Hunt, Gather, and Cultivate...meaningful relationships

It’s up to you to invent the solution for your clients

Brick — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:08:25 +0000

Here is a post from Mark Cuban that rings true as we move forward with product development and is consistent with my experience over the years:
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Mark Cuban on Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers

A great quote from technology luminary Alan Kay that every entrepreneur needs to remember: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

I’m working with a company that at one point had a product that was not only best in its class, but also technically far ahead of its competition. It created a better way of offering its service, and customers loved it and paid for it.

Then it made a fatal mistake. It asked its customers what features they wanted to see in the product, and they delivered on those features. Unfortunately for this company, its competitors didn’t ask customers what they wanted. Instead, they had a vision of ways that business could be done differently and, as a result, better. Customers didn’t really see the value or need until they saw the new product. When they tried it, they loved it.

So what did “my” company do when it saw what its competitor had done? It repeated its mistake and once again asked its customers what they wanted in the product. Of course the customer responded with the features that they now loved from the other product. The company didn’t improve its competitive positioning. It put itself in a revolving door of trying to respond to customer requests. To make matters worse, and brainpower that could be applied to “inventing the future” were instead being used to catch up with features that locked the company into the past.

Entrepreneurs need to be reminded that it’s not the job of their customers to know what they don’t. In other words, your customers have a tough enough time doing their jobs. They don’t spend time trying to reinvent their industries or how their jobs are performed. Sure, every now and then you come across an exception. But you can’t bet the company on your finding that person among your customers.

Instead, part of every entrepreneur’s job is to invent the future. I also call it “kicking your own ass.” Someone is out there looking to put you out of business. Someone is out there who thinks they have a better idea than you have. A better solution than you have. A better or more efficient product than you have. If there is someone out there who can “kick your ass” by doing it better, it’s part of your job as the owner of the company to stay ahead of them and “kick your own ass” before someone else does.

Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happy. Listen to them. Make them happy. But don’t rely on them to create the future road map for your product or service. That’s your job.

Brick

Filed under: Business Principles, Marketing

More food for thought

Brick — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:39:47 +0000

I read this over the holiday break and highly recommend this for all. I found this relevant for anyone is business and consistent with my long-held belief to “mix it up” as much as possible if you want to expand and grow.

Great ideas and innovation come from collaboration so get out there and connect this year. The more diverse the groups are the better so you have different inputs rather than “group think”.

Brick

Filed under: Business Principles, Food For Thought

A formula for success

Brick — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 16:22:33 +0000

I happened to stumble upon this in the paper this weekend and wanted to share because it’s solid advice to start the New Year.

“Wake up before everybody else. Go to sleep later than everybody else. Work harder and smarter than everybody else. And love what you’re doing.”

Here’s to a successful 2012.

Brick

Filed under: Food For Thought, Inspiration

The price is too high!

Brick — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 03:03:03 +0000

Got some push back this week on price as we renew clients and try to move them towards “list” pricing. Every business has to face this decision and the decision dictates the path going forward so make this decision carefully. Your pricing model reflects the value.

I am in a new market with a new product so we are feeling out the pricing model as we go which is an interesting experiment to reach the right price. No fancy regression analysis, more of a feel and trial by error approach. You need several data points before you can make any conclusions if you are in this mode so don’t panic if you get some resistance.

If you can get at least a couple to pay the freight you are probably in the ballpark so start building a value proposition and prepare to defend the price and return on investment. It always comes back to salesmanship and painting the right picture for the buyer. As long as the buyer sees a return your are home free.

Get out your paint and get to work I say.

Happy Holidays.

Brick

Filed under: Selling at Higher Prices

All you have to do is make a call…

Brick — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 15:10:30 +0000

and you are doing better than 95% of the businesses out there.

How many of us are surprised when we get a call from a client service rep asking about the service we paid for? I know I am, but shoudn’t that be standard in a service industry? I think so.

I have always set the bar very high around client service and the return is enormous for what I consider to be very basic blocking and tackling. I wonder why most haven’t figured this out?

I will continue to be thankful that this is a big competitive advantage with very little cost.

Brick

Filed under: What is Great Client Service?, Winning Qualities

Don’t forget, they need you!

Brick — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 23:43:12 +0000

I am reminded again how often we fail to remember there are two sides to every discussion and both sides need each other. That’s right, “they” need you!

Transactions happen because there is a need that is satisfied. We often rush to a conclusion because we want the deal instead of taking more time to really understand the full requirement and perhaps identify another opportunity.

Be the expert and lead the conversation as a trusted advisor. We all need help from someone that can help…If you don’t get through to the buyer, step back and examine the approach because I bet it has a lot to do with the communication.

Brick

Filed under: Communication, Want to be a great salesperson?, Winning Qualities

What makes a well functioning organization?

Brick — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:17:44 +0000

I remember all of the organization behavior courses I had to take and now I can appreciate them more being in a leadership role. I can’t tell you how important it is to create the right culture with clear roles so an environment of teamwork and collaboration is created. Without this there will be departures and a loss of what got you to the top.

Here is a post I found to be very true and worth sharing.

6 Reasons Why Your Best Employees Will Leave

When it’s not about money, your star employees are probably jumping ship for one of these reasons.

By Jeff Haden | @jeff_haden |
Dec 15, 2011

You start a business and you hire a key employee. She’s awesome. You hire another key employee. He’s awesome. Together the three of you create an unstoppable team.

Until one of them leaves.

Sometimes great employees leave because you can’t afford to pay them more and they can earn more somewhere else. Unfortunately, that happens. Often, though, great employees leave because your company has changed—and they don’t want to change with it.

Here are six of the top (non salary) reasons your best employees will leave:

1. The business grew—and so did your ego. Early on you were hesitant, unsure, and filled with doubt; those feelings come with the entrepreneurship territory. You worked closely with key employees and naturally shared some of your feelings. Those employees didn’t see you as weak. Instead they respected your honesty and openness, enjoyed the professional and personal connection, and felt good knowing you relied on them. Then you landed major customers, built a solid revenue base, and started to believe your own hype. Key employees knew you before you were “somebody.” Make sure they always get to see the real person behind your brand shell, because that’s the person they want to work with.

2. A cool startup became a corporation. Growth naturally results in some amount of processes, procedures, and systems. Running to another person’s office with a great idea got replaced by your Monday strategy meetings. Following a hunch and taking a chance on an unproven vendor got replaced by your formal RFP process. “All hands on deck” got replaced by formal job descriptions and meaningless battles over turf. Key employees typically hate processes and procedures, especially when early on anything went—and often worked. Building too many systems and imposing too many constraints, especially without getting input from key employees, makes your best employees start to reminisce about the good old days… and eventually leave.

3. The sky is no longer the limit. Dreaming is fun. Entrepreneurs dream. So do employees. In time some dreams become reality while others are clearly no longer possible. Great employees may not know what they want to do two, five, or 10 years from now, but they want to know they have possibilities. When your business matures and the only promotion left is replacing you, those possibilities disappear. You may not be able to change that fact, but you can talk openly about it. Ask key employees for their ideas. Ask how you can help them feel they are still progressing. If a great employee feels every other door is closed, they’ll head for the exit door.

4. Exceptional skill forged handcuffs. During the start-up phase you and your employees did every job. As the business grew and matured a little focus naturally crept in, and that’s a good thing. But focus also creates a problem. Key employees are key because they can do things others can’t, so the gal who does the best job keeping the trains running eventually gets stuck being the one who always runs the trains. And she starts to feel stifled. And she starts to long for excitement and challenge. And eventually she leaves.

5. Flat is now layered. Once you were the boss. Now there are multiple bosses. Employees who once reported to you now report to someone else, and it’s just not the same for them. This may be the toughest issue you’ll face. Reporting structures naturally change as a business grows, and at some point layers of authority are inevitable. Be sensitive to the emotional impact reporting to someone other than you will create for key employees. It’s a tough line to straddle, but do your best to maintain the connection you once had without undermining an employee’s new boss. Remember, layers inevitably create barriers, so how you operate within and through those layers means everything to your best employees.

6. The NFL is now a little league. In a start-up dead wood means dead company. Bigger companies have greater margins for error, even in the employees they hire. Great athletes like to play with other great athletes, and great employees like to work with other great employees. Key employees quickly get discouraged when others don’t pull their weight—or worse, don’t seem to care. One bad hiring decision can ruin a great team. While you can never be sure every person you hire is great, you can be sure to take action when a new employee doesn’t cut it.

Brick

Filed under: Want to be a great salesperson?

Have you ever closed a deal on the elevator?

Brick — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 15:08:30 +0000

Here is a post from Seth Godin I like…

No one ever bought anything in an elevator

The purpose of an elevator pitch isn’t to close the sale.

The goal isn’t even to give a short, accurate, Wikipedia-standard description of you or your project.

And the idea of using vacuous, vague words to craft a bland mission statement is dumb.

No, the purpose of an elevator pitch is to describe a situation or solution so compelling that the person you’re with wants to hear more even after the elevator ride is over.

Getting the message correct and consistent is critical to success. I like Twitter for that reason because you have to say something compelling with only 140 characters. We all waste too many words.

Brick

Filed under: Communication, Marketing, Want to be a great salesperson?

Take it slowly with sales hires…

Brick — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 21:17:49 +0000

You are here: Home / Sales 3.0 / 7 Hiring Mistakes and How Not to Make Them

7 Hiring Mistakes and How Not to Make Them

December 5, 2011 By S. Anthony Iannarino 3 Comments and 11 Reactions

I am not throwing the first stone here (or the last). I have personally been guilty of half of these. But, alas, it is how one learns.

Hiring Out of Desperation

One of the fastest ways to build an underperforming sales force and burden yourself with human resources nightmares is to hire out of desperation. If you desperately need someone to fill the position, or if you are filling the position because you need to make headcount, you will make mistakes and you will hire poorly.

Instead, spend time recruiting the right candidates before you have a need. Build a pipeline of candidates while you are fully staffed, and give yourself time to be more deliberate and more thoughtful in your hiring.

Too Little Time Interviewing

Interviewing takes time, time you don’t likely have while you are busy with your real job. It’s easy to take short cuts and to spend too little time interviewing. But it’s not just a mistake to spend too little time interviewing in general, it’s a mistake to believe that you can learn all you need to know in 30 minutes or an hour.

Invest the time to interview a lot of candidates. See more people than you believe necessary. Then, invest lots of time interviewing the candidates that might be a good fit for you and your company. Spend time learning about them, and making sure that they are likely to succeed before you hire them.

Too Much Focus on Experience

For some reason, we act as if the fact that a person has a similar sales experience to the sales position for which we are hiring, that it is more likely that they will succeed. When reviewing resumes, we look for the experience, and not finding it, we move onto other candidates. But our own hiring results continually punish us for making the mistake of placing too much emphasis on experience at the expense of other attributes.

If experience isn’t going to be the primary factor that allows a salesperson to succeed or fail, then don’t make it your primary consideration. If you have the ability to train and develop salespeople, then look for factors that will later prove to be a greater indicator of success (more on that next).

Too Little Focus on Attitude, Beliefs, and Behaviors

Because we place so much value on experience, we tend to ignore the real factors that lead to success. We ignore just how important the hard-to-quantify attributes that don’t show up on resumes, like attitude, beliefs, and behaviors. Later on, when the employee is failing, we notice that the root cause of their failure is their attitude, their belief systems, and the behaviors.

Eliciting a potential salesperson’s attitudes, their overarching belief system, and their behaviors will give you more insight to how that salesperson is going to perform than will their past experience. Asking questions to pull out these factors will do much to eliminate some easily preventable hiring mistakes.

Believing Skills Are Transferable

Back to experience. Because someone has sold, we believe that they can sell. But there are major differences in the skill sets, beliefs, behaviors, and attitudes required for different types of selling. A salesperson that did well in a transactional sales role may be ill suited and struggle in a longer sales cycle. The reverse is true, too: someone who managed a complex sales process may struggle in a transactional role.

Make sure that main skills, attributes, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors exist before hiring someone. Hire them into a role in which you are certain that you can help them succeed based on these factors.

Selling Your Opportunity

You have a sales position to fill. The candidate in front of you is seeking a sales position. So you begin to sell them your opportunity, telling them how wonderful the company is and just how great it is to work there. You sell them the position because you need them to take it, not because they are the right hire. While you are doing all the selling, you aren’t learning anything about your candidate.

Save the sales pitch. You need to be sold on the candidate before you do any selling. Your time is best spent asking the questions, listening to the answers, and making an assessment as to whether or not you can help this person succeed should you hire them.

Not Discovering Verifiable Results

If someone has worked in sales, they will have had clients. They will have made lots of sales calls. They will be able to speak about the clients they won, the clients that they lost, and the clients that they should have won, but didn’t. It is a mistake not to identify some of the clients that they won and how they did so.

Ask if you can speak with some of their past clients. Verify that they did in fact win their business, and ask their client what they did that allowed them to win the business. These are results that you can verify, and they are indication of what you might expect from the salesperson sitting in front of you.

Hiring well isn’t easy. It’s easy to hire someone you believe will be a star only to be disappointed. If you have hired for any time at all, you will have had the experience of taking a chance and hiring someone who wasn’t nearly qualified on paper that ended up outperforming the rest of their team. But it isn’t all voodoo and magic. You start hiring well by first avoiding the most common hiring mistakes.

Questions

What are the biggest hiring mistakes you have personally witnessed?

What are the biggest hiring mistakes you have personally made?

What are the risks of hiring out of desperation?

Why do we spend so little time interviewing? How much time does it take to really know enough to decide if a person is a good fit?

What are your best tips for hiring effectively?

Thanks Anthony for this post.

Brick

Filed under: Want to be a great salesperson?

Do you need to know the product?

Brick — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 03:50:10 +0000

This is a common debate among business people. Many think it’s all about the product and many think it’s all about the sales process. I happen to think it’s a mix of both but the real question is what is the mix, what are the ingredients, who does what in the process?

I have learned a lot about statistics again these last few weeks and my brain has worked hard trying to figure out what a Z Score is and what that really means…Do I really need to know that the Z Score is the observation less the mean of the population over the standard deviation or do I need to know what it represents from a business perspective?

I think complex sales are like a sports team with different positions and I just need my tackle to block for me so I can run through the hole. Learn the concept and the big picture solution to the problem and leave the details to someone who can figure out the Z Score!

Business always comes back to the basics no matter what you are selling so work on those because we can never be good enough at listening and building meaningful relationships. You don’t have to know what a regression analysis is but you do have to help your client solve their business problem so use your team!

Go team.

Brick

Filed under: Business Principles, Food For Thought, Want to be a great salesperson?