Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Leaders”
We suggest you make two very important lists before hiring. Make one list of requirements to be successful in the job and another list of traits that will ensure failure. Once you are clear about what you want – and what you don’t – the right candidate will become clear. Continue reading
This week I was listening in on one of our virtual Sales Wisdom workshops. After hearing the candor between the instructor and the participants about how to respond to a particular question, it struck me that there is a big difference between the “right answer”, and the “right conversation”. The role play in the workshop takes real world situations that the participants experience, and strives to have them rethink their automatic responses in tense or confrontational situations. The hope is to engage the conversational partner in a meaningful dialogue rather than directly answer their question (which often can shut down the conversation). Naturally some participants are a little uncomfortable with this approach and have been inclined to answer the question right-out, especially when they did not see any adverse effect on their or their company’s position by doing so.
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When we are leading, influencing, being called upon as trusted advisors or salespeople, the perspective we choose to take in a situation is fundamentally linked to our success or failure in that situation. Perspective tends to drive how we react instinctively, and our reactions drive our attitudes and our behaviors which then drive our outcomes.
Cold Calling is a CEO agenda item. I have become convinced of this as I work with various companies in a broad variety of businesses. As leaders of our companies, if we don’t establish the culture of picking up the phone and calling people we don’t know, it just doesn’t happen.
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“There are 3 types of strength” I tell my kids. “Physical strength, intellectual strength, and the strength of your willpower.” I’ve been telling them this because I see them stuck in a lot of the frustrating patterns of behavior that I also see in myself… and that I’ve been working on continuously for years. So much of our performance in our jobs and in our roles in life will ultimately be tied to our strength of will. For a lot of my customers and coaching clients, their will is tested most when they move from an operations or technical role (engineering, consulting, etc.) into a role with sales responsibilities. It is very often willpower, not knowledge, that limits our performance.
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There’s a lot of rhetoric available about how to become someone’s trusted advisor. It is a coveted position to be in – both in terms of how it strokes our ego as well as being a prime position from which we can grow our relationship (and our role/business) with that person. From my experience in coaching some very smart people, I’ve noticed that being smarter doesn’t particularly create the trust, credibility, or relationship you might seek with your counterpart.
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One of the fundamental fallacies that I’ve observed in selling is the idea that information is the key reason people buy from us. I have watched the sales people, sales engineers, techies, and executives I coach share with their prospects how great their technology/process/approach is, how superior their features and benefits are, how the speeds and feeds are this and that, and continue with a litany of details about the product or service in question. It is as if they believe the information has some magic ability to cause the prospect to buy. It isn’t so!!!
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Sometimes a company’s smartest people are rather handicapped when it comes to situations requiring tact, persuasion, influence, leadership, conversational elegance, emotion, etc. This white paper looks at the numerous roles and situations in which this behavior arises, the problems it causes, the workarounds that get implemented to mitigate the issue, and the actual solutions available to generate long term behavioral change in the personalities and interpersonal skills of, well, anybody who shows that narcissistic, know it all, fear of rejection, talks too much, talks too little, talks about the wrong thing, dysfunctional behavior in the workplace. Continue reading
I had an interesting conversation yesterday that really illuminated the distinction between the work that we do versus the value of that work to our customers. I was discussing a potential new project with a large customer – a global consulting and outsourcing firm. We got to talking about a competitive vendor who may also be considered for doing the project – a much larger and more established firm with deeper reach into my client (and with cheaper prices).
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Click image for PDFAs 2009 draws to a close and we anticipate a new year and a new decade, we are filled with gratitude for those who have made our success possible. So in this spirit we wish to tell you all, simply and sincerely, Thank you! And as is the tradition during this time of year, we stumbled upon …
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