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October 28, 2010
 By Mark Faust
It is effective management and not charismatic leadership that builds sustainable competitive advantage, and fosters the process of innovation. Now, more than ever, better management is needed to grow companies and organizations.
Charismatic leadership is a dangerous fad, and “leadership charisma” is not a sustainable basis for successfully building a company or managing any type of organization, salesforce, team or even a nation.
At the heart of many floundering organizations and teams is the struggle between charismatic leadership versus an effective management process. Where is your company focus?
When a salesforce surrenders to a charismatic leader; throws hope behind an individual and not process, charisma and not logic, speeches and not dialogue, then we are surrendering our own responsibilities, and thus our own freedoms.
 Leadership What does this mean to you as director over a salesforce or team in a business? Focus less on your style and desire to inspire or motivate your salesforce with emotive effort and focus more on the process of management, continuous improvement, systematic innovation, logic, and focus on the customer. As a result you will build sales, profits, and the quality of your team.
If you are an owner, president or top manager, you must focus on effective management not leadership. Here are the operative meanings of these two words:
• Management – maximizing the strengths of resources around you (human and otherwise) while minimizing the impact of the weaknesses in order to reach agreed upon objectives.
• Leadership – motivating groups or individuals to follow your direction, vision or desires bya variety of possible means (charisma, persuasiveness or power)
Hitler, Mussolini and Mao were powerful leaders, but poor managers who followed few of the essential elements of effective management. They led by threats rather than mutual dialogue. Perhaps, you could think of a few more modern “leaders” currently in power around the world. Are they good managers though? Truman on the other hand, was not known to be a good leader, but he is recorded as a president who was one of the best “managers” in the presidency, and was highly effective, despite some mistakes politically he may have made.
Washington and Lincoln were not known for their charisma as much as they were known for earning and giving respect. They didn’t dictate as presidents, they managed.
By this time you may be thinking, “This is just semantics.” No, this is a battle to shift the focus in business from too much weight being put on relationship and charisma to more emphasis on the process of value creation, systemic innovation, logic and focus on the customer. For example, great managers are good facilitators who help their team continuously clarify and refine objectives and the measures of success.
Are you helping your salesforce or teams continuously refine their individual and organizational objectives?
Here are steps you can take to become a better manager and help your salesforce or organization eschew the lure of charismatic leadership.
1. Work with the team to clarify goals…quarterly not annually.
2. Take responsibility. Don’t feel threatened by ambitious subordinates, but celebrate their triumphs with them. Don’t point blame on others. Understand that responsibility ultimately lies with you (be the anti-Donald Trump).
3. Earn trust by being consistent, managing expectations, clarifying and reinforcing clear values that your organization believes in and helps build.
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 By Rye D’Orazio rdorazio@rayandbarney.com
Are you conveying the emotion and feeling you want your prospects and clients to understand when you promote your company, products and services? Are you sure they are hearing your message? Brochures and even websites only go so far. Media advertising and promotion is expensive and may not reach the audience you are after.
Wait, this is a blog about sales performance and sales talent, why are we talking marketing and media?
While I was doing research for a presentation to Non-profits Leaders on how to better leverage technology to communicate to donors, sponsors, volunteers and staff, Brad Ristas, a partner at Ray & Barney Group and fellow blogger on this site, sent me information on Pecha Kucha. Now that is a name to catch your attention no matter what it means.
Check this out as you can use this technique for just about anything you want to convey. We have all done presentations, used PowerPoint and talked a lot, but think of 6 minutes and 20 slides and you nailed what you want to say and how you want to say it.
Here are comments and a great example of how to use this technique from well know author Daniel H. Pink contributing editor at wired.
Let us now bullet-point our praise for Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein, two Tokyo-based architects who have turned PowerPoint, that fixture of cubicle life, into both art form and competitive sport. Their innovation, dubbed pecha-kucha (Japanese for “chatter”), applies a simple set of rules to presentations: exactly 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds each. That’s it. Say what you need to say in six minutes and 40 seconds of exquisitely matched words and images and then sit the down. The result, in the hands of masters of the form, combines business meeting and poetry slam to transform corporate cliché into surprisingly compelling beat-the-clock performance art.
The duo — Dytham is British, Klein Italian — invented pecha-kucha four years ago to help revive a struggling performance space they owned. The first presentations were such a hit that they began hosting monthly pecha-kucha events, boozy affairs at which Tokyo architects and designers showcased their streamlined offerings to crowds of hundreds. Now there are pecha-nights in 80 cities, from Amsterdam and Atlanta to San Francisco and Shanghai. Why? Dytham believes that the rules have a liberating effect. “Suddenly,” he says, “there’s no preciousness in people’s presentations.” Just poetry.
We are pursuing this to launch a campaign about a new service offering around our Talent Services for Sales Performance and Professional Part Time work force. We will send this directly to our target prospects and current clients to educate them on the topics and the value they could gain. We are also looking to use it to promote and recap workshops.events.
Being able to convey emotion and feeling along with the value a product or service provides and to do it in 6 minutes, people will watch, people will listen.
What do you think? Do you have an emotion and feeling you want to convey along with the traditional value, return, etc.? Can you communicate in 6 minutes? Could pecha-kucha help you sell?
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October 21, 2010
By Mark Faust
On the wall of an employer hung the sign, “In business as in life it’s all about three things: 1. Relationships 2. Relationships 3. Relationships.”
While recently participating in a conference of sales VP’s, we heard from researchers and panels of successful sales leaders who shared some contrarian insights. University professors Dr. Chris Plouffe and Dr. Arun Sharma shared a variety of insights from their extensive research on selling and sales effectiveness.
One discovery was that younger salesforces tend to outperform older salesforces. Now this did not mean that a sales team of twenty somethings will consistently outsell those with ten or twenty years more experience, rather sales teams with average ages lower than companies very similar to them consistently had better results. They mentioned the younger salesforce performance factor because it related to another more important finding; effective relationship sellers are significantly out sold by those that focus their selling on added value.
In fact, sales reps that are not as well liked as others on a team are often significantly outselling reps who rate very high on rapport and relationship because they sell value well.
 Relationship vs. Value Selling This didn’t mean that relationships were not important; rather, what these new studies are showing is that in our new economy, selling value is more important than ever, and selling value is getting better results.
This has brought to mind the many experiences of our smaller agricultural company clients whose most experienced reps have been losing business to “young punks” from the larger multinationals. While our clients weren’t often certain why they lost the business, and the sales reps were pointing to that “special deal” or “special pricing” as the reason for the lost business, our research finds otherwise.
As is customary in our work, we interview champion customers, customers with potential for significant growth, and lost customers. The customers lost to the large multinationals do occasionally mention certain “deals” they may have received or some attractive pricing offer, but more often than not, they speak in terms of how the package offer is a better overall value and how they feel and hope that by going with the new supplier they are going to make more money. While some will sometimes point that the “more money” is coming from a lower price, in the same breath those lost customers are asserting that the quality, effectiveness and result from the product and service is basically the same, but most lost customers believe that there will be an increase in performance/value/profits/net return. They were consistently sold by the “young punk” on value, not relationship.
So what can you do to insure that all of your team is improving their focus on value?
The Value Quota – Metrics for Success
In the dashboards and metrics that we help sales management build to better manage their team; we often suggest a measurement, coaching around and inspection of Value Clarification. Rather than starting the focus on “how much do you think you can sell customer X?” start the focus on “how much added value do you think you could bring to customer X and why?”
How do you think your customers wish you would sell them? Wouldn’t they prefer that you created a list of not just the biggest customers, but a list of those whom you thought would have the most financial gain from your solution? Suppose target lists were managed not on the supplier’s benefit and profit, but on the customer’s. Your sales will go up; we know it, because we see it all the time.
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October 17, 2010
 Dublin Entrepreneurial Center
Increase Your Sales Performance Workshop Series
Ray & Barney Group and Pipeline Coach
“The first indication of an improved overall economy will be driven by the Sales groups in Organizations expanding on their Sales Forces because they have to.” Now that’s a quote that could be made by most companies in this current environment. The real catch is that the companies who aren’t building for this environment internally…..and right now…..are going to be the ones left in the dust.
An early morning meeting took place last week at the Dublin Entrepreneurial Center entitled “Learn How To Hire Top Sales Talent: The First of a Three-Part Series on Boosting Sales Performance in 2011.”
Don’t worry so much if you may have missed the first one, because you can redeem yourself by participating in one or both of the other two more scheduled before the end of the year. So read on and then put them into your calendar now. They’re free events too!
Ray & Barney Group combined presentation efforts with Pipeline Coach donating both their time to facilitate the program and outlining the Systems, Skills, and Talent necessary to have a chance to compete in this new “Post-Recessionary” marketplace. Some of the rules have changed over these last couple of years and the stakes have been raised significantly as to the importance of making not just good, but great hires in your Sales Forces.
Rye D’Orazio, Partner, for the Ray & Barney Group kicked off the meeting by stressing the importance of taking the time to provide assessment tools for managing Talent in an organization minimizing the chances of an expensive mis-hire. Providing realistic examples of practical decision making processes, this portion of the presentation drew plenty of questions from those in attendance, prompting Rye to show not only another Partners’ sample of Talent Assessment Plans, but an array of Ray & Barney Best Practices developed over several years and designed for just this purpose.
James Rores, Founder of Pipeline Coach, stressed the need for tending to a business Culture not only in the field of Sales Management, but overlapping Culture with the importance of Assessing good talent and then Onboarding the new employees into the company in a manner that makes the most sense for the individual and the organization.
James originally comes from a 3rd generation family Hospitality Business and has naturally been drawn to dealing with Sales Organizations as a career choice. I know from talking to him that his expertise is in helping his client companies make informed, yet progressive decisions in how they manage their business processes. James is always dealing at a level of “Coaching” clients towards Predictability and Repeatable Processes. This fundamental belief leads to closing the gaps between perception and reality for most businesses. He’s excellent at practical planning and grinding through to laying out a practical blueprint for companies whether they are a $1 billion Sales Force or a Privately-held, closely managed Entrepreneurial small to mid-size business.
Rye D’Orazio also originally came from a 3rd generation family business before heading down the path of building a successful IT Business. After selling this company he has worked for the past 10+ years studying business Life Cycles, trends in the business environment, and working with individuals and companies who are trying to build a better life for themselves in gaining a better understanding of Work-life balance.
Both chemistries complemented each other well by sharing ideas and real-life samples of specific events triggering outcomes that changed the courses for customer accounts. You could easily see how the synergy of the two people and companies in Ray & Barney and Pipeline Coach made for a good match for this session. You could see by their going back and forth within each others’ work how they both share the Passion and the Knowledge of these changing dynamics. It was a learning experience.
All in all it was certainly worth the time and effort to get going just a little earlier than usual and head over to the DEC. I am told that the next 2 events promise to be even more interactive with the attending organizations and individuals and ideas on expanding topics and specific questions are more than welcome before and during the event.
Most everyone in the room indicated on following up with them that they would be attending the rest of the series, which should be a vote of confidence that this event is continuing to head in the right direction.
So now you can put it on your calendar.
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The 2 remaining events in the Series will also take place at the Dublin Entrepreneurial Center, 7003 Post Road, Dublin, Ohio 43017.
| SKILLS: How to use training and coaching to cultivate a winning sales culture
Thursday, November 4, 2010 7:30am–9:30am
SALES SYSTEMS & MANAGEMENT: How to make process and technology work within your sales team
Thursday, December 2, 2010 7:30am–9:30am |
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October 14, 2010
By Brad Ristas
 It really used to be just plain old fashion common courtesy to return a phone call. That was of course until voicemail became so prevalent that our frontline defense system become a voice messaging system. “Hi, you’ve reached the phone of…”.
Most of us grew up thinking that not returning a phone call was rather rude. It was obviously someone having something to say to us, and in the case of running a salesforce, perhaps a potential sales opportunity.
So what really happened to what used to be both a common courtesy and a very effective way of conducting business? We’ve diluted it by embracing non-responsiveness as a practice. It’s going to end up coming back to haunt all of us.
I have to ask: How many long term relationships were built from original cold or referral calls? Most, I would say. Many clients and business associates we’ve retained over the years began with that cold, blind call that said, “Hello, my name is…and with a few minutes of your time…” Today, all of that is no longer the case. And I believe we’re missing good business and sales opportunities.
It’s so in vogue now for organizations to say they are utilizing social networking tools ranging from Facebook to LinkedIn. Is there so much more we can do at these levels? Absolutely, we have just begun seeing what these tools can deliver. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great.
But understand its place as a business tool and sales tool.
Beware of how social marketing tools give us permission to NOT answer the phone. It is OK to occasionally not answer the phone, but not returning the call? Not good.
Try answering the phone a few times on your own and engage in spirited conversation. Challenge the caller. Be congenial, but be honest if you only have a minute or so and get to the bottom of what you both want out of the call. But for gosh sakes, Communicate!
If you don’t, in time you will likely be retreating behind a wall of emails, text messages, meaningless PowerPoints, To do lists and the like that you think will solve your problems. You don’t have a clue what you’re missing.
That next call coming in from someone you don’t know could be the result of that person having done some really heavy duty research and determined that they can be of service to you. They might be able to help your business or be of some valuable service to your organization. Give them the time of day and don’t throw that baby out with the bath water.
I’m afraid there are thousands of potential opportunities and business relationships out there that will never even get to first base because of the acceptability of NOT returning a call or email if we just don’t care to.
So next time, especially if it is me calling, please answer the phone.
Then you can put me on your speed dial for caller ID.
Then you can email me and I will email you.
Next thing you know we’ll be LinkedIn and not removed by 3-4 connections.
Shortly after that we’ll be exchanging family vacation beach pictures on Facebook.
So, could you please just simply answer the phone?
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