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November 25, 2010
 Who Moved My Seven Effective Good to Great Cheese Habits?
By Mark Faust
Every week a new book hits the shelves touting the “new” idea in management and “new” wisdom for business. Regarding the processes of business, human nature and true wisdom, nothing is new under the sun, just as that phrase dates back to Solomon.
 Instead of looking to faddish books start looking to your sales teams. Stop looking to faddish books and start looking to your sales teams.
True innovation revolves around where your focus lies, how unique your solutions to customers are, and how you define, promote and deliver the value you have to offer.
One of the best places to begin your accelerated growth fueled by innovation efforts is by listing and prioritizing your top constraints. You can begin by asking questions like:
1. Where are our greatest untapped sales growth potentials, either existing or specific new customers or both?
2. What do we need to improve to make more sales?
3. What are the top risk factors existing in our business in need of improvement?
…that said one of the simplest ways to ask your team about innovation opportunities is to just ask this one simple question:
• What are this company’s biggest problems that hinder our growth or salesforce?
Great question, but be ready for the answers. Oftentimes the top constraints to growing a business lie in its culture, talent management and talent engagement.
Talent engagement represents the extent to which the workforce identifies with the company, is committed to it and provides discretionary effort so that it can be successful. Engagement is a key leading indicator for high performance workplaces, improved employee productivity and subsequent turnover.
Often while top management is looking out the window into the marketplace to find the levers of growth, the linchpin to growth may be inside the heart of the organization, your people.
Innovation efforts should be holistic and involve improvements in how you serve your internal customer as much as how you might improve your products and services to your external customer.
If you are committed to growing the company through accelerating your efforts in innovation you must focus on the people within your company and work on ways to get and keep more internal customers. And no one has more impact on the talent and employee engagement of a company than the top echelon leader. As long as he or she is humble, innovation can begin. “Humility is the sire of all virtue” especially creativity.
An often ignored area frequently in need of improvement is the sales teams culture. Often a company culture is set by the attitudes and character of the top leader. The strength of a leader’s character can sometimes be the flip side of their weaknesses. One who is patient and a great listener may be slow to make a decision and hard charging visionaries can often be poor listeners and not focused on the people. These weaknesses tend to trickle down into the behaviors of the teams and ultimately build into the culture weaknesses that can become abrasive to both customer and employees.
When the answers to the “biggest problems” question are things like “no one around here appreciates…” or “the company tends to tolerate (fill in a negative term)” then you know you have to work on improving culture.
Two steps to improving culture are:
1. Ask your sales teams for ideas around, “What would make this company a better work place?” or “What would make your job more fun, or you more excited about coming to work?”
2. Put in place a character recognition program where you recognize people for good character qualities.
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November 18, 2010
By Mark Faust
Many companies have an old set of value statements, written by a founder or previous management teams. These values might hang on the wall or be passed into collateral. Whether these speak of the priorities of customers and service, or of treating others with respect, there are several steps any management team can take to make this essential element of your strategy fuel to accelerating growth.
Do you have conflict within your salesforce and/or is growth not as fast as it could be? What is the cost of conflict on productivity and effectiveness?
Most conflict within teams or a salesforce can be traced back to a lack of understanding or enforcement around company values. To have values work as a tool for improving teamwork and reducing conflict, having your team answer two questions each year in an all hands on deck exercise can help to reinforce the desired attitudes and actions.
These two questions are: 1. How do you and customers want to be treated in the workplace? And 2. How will we deal with it when someone doesn’t live up to these values?
Since people tend to support that which they help to create, everyone should have input into these answers.
To supercharge the values in an organization and transform them into strategic growth oriented values, also ask sales teams:
“How would we need to:
• conduct our work,
• work with each other and customers
and what kind of environment do we need to foster
• in our company,
• in our work
• and in our relationships
in order to absolutely maximize joy in the workplace as well as the growth rate, profitability and stability of this company?”
 Use these team oriented strategies to accelerate growth Have every sales associate openly discuss the top traits, qualities, ways, habits, environments, attitudes…i.e., values, that we need to live and work by, and list this out in a long list that will usually have several dozen potential values.
Then ask each individual to privately list out the top six values that they feel are the highest priority values that will most accelerate growth and improve satisfaction, happiness and profitability in the workplace. Then have sales associates team up in twos and agree on a top six together, then repeat the same process in teams of four, then eight etc. until the entire team has come up with what they have prioritized and agreed to what can then be a list of the top six to ten values that will create the optimum environment.
Conduct a similar facilitation around the question, “How will we deal with it when one of us doesn’t live up to our value statements?” the much tougher, but more important question, and yet key to ensuring that the values become reality.
The team or committee could work on also building out working definitions of each value, and perhaps examples. The final word-smithed document can be printed on a poster and ceremoniously signed by the entire team.
Leadership should regularly and publically recognize employees being good examples of walking out the values.
Most teambuilding exercises like ropes courses and falling backwards into your co-workers arms are a waste of time compared to having the team create growth oriented values and strategic growth objectives that will work to accelerate growth as these exercises help to Create Emotional Ownership, the C.E.O. of your growth oriented culture. I’ve seen this process double the size of companies while making it a much happier workplace. Are you ready to grow?
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November 11, 2010
By Mark Faust
One of the best shows on TV is Undercover Boss. Undercover Boss is a metaphor for life, business and God.
Getting choked up watching this show is as predictable as its format which guarantees laughs, tears and cheers all in a prescribed order.
The Process - In ways, every episode is the same, and yet each show is unique. The boss commits to going undercover to work in various jobs throughout the company for a week. Presenting the reason for the video camera shadowing him, as being part of some documentary. The employees have no idea who they are dealing with.
 Improve your Salesforce by Becoming an Undercover Boss Imperfect Gods – Management is like God, a God that can humble himself to walk in his salesforce’s shoes and in the end can deliver sales teams from pain and woes or remain insulated from the sales teams’ realities and become like a demonic guardian of pain and fear.
Trust – At the onset, the boss confides to his inner circle about the mission he is about to embark on. He assumes their trust and asks for final input before donning the armor of disguise. Like kings who led charges in medieval wars these bosses head straight to the front lines of the battle.
Humility – Management is part God, part hero, only to the extent of their humility. In every show, leaders walk in the same dirt and danger as their front line best, and are shocked at the sacrifice, commitment and love their employees have for their jobs, customers and teams. On most shows, we see grown men break down in tears at night as they retreat to their Motel 8 room as they realize how their insensitivity has allowed their best people to experience unnecessary pain and strife.
America’s Best Heroes Are CEOs – While it has become cachet to put the American businessman and especially management as the most iniquitous enemy of the people, the fact is many CEOs are actually the greatest heroes of our time…or at least have the potential to be.
The Final Reunion– Like going to heaven, the employees who endure training the Undercover Boss on the rigors of their job, and other team members are brought together to see video clips of themselves saying things like “he just doesn’t have it in him for this kind of job” or “this guy will never make it here.” But in the utmost of humility and compassion the boss brings innovative solutions and opportunity to each of the participants.
What You Can Do – Despite setting your Tivo for Sunday night on CBS, the very same principles that entertain us the most in this show are the solutions to growing your business. Using a third party to conduct in-depth interviews with customers and employees as well as being involved in such listening efforts is just the beginning to implementing an ongoing effort of improved communication and continuous innovation.
If you’re willing to listen to the salesforce you serve, there will be an abundance of ideas that will deliver your company to a whole new level. So when it comes to your company’s growth and its people will you be a paladin or a pain?
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November 10, 2010
 Dublin Entrepreneurial Center
Increase You Sales Performance Workshop Series
How to Train & Coach Your Way to a Winning Sales Culture
by
Ray & Barney Group and Pipeline Coach
Another great session with the focus on Training and Coaching where 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 marketplace.
James Rores covered how Sales Culture is the bridge that connects strategy to performance. Your people walk the bridge and you can make culture a tangible component of change by having the proper focus. The way to get there is to:
- Measure so you can manage.
- Track so you can train.
- Confirm so you can coach.
 Measuring Sales Performance Measure Results:
When we measure the little things we have a greater opportunity to impact performance – creating a more accurate, common language shared among sales leaders, managers, and producers.
Rye D’Orazio discusses assessing your talent to know where to start is a key component of measurement looking first at Behavioral Traits: Nature of Reaction, Extraversion, Originality, Agreeableness and Channeling Effort. Rye went on to discuss the importance to competencies and knowing which ones your sales team need. James added the importance of knowing the ease of changing competencies from relatively Easy to Change, Harder, but Doable to Very difficult to Change.
Train to Control:
James also talked about when we know what to measure and how to communicate what we learn that best practices and controls emerge. James said the “Tracking (documenting) best practices and controls creates value and makes value transferable. We are able to more quickly ramp-up new team members and drive individual performance”. Areas to look at are:
- What and How we do:
Demand Generation, forecast …
- What and How we think:
Risk taking, stress management …
Coach to Accountability:
The last topic covered was coaching. After we understand the many components of a successful outcome and the best practices that make success possible, we must partner in their execution. Accountability creates the connective tissue (mortar) that holds our people to the management and training systems developed to ensure their success.
- Personal Habits:
Time management, prioritization …
- Personal Behaviors:
Perceptions …
The highlight of the session by far as indicated by the attendees was the section on the practical emails in contacting and communicating to prospects. Great examples were provided on ways to contact your top prospects and get a response. The email samples centered around getting your prospects Attention, creating Interest and Desire and offering an Action to take.
Check out this PDF for more information about this session!
We hope you can join us at the next session on SALES SYSTEMS & MANAGEMENT: How to make process and technology work within your sales team.
Thursday, December 2, 2010 7:30am–9:30am at the DEC!
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November 4, 2010
By Mark Faust
Have a clear central growth goal?
• 66% of the companies we surveyed don’t have one, but wish they did.
• Of the companies that had one, only 32% regularly communicated their progress.
• Of the companies that had one, only 28% had a realistically challenging one.
• Only 14% of companies are creatively engaging their customer to accelerate their progress toward it.
• 100% were certain they could exceed their current performance!
What are we talking about? A central growth objective that is both a stretch beyond your current growth trajectory and yet realistically challenging.
 What is your Central Growth Goal? If “all the stars were to align” and your sales teams implemented significant improvements and innovations, what is the incremental growth you envision your sales teams could experience?
We recently sent a survey to hundreds of leaders of companies and found that, despite agreement from the respondents that the following were key best practices in accelerating growth, the vast majority of organizations failed to successfully implement any of the following guidelines. How does your company stack up?
1. Do you have a specific central growth goal for your salesforce that is understood by everyone on your sales teams?
2. Does your salesforce realistically believe in and are they challenged by your Central Growth Goal?
3. Does your Central Growth Objective excite, inspire, and emotionally charge your sales teams; does it exhort your sales teams into action, or is it just another directive?
4. Are your metrics charted, graphed and visually fed back in shorter (monthly or more frequently) periods of time, to all of your salesforce?
5. Is an objective third party challenging you and the sales team to raise the bar, dispelling skepticism of aggressive growth, and insuring open communication?
6. Is your Central Growth Goal built not top down, but by consensus, with a representative set of inputs from your sales teams that is more objective?
7. Is a representation of your customer base invited to give insights toward improvement and are customers’ challenges invited through one on one open dialogue, ideally with a third party instead of quantitative surveying tactics?
Despite excellent past history, almost every company has made significant improvements when they challenged themselves to raise the bar. It’s not magic, but rather a simple process of management formulated over 60 years ago that just isn’t fully implemented very often and isn’t quite as effective unless a third party is involved in facilitating, coaching, challenging and holding accountable those who are the stewards of growth.
If your “strategic plan” doesn’t come as close as you want in regards to having each of the above seven points executed, you probably have a partial growth plan instead of a fully fleshed and aggressive one.
If you are a steward of growth and think the bar can be raised, pass out the survey above. Challenge your leadership to raise the bar and make this the fastest growing time in your company’s history, just as many other companies are experiencing.
Imagine what January, 2011 might be like if you accomplished your stretch vision!
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