self development

Embrace First

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Embrace First

The best business advice I ever got was about 10 years ago.

She hauled me off into a side room and said “At least embrace the culture first, even for just a few minutes, before you go ahead and change it”.

Seems timely these days.

A lot of us have new responsibilities. Some even have a new job. A whole bunch of us have new customers we are calling on. And even if you don’t have any of these, it’s a new year and most of us have something or someone we are charged up to go about and change.

But here’s what you gotta know.

You have to take those “few minutes” first to embrace, to learn, to build some trust, to analyze what levers you can really leverage. Those few minutes can be literally a few minutes, but more likely it’s longer than that. It can be an hour, three days, a week, two weeks or even a couple of months. And that’s the problem some times; – we have so little patience once we’ve decided that change is needed.

But remember that that culture or department or team or customer you are trying to go change already exists. It’s a real thing. It’s not like you are starting from nothing. It likely has some people, processes or strategies that do work or are wicked smart or have already brought the effort forward from someplace that was much worse.

Ignoring that is stupid. It’s not about going slow. It’s about going smart.

So take the “few minutes” to embrace it, them or the group. Get close. Listen. Don’t’ talk. Take a few steps to the right or left and embrace again. Get close. Listen. Don’t talk. Rinse and Repeat.

And when you think those “few minutes” are up and you’ve listened enough, force yourself to add a few more.

Change is big and change is good but change works far better when you start with an embrace.

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

3 Little Words That Will Rock Your World

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It’s not “I love you” cuz’ I don’t.  Not really. 

But no worries ( and sorry if I just rocked your world :)), those aren’t the 3 little word types I’m talking about anyway.

Actually, I’ve got 3 sets of 3 little words that are a heck of a lot better than what we usually say.

These words are perfect for pros in Sales, Marketing, Training, Leadership or just plain ol’ Life in general and should be used all day long.

So good are these 3 little words that they will Rock Your World.  They will do better than that and make Glorious your entire 2012 if you chose to use them liberally. 

So the question is, do you want to improve your performance, have people really love you more, crush quota or get promoted this year?

Oh Hell Yes!  (Um…These are any of the 3 little words I am talking about- but I like them).

Here they are.  Print these and tape this across you’re the face of your smartphone- that way I know you won’t forget them. 

  •  “What I Can”: Oh to have a dollar for every traditional phrase I hear of “there is no way” or “I can’t” or “It is not possible to hit that date” and I’d be super rich.   “What I can” followed by the word “do” or “say” or “give” is so much better.  Simple psychology here- focus on the positives or what is within the realm of possibility.  The opposite i.e.  “can’t” is an automatic tension raiser.  Use “what I can” this in sales, coaching and collaboration and people, no matter what you do, will see you as someone who always says “yes!” 

 

  • “What We Believe”:  This is especially for you sales and marketing types.  Usually we blather on about “What we have” in the realm of the products or services, or options and promotions etc.    Instead of starting your sales and marketing conversations with “What we have are ____ and ____…” replace it with “What we believe is small businesses should take advantage of______ “or some phrase like that that espouses intelligence.    Customers/ Prospects know your darn products (heck they went online before they called you!).  What they want is advice and counsel.  They want a company or a person that has an opinion, a belief.  It’s less risky that way.   They want to hear what you believe.  Do this and you will make more sales.

 

  • “What Most People”:  Throw away everything else – these are the most powerful words in sales,marketing and training.  There is comfort (especially in a sketchy economy) in what other “like” people or businesses do.  Just lead with these 3 words!   You don’t need to explain it, tee it up or cringe before you say it.  “What most people buy is the _____”.  Or “What most people say is within 120 days they see great results”.   You get it.  But no one really says it often enough.  People and businesses (especially some say, small businesses) wont’ move till they know it works and most others are doing or using it.  Say it 50 times a day or more and you win!    

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

 Mark

3 Frogs

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3 Frogs

I had (and have) other posts ready to go for the New Year -all with of course the usual focus on helping you and me “grow the business”. 

But I am stealing shamelessly from the message my local Parish Priest gave yesterday at church services cuz’ his message was frankly better than anything I could have written for today.

“There’s an old adage about three frogs” he said.   “Three Frogs sat on a log and one decided he would jump.  How many frogs are left on the log?”

Some answered “Two!” but most mumbled or said nothing.

“The answer of course, is three.” Father Paul said.

I had never heard of this 3 frog adage but the message was both obvious and stunning to me.  Father Paul filled in the blanks in his short sermon.  Decision is not action.  All of your dreams and goals and resolutions and lists we make this time of year aren’t worth much if we really don’t act upon them.

I’m guilty of this.  For 10 years, I’ve written and kept my New Year’s resolutions and goals and plans and lists nearby me at all times.  I look at them often.  I’ve achieved many.  Ok, some.    I looked at them all in fact this last week just to prepare for setting this year’s goals.

Last year I made the decision to limit my 2011 goals to 3 actionable things versus carrying about 10 each year in which I strived.  Each of these three things was important.  If I am honest with myself though,  I got just one achieved and partially one of another so I batted about .400.  Pretty sad for a whole year and only 3 big dreams.

I’m not going to be that unmoving frog this year.   And I’m not going to pat myself on the back for just “deciding” to do exciting and different things this year and that I was able to write it down and look at it. 

 Nope, I’m jumping this time. 

 Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark.

Great Gifts For Sales People

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4 Gifts Your Sales People Need This Year

This one is for all the sales leaders and coaches out there….

Looking for that perfect little something for your salespeople this year?    Look no further.  And no worries, I checked this list twice.

Hands Free Gift Cards:  Instead of adding more for your sales persons’ hands to do next year; take something away.  Entering orders in 7 systems, 3 tracking sheets, 2 CRM’s and the partridge in the pear tree isn’t selling.  That’s called data entry.    Sales people need to read and think and speak and sell and then read and think and speak and sell some more.   I get the efficiency and information gathering piece and you do too.  But I know there are gifts out there, be they tools or  support that can take some burden off the hands.  More Hands Free = More Sales.

25- $5 Expired Scratch Tickets .   Ah…. the joy of wishing and praying and of hoping the luck comes in will be dashed (Holiday pun intended) when you hand over these 25 expired loser tickets.  It’s one of the better gifts for sales people because even though it is downright mean, it’s a great message that that kind of good luck don’t work no more in sales.  Every scratched ticket does not get you closer to a winner, that’s for sure.  Same for unconscious dials & smiles!  Sales is not about spraying (or scratching) and praying!

A Coaching Promise.  No -, a real one!  Not the same old coaching you do all the time – you know that kind right?  The kind where you talk about the numbers and say cool stuff like “What are you going to do to hit those numbers?”  or” “I’ve noticed a decline in your performance lately, What’s up?” conversations.  Heck, Siri can coach like that.  I mean a coaching promise on the “How” to hit those numbers.  I mean a coaching promise that has you show, preach, teach and demonstrate how it’s done.   Real Specific, Real World and Real Time means Real Sales.

A Stronger Point of View:   I don’t mean yours, I mean your company’s.  Selling today is less and less about discovery and digging and probing and uncovering the darn needs of a prospect.  It’s more and more about being attractive.  Sales people need the powerful story; the powerful differentiators and the powerful point of views that attract prospects to the sales rep and into the conversations – not push them away.  Boiler Room & Glengarry Glen Ross are so 90’s – it’s 2013 and the world’s a lot smarter, a lot less trusting and just plain different now.

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark.

 

Tebow

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Tebow

I honestly don’t know much about this guy compared to my daughter (23), who would if asked say “Yes please!” and marry him by 10 am today if she could.

Oh, I do love football.  But weekends are busy.  I rarely carve out 4 hours in continuous chunks on Sundays and frankly the Broncos aren’t on much where I live.

But I do know it’s not how it’s supposed to work.

He’s going to get killed out there.  He’s not doing it like he’s supposed to.  He’s going to have to eventually get on board with the way it’s done.  He’s not the future of this team.  He’s not saying things like everyone else.  He’s not going to win.

Except that he does.  And last night, stunningly so.

So maybe it’s not about doing that thing or those things better than anyone else.  Maybe it’s more about ridiculous confidence.  Maybe it’s more about the power of obsessively visualizing a dream than we ever thought.  Maybe its more about fearless dogged hard work and that same fearless dogged conviction about something or anything but yourself.

Look around you now.

Think hard at the people working next to you, or those lined up as applicants in the lobby of your building, or those who work in the little satellite office you’ve visited once or twice.  Maybe a kind of Tebow like person is right there thinking the wrong way, saying the wrong stuff and just plain working off a whole different playbook than you and me.

Those folks may not know it yet ( or know it without a doubt),  that that is not how it is supposed to work.

Maybe now though, you should hold off telling them that and just keep it to yourself.

Till next time,
Grow The Business.
Mark

Hard Work Redux

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Hard Work Redux

It’s not unusual to go home now and need to study work documents, emails and Power Points all night long it seems just to be ready for work the next day.  It can feel like you are studying for a final exam.   And some neuroscientists say our ability to think and learn has outrun our ability to remember, execute and act upon what we know.  Yep, that feels about right sometimes.

Our customers’ and prospects’ knowledge relative to us is pretty clueless – at least in spaces we need to be good at.  That’s new.  Used to be everyone kind of knew what we knew.   Not much rocket science to understand what a business card was for, but a “landing page”?  Yeah -you see. 

I can’t sell my colleagues, learners or bosses on stuff and visions like I used to anymore.  Now, I gotta really teach em’ first; really spend a lot of time educating before I can get anyone onboard.  Nothing wrong with that.  Just the way it is now.   Bet it is for you too. 

Hard work used to be – let’s face it, a lot below the neck.  Push harder, run faster , show up more often, beat the other guy to it, keep dialing, keep smiling, drive all night, stay later, get in earlier,  never give up,  never take “no” for an answer,  etc etc.

Now the hard work seems like it’s in your head now.  Again.  Like it used to be.

Know more, read more, analyze more, compare and contrast more, strategize more, think more, share your perspective and insight more, study more, research more.

Ain’t nothing wrong with that.  That’s the way most of us were brought up in school.

Never thought the stuff you did in school would help you in the real world eh? 

Things are different now. 

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

Small Business Naked

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I’m not one for craft fairs. But I went to one recently and learned some awesome things.

Normally attending a craft fair, even if it is to only walk through as a courtesy to the organization running it, is worse for me than a visit to (gasp!) a mall.

Add the hustle of the Holidays and hundreds of sugar amped children screaming for Santa (fueled undoubtedly by the 4 tables of chocolate baked goods for sale) and I’d frankly rather drive ingots into my eyes.

But a couple of weeks back, I spent 45 minutes walking through one and it hit me hard.

These folks are Small Business Naked.

There’s no hiding in a storeroom or behind a “Closed” sign or even behind some HTML code for these craft table entrepreneurs. These folks have no choice but to lay out their wares right there in front of you, with no where to hide and are totally exposed.

These folks sit or stand inches away from their hand crafted “life long passions” or their “work that pays the bills” or in many cases as you could plainly see – they stand in front of what they feel is the very definition of themselves.

These naked small business owners have to have tremendous egos and confidence and pride like any small business owner we know but also have the unavoidable stress of being assessed and judged by hundreds or even thousands of people in a compressed period of time.

“Do you like me?” is what each business owner is asking you with his or her eyes as folks walk by. Meanwhile there is no wondering about the competitive landscape. Each naked small business owner needs to only look left or right to see who and what they are up against, fighting for those dollars in the strolling public’s wallets. No where else is the competition so “out there in plain sight”- with dozens of smiling yet competitive and competing small business owners inches from and across from, each other.

On so many levels, it’s clear that these folks who purchase a “craft table” face so many of the same hurdles the traditional small business does ranging from product market analysis to production, to inventory management, to marketing, to pricing strategy, to selling skills and the list goes on.

Except for one thing – They are out there exposed for 5 or 6 hours at a time, hiding nothing about who they are and what they do. That’s an awesome thing. I know now I’ll see these fairs a bit differently; perhaps as an opportunity for me to keep learning from some of the gutsiest group of small business owners out there.

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark

5 Things You Will Soon Lose (But It’s OK)

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Your Resume:  What you think of and how good you are about getting or keeping customers  (the only thing any employer truly should care about)  will soon best embodied by your blazing trail on the web via your blogs, slideshares, tweets, posts and commentary by businesses and customers you’ve influenced ( or not).  Your web fingerprint is a lot more credible than that single pager of spin we’ve grown to love.

 Your Thirst For Big Numbers.  You’ll soon despise having 500+contacts in LinkedIn or 10,000 followers on Twitter.  Instead you’ll yearn for being part of as many smaller networks you can.  It’s a bit sad, but we are embracing ever more tightly, the belief that “the bigger the network is the lower the trust of those within it.”  Tough business this world of trust is.

Your Memory:  Well, at least the loose data stuff.  With the Googlization of the world and how it changes how we use our brains (it’s a fact by the way)  to find out about stuff,  you’ll need just a swipe or a couple of spoken syllables into your (insert wicked smart battery powered thingy here) to get that memory jogged.  Good news it that neuroscience studies show it leaves more focus for the brain to work on more important stuff. 

Your Social Skills:  Tragic but we’ll soon be hard pressed to remember how to make eye contact, know which hand to lead with to shake hands and remember that unlike IM, you have to wait for someone to stop talking before sharing your thought.  Forget “Virtual Meeting”,  “Flesh Meeting” will become two dirtier words. Happily,  when we realize what we’ve lost we’ll get a fresh start on new and improved social skills. 

Your Boundaries:  It will happen.  Meeting at10 am.  Meeting at2:30 pm.  Go home at4pm.  Play with kids.  Nice dinner at6pm.  Watch reruns of 3 and a ½ men (Sheen came back from the dead- it was of course, just a dream).  Meeting at9pm with New Zealand staff.  Sleep.   Meeting at8am in UK client.  Meeting at10 am.   Rinse and Repeat.  Global is big. Global is different.  But global is money. 

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

 Mark

It Never Was About You

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In business to business selling (particularly small business selling), good sales people begin to fail when it becomes about them.  

I see it all the time but I don’t mean when it becomes about being number one, or hitting the goals or maxing out on commission plans;- ain’t nothing wrong with that. 

Consider rather, the talented Sales Rep who begins with a new company or now has to sell a new product.  He or she is trained and coached to present to the small business owner not only what this product or service does for them but what it does or has done for small businesses just like the prospect they are speaking to. 

That makes perfect sense because the credibility of the solution or product obviously is not with the Sales Rep – it’s with the common customer experiences of customers that look just like the prospect.  Just like it should be. 

But then something strange happens.   

As the sales person becomes more successful, they start to believe they can skip all that “other customer stuff” because after all, they understand it all now.  They start to omit the small business statistics, the stories and the testimonials of other small businesses in their pitches.   The sales rep begins to launch into monologues about what they themselves know, what they themselves believe and what they themselves recommend.  

But the problem is “they themselves” still have comparatively little credibility with a small business prospect and frankly boasting about their time or years selling the product is a poor substitute for sharing what other small businesses are actually doing.

It’s never good to stop leveraging with other like small businesses do.  Never.   Sure, your credibility and experience counts over time but know your audience (SB’s) –  Survey after survey will show “what others do” is a highly influential variable in the sales process with small business.

If you are a sales rep who had a great start last quarter or last year but are starting to tail off or perhaps you coach sales reps that have had a great start but are fading; think hard about why.  If there’s scant reference to other successful customers and what they do, then it’s time to pretend you don’t know much about your product and sell like that again. 

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

 Mark

Customs Fail and Redemption

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Maybe it was the long drive.  Maybe it was just the thoughts of the most recent conference call that ended on our cell phones.  Or maybe it was the pressure of seeing the guns they were holding. 

 Regardless, it was failure.

Years and years of living, leading, preaching and teaching about our company’s  Transformation had just fizzled into 7 tepid words.

“….Checks and forms and stuff like that……”

That was our answer given to the Canadian Border guards to the question “So tell me, what does Deluxe do?”  when the three of us attempted to cross into Canada on our way to the Mirimichi, NB site from Groton, Ma.  

Waah.  Wah Waaaaahhhh.

After our passports were inspected, our trunk searched and our vehicle registration scrutinized, we sped away and realized immediately the enormity of our missed opportunity.

Chalk it up to what some call “primacy” where under pressure we revert to what we learned first about something years ago.  Maybe that was it.   Or chalk it up to tiredness or laziness or just plain ol’ choking when you got your chance at the plate. 

Either way it was bad, very bad. 

All week in Mirimichi we skulked from meeting to meeting and pondered the blunder.  Elevator speeches are critical and come in all sizes and in all places.  Even, we sadly learned, at border crossings.  What Deluxe Corp really does today is so much more than checks and forms and stuff like that!   How could we have dropped that ball?  What does that mean about ourselves and our next “test” whenever that is?  Will we ever recover? 

3 days and 5 hours of driving later, we had our chance.

We were crossing back over to the other side. 

Sunlight glinting off the M-16 rifles slung low by the two border patrol agents, we sat patiently at the checkpoint awaiting our turn.  Even from 25 yards away, our eyes narrowed and locked on to the men almost daring them to ask us – no not ask –interrogate us about exactly what Deluxe Corp does! 

Our turn came.  We rolled slowly forward with shoulders back, heads held high and with  military like precision slowly lowered the three car windows to proclaim as one, our company Transformation and nail this chance at personal and corporate redemption.  

“And what does Deluxe do?” asked our chiseled, square jawed inquisitor.

“We provide online and offline marketing services and thousands of other products for all kinds of businesses and financial institutions.” 

The agent nodded his head and smiled.  It made perfect sense to him. 

Was it perfect?  No.  Did it capture everything we do or can do?  Heck no.   But by golly, it was real, it was different and it was tangible.  It couldn’t be some catchy slogan, analogy or metaphor or these guys for sure would have given us a different and more personal kind of search this time.  Bottom line- We did it!   It was a lead story about Deluxe that was so so far away from just “Checks and forms and stuff like that.”

Don’t do what we did on the way up to Canada.  Be ready.  Someday someone (hopefully not with guns drawn),  is going to ask you what your company does and how you answer that can be a very big deal.  

Don’t fumble the pitch or mumble the wrong story.  It can be the difference in how well you break through to the other side.

Till next time,

Grow The Business.

Mark