Do you know the difference between a "wonderful human being" and a "good salesperson?"

Knowing the difference between a good human being and a good salesperson is mission critical for any sales based organization. More often than not sales managers and business owners donning the sales manager's cap get the two confused and hire someone because he or she is a wonderful human being and then wonder, 'Why are my sales numbers down?" Women want beautiful healthy skin but buy skin care products because they smell nice and the packaging is so attractive! Business leaders will often hire a team made up of people that make them feel comfortable and actually look, think and talk like them even though they have been talking about the importance of diversity for innovation and new ideas. Universities hire academics with the best research credentials and put them to work teaching MBA students even though carrying out research and teaching the managers and leaders of tomorrow are two completely different skill sets. So, yes the problem is not confined to the sales department but I would argue that the problem is more prevalent in sales than in other places and also the impact of poor hiring practices in sales is higher than in other areas. This is because sales is 100% a revenue generating function; no selling no revenues and no revenues no profits and no growth. If your company has been guilty of hiring of hiring a lot of good human beings who are not really good sales people, do not worry. It is not too late and you can still do a lot about it. 1.The first step is to get the wrong people off the bus, get the right people on the bus and the right people in the right seats 2.Give your salespeople the right goals and the right incentives 3.In addition to individual goals and incentives create some team goals and incentives 4.Create a sales report that compares the goal vs. actual numbers for each salesperson and then publish it daily - salespeople see each others' numbers 5.Have a regular weekly sales meeting 6.Have a bi-weekly or monthly one-on-one with each one of your salespeople 7.Let everyone know that not meeting goals for three months in a row will make a salesperson immediately eligible for termination 8.Repeat step 1 until you have a solid team of A players who can perform to your expectation 9.Now do everything to retain these A players and see your revenues grow We still have not answered the question about how to get the right people on the bus. The answer is quite simple really - during your interview process ask the candidates to actually do right there, in the interview, the exact thing that you are hiring them to do i.e., SELL. •Ask them to sell you a bottle of water •Do some role play and ask them to handle your objections •Ask them to describe an ideal sales process •Ask them to come up with a high-level sales plan •See if they send a Thank You note after the interview and follow up •Ask them for help with something and see if they have a friendly helping nature •Tell them you don't want what they are trying to sell you and see how they take rejection The key to making this type of an interview work is to make it as close to the real situation as possible. And then remember, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck!

Removing the shroud of mystery from the topic of GROWTH Part 2

Once you have a great team together, you need to make sure that the team has the right people in the right role (right people in the right seats on the bus). The team also needs to have a clear,powerful and inspiring mission, a superordinate goal and a central core purpose. If you put the personal core values, beliefs, habits and behaviors of your entire leadership team together, you will get what I would call your cultural engine. It is this engine that drives the culture of your entire company. Growing a company while running it successfully requires a culture of disciplined thought to begin with. How would you know if your company has a culture of disciplined thought or not? What is disciplined thought anyway? Disciplined thought is one part of a four-part approach: CONNECT,THINK, PLAN, DO. It is the discipline that ties your plans and actions to your company's central vision, mission and values. It is the discipline that translates the aspirations of a company into clear, actionable plans. Without disciplined thought a company will lose the battle to keep things real. What would happen if you skipped the think and plan steps and went straight from CONNECT to DO. Well, at the risk of sounding facetious, you will essentially be caught up in a DO LOOP that will soon become a DOOM LOOP for your company. You will forever be building castles in the air, if your company survives that long. What are the elements of disciplined thought? Disciplined thought involves: •Clearly defining the problem and agreeing upon the problem definition as a group •Gathering the facts of each case and understanding the magnitude, the significance and the potential impact of the problem •Processing the information through the six thinking hats •Understanding the source of the problem and identifying the root cause •Clearly defining the goals and the purposes of the organization •Developing and exploring as many alternatives as possible and identifying trade-offs •Understanding what it will take to successfully execute the project •Developing hypotheses and testing them The above are just a few examples of disciplined thought. Implicit in the phrase 'disciplined thought' is also the idea that the team and the leader have the emotional fortitude and ego strength to be patient and wait until the facts are known and the analysis is done before taking action. This is a key discipline that any company that wants to grow and be successful needs to master. A study conducted by the Gallup Corporation with Deepak Chopra as the lead researcher found that there are three key components of happiness: 1.The Brain Set Point - do you see the glass as half full or half empty? (41%) 2.Your living conditions or external conditions (9%) 3.Your day-to-day choices and decisions (49%) Applying this to business, 50% of your business well-being and success is determined by the strategic choices you make every day. A culture of disciplined thought helps you make the choices that determine the remaining 50% of your business well-being. "Think before you leap."

If your product or service is so great, why are there not many takers for it?

In spite of the hundreds and thousands of books and articles being written about marketing these days, the average small business owner is still not very clear about what marketing is and its true purpose. Let me see if I can reduce all the marketing knowledge down to its basics for everyone's benefit. I will use as few words as I possibly can in attempting this exercise. I will also describe the fundamental marketing problem of product or service adoption. In the end, I will provide some recommendations on how to increase product/service adoption. First, three basic questions: 1.Let us say you know of a population of people with a specific set of common needs and wants 2.Let us also assume that you know what these needs and wants are 3.You also have something that meets their needs and wants Three follow-up questions: 1.Does that population of people know its needs and wants? 2. Do they know of your solution? 3.If they do, why are they not going for it? If they know their needs and wants and have been presented your product or service but are not going for it, then it could be because: 1.They are not able to make the connection between their needs and your solutions 2.Your solution meets their needs but not their want 3.They do not approve of your solution because your solution conflicts with their value system 4.Your target customers’ existing mental models of what a solution should look like do not match your solution To ensure that your target customers actually adopt your product or service, remove the barriers to product/service adoption by: 1.Connect the dots for your customer 2. Identify and fulfill needs AND wants 3. Identify sources of misperception and eliminate them 4. Identify faulty mental models and correct them 5.Offer your customers a tiered cost structure

Be a purple cow, but be a purple cow that produces white milk which tastes good!

I hear this a lot from business owners - "Differentiate or die." And, I agree. You certainly need to be a purple cow* and stand out. But, being purple is only piece of the puzzle. It helps you to get noticed and to attract potential customers but being purple does not necessarily lead to long-term relationships based on value exchange between the buyer and the seller. Purple cows can also attract people who don't really care about what the purple cow has to offer. In fact, purple cows may attract people who are just looking for the next big purple cow to marvel at and get entertained but have no appreciation for the core of the purple cow's offering. I would suggest that you start off by first being relevant to your customers' needs and then paint yourself purple. In other words, inside the purple cover, there should be something that truly meets or exceeds the needs of your customers. And, if your goal is to build a company that will last into the future and thrive on change, then you should also have a marketing engine that continuously keeps track of changing customer needs and wants and can continuously morph your product or service to stay relevant in the midst of change. Of course, that also means tomorrow's cows may need to be green; not merely to stand out, but to survive!

Removing the shroud of mystery from the topic of GROWTH Part 1

Let me ask you a basic question: what is a company? No, really, what is a company? A company is fundamentally a collection of roles executed by one or more people. Let us say there is a company ABC services Inc. that is generating annual revenues to the tune of $5 million and employs 10 people. In other words a team of 10 people is generating $5 million. Let us say the company now wants to grow its annual revenues so that it is generating $10 million and it wants to do this over the next 3 years. How do you think the company can do that? Well, another way of looking at the company's current reality is that its team of 10 people are performing at a $5 million level. This performance is essentially a function of the current knowledge, skills and capability level of its people. If this company has to generate $10 million annually the company is going to need a team that looks quite different from the one they have now in terms of its knowledge, skills, experience and capability. Step-by-step approach to putting together the team that will grow this company into a $10 million organization: 1.Identify a few very successful, high-growth $10 million companies in your industry 2.Look at the composition of the leadership teams running these companies 3.Clearly identify the roles on their teams 4.Most importantly look at the CEO, CFO and COO roles 5.Identify the knowledge-level, skill sets, qualifications and experience associated with each role 6.Compare this with the roles in your current team 7.Identify the gaps in roles and competencies on your team 8.Develop a strategy to acquire or train for missing competencies 9.Develop a project plan and a time line for filling in the missing competencies This is the first piece of your growth strategy. Steps 7 and 8 represent a lot of heavy lifting. Get expert help if you are not sure how to do this. I use a much broader definition of "competency" than is normally used. By competency I mean the set of abilities required to achieve the desired goals. It includes technical competence, emotional intelligence and fortitude, ego strength, vision, ability to execute, ability to make the right choices everyday, level 5 leadership skills and the operating mental models. Here is Jim Collins video on the concept of "First who, then what." http://www.jimcollins.com/media_topics/first-who.html#audio=77

Do you suffer from "confrontationophobia?"

Through coaching presidents, owners and CEOs I have observed that the successful business owners and executives have one thing in common - the courage to face the brutal facts and also the courage to bring the brutal facts home to the individuals they are working with. I just googled "Fear of confrontation" and stumbled upon a very interesting website called "dailystrengths.org" where one of the readers described her phobia of confrontation as below: "I am terrified of confrontations! I just freeze, and stop thinking. I put them off and put them off, knowing I am just making it worse in the end. I can't seem to help it. I just cannot instigate a discussion that I know will end in a confrontation. It terrifies me. So, when there is something going on that I need to talk about, I just keep my mouth shut, and let it get worse. When the confrontation comes, I just let it wash over me, until I can get away from it." At least she has a clear idea of what ails her. Most people are not even aware that they have a fear of confrontation and will not even admit to it. Now, why is the ability to confront facts and people such an important skill for business owners and executives to have? Well, for one, running and growing a business is a constant daily struggle to keep things real: •keeping projections of future growth real •keeping sales forecasts real •keeping conversations with employees, partners and customers real •keeping products and services real There is a constant battle raging between facts and fiction. It is not always clear if the big fire you are getting ready to fight is a real fire with real smoke or a figment of someone's imagination. To make matters more complicated, business realities are always changing and businesses and business owners are under a constant pressure to respond appropriately to changing customer needs, wants and preferences. Given this dynamic nature of business, the ability to see and confront brutal facts and the ability to bring brutal facts home to employees, customers and partners in a clear, firm and yet compassionate way is a critical leadership skill that you simply cannot afford not to have. In coming blog posts I will talk about how you can identify if you have a fear of confrontation and what you can do about it. "To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." - William Shakespeare

Has nature mandated that people should work in teams or do we have a choice?

As a systems and Industrial engineer, I realize that one can design a system that can do many things but not everything. Making tradeoffs is an integral part of any design process. The cheetah can run at lightning speeds during the chase but has to sit down to catch its breath immediately after the kill ..i.e., it cannot eat its kill right away. And while its catching its breath, a bunch of hyenas in the vicinity, those shameless scavengers of the wild, can make off with the cheetah's hard earned dinner! So, it appears, every system has some inherent strengths and invariably some vulnerabilities or flaws. The lion is an awesome hunter on the ground, can climb trees and is a demolition machine in a fist fight, but it cannot fly, it cannot stay underwater like the crocodile and it cannot bring down trees like the elephant. The PC cannot do everything the MAC does and vice-versa. One also cannot help noticing that there seems to be a certain logic to every natural system. The cheetah's body, hunting technique, habitat, choice of food, social life, parenting techniques...everything seems to fit together. So also in the case of the lion and the crocodile. What if the cheetah hired a consultant to discover the best practices of the lion society, the croc society and the maybe even the human society? Would the cheetah then idolize, say the lion and become a lion? My guess would be that the cheetah can adopt the best practices of all the societies on earth and become a better cheetah. Thus, we need to find what our core is and hold on to that while we can incorporate the best aspects of the people we admire or the people we would like to be...only to grow into a better version of what we are. After coaching presidents, owners and CEO's of high growth companies in the US, I have to the conclusion that the scientist CEO may never become the leader CEO and the pharmacist president may never become the leader president. Wisdom lies in first recognizing your core and then compare it with the needs of your organization and where there is a gap between what your organization needs and what you can provide individually, its time to make room for other people who can complement your core. In any case, no individual can single handedly provide everything that an organization needs. It appears that nature has mandated that human beings must work in teams and diversity is not a luxury but an absolute necessity - diversity in terms of personality type, education, experience, skills and ethnicity. What do you think?