For Moral Leadership, is a must read for exploring this in greater depth.

The reality is that there will always be a gap between aspiration and execution but without striving to become better we do not grow. Look deeply at the value you bring customers and markets to identify the higher purpose of what you do. How do you impact individual lives and society? In what way are you a force for good in the world? Instilling a foundation of positive values and beliefs for making a difference is tremendously powerful in harnessing human energy to build your enterprise and brand.

As a leader, first strive to be a good human being who places customers and staff ahead of your own needs. Be a force for good and, rather than criticise, encourage and seek solutions. Be energetic and passionate about the success of your team and customers. Be accountable and driven to achieve results.

In summary: Define what you believe about yourself and your organisation concerning the value you offer your customers, markets, investors and employees. Then document how these beliefs should emotionally impact behaviours at every level. Begin with yourself and become obsessively focused with customer success and bring your entire team on the journey of change so that every individual can personally own the right values and embody the culture. The leader’s actions need to be the culture. Constantly ask yourself: How are my actions evidencing the culture we claim to have? Be the change you seek in your organisation and carefully recruit only those who share your customer centric values. Empower and liberate the team to represent the brand and trust them to step up and do the right thing.

These are the key ingredients for creating a positive customer-centric culture:

1. Focus on your higher purpose relevant to customers when defining your culture and create emotional connections for all staff.
2. Use a mirror, not a manual, to transform your organisation by living the values to transfer the culture.
3. Carefully hire only those who are culturally aligned and have proven themselves to possess the necessary attitudes and values.
4. Empower and liberate all staff to embody the culture and represent the brand. Trust the team to step up and reward and recognise those who create customer magic.

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: Nick Webb

Decoding the CEO – Ten Rules For Engaging

No matter how senior our role, we all need to sell to our boss or board and it starts at the job interview. Later we need approvals for various initiatives or projects we want funded. We also have agendas we want advanced, promotions we seek, and conflicts to resolve. Every organization is political in nature and competing agendas abound – this complexity creates a minefield that must be navigated to then engage with the person of ultimate power… the CEO.

The buck stops with the CEO, but so does every decision – he or she has the power of veto. CEOs are the puppet-masters pulling the invisible strings in the background. Their agendas are the ones that win, their people rise to the top, and their priorities take precedence. But it can be intimidating dealing with the CEO, whether you’re an external consultant, sales person or an internal subordinate. Yet the CEO need not be a mystery. Every CEO is human, and he or she has needs that you can meet. Behind the façade is a real person with fears, insecurities, goals and aspirations. They have to manage the board, inspire their leadership team, deliver results and manage risk that could blindside or derail. They also need to build the corporate brand – but most neglect building their own.

Strategic selling is first and foremost defined by engaging early at the most senior level possible. You may not need to engage the CEO of the organization, but you do need to sell to the ‘CEO of the problem’ that you can help with. The person who actually owns the problem or opportunity, the one on the hook for delivering the result, the person who controls the funding and authorizes the decision – this is who you need to engage. Everyone else is a mere recommender or blocker.

So, how do you engage effectively at the CEO level? The very best leaders are focused on delivering results, making a difference, treasuring time, building people, and leaving a legacy. Here are ten rules to honor on your quest to engage successfully.

1. Be a person of value – a domain expert who can help make things happen. No-one likes being sold to but they value relevant information, insight and perspective from someone with humble wisdom, a strong network and the gravitas to carry the conversation.
2. Start at the end and lead with ‘why?’. Get to the point and be concise. Genuine insights are rare and never cliché, so do your homework and understand why the conversation is important. Only once you’ve anchored the conversation, should you talk about the what, how, who and when.
3. Open powerfully by not talking about yourself. Make it all about them by showing that you’ve done your homework and that you understand how you can potentially help deliver their agenda, solve their problems, or realize their opportunities; both for them personally and professionally.
4. Talk the language of leadership: positive outcomes and managing risk.
5. Talk the language of business: delivering financial results and KPIs.
6. Talk the language of legacy: sustained change that makes a difference in the lives of customers and staff.
7. No faking-it and no bullshit. Know the industry and have evidence to support your assertions. Be masterful at telling great true stories but be conservative. Also be honest and transparent. If you don’t know, then say so.
8. Always be early, have an agenda, respect time, follow-up in writing. In short – be a pro.
9. Let them be in control. Ask them what they want to see happen after the meeting and what the next steps should be. But if they sponsor you down, always maintain your direct relationship – the right to contact them whenever necessary.
10. Always deliver on every promise. Be rock-solid reliable.

People are best motivated by reasons that they themselves discover. Never therefore preach, sell or lecture. Instead ask great questions that cause self-reflection for the person with whom you engage. All of the above is relatively straight-forward but here is something that could change the way you create value for the most senior people you work with. The fact that you’re reading this means that you could execute.

Most CEOs are consumed by delivering for their company and many neglect their personal life and brand – burn-out is common. Every sales person should build their personal brand in social because people buy you before they buy what you’re selling. You should become an expert regardless of your age. It’s a skill that requires much research and nuanced effort but it’s essential. Why don't you offer personal education and assistance to the CEO on how to build their personal brand in B2B social?

Here is why it could work. Domo and CEO.com recently published analysis on the social presence of every Fortune 500 CEO. Here are some of their findings:

• 68% of CEOs have no social presence at all on the top five social platforms
• Of those who are on social, 73% are solely on LinkedIn
• Nearly one-third of CEOs on Twitter don’t tweet
• Almost none understand social strategy and the interconnectedness of platforms

Below is an incredibly well designed infographic from Domo and CEO.com and you can also download the full report here: 2014 Social CEO Report.

View fullsize

LinkedIn is an amazingly power platform. Find ways to use it to research and then engage with the CEOs you can best help. Become the expert they trust and rely upon. Don't be intimidated – step-up after you’ve earned the right to do so. It’s not as scary as you think.

Here is an excerpt from my book, The Joshua Principle – Leadership Secrets of Selling, where Joshua’s father, a CEO, is giving his son, a salesman, advice on how to engage at the senior executive level. We pick-up the conversation with Joshua asking Mark about potential insights gleaned from reading the annual report of Zenyth, his must win deal.

“Anyway, there’s a lot to talk about with Zenyth. This meeting with their CEO is going to be critical. Do their financials reveal anything concerning what’s really driving their decisions?”

Mark opened a folder he had brought in with him. “It’s actually quite interesting. If I was on their board I would ask the CEO what they’re doing about all the cash on their balance sheet.”

“Isn’t cash a good thing?”

“Not necessarily. Too much cash on your balance sheet can make you a hostile acquisition target because the cash can fund financing costs. Cash is also an underperforming asset; it means you don’t know what to invest in for growth.”

“I guess Zenyth is conservative.”

“It’s not about being conservative. Too much cash on the balance sheet is a wasted resource. I’m pretty sure that the new CEO will be under pressure to look at acquisitions or some other plan for expansion. But they have a bigger problem; I’ve analyzed the last five years of numbers and had a look at recent analyst guidance – well, criticism really. Their sales costs, as a percentage of revenue, have been going up for the last three years in a row. Their margins are also being squeezed and I found an interview with the new CEO that pretty much reveals his hand.”

“Thanks for doing this. You must have spent most of the afternoon on it. Is that the interview last month written by Patricia Smith?”

Mark was impressed that his son had also tracked down and read the article. “David Thomas stated that client retention is his number one priority and that he wants delighted customers. I bet the reason they’ve been losing customers is that competitors are targeting them. When you have market dominance you’re a sitting duck for niche players to pick off your vulnerable customers.”

“Thanks Dad. I hadn’t made the connection with any of this. So would you say they were in growth, crisis or business-as-usual mode?”

“Why do you think it matters?”

Joshua explained the concepts he had discovered concerning the modes of business and the consequential motivation for decision-making. He fumbled with his own notes and showed them to Mark. “This is what I’m trying to figure out – the mode they’re in and how it translates to the things that are driving the CEO.”

“If I think about their situation in those terms I guess I would say they have a mild crisis – customer churn is consistently eroding profitability. If I were David Thomas [Zenyth CEO] I would invest in things that help retain and grow profitable customers. All businesses invest in strategies to drive top-line revenue but many neglect the fact that it is far more cost effective to retain a customer than acquire a new one.”

Joshua was busy taking notes as Mark continued in a measured tone. “The smart thing for David Thomas to do is invest money in limiting customer churn. That’s where he will get the best return on investment. He can continue the pressure on his sales operation to keep delivering new clients but he will only fix his profitability problem by stopping the defection of valuable customers.”

“Are you sure? How can you know all this from looking at their balance sheet?”

“All I know is that they have too much cash on their balance sheet and they’re suffering from eroding profitability which is positioned as a cost of sales problem. But one thing I’ve learned in business is that the problem is almost never the problem. Symptoms are not causes, and I think that if you get to have a genuine conversation with their CEO, he will admit that the real problem is customer churn rather than customer acquisition.”

Joshua looked up from the notes he had been scribbling. “But how do I have that kind of conversation with a CEO? I’m just a salesman.”

“You can have a conversation with your own CEO can’t you? Look, David Thomas is just another person but he’s under real pressure to deliver results. He needs to fix a problem he describes as a customer satisfaction challenge. His P&L describes it as a cost of sales problem. Their annual report describes it as eroding margins caused by competitors. They are a market leader defending their incumbent position. All you have to do is understand what keeps him awake at night – but don’t ask it that way. I hate it when salesmen ask that question. I usually say; ‘my wife – she snores rather loudly’... They always laugh too but then I ask if they have any other inane questions.”

Joshua stopped laughing as Mark continued. “The only thing a CEO dislikes more than amateurs who waste their time, is sales people who waste their time. Josh, you seem to have done your homework and I hope my input is useful, but you must have a business conversation with him. He’ll open up once he sees that you have genuine insight.”

Joshua rubbed his face with fingers combing back hair revealing a pensive look. “I can’t begin to tell you how far out of my depth I feel. If I botch this meeting with their CEO I’ll be finished with my boss.”

“Son, even the most successful men have insecurities. We all secretly worry that we are going to get found out. I feel like I’ve been out of my depth most of my life; I really mean it. Maybe David Thomas feels out of his depth too and you’re someone who can help to get one of his problems under control. If you succeed it will make your career.”

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: DonkeyHotey

LinkedIn vs. Facebook

Social networks are fads, like fashion, like pop songs from boy bands. We saw it with MySpace, Friendster and AOL; the list is endless.

If content is King and Context is Ace, how can Facebook last? It's almost all paid advertising now, at least in my feed when/if I log in.

But I seldom use Facebook… my sister gives me enormous flack about it… I tell her I only have so many hours in the day and my B2B world is LinkedIn. Facebook is full of ads, has a very confusing UI, and is Shangri-La for wasting time and the trivial. I definitely see how it’s great for grandparents to help keep up with what’s happening with their children and grandchildren interstate… but the rest is mostly narcissism at its finest, as far as I’m concerned. There are better apps for sharing photos and one-liner updates.

As a speaker and author, I can gain viewers if I pay for them on there. Why would I do that? I'd rather start meaningful business conversations in my RSVPselling Group on LinkedIn or go engage in conversations in other great ones likeStrategic Selling.

Yes, there are ads in LinkedIn but they are unobtrusive and in the context of what I'm doing, just as they might be in The Australian or WSJ, out of sight - out of mind, unless something catches my eye.

I could fill this article with a million statistics and prognostications but I can certainly simply empirically observe behaviors from my own life. My 18-year-old son isn't going to hang out where his parents are on Facebook. As he gets into University, he'll most likely start building a living resume on LinkedIn, sharing his internships, community service, extracurricular activities and student involvement to ready for the workplace. He could even utilize LinkedIn's YOUNIVERSITY to find the perfect university matched to his skill-set aspirations right now.

Reid Hoffman is a humble visionary. He built LinkedIn with a slow burn marathon-versus-a-sprint mentality. He reimagined networking reducing the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon to 3 degrees of "everywhere you want to be" with millions of professionals. It took well over ten years to become an overnight sensation and generates the most revenue of any social network of its kind for B2B brands.

Twitter has stayed relevant and will continue to be so because of its ability to be the megaphone, amplifying the blogosphere and arguably that blogosphere is moving inside LinkedIn with the network effects now made possible by its true breakthrough: LinkedIn Publisher. Paradoxically, users are starving for content searching desperately for signal in the noise amidst the glut of it on the web. LinkedIn gets that and is curating a patchwork quilt to capture the Millennial meets Boomer Zeitgeist. I recently made a bold prediction on here that LinkedIn Publisher will replace the blog as we know it. I followed that up with a show-stopping decision to stop blogging outside of LinkedIn. Perhaps WordPress will run within the platform via an API one day, only time will tell.

My prediction: Facebook is a meme. We'll see 10 more like it by 2050.

LinkedIn will keep on trucking along because of stickiness, CV reference necessity, career advancement, it's 10X moonshot quest to map the "economic graph," the fact they built the new Bloomberg Terminal with their Recruiter product and the fact that the articles I'm reading on here that YOU, yes you - my peers - are writing, are so downright phenomenal not to mention hyper-relevant to me.

Straight talk: Executives are sharing candid insight about what it's really like out there from the polished halls of government [and the seedy backdoor corridors, I might add] to the trenches in the cubicles. Utility: The modern sales team can innovative with a 5-seat license of LinkedIn Sales Navigator for their LinkedIn War Room and has access to a full blown Social CRM plugging into Salesforce to unlock never-before-seen business intelligence and trigger event tracking functionality. The kicker: passive monitoring of what influential prospects are sharing rather than the awkward assumptive friend request. Ladies and gentlemen, behold Social Selling 3.0 and LinkedIn is ushering in a new era of disruptive sales thinking, along with the thought leaders and proponents of #SocialSelling who inhabit it, vaulting its status among the results-driven.

LinkedIn is the telephone or light bulb of social networks from a technology evolution standpoint. Nobody needs to reinvent the wheel because their savvy engineering organization is adapting and evolving fast enough to continue to disrupt themselves. Kudos to Jeff Weiner for his operational excellence, keeping an agile startup mentality at this size and staying LEAN. They've adapted to mobile, they've adapted to content marketing, they've adapted to mass collaboration and embraced the Wikinomics principle of prosumption. Users are co-creating the dream with them.

They're encouraging the world to read and write again proficiently. They're making it cool to get really good at it. It's cool to be smart, be mentored and learn from diverse cultures and generations. That's a message that resonates with me and why I'd encourage my son to log in to this network rather than turn another one off to go do his homework, study for an exam or complete a term paper. In fact, the resources on here could help him excel at just that. He could interview a veteran or tell a true story and find new context based on his life and experience. True, I've seen some "cats with snorkels" videos creeping in recently but LinkedIn does a staggering good job of policing itself.

What is possible for LinkedIn? Becoming the modern-day newspaper. Oh, it's done that with Pulse. Becoming the social network to replace all social networks. Well, it's done that for me. In essence, a virtual reality that synthesizes the neural networks of the analog world allowing for networked synergy never before possible as a once separated global business collective, now inexorably united.

Generations united. The true second life.

What is possible for LinkedIn? Well studies have shown despite 68% of CEOs not being on social media, LinkedIn is the gateway where they dip their toe in the water. When they achieve their grand vision of mapping the social graph of a billion professionals [see the above Jeff Weiner keynote], the network effects will render the concept concrete like the telephone achieving total ubiquity. From this platform, almost infinite combinations are possible. Knowledge sharing and the synergy of human creativity, ingenuity, compassion and collaboration become possible in dramatic new ways we can only imagine in our wildest dreams. Not to mention, employment opportunity abounds in all its various and sundry forms including meeting the demands of the freelance explosion.

Sorry Facebook, we get that ads drive revenue but LinkedIn has simply done this in such a more elegant, reliable way as of late. The argument will be made, well Facebook is for social and LinkedIn is for business. Not so! Outside of private time with my friends and family, consulting clients is my passion and since I do what I love, I seldom actually "work" a day in my life.

The point being is that the lines between social and business have blurred since the recession for many. In weathering any economic crisis, the workforce of the world gets focused on economic advancement and success to find the light at the end of the tunnel. This requires tremendous time, effort and energy and personally, I'd prefer to blow off steam on a long bike ride than socialize over a network mobile, Virtual Reality or otherwise if it's not immediately relevant to my interests, life and career goals. Others may have a different view here and contest this. I understand - entertainment is important too. But the interest graph is not enough, it must be overlaid with the economic and social graphs to build a four dimensional matrix, a garden where it's a joy to wander and even get lost (or found!).

They say the Millennial generation is poised to become the greatestentrepreneurial generation. This research also tends to support my thesis here. If this is true, they too will take to LinkedIn like a duck to water. And guess what, on LinkedIn, it is cool that parents and older people are in the mix. Every budding entrepreneurial Millennial will study Sandberg, Rometty, Wojcicki, Mayer, Whitman, Burns, Catz... ad infinitum. Many will go one step further and connectwith them!

I was inspired to write this after reading Nicholas Carlson's brilliant missivecomparing LinkedIn to the Yahoo of yore. I think he gets a lot of things right in this article and I noticed some heated debate erupt. Tea leaves aside, history will be the arbiter as YOU cast your vote with every mouse click. Zuck is a brilliant entrepreneur. Never-to-be-underestimated, he will endure. Is he one step ahead anticipating this to pivot in time, MANY TIMES?

Let's analyze: Instagram is the undisputed Queen of photo sharing (although some of us now eschew any publicly posted photos or data whatsoever, yearning for true privacy) and Oculus Rift may usher in a new era of commerce in virtual worlds. It would be amusing indeed to see a B2B meeting with conservative executives resplendent in their VR goggle headsets! Lest we forget, FB could carve out a strong niche in gaming with its wearable tech going up against Microsoft Xbox. Facebook is also experimenting with business networking for which they'll face the existential chicken-and-egg Branchout problem. Will they adapt fast enough to meet the market ahead of the cusp? Recently this Darwin riff has been floating around LinkedIn feeds and I think it's most applicable to theorizing why tech companies can win:

In the classic words of Dennis Miller, "Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong." What do you think? Comparing Facebook with Yahoo back in the day is one unique take on it. The other is just sizing up our own personal usage and each social network's ongoing utility and efficacy toward 2015. Any technology arc will typically play itself out in a winner-take-all denouement. For this reason, I believe LinkedIn to be the sleeper hit that will endure. They're adapting to change fast enough and continue to surprise and delight us upon each log-in by bringing us closer together.

It's an author's paradise right now; I'm humbled and grateful to be developing a strong following. My recent tribute to a real world hero, pilot Richard de Crespigny, who saved hundreds of lives with an emergency landing in Singapore has exceeded 60,000 views and is about to eclipse 600 shares. What's been most impressive are how people from all walks of life are coming out of the woodwork, reading the entire thing and contributing so thoughtfully in the comment thread. They're watching all the documentaries, reading his book and adding so much intrinsic value and nuance back to this incredible story in near real time. They're amplifying this with Twitter. So far I did find one share on a Pilot News Magazine's Facebook Page but unless they're paying to boost exposure I'm thinking under 15% of their 6,000+ followers may see it. My followers on here have doubled in under two months at a faster clip than any concerted effort I've made in the past to organically grow my Twitter or a Facebook Page traffic. I'm very excited to see where this networking, publishing and career building powerhouse phenomenon is going in 2015.

Who will be the first to map the economic graph? The world of virtual reality is definitely not flat.

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: Bratislavská župa

Sales Professional's Oath

The world is changing faster than ever and this is going to be the year of leadership… real leadership, naked, transparent, values-driven, human centred leadership. Technology will continue to accelerate at break-neck speed, the noise with increase by decibels, visual pollution online will swamp us. Distractions and gimmicks will abound. But here’s what won't change – the importance of quality relationships in doing quality business and making a difference. All business is done at the speed of trusted relationships.

The way we sell has always been more important that what we sell. This is the biggest differentiator in the world of B2B selling; and it’s what will set you apart in creating your success. Will 2015 be your break-out year as an entrepreneur, manager or leader? How will you leverage technology and social platforms to accelerate the time it takes to create trusted relationships?

Here’s a law of life: Things only change for the better when we do. Make this the year you embrace social and live the law of reciprocity. Whether you subscribe to the principles of sowing and reaping, or believe in karma, or the reality that we attract what we radiate, or the golden rule of do unto others; it all boils down to one thing – YOU need to be different.

We must be the person worthy of the success we seek! Personally commit to The Sales Professional’s Oath here by hitting the like button. Then cut-n-paste the following and adapt to be your own affirmation; print it and stick it up on the wall at you desk. Read it every day – make it part of who you are.

The Sales Professional’s Oath

1. I am a loyal person of integrity and positive influence. I am values-driven and make a difference with a sense of purpose in all that I do. I lead by listening and serving others. I have an optimistic attitude and gossip has no place in my life. I do what is in the best interests of my client and my employer. I will do no harm – no lies, no half-truths, and no duplicity. I am transparent in my motives and values as I do what it takes to deliver for those I serve.
2. I open powerfully by not talking about myself. I positively challenge the status quo and believe in the value I offer. I am a subject-matter expert and problem solver, always diagnosing fully before prescribing solutions. I know exactly what a well qualified potential employer or customer looks like and I seek strong cultural alignment in choosing those with whom I work.
3. I always lead with ‘why?’ and I get to the point by starting at the end but with context before detail. I am concise yet connect emotion with logic and provide credible facts to support any assertion. I am masterful at telling relevant powerful true stories and only after the ‘why?’ is established, do I discuss the who, when, what and how. The last thing I discuss is my product, service or solution; or who we are and how we operate.
4. I talk the language of leadership – positive outcomes and managing risk. I talk the language of business – delivering financial results and KPIs. I talk the language of legacy –sustained change that makes a difference in the lives of customers and staff. I am positive yet conservative and I possess gravitas in how I operate – energetic yet never in a rush.
5. I treasure time and use it wisely, investing it rather than wasting it. I distinguish between the urgent and the important. I build quality relationships of trust, online and in the physical world. I research and prepare for meetings; especially with the insightful questions that I plan to ask.
6. I am always early, have an agenda and am fully there for people when I am with them. I actively listen, take notes and follow-up in writing. I document and validate the customer’s critical events, dates, timing, approval and procurement before forecasting.
7. I thoughtfully build my brand and network, embracing social platforms to be a positive contributor. I carefully choose those I follow and I happily promote others who I believe in. I share and collaborate well with others.
8. I am the best employee my boss has in the team – positive, reliable, and professional. I make things happen and deliver results but I also care about people. I always deliver on every promise, big or small. I am rock-solid reliable. I keep our systems up-to-date and I provide accurate and timely data so those above me can make informed decisions.
9. I am a life-long learner and I read a minimum of one hour every day from leaders online and one book a month to improve myself personally and professionally.
10. I pursue meaning and purpose rather than entertainment and happiness. But I never take myself too seriously and I have a well-honed positive sense of humor.

Could this be the year for you where personal leadership and professionalism becomes the hallmark of execution, internally and with customers? Be the change that your world needs. Great execution is more important than strategy. How will you execute the plays this year? How will you eliminate distractions and make a difference? How will you transform the way you lead? Here’s what I’ve learned about leadership over three decades.

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: Rob Chandler

Abracadabra: 8 Epiphanies From 80 Posts

Here's a little list of light bulbs that went off in my head as I've gained my sea legs with the LinkedIn Publisher platform in the early days, endeavoring to leverage it in building a platform of my own, as Michael Hyatt would encourage. These truths still apply today:

1. Reciprocity rules. I like, share and comment on others posts at a rate of 10 to 1. Why? Because I am curious and it pays to pay it forward. I do my best to take the time to personally like and comment anytime someone ever interacts with me in any way. I realize this is not scalable but it pays dividends accelerating the speed and quality of the platform I am building here as an author and speaker. It's manageable because I can batch process this returning to it in scheduled intervals.
2. The network effects on LinkedIn are sensational and exponential compared with any other platform I've personally used, especially when one nails a great story line.
3. It's possible to grow an entire social media footprint just by focusing on writing great content on LinkedIn. Making this the core of my strategy was risky but has paid off rapidly. Publisher has been the hub and the other networks like Google+ and Twitter are spokes playing key roles in the supporting cast. Twitter is the best amplification strategy, hundreds of retweets yield massive likes, comments and shares. I always thank people when they add commentary.
4. The perfect length of a post is 1,600 words or approximately 7 minute read, data has been analyzed on this (some studies say 1,900). It's shocking how many professionals love long form content. A frequent response I get on the longest ones that I share is ironically, "Great concise read." Moral of the story: readers are leaders so there are some incredible readers out there and writers who will reply with incredibly profound comments. They even take the time to research the story and add incredible intrinsic value.
5. Quality still trumps quantity: When I invest significant time on a weekend to craft just one post, I do notice that effort pays off dramatically. Super high quality content is given wings on LinkedIn. Variety is the spice of life so switch it up a great deal and experiment. As soon as you're sure you've cracked the content code, a post will fall flat. Formulaic posts can create consistency but there is little rhyme or reason beyond this maxim, "If it truly inspires you, your true audience will find you and be inspired." So write from the heart with passion about what you know!
6. Don't be shy to contact powerful people you admire and engage in relevant and meaningful conversations. The time to start doing that is now, don't wait another minute. When you tweet at bestselling authors or thought leaders, they often will Tweet right back, impressively within minutes, even seconds. Yes, they're that good and always on. They practice what they preach: #socialselling
7. Leadership seems to be at the core of a great deal of the problems in business right now, maybe even the world. My readers wish that more people in any position of power operated with greater integrity. It's been gratifying to evolve the content from a sales discussion to a greater leadership discussion and realize in many ways, it's one and the same.
8. Remarkably, readers on LinkedIn seem to enjoy overwhelmingly positive, inspiring posts as opposed to conflict and controversy which is typically not what the internet is known for, particularly in social media. It's been my experience that dry B2B brochure-like content typically falls flat. Astonishingly, if you truly put yourself out there, almost no one hates on you (OK, maybe a couple). This too is remarkable when thousands of new people cruise past your profile to learn more about who is writing and many write in.
9. BONUS, I had to add one more as a runner-up because I haven't seen many people mentioning this word lately but it's still a key arrow in your quiver. Mash-ups are here to stay. Comparing sales to Cricket or piloting an aircraft to being a brand ambassador, taking a bunch of wildly disparate elements and finding things in common while mashing them up, tends to create enormous hybrid synergy and remarkable, Power-of-Wow, Purple Cow content. Mash-ups are also a great way to source content from evergreen and recent topics. There are millions of human systems that one could draw inspiration from by comparing them to situations in business. There are unlimited lessons from history, art, music, philosophy, science, sports and especially walking in nature that apply to sales, marketing and leadership excellence. Perhaps that's why Steve Jobs loved to take meetings while he strolled...Cross train, get away from the computer (yes, your smartphone is a computer!), experience life and bring your own unique perspective back to the fray. Being uniquely you is the strongest card that you can play. Social media isn't going away anytime soon so you can make your mark and perhaps a little bit of magic by infusing insights from your life experience.

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: Eva Peris

The Tao of Jobs in Sales

“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

Is there still room to innovate in the world of sales? Emphatically, yes! Study the masters, the greats, study all styles and build your own. Realize buying habits have changed so study research from Corporate Executive Board (CEB) and make sure to factor in the real-time nature of the internet, as Andy Paul talks about in his books. The great salespeople I’ve managed and trained have had an inherent sense of curiosity, always questioning, always innovating, looking for new ways to blend the technology of sales: Old school meets new school. SPIN questioning is a technology, so is Challenging with new insight.

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Intuition is key in navigating deals of all sizes but especially in reading big complex deals with ultra long sales cycles. Many of you reading this have put in your 10,000 hours. My advice to you is simply, “trust your gut.” Sometimes you get split seconds to make a call, the Gladwellian thin-slice, nanoseconds to read people and pressure to react. Great managers empower their people, they train them through role play and ride alongs to hit their marks. There’s a temptation to play a character, to 'fake it until you make it' but ultimately, being yourself which requires that you muster courage and confidence, is going to trump everything else. Even a seller leveraging weaker tactics who believes in herself will outsell any contrived facade masking insecurity. 55% of communication is body language, 38% is tone of voice and 7% is the actual words spoken so the nonverbal cues will be huge for you. Be comfortable in your own skin. Develop this. Seek to enjoy the selling process. To do this, simply move from interesting to interested, wholeheartedly hang on your customer's every word. It’s about them!

“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

There’s something to be said for customer experience design, the design of a CRM, your Salesforce Automation, your enablement programs, your pitch and the insights themselves. It’s all a grand design, think hard on it. Measure twice, cut once. Coming from a design perspective is actually a unique way to look at it. “And one more thing…” Jobs was a master of suspense and showmanship in his legendary keynotes.

“Why join the navy if you can be a pirate?”

Salespeople will like this. It’s definitely a field that requires pirates and ninjas level freedom of improvisation and creativity. Ultimately your gauge of success will be revenue and customer satisfaction/retention so it will be up to you to structure your day, week month and quarter to optimize the ultimate outcome. Perhaps the greatest form of rebellion is pushing yourself to total mastery of the art and science of sales which is a triumph over self. This requires extraordinary levels of patience. I’m not suggesting you fly the Jolly Roger from your computer but thinking differently is the Jobsian hallmark. There’s no one right way to success! Approach the playing field with out-of-the-box ideas and a lion share of intensity coupled with fresh energy. Never to be discounted, there are many lessons to be learned from military strategy also.

“.. almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Passion dictates performance. Find your niche, do what you love. If you figure that out, you’ll never work another day of your life. Jobs figured this secret to life and business success out early on. Fall in love with helping customers solve problems. Fall in love with serving and helping others, the time will fly!

“Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

Setting expectations is key, always level set with customers. That being said, anytime you exceed expectations, you’ll blow their minds. Do you know how rare it is to receive a handwritten note these days? How about the Dale Carnegie simple strategy of just remembering someone's birthday. Dale kept it on notecards, you get notifications every day from social networks directly to your inbox; there’s simply no excuse. Customize, tailor and research for your presentations. Make agendas thoughtful. Be strategic. Take time to learn about clients before you meet with them. Winging it is the opposite of a quality experience. You are the face of your brand and the company. Going the extra mile is actually about little personal touches in this digital, always-on era. Excellence is in the execution.

“A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.”

There’s an optimism conveyed in this quote. Know that you can sell, believing wholeheartedly in your product and the company you represent. Join a company that is growing where the energy you contribute can have a synergistic effect: 1 + 1 = 5. From acorns, oaks.

“To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.”

Discipline meets disciplines, we wear multiple hats as entrepreneurial sellers. We must stay laser focused on the daily activities that drive outcomes that we can influence. The therapist, the doctor, the technician, the customer service rep, the personal trainer. The analogies are endless. It’s a long game and you will gain the greatest payout sticking it out more than 18 months in one role. Outlive the enterprise sales cycle and set your sights on a bright horizon, knowing you can get there with consistent inspired effort each and every day. A positive attitude is your edge. It’s how Jobs continuously silenced critics and skeptics, creating something out of nothing, even releasing a phone when so many in the industry panned his breakthrough idea as "already done," predicting failure.

“In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

When you think about confusing sales processes or a hodgepodge of CRM data you get a sense for a need of design inspired thinking. With the customer defining the new funnel, designing a set of procedures to reflect this and allow reps to be nimble is critical. Customers being 57% through the decision making process, creates a bizarre asymmetry. Engaging upstream with critical insight requires designing a new sales process for your organization, getting closer to the buyer. "53 percent of B2B customer loyalty is a product of how you sell, not what you sell," according to CEB research.

“You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.”

This quote has profound implications on sales. It may be the most relevant one when you talk about B2B complex selling in enterprise environments. Nine times out of ten, a customer will surface a symptom they believe is the problem. It’s up to us as sellers to peel the onion and to do much of this in advance. We can collect enough data during due diligence to provide an informed diagnosis, refine that diagnosis and work collaboratively on a prescription. We can come to the table with a rock solid value hypothesis and work to prove this out together qualitatively and quantitatively (Jeff Thull). Clients don’t always know what they want, what's wrong or what a solution could look like. They're often enamored with the status quo or a shiny object that they think will solve it. They've often been misdiagnosed and are drilling off into infinity compounding the problems. Executives do understand their core business drivers but sometimes they’re so close to it, they're blinded by familiarity. Moving off the solution to focus on their pain is a Mahan Khalsa principle that is an ingenious perspective on this. Fixing a set of symptoms is just a band-aid approach. Bring your subject matter expertise to the table to close this gap in understanding and help point customers in the right direction of incremental progress.

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”

Iterate quickly, take 100% responsibility for your mistakes. Own them to your manager, to your customer and to the executive team. If you operate with good intentions and integrity as your compass, you’ll inspire confidence and become a trusted advisor.

“The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.”

This is the Jobsian distillation of management science at its finest. Hire rockstars or train them to be so (take responsibility for grooming them) and then get out of their way, remove obstacles and push them out of the nest so they can fly. Watch the magic then unfold when you empower and enable gifted sellers. Drive comes from within in so unlocking this in people creates star performers who take pride in their work and self manage to an extent. I like this quote because it highlights the simplicity of the viewpoint of building a team of talented people and getting out of their way. Jobs lead by example and created a world class culture of innovation. He demanded this by the example he set. He brought in people he felt were even stronger and more talented than he was like Jony Ive, to expand his ability to put a “ding” in the universe. Despite foibles, he did not act alone even though catching heat as a misperceived solo flyer.

“I think we're having fun. I think our customers really like our products. And we're always trying to do better.”

Spirit of play, élan vital, esprit de corps, there are so many ways to express this concept. Put into practice: have a blast, work hard and play hard. A sense of joy in what you’re doing is contagious with customers. In fact, "fun" unto itself can create customers even entire markets.

“I want to put a ding in the universe.”

I love this quote. You’d think setting huge goals would be demotivating. The old adage, "reach for the stars and you just might hit a mountain," is more realistic. I actually find I’m even more motivated when I think bigger. Set achievable goals but also put forward stretch goals to anchor your progress.

“So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we'll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.”

This quote is about handling rejection graciously and persistence. Jobs didn’t take no for an answer. He was hell bent on selling his vision. The sales will come, you have a good product, just know that it takes consistency and persistence over time.

“Pretty much, Apple and Dell are the only ones in this industry making money. They make it by being Wal-Mart. We make it by innovation.”

Brazen, yes I know but Jobs was always willing to stir the pot. I really just think it shows the faith, tenacity, and unerring vision in the company he’s building. The takeaway here is to have an unwavering belief in what you’re selling.

“It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.”

Challenger selling vs. relationship selling. You can give clients exactly the product they’re looking for and risk being commoditized out. Or, you can diagnose the larger complex problem which is typically comprised of many facets and build out a suite of solutions that even see around corners. This will protect your margins and buffer you from competitors nipping at your heels.

“Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Steve Jobs was a game changer and polarizing force but he changed the world as we know it, millions would agree. His technologies live in our homes and most of our pockets. Market share? He created and won by literally creating new markets. Sales and product teams can unite with those in marketing and design. Getting the silos out of the organization and making sure to have meetings of cross-functional teams is critical to stay ahead of the breakneck pace of technology acceleration. Product can inform Marketing, can inform selling. Front line sellers are closest to the customer after all and can bring incredible insight back to the product team from the field. Sellers run the gamut in unique ability and life experience. I’ve found many that are extremely talented in another area like music, swing dancing, language learning, philosophy, Sudoku or Jai alai. Through his "reality distortion" field and Jedi Mind Trick intent, Steve Jobs was able to push through the barrier of skepticism and actually change the world. There is a great amount of resistance to change. We need to puncture through this wall with our advocates in the buying organization to foster true disruptive innovation from within, especially when we vault like David vs. Goliath against megalithic incumbents.

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: MIKI Yoshihito

Social Selling — Lessons In Leadership

My recent blog post about QF32 and Captain Richard de Crespigny has had more than 140,000 reads in the first week. The response has been phenomenal with comments, likes and thousands of shares from all over the world. The momentum has been difficult to fathom – I’ve been wondering why this post went ballistic.

I am relatively unknown outside of Australia and I’m just five weeks into a bold social strategy after being pushed by a good friend to do something unconventional. My big play was to stop blogging on my website and go exclusively to where my market is – the most powerful publishing platform in the world right now, LinkedIn. Every person who matters to me in business is on LinkedIn, and I decided to go to them with no ploys to lure them away to my website, nor capture their details, nor send them a newsletter. No selling to anyone, just a commitment to write original quality content that gifts my expertise and intellectual property to the world – no strings attached. If people buy-in to what I’m about and if they think I can help; they’ll contact me.

I had taken the unprecedented step of making LinkedIn the hub of my social strategy rather than just one of the channels. Every book you read says don't do this and instead recommends making one's own blog site the hub. But social is about affordable experimentation and open source. I publish in LinkedIn, source great pictures from Creative Commons in Flickr, spread the word with Twitter, and push to other channels like Google+ and Facebook to help with my search rankings. The next big initiative from me will be releasing video blogs published in YouTube. Throw in a few scheduling and automation tools such as Buffer, ManageFlitter and TweetDeck combined with Bitly for trackable shortened links… and I’m equipped to be a publisher! No production costs or PR agency charging a fortune for a ‘behind the curve’ strategy executed by junior staff who don't really understand my niche market of B2B sales leadership. Just less than $1k per annum in cloud software subscription licenses with free training from blogs by David Meerman Scott and others, YouTube clips galore and content on the websites of the technology providers – it’s a brave and empowering new world.

Some may see my strategy as controversial. Am I missing out on the holy grail of monetizing my blog? This was never my intent. My intent is to build the largest platform that I can to help business leaders everywhere flourish by giving away my I.P. If they'd like to read my book, they can, in fact many have gone to Amazon and picked it up as a byproduct of all this. Yet again, a testament to engaging and educating rather than selling on here. My bread and butter is speaking, consulting and mentoring so although I could go all in on a gated, blog monetization strategy (very Web 2.0 think), my primary hurdle is getting out of obscurity itself: discovery.

The biggest challenge however hasn't been the technology tools; it’s been the authoring tool… me! I’m 52 and am learning new tricks. I don't write fast but I do go for quality – it took me four years to write my first book part-time but it’s been an Australian bestseller. Recently, my wife and family have been kind allowing me to disappear every evening to write blog posts in the last 6 weeks and I’ve watched very little television in that time. I’m enjoying not being pumped full of negativity and instead rediscovering my love of research and writing. I'm becoming something of a mini news station, endeavoring to put out inspirational stories and empower people to excel in their chosen fields including sussing out this whole new realm of #SocialSelling. The comments and new connections alone have been worth their weight in gold.

As I write this, I’m at 30,000 feet leaving Australian airspace on my way to Vietnam with my family for a vacation. I’m cramped in an economy seat on a full flight with my laptop perched awkwardly on the tray table as I peck away. The person in front has slammed their seat back into the full recline position. The person two rows forward is incessantly making disgusting noises by snorting his adenoids into oblivion to avoid having to blow his nose; and the person behind keeps breaking wind (not my wife or children). Amidst all this, I was writing another post but being in an Airbus A330 caused me to think about Captain de Crespigny again… and then it hit me – something huge. I switched to write this post instead.

Here’s my epiphany. Social Selling 3.0 is to B2B selling, what Richard de Crespigny is to aviation. Old school meets new school; timeless proven practice meets new age technology, disciplined execution meets automation, leadership commitment meets service excellence, good manners meets instant social communication channels.

Richard de Crespigny is an amazing man. He’s old school military. The kind where you take full responsibility, assume nothing, maintain discipline, take no shortcuts, communicate clearly, work as a team – all the good things about "old school" we never want to lose. But I think he is also the David Meerman Scott of the aviation world. David was an old world traditional marketing executive who embraced social media and social networks to literally write the book on social. Richard is an [old world] impeccable pilot, trained by the military and transitioned to commercial with Qantas, but he also has a passion for software technology. When I interviewed Richard in 2012, I discovered that he had written his own CRM product and sold it in his own business (with his beautiful wife) in the early days of the dot-com era. He does both acronyms: Customer Relationship Management and Crew Resource Management!

Richard de Crespigny is an old dog who constantly learns new tricks. He was fascinated by software and he went far beyond the required levels of learning and certification to Captain the A380. He took the time and effort to understand the A380 system laws written into the software by Airbus. He did this because he is naturally curious and also because of the life-saving benefits of understanding system logic. He then applies human leadership, situational awareness, decision-making clarity and teamwork; supported by technology automation – not confused by it. This was what saved QF32.

Anyone who thinks that pilots merely ‘drive the plane’ doesn’t understand what really goes on. One pilot once said to me, “being a commercial aviation pilot is best described as thousands of hours of boredom, punctuated by moments of terror.” We need leadership in society like we need oxygen – lives depend on it. Pilots understand this and so does the military. Boat and ship captains understand; surgeons understand and so do many other professions. Business and political leaders need to step-up too – our way of life depends on how they lead.

Here are six things Richard de Crespigny did to lead magnificently on the flight deck and there are elegant lessons and linkages for all us seeking to execute Social Selling 3.0.

1. Listening. He listened to lead. When his team said ‘no!’ to his statement that he was climbing to gain altitude, he listened. When someone in the team said: ‘That landing speed can’t be right’, he said: ‘Recalculate and have it cross-checked’. Social selling 3.0 is all about listening for trigger events and researching before engaging. Social listening and targeted publishing and engaging, replaces old world interruption marketing and push selling.
2. Automation. Richard did not allow the technology to automate the chaos. He used technology as part of his toolkit and management resource. If it didn’t work for him, he jettisoned it (so to speak). A big social selling mistake is to allow spam-bots and other marketing automation tools to turn you into a spammer or push seller. Your personal brand is everything so beware the damage caused by blasting volumes of junk into the ether.
3. Delegation. He did not delegate responsibility, only tasks. He maintained control at all times. There was always role clarity and he set it in place before they pushed-back from the aero-bridge even though there were members in his team on the flight deck more senior than him within the organization. Success in Social Selling may require an assistant or team but beware engaging anyone who is from a foreign culture without first doing your homework in healthy respect for communication variances. You'll recall in the Challenger sale how the methodology needed to be clarified in certain markets with the qualifying phrase "respectfully challenge." Perhaps they do not have your language as their first tongue, or do not understand your industry and what you’re all about. I see laughable engagement from virtual assistants with terribly mangled English and inane questions or comments. Not to say there aren't proficient ones to be found out there, yet you need to take control and invest the time yourself as much as possible. Don't lose control.
4. Group-think. He harnessed the resources of his team and took all input and advice but it wasn’t a committee. Richard was the leader, he was born for this event; he stepped into the breach magnificently without doubting himself in any way. In social, crowdsourcing is a valid strategy but don't merely regurgitate the wisdom of others. Instead, have your own positive opinions and be an innovator and thought leader. The best way to predict the future is to create it.
5. Stay on task. I’m a huge fan of Air Crash Investigations and it never ceases to amaze me how often the pilot forgets to focus on flying the plane as disaster unfolds! When all the alarms are going off or something quirky is happening with a reading or instrument, they become fixated and forget to fly the plane… not at Qantas and not with Richard. Success in Social Selling 3.0 also requires you to avoid distractions, so stay focused on what matters, filter the noise and stay on task. Who’s your audience and how can you help them? Provide new quality content and insights.
6. Stay Positive. Richard stayed positive all the way through. He knew there was a way to succeed, even after the whole thing was over and he was struggling emotionally. He had the finest aircraft, technology, crew and employer that the world had ever seen for this kind of crisis. He never blamed anyone and just continually paid tribute to the aviation industry, and the people and brands he was associated with. Thank you Qantas and Airbus! Avoid the temptation to go negative in your social engagement activities.

The genius and robust design of the Airbus A380, combined with a flight-deck crew who understood both the human dynamics and computer systems, made a powerful team to thwart disaster. They brought the very best of old and new together. That’s what Social Selling 3.0 is – the timeless principles of strategic relationship selling (where trust is built on insight and value) accelerated and enabled by the mind-boggling reach and engagement capability of social media and social networks. Social disintermediates traditional power, it transcends title, bypasses gatekeepers and side-steps market-makers. Anyone with insight can now publish and engage based upon the value they offer their market.

In your Social Selling 3.0 initiatives, remember that technology is not the message, it is merely the medium. It’s just a suite of tools and engagement forums. Quality content remains king and value will always reign supreme. I’ve had a mentor for many years and he is one of the best. Values-driven, holds me to account, always challenging me about my purpose in what I do. Someone else who read my book also confronted me to step-up onto a bigger stage. They both challenged me to get serious about my social presence after resisting for so long. More importantly, they made sure I know why… but that's a story for another time.

P.S. While I’m on the topic of aviation, here’s a taste of what I learned from my own plane crash when flying an aerobatic biplane many years ago.

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: Angelo DeSantis

A Job Interview Is Not About You

Selling yourself is always the most important phase of a sale because people are only interested in what you have to offer once they trust you. It’s not easy – it’s a cynical world, that’s why you need an impeccable social presence, especially on LinkedIn, with a profile that attracts people to you. Avoid the ‘quota crusher’ persona and instead show yourself as a domain expert with strong values who is well networked. Also, have a CV that is well honed and tailored for the role you're seeking. LinkedIn does not replace a resume.

But before you can sell someone’s product, service or solution; you’ve got to secure employment with them. Selling yourself is everything at the job interview and there is a key rule to follow if you are to succeed. It will seem counter-intuitive but here it is: It’s not about you – it’s about them! That’s strange, you’re thinking, they’ve asked me in for an interview and they’re asking questions about me – of course it’s about me! They want to compare me with others. No, they want to know what you can do for them compared with what others can do for them. There is a very important distinction – what can you do for them? Not, tell us everything about you. Avoid the temptation to waffle-on about yourself… can you hear the snoring? Instead, show insight in your understanding of what they need from you and how you can deliver for them.

Think about what’s going on in the mind of the potential employer. After all, that’s what masterful selling and negotiating is all about – obsessing about what’s happening in their world. Employers hire someone because they have a problem or an opportunity but they worry about hiring the wrong person. This is because it’s one of the most costly mistakes they can make. It’s expensive in terms of money, time, market momentum, credibility and emotional energy. Recruitment fees are significant but lost time and effort is much more costly. They also worry about the risk to their business and reputation if they entrust their brand to someone who fails to deliver or damages relationships through incompetence or unethical behavior. The best recruitment consultants focus on cultural fit as the number one key criteria once they have a short-list of candidates.

Employers always have a range of candidates that appear to be equally qualified but skills alone are not what make a sales employee successful. Qualifications and skills are prerequisite rather than differentiators. What the employer cares about most is the person’s ability to influence and deliver results while also being a good cultural fit within their team. There are myriad qualified and knowledgeable employees that don’t get promoted because of poor attitude. The sad thing is that they often never know the real reasons they were passed-over for promotion.

No-one really cares about what you know or your qualifications. They care primarily about themselves and what you can do for them. All employers, consciously or not, seek the three Cs in hiring someone: Competence, Commitment, Character or Cultural fit.

If you’re older, then you need to show that you’re energetic, healthy and technology-savvy. If you’re younger, you need to overcome the stereotype of being a casual, impatient, itinerant, ‘click and flick’ technology distracted, unwilling to diligently serve and prove yourself before being rewarded with promotion. Your LinkedIn profile and online social presence therefore needs to break the stereotypes and address any concerns before you can make it to the interview stage. Remember, a LinkedIn profile or CV will be used to screen you out of their process if not crafted masterfully.

Success is a 50:50 proposition in that both you and your employer are needed in the equation. Do your research online and within your network to assess whether your potential employer is Competent, Committed, and of good Character or Culture. The issue of alignment is not a sales ploy, it is genuinely important and goes both ways. You need to know your boss is committed to your success and able to deliver.

In addition to the three Cs, you need them to discuss the three Ps. You should evaluate the potential for success within their organization based upon their response to the following topics: People, Proposition and Patch. Your employer has an obligation to provide an environment within which you can be successful. This means they need to have people you are proud to work with (competent, committed and of good character), and a value proposition that is strongly differentiated in the market; and a territory (patch) that is viable with an achievable target. During the interview process, you should gently and humbly explore all of these things.

You should also gain an understanding of their expectations for the role and the process for selecting and then hiring the successful candidate. Here is a phrase that could transform any job interview if delivered well.

‘I think the most expensive mistake you can is to hire the wrong person in this kind of role. But equally for me I can’t afford to accept a role with the wrong employer. Rather than sell to each other I would like to understand whether this is a good fit for both of us. Like you, I’ve done my homework for today so may I also ask some questions I think only you can answer?’

Adjust the phrasing to suit your own style but the important thing is to establish genuine empathy for their difficult task of evaluating candidates for the role and assessing cultural fit.

Experienced managers however often regard the interview persona as a façade. They can be cynical so be prepared for what they may ask and be ready with your own insightful questions. If you are asked direct questions, then provide candid direct responses. Never avoid answering a question.

Remember, you wouldn't be at the interview if they did not already believe you to be qualified and experienced. They are fishing to see whether you are a cultural fit and ‘the real deal’. Provide examples of situations you’ve navigated to convey the strength of your suitability.

Here is an excerpt from my book, The Joshua Principle, where Joshua Peters is being interviewed for a sales role slightly beyond his qualifications:

Joshua sat with Janet Reynolds in the CEL boardroom. She possessed a disarming manner that masked a laser-like ability to get to the truth. She had granted him an interview because she liked his direct approach and evidence-based validation of performance and capability. It didn’t take long for Janet to get down to business.

“On paper, you don’t make the grade for this job but you sold me on giving you an interview. Tell me, why should I take the risk of hiring you?”

Joshua looked her in the eye. “I know that hiring the wrong person for this role is the most expensive mistake you can make. It will cost you time, energy and revenue. Worse than that, it could damage your reputation and brand. Equally for me, I can’t afford to take a job with the wrong employer. I’m looking for a long-term successful career move. Rather than sit here and sell to you, I’d like to explore whether there is genuinely a good fit for us to work together. Is that an approach that works for you?”

“Sure, but you haven’t answered my question.”

“You see me as a risk because I don’t have specific industry experience or a CV that shows stability and long term performance. Are these your main concerns?”

Janet didn’t like losing control of the conversation. “Let’s come back to all that later. You’re right in saying the biggest mistake I can make as a manager is hiring the wrong person, but what’s the biggest mistake most sales people make?”

Joshua paused before answering. “The two big mistakes are pursuing business that cannot be won and selling to people who cannot buy.”

“So how do you avoid wasting time and resources?”

“I qualify properly. I then invest with people at the right levels to set an agenda that creates value and an advantage.”

Janet was skeptical but Joshua leaned forward. “Janet, I know this all sounds cliché but I’ve done my research. CEL is who I want to work for. I’ve done more than visit your website, LinkedIn profile and read analyst commentary. I’ve met with some of your customers. I believe I can learn from you in selling real solutions to serious business problems for large organizations.”

“That’s all very well, but how does this overcome your lack of experience in our industry?”

“All risk comes from not knowing what we don’t know. In the case of hiring me for this role, the issues are whether I’m competent, will I be committed and am I a cultural fit. Employers usually hire based on skills yet have to fire based on poor fit or performance. I would like you to get to the truth of who I am and what I offer by talking with the most qualified people.”

Janet said nothing.

“I know that what I’m about to suggest may seem unconventional but I would like you to meet with the CEO of my biggest and most recent customer, and also with my current boss. I know that references are usually used to validate the decision at the end of the process but in my case I would like the reference phase to occur early. Is that something you would be willing to do?”

Janet sat back and a wry smile appeared as she spoke. “I’m intrigued as to why your current boss would be willing to act a reference. Is he trying to manage you out?”

“Actually, it’s the opposite. He wants me to take a promotion to sales management but maybe that’s the first question you should ask him when you meet.”

There was a period of silence before Janet finally spoke. “Let’s come back to that at the end of this meeting. Right now I would like to focus on your approach to selling. Do you regard yourself as transactional or are you strategic in how you sell?”

Janet had unwittingly but instinctively set the scene for Joshua to talk about RSVP. “Both are important and require good relationships and effective tactics but it’s also essential to offer unique value and have complete understanding of their buying process. Relationships need to be managed strategically which means positioning early, starting at the top, understanding the power-base within the organization and then aligning with winning agendas. But more than that, I know we have to become part of a compelling business case.”

Joshua continued, focusing on strategy and changing the rules on competitors. The conversation demonstrated real substance in Joshua’s knowledge and maturity. Janet was impressed with what she heard and progressively became more open. Joshua knew he needed to sell through asking questions and, more importantly, he needed to understand Janet’s process for evaluating and hiring the successful candidate. He changed the direction of the conversation.

“Janet, what happened here at CEL to create the opening for this role?”

“To be candid, we hired the wrong person, they didn’t perform. It was as you described – they appeared to be qualified for the role but they were not a good fit.”

Joshua already knew this from meeting with one of their sales people. He was glad she had answered honestly. Janet had passed the first test and he seized the opportunity to begin to understand her selection criteria.

“What will make the right person successful in this role? What defines a good fit?”

Their meeting lasted ninety minutes and Janet agreed to speak with Michael Blunt and David Thomas as the next step. Joshua would brief both men concerning what he needed them to cover in their conversations with Janet. His adaptation of Damien’s interview phrases had worked. At the next interview Joshua would do a lot more of the questioning and move on from the three Cs to the three Ps. He would focus on how CEL uniquely created value for customers and also the caliber and style of the People with whom he would be working. Lastly he would discuss his territory – Patch – to ensure he had a viable market within which to operate.

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: tec_estromberg

"Boulder Management" by Sisyphus

Let's just assume Sisyphus finally summits to the mountaintop and rests the boulder in place. Rest assured, he'd have an instant business management bestseller on his hands that every MBA would be required to read forevermore. Implementing the below methods and drawing inspiration from these books will certainly help you breathe a sigh of relief as you right the ship and navigate it through a frenetic 2015 sales management maelstrom.

For those of us who’ve dedicated our lives to a career in sales, we’re all too familiar with Sisyphus, the Greek Myth of the man pushing a boulder up a hill for eternity only to have it fall back down upon him, time and time again. So much of what we've traditionally done to succeed has been mind numbing repetition but all that is changing thanks to things like automation, social selling, trigger events and new ways of connecting with target prospects.

Perhaps you've felt like Sisyphus in a deal. It’s even a trendy tech word "Sisyphean" which is often interchanged with Herculean, although these dimensions are highly juxtaposed when it comes to the concept of conquering a massive challenge or reaching a "wildly important goal." This post is all about the WIGs, so that I'll get right into that in a moment.

Luckily, the challenges of professional selling are not insurmountable but if you do not heed the following advice, you too may find yourself banished to a seeming eternity of rock pushing if not enjoying selling much less. In sales, we thrive on the challenge of battling time and exceeding our number. We thrive in going up against the incumbent, our competitors and the two horsemen of time and the status quo. Whether your boulder is conquering your personal best, renewing a key account with ACV growth or disrupting legacy dinosaur business models, the following ideas could help you prevent it from falling back down on you, even lighten the load:

I read the book Four Disciplines of Execution recently and was struck by its deconstruction of lead measures versus lagging measures which drew a parallel in my mind to Jason Jordan's bestselling management book, a modern classic. It was very interesting to witness Sean Covey focusing on WIGs or "wildly important goals." I’ve written about the rocks and the sand, my 80/20 inspiration for daily time management and extensively about Cracking the Sales Management Code, which espouses leading indicator driven KPI management in prior posts, so I think these points are worth underscoring in recommending this superb, foundational work.

Both books got me thinking about the meta concepts of Leading versus Lagging Indicators and their corollary Leading & Lagging Measures. It's an important question to relentlessly ask ourselves? Which actions am I taking that are driving results?

How can we tangibly effect change on our external environment, increase our pipeline, impact the current sales cycles we’re in and accelerate our progress as professional sellers? One major way is to focus on leverage. The levers that push that proverbial boulder up the hill. They are most certainly leading measure activities in contrast to the static lagging measures that "follow," levers to hurtle the metaphorical missiles of enterprise tactics from your trebuchet of strategy over the parapets into the stronghold of Castle Status Quo. I think I just hit the TILT switch on metaphor usage.

Ironically, revenue itself is a lagging indicator and cannot be managed in a CRM. Management can bark at pretty dashboards projected at a wall and send consternation down the command chain but this typically just creates an end-of-quarter fire drill and is much ado to no avail in helping your team qualify their deals more stringently, make that 5th to 12th contact (where 80% of sales actually close) or engineer a competitive strategy to close the deal more efficiently and effectively.

Things like reporting, endless meetings and constant revenue check-ins coupled with unrealistic goal setting and vanity metrics really don’t move the lever toward the Wildly Important Goal. This is a big goal each one of us sets that harnesses our inner drive. The 4DX book makes many recommendations but one I appreciate is weekly WIG sessions between managers and direct reports to recalibrate, checking in on the progress of the goals set the week before. There's a new science of change management in play here that is worth studying and applying to bring your organization to a new level. Rather than review the entire book which is a jewel in the crown of Franklin Covey’s flagship global training, I thought I’d simply hone in on a few key concepts.

As a supplemental side note, Mahan Khalsa who's trained sales squadrons at blue chips, the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and Accenture is also doing brilliant things over at Franklin Covey and wrote Let’s Get Real or Let's Not Play which is another sensational treatise centered on authentic "get real" sales processes to grow revenues. It features amazingly useful and thought-provoking flowcharts throughout that I recommend to help sustainably grow revenues in 2015. Key takeaways for your team:

• Surface new business opportunities in a holistic way that all parties can be invested in
• Build a conversation structure that gets to the bottom of the true client needs and fosters a trusted advisor relationship
• Ask the hard questions is a finesse way, then practicing active listening
• Increase propensity of deal closure by building mindshare and openness
• "Move off the solution to diagnose before you prescribe," see Mahan's brilliant YouTube video below:

What are the actions that you can control in your day to move the needle as a front line sales manager or sales executive? Step one, take a look at environs you can play in where contact rates are the highest. What activities can you execute each day to engage most effectively? Hint: that’s rarely still email or a telephone (under 5% engagement rates). I’ve tested my ability to contact senior executives in companies and granted, this is the software and technology sphere, but Twitter can often garner a refreshingly rapid response and effectively personalized, Group-driven or InMail-driven digital outreach can yield incredible results i.e. higher conversion rates to appointments set. Another leading measure can even be the research phase itself. Rather than rattling away endless calls to Executive Assistants, performing due diligence to get smart about segmenting and targeting a healthy base of the key clients based on trigger events, goes a long way. This helps you avoid the "busy fool syndrome" I've talked about and is one of Konrath's Paradoxes: "slowing down to speed up."

When asked about how to measure the success of social selling and get to ROI by Gerhard Gschwandtner in a recent Selling Power interview, Jamie Shanksresponded, "There are a couple of leading indicators you should be looking at. One of them is the size and the effectiveness of your LinkedIn Network and it's called your social reach...And 'How is my voice growing over time?" Linked & Twitter are providing you these baseline metrics...Those are leading indicators. The lagging indicators are the opportunities and the revenue you are driving. And if you’re not driving that money, then you need to look back at your leading indicators and say, ‘what am I not doing? Are people listening? Is my social reach terrible because my network is small? Whatever that is." I would add that generating super high quality influencer content via LinkedIn Publisher will be a new lead measure activity this year as sales people become micro-marketers.

If your goal is to close 5MM in new revenue this year, you'd better have a realistic concept of where those sales cycles began last year to land some of those in the first and second quarter. Otherwise, have the courage to level set with management and your CEO that these will most likely stack up in Q3/Q4 because you'd rather do it right and nurture the account rather than destroy the natural order of paradise by being pushy or rushing. Real-time selling is real but it's no longer a sales cycle, it's a buying cycle so customers are leading the dance.

Relentlessly focus on strategy in qualifying the exact companies you will seek to penetrate based on trigger events, the strongest of which are stakeholders who were just promoted or transitioned to new companies. Keep this list a short list and go deep to the target rather than widening the approach. (Mike Weinberg) If your company has sold to these executives before and they’ve moved into a new world they are already champions of your disruptive solution paradigm, so getting back in touch with them via a referral / warm introduction can help you to gain ground in the new account.

Static and active is another sound way to look at KPIs from this vantage point. Bernard Marr wrote the book on KPIs as a mechanism for accurate business forecasts so peruse his prescient corpus at this link. Jason Jordan found that only 17% of sales metrics captured are activities that contribute to a sale! Jason and Michelle Vazzana unpacked 306 metrics, breaking them into 3 buckets: sales activities (17%), sales objectives (59%) and business results (24%). The first are highly manageable, the second directly influenceable and the third are not manageable but relate back to sales objectives. “Activities can be managed – outcomes cannot."

If I could only obtain 6 metrics (in addition to deal value) from a CRM, and assuming the data is accurate, here are my choices:

1. Qualified pipeline as percentage of quota/target
2. Opportunities by deal stage
3. Opportunity qualification scores (with snapshot versions)
4. Deals stuck at stage beyond defined period
5. Meetings that progress the sale (with call plan in the CRM)
6. Opportunities with close plans (versioned and in the CRM)

What would your six key metrics be to drive the team and ensure they are building pipeline and progressing the best opportunities effectively?

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: AK Rockefeller

The Seven Reasons Selling Is Not A Profession

I’ve been in professional selling most of my life and it’s been very good to me. Notice I use the phrase, ‘professional selling’ rather than ‘the sales profession’. In all of my writings you’ll see that I maintain this distinction and I do so very deliberately due to a deeply held conviction – there’s a problem in selling, we’re not actually a profession and we desperately need to be. It’s okay, I’m ready for the rocks – throw at will.

I think professor Neil Rackham understands this and has been working behind the scenes for many years with universities to make selling a post-graduate qualification. Mike Kunkle commented shortly after posting this that about 80 of the 4,000 universities in the United States offer a dedicated sales curriculum. The mission of the Sales Education Foundation is to change that, and elevate the sales profession through university education. Thanks Mike and also for your work with Neil Rackham in this regard!

Robert Kelly from The Sales Management Association also does great work in lifting professional selling. There are other associations and publications that also make huge contributions including Jonathan Farrington with Top Sales World and Gerhard Gschwandtner with Selling Power. In LinkedIn there are many groups that foster conversations, debate and information sharing including the ‘Professional Selling’ group moderated by John Smibert. All of this is valuable but it doesn’t make selling a profession by any reasonable test.

Don’t misunderstand me, I know that many sales people are professionals in every sense of the word, both with formal (university and post-graduate) qualifications and in how they operate. Some in selling have a university bachelor of psychology or business, possibly an MBA or even a masters, but almost none have a qualification in sales. But universities don't offer qualifications in sales, you’re thinking… exactly – that’s my point. Here’s the big test: If you asked people randomly if they regarded selling as a profession, you wouldn't get a resounding, ‘yes.’

Yet sales people earn as much or more than all other professions. Although selling is conducted professionally by many, these are the reasons why it’s not really a profession:

1. The vast majority of sales roles do not require a university degree. This is especially true in B2C but in the world of B2B, degree qualifications held by sellers are rarely directly relevant to the activity of professional selling.
2. Very few sales roles require a license to practice which can be revoked. The financial services industry is one exception and licensing was introduced due to severe moral lapses within the industry post-GFC.
3. There is no peak standards body. Unlike most professions, there are very few associations that represent the professional members. The Sales Management Association (SMA) being an exception but where is the association for sales professionals (individual contributors as opposed to managers) with a creed and code of conduct?
4. A sales person does not lose their job for malpractice. Most sales people are adept at blaming others when a customer is lost. Uncompetitive pricing, a desperate competitor, bad luck – I’ve heard it all. A surgeon does not blame his client if he leaves an instrument inside the patient.
5. Sales people regularly prescribe ‘solutions’ without proper diagnosis. Imagine if doctors prescribed without thorough diagnosis, yet many sellers push their ‘solutions’ as a cure-all remedy.
6. Failure to take notes and keep accurate records. It staggers me how often I see sales people sitting in meetings failing to take notes and record actions; then fail to update the CRM when they get back to the office.
7. Sending substandard proposals that do not accurately reflect the requirements and needs of the buyer. A real professional listens, understands and validates before sending a proposal or contract. They also ensure the document is not generic and does not have errors in it.

Think about all the recognized professions out there: accountants, managers, marketers, architects, engineers, lawyers, judges, doctors, nurses, dentists, psychologists, pilots, and teachers. My wife is a qualified teacher and is now doing post-graduate studies with a college to become a counsellor. As I write this, we are in Vietnam on vacation and we met a lady from South Africa who is also doing the exact same program with the same college in Sydney but via their distance learning program – it’s a small world. Sales people can easily earn double the income of a teacher or counsellor, yet the teaching and counselling professions require years of study and substantial cost just to earn the right to practice. But not selling; in many cases you just need the ‘gift of the gab’ and the right personality to plough through rejection and you’re away.

Many trades are professions because the tradespeople have to do apprenticeships, pass tests and secure licenses that can be revoked. These include builders, electricians and crane drivers. The military adopts a hybrid model of professional qualifications (academic and ‘trade’) but every member of their team is thoroughly qualified for their role and is a professional in every sense of the term.

And we wonder why selling is often not respected – right up there with politics and prostitution.

What are the drivers for making a vocation into a profession, in the fullest sense of the term? Here is the surprising answer… When the public needs to be protected from poor practitioners. When I walk onto an aircraft, I don't want the pilot to be in command because he talked his way into the command seat. I want to know that he is qualified and experienced; and more than that, I want to know that he is regularly certified and tested. All of our lives depend on his competence and leadership. Review the list of professions in the above two paragraphs; any dodgy operator can cause significant damage to lives. This is why the financial services industry was forced to regulate their sales people – their advice can cause severe financial loss and the public needs protection from amateurs and unethical operators.

Can sales people cause significant damage by recommending products, services or solutions that are not fit for purpose or in the best interests of the client? Absolutely yes! This test alone justifies the need for professional selling to become a university degree qualification with individual industries also having regular certification testing and code of conduct. The good news is that there are approximately 100 universities around the world now offering sales qualifications. Take the time to follow Professor Neil Rackham as he is leading the way. Selling is a demanding field because you need the listening and questioning skills of a counsellor and psychologist, the diagnostic capabilities of a doctor, the financial abilities of an accountant, the analytical skills of an MBA, the solutioning capabilities of an architect and engineer, the leadership qualities of a pilot, the strategic thinking of a general, the ability to market and teach (The Challenger Sale), and the ability to communicate like Bill Clinton. No wonder employers are willing to pay so much to those who can execute.

[Since this original post: Jason Jordan wrote to me adding another important prerequisite for something being a profession: a profession needs to have specializations. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, engineers, and other 'professions' all have sub-specialties where they focus and hone their talents. For sales, there needs to be an acknowledgement that there are different types of sellers -- inside salespeople, key account managers, territory salespeople, and other specialties that have unique skill sets. AND it's okay to remain in one role for an entire career. Inside sales doesn't have to be a career path to outside sales... Different skill sets, different professional paths. Jason also contributes to the Sales Education Foundation along with Professor Neil Rackham.]

We in selling deserve to be a profession and recognized as such! The public needs protection from the worst of us and we deserve the respect earned by the best of us. Let’s lift the bar. Here is my checklist for sales professionals. How do you rate yourself?

1. Dress: Professional and conservative (minimal jewellery and perfume).
2. Manner: Friendly, positive, polite, accurate and thoughtful.
3. Business cards: Always have with you and treat with respect.
4. Empowered: Use the language of leadership, delivering outcomes and managing risk.
5. Appointments: Arrive five minutes early and have an agenda. Talk only one-third of the time and ask insightful questions. Always take notes and agree to follow-up actions for progression. Anchor every meeting with follow-up correspondence.
6. Pen and notebook: Always have with you and take notes (think Moleskine but yes, you can use a tablet)
7. Accountable: Deliver on every [small] commitment.
8. LinkedIn profile: Professional picture and state your value, not just your history.
9. Voicemail: Professional greeting that confirms it’s actually you. Return all calls and respond to all messages.
10. E-mail: Relevant subject heading. Don’t copy people unnecessarily. Proofread before sending. Signature with complete contact details on all e-mails.
11. Proposals: Structured, concise, tailored and relevant. State what you want them to do and why it’s important. Proofread for grammar and spelling.
12. Presentations: Avoid PowerPoint hell (endless slides about you). Make it all about them (relevance and their benefits).

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: Lauren Nelson

13 Bold Unconventional Sales Maneuvers

1) The Intercept

The prospect is just about to buy so you could call this the perfect storm of compelling event meets multiple trigger events. Combatively, you demonstrate the value of your solution seconds before the photo finish and steal the ball aka the deal right out of the jaws of the competitor. It's risky but if you can spot a flaw or establish FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) it can be leveraged. Savvy executives can be susceptible to ambivalence and will often kick tires the hardest in the 11th hour. Many software vendors combat this with price drops but the more sophisticated play is to position your solution on value. The intercept can shorten an 18 month sales cycle down to mere weeks when executed correctly, especially if this is an existing account and the need is NOW.

2) The Hail Mary Pass (or Kick)

Lob a call into the CEO's office, make their EA your best friend by giving them the respect of an authentic pitch, and leverage this demand creation to schedule an on-site meeting between your own CEO and theirs. This takes boldness, courage and selling internally to get buy-in. The true wingsuit base jump here is to land the 1-on-1 yourself. (Combine #3 + #4)

3) The VITO Envelope

Send a plain manila envelope by courier with a one pager inside, hand addressed to the key executive and signed. Another way to execute this is via FedEx delivery to the Very Important Top Officer (VITO). They'll typically always read these because it's so rare. The letter sets-up a follow-up call. More tips on the structure of the letter in the Anthony Parinello classic. Paragraph one, WIFM, what's in it for them: move from value proposition to value creation. Lead with provocative insight and demonstrate you've performed thorough due diligence of the business issues.

4) The Neighborhood Technique

Book your ticket to a key city in your territory. Then e-mail your prospect that you'll be in the area. Schedule multiple "neighborhood" on-sites or leverage this technique to book meetings around a conference. This is most effective one week out.

5) Conference Within The Conference

Reserve a meeting room in a classy hotel across the street from a major conference. Schedule a dozen appointments over a couple days with key executives. You can leverage this to replace an entire quarter of on-sites. The executives are already there! The other ingenious method is to get a free floor pass, diagram the entire multi-level conference floor blueprint out and then strategically approach every single relevant booth moving past the greeters in front to the executives in back. Goal yourself to collect 300 business cards, shake every hand and add them all on LinkedIn with a personalized invitation; keep a running log in Evernote. (Ideal strategy for Dreamforce and OpenWorld).

6) Head To Head Pilot

If you truly have the better solution, challenge the incumbent to a fulfillment duel. Commence bake-off: may the optimal solution that drives the greatest efficiency win! Make sure you agree upon fair success criteria and eliminate any inequities or handicaps. It must be an apples to apples comparison in your apple pie contest.

7) The Full Blown Referral

Bold move but put their key decision makers directly in touch with your biggest client. YouTube video testimonials can be a fall-back. Believing is seeing!

8) The Reverse RFP

Build an RFP criteria document that realigns your strengths based on the selection criteria and question-set. Offer to provide prospects free consulting on the RFP process to ensure they are asking the right questions. Tip the scales in your favor.

9) "Your Baby Is Ugly"

Candidly level with them on what is broken by diagnosing their problems before hand. Be honest about how dire the situation is. Nobody likes to admit their "baby is ugly" but in business, it's refreshing and highly 'Challenger Sale' to respectfully call out the elephant in the room of a missed quarterly target, flawed network architecture, broken website or fatally flawed SFA.CRM implementation. Hint: read between the lines of the annual report.

10) Walk The Halls

With an existing account, literally take a desk in their office, post-up for a day and get to know everyone in the building. Walk the halls and hang out at the water cooler. Without exaggeration, I've seen this technique work selling into finance where relationship building is still crucial, especially in key account management.

11) Be Over-The-Top Remarkable

I saw a top sales executive out-dress everyone in flawless suits, ties, pocket squares and shoes you could see your reflection in. Peacock much? Well, that was his thing and he authentically owned it. I saw another salesperson who was an expert at swing dancing who would clear the middle of the dance floor at company hosted client events. Another way to be remarkable is to recommend an idea that is fundamentally transformational to their business model. Push the envelope. Be willing to leave bright shiny collateral behind, like a massive poster board with a Vizio diagram of your latest collaborative brainstorming session. #unexpectedvalue Brian Lipp writes in,

A colleague once sent a cake to a CEO to land a meeting with 'we can help you eat more cake' on it, had engaged the EA beforehand, it worked.

12) The Ensemble Close

Be the conductor of the symphony. Despite the size and stratification of this global firm, a top performer at a software automation company won huge deals by looping in almost every conceivably party in the selling organization, even the CEO and CTO. Much to the chagrin of lower performers, so many stakeholders on both sides were invested in the deal, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy it would close and the deal even grew mid-closing! That guy always got the top performer award at every kickoff. (Not so coincidentally, he was also the aforementioned King of Swing!!)

13) Ghost Protocol

One of the people I am mentoring is achieving amazing sales results and in my view it's because he has gained the trust of his own CEO to the point where he is leveraging the CEO's LinkedIn account. This takes significant trust from the CEO but is a great example of achieving maximum support internally as you then go into the marketplace at the highest possible level with an 'insight' and VITO-style of approach. Another mentee unleashed a ghost army via a stealthy B2B lead gen startup that leverages an AI engine to effectively generate a dozen warm C-Level intros per week, skyrocketing fresh pipeline so sustainably, it's temporarily supplanted the need for hiring an analog inside sales team to augment it!

Strategic selling is about engaging early at the most senior levels and some of these tips can help in that regard. But if you're late to the dance, many of these ideas may spark ideas to execute before choosing to simply qualify-out.

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: Skydive Lillo

 

Why Men Are Great Listeners – Gender Matters

Men are brilliant listeners – if they think there is the slightest chance of money or sex at the end of the conversation. Seriously, gender differences are real and the greatest disservice done to the advancement of women during the women’s liberation movement was the notion that men and women are the same. Women and men are of equal value but there are real variances beyond the obvious physical characteristics – the brains of men and women are radically different and so is their brain chemistry. Diversity in any team is essential for success – cultural, personality and gender. The strengths of both women and men should be harnessed by valuing difference when building balanced teams; this is how to avoid blind-spots and ensure we relate to everyone on the other side when we sell or negotiate.

Self-management is essential for success, and communication skills are the foundation on which influence is built. Whether you’re in sales, support, service, management or leadership; understanding yourself and others is prerequisite in any leadership role. Here are some interesting facts about gender difference, and then some recommendations for both men and women in the workplace. None of this is politically correct, but maybe I can get away with these comments in the USA because I’m from Australia.

Firstly, men have larger brains than women but size plays no role in human intelligence. This is despite some men proclaiming that a bigger head and brain makes them smarter. A women once said to me in a course I was running: “It just shows that men have thick skulls or fat heads – either way it obviously makes it more difficult for them to hear.” There was lots of laughter in the room, especially from me.

Male and female brains are physiologically different, evidenced by the fact that the female brain has 40% more connectivity between the hemispheres (corpus callosum). In computer speak, this faster bus speed between the two CPUs helps account for the way the female brain can multi-task so well. Another important factor influencing gender difference in communication is that the centers for key brain functions occur in different regions within women and men. These diagrams below are simplistic but paint the picture.

Note that the adult male brain is less connected for words with emotion. Note that the adult female brain has words being generated in multiple areas on both sides of the brain, and that words are well connected with emotion. On average in a day, a women speaks almost three times more than a man, but the volume of words does not necessarily equate to more effective communication.

In addition to ‘brain wiring’, gender chemicals also play a significant role in how men and women think and act. Testosterone, for example, produces competitiveness and aggression, while oestrogen and progesterone create feelings of well-being and calm. Testosterone levels are up to 20 times higher in men than in women. Testosterone is literally a mind-altering anabolic steroid, creating competitive aggression. The male brain is wired for focus and men generally possess the following comparative traits:

• Stronger spatial ability (map reading, mazes, etc.)
• Poorer peripheral vision than women
• Less receptive to non-verbal communication
• Independent, self-reliant, competitive and focused
• Focused on things and theories
• Seek power and dominance
• Less equipped to explore and express feelings

Doctors Anne Moir and David Jessel were pioneers in the field of gender brain science and documented ground breaking research in their book, BrainSex. Much has been been built on their work over the years and here is some of their commentary on men. In most of the key senses, he hears and feels less. He is more single-minded because his brain is more compartmentalized. He does not notice distractions (page 101). By contrast the bias of the adult male brain expresses itself in high motivation, competition, single-mindedness, risk-taking, aggression, preoccupation with dominance, hierarchy, and the politics of power, the constant measurement and comparison of success itself (page 159).

The female brain has significantly greater connectivity across the two hemispheres to support ‘multi-processing’ of the higher order functions. Women typically possess:

• Stronger verbal ability
• Superior peripheral vision (literally more connector rods in their eyes)
• See, hear and feel (tactile sensitivity) more than men
• Greater sensitivity to non-verbal cues
• Better memory for faces
• Natural desire to focus on people and relationships (socially interdependent)
• Stronger natural awareness of ethics

Here is some of the BrainSex commentary on men by Doctors Anne Moir and David Jessel. [Female] superiority, in so many of the senses, can be clinically measured… it is what accounts for women’s almost supernatural ‘intuition’. Women are simply better equipped to notice things to which men are comparatively blind and deaf (page 19). [A woman] sees more, and remembers, in detail, more of what she sees… she is better at imparting, and receiving, the social cues of body language… she has a better memory for faces and characters. She understands, better than a man, what a person means, even if that person is apparently saying nothing. That’s because her brain is specialized for this very function… the right hemisphere of her brain that controls the emotions is better connected to the left side of the brain that controls verbal expression than it is in men. The intuitive, if you like, is more in touch with the communicative skills (page100).

So imagine if you could create a hybrid male/female brain… Angelina Jolie meets Sylvester Stallone… scrub that thought, too disturbing. It’s impossible anyway because the female chemicals of oestrogen and progesterone combat and largely neutralise testosterone. But you can assemble teams with balance and finesse. Every corporate board, every leadership team, every sales organization should be comprised of men and women. The very best leaders value and harness difference in the pursuit of common goals through cohesive values.

Here are my suggestions for any man in business if he wants to overcome weaknesses naturally inherent in their brain wiring and brain chemistry:

• Seek to develop awareness of non-verbal communication cues
• Recognize and value the differences and strengths that women bring to any business situation
• Learn to communicate your feelings as well as your thoughts
• Develop relationships in the workplace of genuine friendship, and without any ulterior motives

And here are my suggestions for any women in business who also seeks to excel in the world of business, politics or community service.

• Provide context before detail
• Start at the end, lead with ‘why it’s important’
• Be focused and outcomes driven
• Prioritize issues and actions
• Dress for business and do not distract with jewellery, cleavage or hem-line
• Consider lowering tone of voice (if necessary)

For women, it’s about how you lead, not about how you look. By all means use your femininity but never allow sexuality to be a factor… you’re better than that. One of the best sales managers I reported to in the early years of my sales career was a woman. She was very tough, more so than any man I’ve worked for, but genuinely cared about everyone in her team. She didn't accept crap from anyone – her employees, her boss or her peers. She was strong and confident and I once witnessed a senior executive from one of our resellers make an inappropriate comment to her. It was misogynist bullying but she didn't take the bait. I asked her about it afterward and she smiled as she said, “Women should never lower themselves to the standards of men.” Touché.

If you’re engaged in M&A due diligence or a negotiation or a sales presentation; always have a balanced team on your side. Women naturally read what’s really going on between the lines, between the glances, and the body language; far better than men. Women are better naturally wired for morality and communication. In this regard, the best leader for the job is probably a woman, but only if she is qualified, goal-driven and focused.

Before I share the last interesting fact, I will tell you another story. I once asked a friend of mine how he and his wife were going. He answered with: “Don't know. I haven’t spoken to her for 3 days.” I was concerned: “Did you have a bad argument – is your marriage okay?” He responded laconically: “Everything is fine – I just didn't want to interrupt.” The story is not true but the fact is that on average women speak 20,000 words a day and men only 7,000. They talk things through and listening is a skill we all (male and female) need to develop in our personal lives, business and professional selling – practice active listening in everything you do by taking a genuine interest in others.

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.

Photo by: Craig Sunter

My Plane Crash and Lessons For Leadership

I was a pioneer in the ultralight movement in Australia and owned a small aerobatic biplane. My passion for flying was tempered with a healthy respect for the dangers of aviation and I knew that deaths in sport aircraft were mostly attributed to ‘pilot error’ or the lack of correct ‘owner maintenance’. Usually a polite way of explaining inexperience, over-confidence or shoddy modifications leading to catastrophe.

On the day of my crash I was part of a group of 5 aircraft travelling cross-country to a fly-in, cruising at 2000 feet above a huge plantation pine forest. I was at the rear and slightly above the others. Everything was normal – then it happened. The engine screamed to maximum revs and the needle on the tachometer swung wildly beyond the red-line. I immediately urged the nose down to maintain airspeed while reducing the throttle. The engine idled and I slowly reintroduced power but it raced away again with little throttle input. The propeller was simply free-wheeling in the air-stream and it was obvious that something in the drive system had failed.

The twisting narrow dirt roads below were tell-tales that the terrain was treacherous but in the distance ahead, the forest ended and semi-cleared scrub took over. A little further to the left of the shortest route out of the forest was a cleared semi-rural area that looked viable. I should be able to make it to the clearing, but if I can’t I’ll adjust my glide-path to the right and land in the scrub, I thought.

My father’s words echoed in my head: “Any landing you walk away from is a good one.” Don’t try to save the plane; stay calm and you’ll live, I thought. For a brief moment I toyed with the idea of deploying the ballistic parachute which was connected to the aircraft in the event of structural failure. But the vision of an uncontrolled spiral decent into a pine forest, with the aerodynamics of the wings fighting the parachute, had no appeal. I killed the engine, switched-off the electrics, tightened my seat belt, fastened the chinstrap under my helmet and offered a distracted prayer while I focused on managing the glide. No radio and no-one noticed by forced descent – I was on my own.

My plane had a 16’ wingspan and was a home-built, flown under Australian Air Navigation Orders (ANOs) for ‘ultralight’ sport aviation. We were largely self-regulated and the rules stated that we were always to stay out of controlled air space and below 500 feet. But height is safety – it buys you time if there is an engine problem. This is why I was cruising at 2,000 feet but well below the 10,000 feet controlled airspace above.

I had lost about 500 feet since the drive system failure and was heading for the clearing just beyond the edge of the forest. Keep it flying, maintain airspeed, don’t stall, stay focused, relax. All I could hear was the haunting sound of wind whistling through the rigging wires but I was steadfastly calm. I had made dozens of practice forced landings in previous ultralight aircraft and on two occasions had real emergencies during take-off. On both occasions I had managed to walk away and I believed I could do it again – if I maintained control.

Now at 1000 feet, I was feeling decidedly nervous about my ability to make it to the clearing on my current glide path. At 500 feet it became apparent that I wasn’t going to make it. I made the decision to abort the clearing and moved the stick to the right and headed for the nearest exit point from the forest where there was a small dam in semi-cleared scrub. The tops of the pine trees were looming and on my current glide slope I was going to be 70 feet short of escaping the forest, but I still had good airspeed. I focused on the tip of the trees 50 feet in from the boundary where I would begin to wash-off air-speed before finally escaping the forest. At least, that was the plan.

I was now down to 100 feet above the tree-tops and 150 feet short of the last of the pine trees. I had 55 knots and I eased the stick back, decreasing my rate of decent, but now sacrificing airspeed. Stall was always preceded by sluggish controls and would occur at 32 knots; the point at which the wings failed to produce adequate lift. I knew that stall-induced spins were always fatal close to the ground.

My air-speed was down to 40 knots and I was holding a reasonable sink-rate with 25 feet to go. The controls were beginning to feel mushy; 35 knots! I pushed forward on the stick to improve airspeed and in doing so gently brushed the tip of the last pine tree. Airspeed – I must get more airspeed! I only had 60 feet of height with a small dam in front of me and light bush beyond. I pushed the stick forward and dived for the dam to create more airspeed and lift – pull back!

The relative silence of flight was shattered. My tail wheel snapped off with the impact of my heavy three-point landing and the suspension was hammered. After careering only fifteen feet, my main wheels dropped into a deep bulldozer rut that had been formed during dam construction and the whole under-cart was torn away. The fuselage skidded forward on its belly and lower wings. The propeller and right engine bearer snapped causing the engine to collapse, destroying the firewall which partially lodged against my right leg. The journey was abruptly halted when the lower left wing collided into a hidden tree stump. The wing-spar was snapped close to the fuselage and my landing had come to an abrupt end only forty feet beyond the dam. The picture in this post is the actual crash site.

The silence was eerie but I could hear my heart pounding with adrenalin. I wondered if I was okay and wiggled my toes, successfully confirming that I had feeling. The splintered fire-wall and engine however was pressing against my right ankle. I tried to bend my knees but my lower right leg was jammed. I removed my helmet and dropped it to the ground. I noticed helmet paint on the instrument panel and could smell fuel. Petrol vapour is explosive and I focused on how to extricate myself but removing my right leg seemed to require the agility of a contortionist. I twisted and leveraged myself out leaving my shoe behind. The fuel tank had not ruptured but the feed line had been split, fortunately not dripping onto the exhaust. There was very little fuel due to the fact that I had has closed the tank valve in the air.

As I looked back at the pine forest from in front of the aircraft, I remember feeling euphoric. Great landing – I’m alive and uninjured, I thought. I then walked toward the forest and stood on the dam, surveying my makeshift runway. It was not a pretty sight, seeing the wrecked plane from behind. Five feet either side of my chosen path were enormous half-buried trees covered by light re-growth, making them invisible. I surely would have shattered my legs if I had impacted any of these head on. This was the era before mobile phones, and I walked for about forty minutes to a remote farm-house to be greeted with suspicion before being allowed to use the phone to call for assistance.

I’ve come to understand that the outcomes we experience in life are largely determined by the way we think, feel and act. Bad luck is often not that at all. Every profession has an ethos, a code, and tried and true set of beliefs and values that drive it forward. There is no better example of continuous improvement and leadership excellence than aviation. Airbus, Qantas and QF32 are great examples with Captain Richard de Crespigny and the flight crew of QF32 embodying the very best of leadership design and behaviour.

In my own time as a private pilot, there were truisms I embraced: All the runway behind you is of no use at all (always take the time to taxi all the way to the end to provide as much runway in front of you as possible. If you have an engine problem, you’ll be able to abort or land more safely). You only have too much fuel on board if you’re on fire (always have maximum reserves in case you get lost, the head-wind is stronger than anticipated or the weather turns bad and you have to find an alternate field).

I attribute my survival to a number of things; one of them being a definition of success for forced landings that my father taught me: “Any landing you can walk away from is a good one.”

There was another definition that also helped save my life, imparted by my flying school instructor. Just before I went solo he asked me: “What’s the definition of confidence?”

I thought for a few moments and gave him what I believed was a good answer: “When skill and experience come together.”

He shook his head. “No. Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.” He went on to say that almost every recreational pilot who crashes, does so because they were over-confident and too casual with their pre-flight and weather checks. “Never over-rate your ability and never take anything for granted – dirty fuel, an insect in a pitot tube, anything.”

I chose to own that definition of confidence for flying and business – it has saved my life and won many deals. It has helped keep me safe and successful because I constantly think about what could go wrong and I seek to be vigilant and prepared. I regard confidence as the paradise of fools.

My father first taught me to fly and beyond attitude and definitions, he emphasized the necessity for both knowledge and experience. He educated me about engine failures by encouraging me to experience them in controlled circumstances. I had glided my plane all the way onto the runway many times. Practice, experience, correct thinking, and a positive attitude, all played a role in my successful landing. The way we feel about ourselves and our purpose in life largely determines how we respond to opportunity and adversity. We need to be positively expectant, yet our confidence can be misplaced. Years later I reflected on what I had learned from flying, and how my flying instructor’s definition could apply to business and all aspects of life.

In truth, my aerial mishap was no accident – it was 100% my fault. Months earlier I had broken a propeller on a heavy landing that I mismanaged. I replaced the propeller but did not pay attention to the drive-system. A hairline fracture had been created in a $2 bolt and it was only a matter of time before it failed – I should have replaced it. Sound familiar? Just like Air Crash Investigations, catastrophe is often the cumulative effect of small problems or innocuous cascading events. Here are the five lessons for leadership that flying has taught me:

• Pay attention to the detail – it’s where the devil lives. Strategy and planning means nothing without great execution.
• Be positively paranoid, always think about what could go wrong and be prepared for every contingency.
• Always consider the unintended consequences of an action or event; think things through.
• Remain calm, think clearly, and maintain situation awareness when things go wrong. Leadership demands clarity.
• Stay on task, filter the noise and don't let distractions take you away from what’s important.

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.

Maing Image Photo by: Tony J. Hughes' crashed Cessna

Syllabus for Sales Mastery

Books are a uniquely portable magic ~ Stephen King

The average CXO reads over 50 books per year while the average reader digests around 6.

Success leaves clues. If you have a long commute or flight to visit clients in the field, turn off the music, video games and talk radio and transform the car, train or plane into a mobile classroom. In the spaces between each frenetic day, you are given the golden opportunity to develop subject matter expertise by which you can draw unique compelling business insights to share with your dream clients. I believe the secret to career success in any field in 2015 will rest squarely upon a solid foundation of reading and writing prolifically. Sales is often called an "art meets science" because it is based on the empirical frameworks of strategy, communication, persuasion and value. One of the most common questions I get in response to my writings and when I speak and consult is,

Tony, what are the most cutting edge, advanced and sophisticated books you suggest reading in order to master strategic selling methodologies and frameworks that drive world class revenue results?

In addition to 10,000 hours in the field, these are some of the literary gems that formed the cornerstone of my thinking in devising my RSVPselling meta-framework that I've utilized over my three decade career, recently to help close a $100MM deal.

Corporate Solution Selling

SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham
Scientific study of sales and excellent tactical sales methodologies, still the bible on questions and active listening

People do not buy from salespeople because they understand their products but because they felt the salesperson understood their problems. - Neil Rackham

Power Base Selling by Jim Holden
Business sales strategy

Strategic Selling by Miller & Heiman
Complex sales planning

The New Solution Selling by Keith M. Eades
Strategic solution selling

The Challenger Sale by Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson
Sales and marketing [finally] come together for effective strategic demand generation

The world of solution selling is almost definitionally about a disruptive sale. It’s not that you’re asking customers to buy your product and put it up on the shelf with all of the other products they’ve bought. Rather, you’re asking customers to change their behavior—to stop acting in one way and starting acting in another. - Matthew Dixon

Business Leadership

Good to Great by Jim Collins
Business and personal leadership taken to Level 5

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber
Principles of business success

The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
Success in business and life

Principle-Centered Leadership by Stephen Covey
Sustainable success and self management

Built to Last by James C. Collins
Business leadership

Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one—and not necessarily the primary one. - James C. Collins

Making The Difference by Pat Dixon
Women and men in the workplace

The Emotionally Intelligent Manager by David R. Caruso and Peter Salovey
Making emotions work successfully in business

Communication

Brainsex by Anne Moir & David Jessel
Gender difference from extensive scientific study

Personality Plus by Florence Littauer
Personality understanding and interaction – Christian aspects

New Business Development

New Sales. Simplified. by Mike Weinberg
Timeless principles for action based new business development

The best intentions, target account lists, and powerful sales weapons are useless if we never launch the attack. - Mike Weinberg

Proactive Sales Management

Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan & Michelle Vazzana
Revolutionary methods for leading KPI driven management

Crisp Sales Objectives are the difference between a chaotic selling effort and a precision selling effort. - Jason Jordan

Persuasion

Influence: Science & Practice by Robert B. Cialdini
The fundamentals of what drives human behavior and exchange

Trigger Events

Shift!: Harness The Trigger Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers by Craig Elias & Tibor Shanto
Introduces the concept of Won Sales Analysis vs. Loss and highlights the three types of trigger events including which are most powerful to spot and leverage to rapidly open and accelerate deals

Consultative Sales

Mastering the Complex Sales by Jeff Thull
Diagnostic business development, forming a value hypothesis and proving out value clarity

Execution & Time Management

The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Sean Covey & Chris McChesney
One of the few books written on execution and WIGs (achieving your wildly important goals!)

The kind of scoreboard that will drive the highest levels of engagement with your team will be one that is designed solely for (and often by) the players. This players’ scoreboard is quite different from the complex coach’s scoreboard that leaders love to create. It must be simple, so simple that members of the team can determine instantly if they are winning or losing. Why does this matter? If the scoreboard isn’t clear, the game you want people to play will be abandoned in the whirlwind of other activities. And if your team doesn’t know whether or not they are winning the game, they are probably on their way to losing. - Chris McChesney

Readers are leaders and sales is yet to be a recognized profession, seldom taught in school. Get a mentor who gets results, embrace a consistent, simple sales process, remember "you play like you practice" and apprentice under someone you admire who admires you in return. As traditional enterprise field selling is supplanted by self-service, automation, new inside paradigms and customers are closing in on 90% of the way through the purchasing journey, I believe that knowledge will still be the ultimate power to future-proof you for a budding career in strategic sales.

For should it come to pass that our ranks are reduced by 75%, the remaining 25%, to quote a friend 'will not only be in great demand, but be filthy rich due to our abilities.' - Renbor

In your opinion, what are the books and resources that are timeless that can make or break a career, quota and calling in sales? I'd love to hear from you in the comments below. For my vision on how these all fit together, please also check out this post on the Evolution of Selling and this more in depth article on Solution Selling vs. Challenger Selling. In closing,

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. - Da Vinci

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: Eirik Stavelin

How To Hire Sales People. Sales Aptitude Test

At the end of this I’m going to gift you my sales aptitude test, absolutely free. For the last four years it’s only been available to those who purchased my book but I’m on a mission to give much of my IP away and live the law of reciprocity. I’ve been in professional selling for 30 years. During that time I’ve been a sales rep, sales manager, sales director of public companies, and managing director of my own businesses and also for global operations in Asia-Pacific. I've written a bestseller on selling and taught it for a university and run dozens of courses. You’d think I would be masterful at hiring the right sales people. But I have a confession to make; it’s incredibly difficult to hire great sales people and I’m probably no better than the majority of others leaders seeking to build effective teams to drive revenue.

What defines the right sales person and how do you screen-out the dross? Once you’ve got a short-list, how do you get past the masterful façade being projected? How do you differentiate the candidates? I’ve written about the importance ofcultural fit and how to best execute a job interview but for the employer or recruitment consultant, how do you get the truth about the real person, their capabilities, their values, and their defects?

Without doubt, the biggest mistake a manager can make is to hire the wrong person. This is because it damages your own personal brand and wastes huge amounts of time and emotional energy in managing the person out. It also has devastating consequences on revenue and lost momentum. Finally, it can also damage corporate relationships in the market-place. Never hire the best of the bunch. Only hire the right person – the one you feel strongly will be successful in the role and fit within your team culture. Here is what I regard as the best process for hiring and also rules that should never be broken if you are committed to managing risk.

Go beyond the job description and qualifications. Forget generic job descriptions! Instead write an ad that talks about what the person is expected to do and how they will need to execute. Ask them to write a one-page letter, attaching their CV, highlighting why they are the ideal candidate to join your team. Don't accept something that merely plays back the advertisement and obviously reject those who do not have prerequisite qualifications and experience. Does their CV provide evidence of consistent high performance? Have they been with past employers for sustained periods of time? Do they possess the necessary qualifications and experience?

Progressive screening to qualify out. Now that you have an initial group of candidates who have the necessary qualifications and responded as requested; it’s all about a progressive qualification process to continually screen down to a short-list.

Can they write? If they could not write a good letter (structure, grammar and spelling) or failed to do basic research and adapt their pitch, then reject them immediately. The covering letter and CV should also have been tailored to show relevancy for the role. You don't want a generic sales person and neither do your prospects and customers. Seriously, this is important because if you hire someone with poor written communication skills, you will forever be editing or rewriting proposals or correspondence – you don't have time. Worse than this, they will submit losing proposals that miss the mark with prospects. In complex B2B selling, written skills are essential.

LinkedIn social proximity. LinkedIn is phenomenally powerful and it is likely that you know someone who knows someone who knows your candidate. Use your network to check the candidate out informally. Do it as an ‘off the record’ conversation, nothing official. Ensure the conversation is nuanced and that you pick-up the subtext of commentary about the individual. None of these conversations should be with a formal referee listed on the CV and certainly not with their current employer.

Psychometric Testing. The next step is to conduct psychometric testing (intelligence and operating style) and personality profiling (if not incorporated into previous). Here is something controversial: I don't hire amiable personalities for business development roles – they have no chance of executing concepts such as Challenger Selling. Anyone who has a personality that avoids conflict or tension will be high maintenance and struggle to execute – you will forever be pushing them. The HR department will not like this, nor will they be in favour of informal ‘social proximity’ conversations but you cannot afford to get the hiring decision wrong, and you must take all necessary steps remove risk from the hiring process.

Written Exercise. Can they write under pressure? Before you run your ad, take the time to create a realistic sales scenario with a two page brief supported by a subset of your marketing collateral. This should be tailored for the sales role (field sales versus inside sales versus pre-sales / solution architects). Only give the candidates 24 hours to respond. For a business development role, ask them to write a two page executive summary that would lead a formal proposal. You’re looking to see whether they can construct a relevant, concise, professional, logical, evidence-based letter that focuses on business value rather than features of your company or functions of your product, service or solution.

The Interview. This is where you are laser-focused to determine cultural fit. They have already demonstrated that they have the skills and qualifications to do the job but now it’s all about their values, work ethic, attitude and personality. Put them under pressure and ask them to provide real examples of how they’ve dealt with difficult situations. Ask them these kinds of questions:

• How do you define ‘strategic selling’ – what do you do that makes you ‘strategic’?
• What was your biggest loss and what did you learn?
• How do you qualify an opportunity?
• What was your biggest win and how did you create value and manage risk?
• What’s your approach for building pipeline?
• What are the professional development books you’ve read in the last 12 months?

Integrity trap. If the candidate comes from a competitor, ask them what they can bring to role beyond their skills and experience. Ask them what IP they possess that can help them accelerate their success. If they say anything other than their insights, domain expertise and relationships; don't hire them. Anyone who offer to bring a contact database, pipeline report, or any other private and confidential information belonging to your competitor will most likely do the same to you when they leave. Integrity is everything – yours and theirs. There are also obvious legal issues you could become embroiled in. Your personal and corporate reputation is everything so reject anyone who shows poor moral judgement.

Reference checking. Never delegate reference checking and never make it an afterthought. Always select the people you want to talk with rather than the ‘buddies’ listed as referees on the candidates CV. You know they will say nice things and report back to the candidate afterward. Instead select the most senior contact of a large deal they won, or a senior contact with their biggest channel partner. The hiring manager (the person who the candidate will directly report to) must do the reference checks personally, over a coffee if possible rather than a phone call.

Again, hiring the wrong person is the biggest mistake you can make. It will cause you enormous pain and damage your own career. When in doubt about a candidate, don’t hire them. Wait, be patient, get it right. If you use a recruitment consultancy, make them earn their fee by ensuring they understand your culture and that they define value in fewer CVs rather than more CVs. Don’t let them bombard you with marginal candidates or send you anyone that is not both technically and culturally qualified. The very best recruitment consultants work with a ‘less is more’ ethos and invest the time with you to understand your culture.

I promised you a free Sales Aptitude Test for complex B2B selling and here it is.http://rsvpselling.com/content/sales-aptitude-test. The password is RSVPYES. You’ll need to register on my website so that your results can be saved and you can take the test as many times as you like. I won't use your details to market to you – no spam, no newsletter, no contact. The self-assessment takes approximately 50 minutes but there is no time limit and it can be completed in multiple sittings. Upon completion, summary scores are provided for the following seven competencies in professional selling:

- Sales Process
- Communication
- Knowledge, Attitude and Skill
- Opening
- Closing
- Objections
- Opportunity Development

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: Sam Churchill

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