Hmmm...

Why do we bother even making this sound? Come on...be honest. You already know that you don’t like or don’t agree with what the other person is saying.  So what holds us back from finding a way to communicate this clearly. Hmmm...a gentle way to let someone know that what may follow next could be unpalatable for them. However, the trick in this is that this bleat of ambivalence is often misinterpreted or mis-read as to meaning something it does not. In the ears of the hearer it may sound like just a small shift in perception or agreement is required to get the point accepted.

People on the autistic spectrum, say with Aspergers, seem to have no problem telling it as it is. We all laugh at the characters Lou and Andy in Little Britain. Andy seems to show a remarkable consistency in communication when he declares “I want that one” or “I don’t like it”. I have never heard him say “Hmm, I’m not sure, let me think about that one”. No hedging, no grey, fuzzy thinking. He may change his opinion through 180 degrees now and again but when he says it he seems to really mean it.

Clarity in communication is very much a two way street. The trouble seems to stem from the reality that there are layers of communication or perhaps more accurately trust that have to be traversed before we can arrive at a point of truly honest exchange and understanding. Like most people, we try to avoid deliberately upsetting others and we worry about the possible adverse impact on the participant in the conversation. Aren’t we really focusing on our presumption of offense. Are we really more at ease if our dialogue partner goes away with a false impression that provides comfort for the time being and is then later disappointed when they learn that we really thought the idea / suggestion stank? Not only are they disappointed in our response they also learn we are not entirely straight, honest and truthful. Hence, by osmosis and association, their despondency attaches to us and not just the item being discussed.

It’s not easy to communicate with integrity. We have to own our own true thoughts and feelings and relay them in a way that is congruent with our thinking. Whose responsibility is it for how they are decoded and interpreted by the listener...mine or the listener’s?  Surely I can only take full ownership of my thinking and expression and maintain a healthy boundary of expectations when communicating with others.

So, in a more Apsergery spirit, I say down with “hmm”, let’s all take a breath and tell it like it is or like it may be. All done in the best possible taste of course.

The Sales Controversy

Leadership, how it hurts!

Leaders, leading, leadership. Now, perhaps more than ever our ability to adapt and thrive in an often harsh and precarious business environment depends so much on the abilities of the leaders in our communities. When I talk about leaders, I don’t necessarily mean the chief executives. I am referring to the people up and down the chain of command who lead on a daily basis, getting us to question what we are doing and how we are doing things. The people who encourage us to reflect productively and help us make effective change. These people can be anyone, anywhere. You’ve all been in meetings where the delicate issues are deftly circumvented before someone decides to put the important and awkward question on the table...that’s the person showing the lead. Taking the group where the group needs to look.

Actually, leading doesn’t only occur in groups. You exercise personal leadership with yourself. So when you consider the issue of leading and leadership bear in mind that there is a macro and a micro focus to the discussions. For those of you already in leadership positions in organizations you might have to review your own personal self-leadership before you can effectively consider your leading of larger groups.

There are many fine books on the subject of leadership packed with examples of inspiring quotes in difficult circumstances. What many of the books don’t talk about are the personal  dangers and challenges that leaders have to endure when they act in a leading role. 

You would think that many teams would be happy that someone is there to take the lead, take the strain of doing the key thinking and frequently being there as a convenient buffer when problems hit the fan. Some are up to a point and that point is often the instance where their own values, habits or beliefs get challenged. Then the problems rise; and the problems will arise whether you are leading when you know the answers or leading when you don’t.

Resistance is inevitable

Like many of you reading this, I have seen the occasional episode of Star Trek. There’s a quote that comes from one of the protagonists in the series, “resistance is futile”. Well, having seen the good guys triumph on more than on clash you’d think the Borg would adapt (that’s what they are supposed to be good at...) their mantra. I’d like to propose my own mantra and one which has stood the test of time. I’d like to suggest we all get comfortable with the following, “Resistance is inevitable”. I have found this to be the case time and time again. Even with teams that I have personally steered through difficult times and with whom I have carried considerable credibility. There just seems to be something about groups of people that at certain points fosters reluctance to the leading process. 

The roots of this resistance can be deep and many-branched. Often, when you dig down past the superficial bluster the real anchor points are those which make the resistees personally challenged. It’s as though some part of their personal psychodrama is getting re-written and they don’t like it but rather than coming up with valid amendments....they just resist in a wonderful variety of ways. Here’s where things get difficult for those leading. How much energy do you invest in persuading people who fundamentally just want to say no, not just to you, they just want to say no?  At what point do you decide enough is enough and simply press ahead and take the risk of being deemed to ride rough-shod over your team? Do you switch-off and just carry on regardless or do you remain open, sensitive to the views of others but relentlessly bring people back on point?

Having a bit more understanding about why resistance occurs gives us more tools to deal with the bumps in the road and helps to minimise the personal impact on ourselves as we steer groups through change.  Your integrity has to be your shield in such instances. Holding to your core values and revisiting the purpose of change have to be your guiding markers. Many of the dangers that come from the exercise of leading stem from the core reasons why leading is necessary in the first place. Anything other than changes of a technical nature offers challenge to the habits, beliefs and values of your team. You are forcing people to query openly that which they have often taken for granted. One minute, you are jogging along (happily or unhappily) then you are being asked to question what you’ve always done and how you’ve done it...no wonder many people resist change and being led.

So, my challenge to you this week is to look at yourselves with new awareness and to ask how are you leading? How are you ensuring that you remain healthy in the face of resistance to leading and how are you adding value to the thinking and performing of your team and yourself?

The Sales Controversy

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Low self-esteem, high self-esteem...actually its a choice and the choice is yours to make

Belief in yourself is one of the cornerstones of self-esteem. In order to function well in our home or work environment we need healthy levels of self-belief and self-esteem. If you believe you are worthwhile and capable in a range of situations, then your behaviours reflect those thoughts and beliefs and hey presto, you seem able to cope with whatever comes your way. If your thinking starts to throw up negative self-messages, then this influences how you feel about yourself and pushes you into a pathway of declining self-esteem. So, your thoughts have a profound influence on how you feel and how you think and has a direct relationship with your behaviour, which can in turn feed back into the system.  It would seem then that we have thinking, feeling and behaviour, all connected and all going on at the same time and it might be a matter of optimal balance that keeps us in a zone of positive self-worth and imbalance that throws things out of whack.

Every experience we encounter, every positive exchange with clients, every deal made, every lost sale is a culmination or product of our thoughts, feelings and behaviour. 

Our thoughts, feelings and behaviour are in a constant state of flux. You pick up the phone, have a conversation with a business prospect and your thoughts and feelings are impacted. There’s a positive outcome and you feel one way. The outcome is negative and you feel another way. As such, our self-belief and self-esteem can oscillate (sometimes quite widely) from one minute to the next. Some event or thought influences your thinking and knocks you off balance, your feelings take a dive then the whole world shifts. The thoughts that were supporting a positive self-belief evaporate everything takes a hit. 

So, in order to restore balance and perhaps find a way to maintain a stronger, more stable self-belief, its vital to know more about “how you choose to think” or “how you choose to allow your thinking to be influenced”. If you can learn to adjust your response as negative events occur you can often prevent or minimise the impact on your self-belief and self-esteem. If thinking, feeling and behaviour are inextricably linked to influence your feelings of self-belief and self-esteem,  having the ability to CONSCIOUSLY reinforce or positively change one of those factors can change the nature of your experience. Now that’s a skill worth practising isn’t it?

Here’s an exercise to help you learn a bit more about your thinking. Think of a time when you were in a great mood and then something happened to knock you off your perch...maybe you took some criticism, a project or deal fell through unexpectedly or maybe someone just didn’t notice that you did something terrific.

A. Write down how you THOUGHT about yourself when you were in the state of high self-esteem BEFORE the incident happened.

B. How did you FEEL at this time?

C. How did you ACT before the incident?

Now try to recreate the circumstances of the event and try to relive the situation that impacted on you

D. What were your THOUGHTS AFTER the event

E. What are your FEELINGS after the negative impact?

F. How was your BEHAVIOUR affected?

Take your answers to D,E and F and put them into the model diagram below (Diagram 1)

What does the diagram now show you about your response to the situation? Which seemed to come first, the thought, the feeling or the behaviour? This change cycle can be very useful in helping you to understand HOW you react and give you insights as to what you can do to make improvements.  

On reflection, which of your responses COULD YOU CHANGE? Could you alter your thinking? Maybe you could have used humour to soften the event. Could you have changed your behaviour, e.g. said something in a different way, not sent that email or whatever...

Now think of one response that you could change and write it into the appropriate place in Diagram 2. 

Reflect on this change and ask yourself how it might change the other factors in the diagram. Write in the other elements that are changed. Then consider how this affects your experience of the event now?  Understanding more about how you process your experiences gives you the opportunity of positively influencing your response when
self-belief is challenged. The next time some adversity strikes, could you use this model of change to your advantage?

Remember, if your thinking and reactions can create low self-esteem your thinking and reactions can create high self-esteem. Once you understand how this works, the choice is yours.

Now you know something more about this mechanism, please think about how you can interact with others more responsibly as you may be having more of an impact that you first thought.

The Sales Controversy

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Self-belief

With it you can achieve just about anything, including success in selling.  Without it you’ll fail at just about everything, especially sales. And yet the difference between the two states can sometimes be so miniscule as to be totally marginal.

So how do you get self-belief and, perhaps more importantly, how do you hang onto it? To an extent, self-belief is a by-product of arrogance and you can’t function in sales without a healthy dose of arrogance. But you need empathy too – the very best sales people have all three: self-belief, arrogance and empathy. As they say, success breeds success, and once you start, never stop.

Some of the personality/psychological tests of recent years have attempted to measure self-belief and how unshakeable it is. Having lots of self-belief is all very well until a major blow to your self-esteem and your ego turns up which causes you to question yourself – your abilities, your passion, your utter ruthlessness are all put under the spotlight. Are you the sort of person whose self-belief is high enough and tough enough to withstand it? If so, great; if not, well……

Because to finish at the top of the sales league year in, year out, requires a level of self belief not found in the majority of the population. In just the same way that having a high IQ will put you into the top 1%-2% of the population, so will having an unshakeable self belief; “I’m good, and I know it and, from a competitive point of view, I’m better than you and I know it. Out of every ten deals that you and I compete against each other for, I’m going to win at least seven”. As an experienced sales manager and sales director, any sales person on my team with a 70% win rate is a star.

But that mix of self belief, arrogance and empathy is a strange one, as are a lot of the other traits that go to make a really good sales person. What one of the personality tests calls “resource investigator”, the ability to question everything and get answers, the ability to get other people, including prospects, to put their resources into answering your questions, is a major factor, as is what’s called “chairmanship” (the ability to lead and run a meeting despite the fact that there may be a number of much more senior people present).

In any event, that total and utter belief in yourself is paramount. If you don’t believe in yourself, you’ll lose. And so drive plays a factor: what is it that gets you out of bed every day? Drive and self belief together form an unbreakable ring of professional solidity. With them, you can take on the world – and win.

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Sales professional...know thyself!

In the B2B and B2C world of building stronger trusting relationships there is much to be gained from greater self-awareness. In the realm of personal development there is an excellent model to build greater self-awareness in individuals and teams, improve team development and inter-group relations known as the Johari window. This model of self-exploration was developed by American psychologists Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham in the 1950’s. The name “Johari” comes form a combination of Jo and Harry.  The framework is particularly relevant when exploring the impact of soft-skills on behaviour, empathy, co-operation.

The model represents information on feelings, experience, views attitudes skills, intentions and motivation in an individual, in a group or individuals within groups from different perspectives. The diagrammatic representation of the model is often a variation on a 4 celled grid or 4 quadrants. I’ve shown the most simple one I can find to make it easier to assimilate.

The aim for any team (sales team or supplier/customer) is to get as much activity and understanding into Quadrant 1. This is where there is greatest transparency and sharing and where the best communication and co-operation happens.  New team members start with fairly small Quadrant 1 because little is known to the team about them so open questions and dialogue are essential to expand this area. Team members can reduce the size of their Blind area (Quadrant 2) by asking for and receiving feedback.

Managers and leaders have a vital role in encouraging healthy feedback amongst groups to ensure that team members develop to their maximum potential. Encouraging active development in Quadrant 1 is a vital component of effective leadership.

Quadrant 2 can be regarded as the Blindspot that we all carry about ourselves. The behavior and attitudes we display that we’re not really aware of. We can reduce this area (increasing our self-awareness) by seeking feedback from others. Managers and leaders who promote a climate of non-judgemental feedback and trust can help everyone involved (individuals or teams) to reduce the size of their blindspots.

Quadrant 3 can be more of a minefield that it might appear. It represents the area where information, feelings, agendas are apparent to “you” but are not “known” to the group or “other”. You must take great care when trying to create greater openness in this area as it involves the individual helping a group or other to accept or consider a viewpoint that they are not aware of and may potentially be unpalatable.  

Quadrant 4 represents the area(s) of a relationship in which all parties are self-unaware. This is the hidden zone for all concerned. Given any particular situation, who knows what lies in this region of the model but many of the limiting factors in your operations may have roots in this sector of the relational framework.  Managers and leaders may well have to call upon the expert input of coaching or counseling services to help improve development in this area.

You can also use the Johari window to represent the relationships in B2B and B2C scenarios. Why not experiment a little and see what insights may be revealed when you look at the sales relationship using this particular lens.

The Sales Controversy

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Emotional intelligence...have you got what it takes?

We talk a lot about building trust between providers and clients. We encourage refocusing from the objective or outcome to the process itself, which tends to create longer lasting, mutually respectful relationships. In order to accomplish this we have to explore different models of behaviour and approach than the old “push” model of direct, pressure oriented selling.

A newer model of assessing potential for developing better business relationships is emotional intelligence / emotional quotient (EQ).  It provides a means of understanding and assessing people’s behaviours, attitudes, management and leadership styles. Fundamentally, EQ encompasses two facets of intelligence:

(1) Understanding yourself, your behaviours, intentions, goals and responses

(2) Understanding others and their feelings

EQ can be represented in four segments as illustrated in the diagram below. 

Investing in development of your EQ can lead to far more productive work and personal relationships.  Raising your EQ levels can make a huge contribution towards reducing stress for individuals, teams and organizations. It can help to decrease conflict, improve empathy and understanding and make a significant contribution to your ability to create and sustain greater trust in your B2B and B2C communications.

How will you be regarded in your team when you start talking about all this “soft, feely” stuff?  The world is moving strongly in this direction. We only have to look for a moment at the whole Web 2.0 phenomenon where customers require and demand greater transparency from companies and have an ever-growing platform to voice their thoughts and concerns in a shared, open setting.  How developed are your skills to allow you to engage fully in this changed era of fuller involvement and accountability? You can check out the following two resources to help you on your way to a healthier EQ

Test yourself psych tests http://ow.ly/8Wrum 

The Trusted Seller by Mark Bishop (eBook) http://ow.ly/8WrGp 

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Loyalty

It's funny isn't it? How employees so badly want loyalty to be a two-way street while employers seem to see it as a one-way street? "You will give us your loyalty but when you need some, you can forget it. We have no loyalty to you whatsoever". Ever been there? Most of us have, particularly in sales.Over time it erodes any employee-to-employer loyalty because staff realise that no matter how loyal they might be, their chances of getting any back are low to the point of invisibility.
 
Here's an example: I had a sales guy on my team who'd been with the company for quite a few years, selling software with average order values up at $30-$50k and sales cycles at around six months. He was a solid performer, always coming in at quota or close to it and needing little management time (ie. mine). Then all all of a sudden, zero. For several months. His response? To work even harder in the belief that he had the talent and skills necessary (which he did) and that more  effort and graft on his part would, eventually, turn things around. But it didn't. My response? To repay the loyalty that he had shown in previous years and give him a lot more of my time. I worked out the problem (loss of confidence) and by adding my own skills and talents to his we started to turn things around.
Eventually, we won a big one and one that the client had told us that we'd lost. We'd carried on selling and got the client to extend his final decision. He agreed
and we showed him why we were the better choice. But this isn't my real point.
 
Yes, I took the decision to stand by him and work together with him to fix his issues but I'm not telling you this to get a pat on the back. During the entire time of his poor performance the company was on my back to get rid of him. I had enough clout in those days to deal with it. If I hadn't, he would have been fired. So much for loyalty.
 
Two more examples: a sales guy who's father died while he (the sales guy) was on holiday. The company rule book said: two days for compassionate leave in such  circumstances. It took him two days just to get back to his mother. I said: take as long as you need. He came back three weeks later with a burning, ferocious loyalty.
Another:a sales lady was badly shocked when her father dropped dead in the street. Same deal: take what you need. Same outcome. People can't deal with these massive traumas in two days. Any company that says "deal with it in two days" is showing a marked lack of loyalty. 


We would like to hear some of your stories on this issue...get in touch.








The Sales Controversy




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Rapport...in or out?

Rapport can be described as a state of comfort, acceptance and exchange that exists between people who are relaxed, at ease in each other’s company where there are particularly good conditions of receptivity to communications.

Human beings are funny little animals. We like gravitating towards others like ourselves, i.e. like likes like. When in a state of rapport we have focused on (and possibly amplified) the similarities between ourselves rather than the differences.

Rapport skills serve us very well both socially and in business and there are many publications on the subject of developing the techniques of rapport. The trouble is that many practitioners take a very text-book, linear approach to implementing these techniques which on the other side of the handshake come across as highly contrived, artificial and can create more barriers from the outset.

One of the best ways to learn rapport is to watch it in action before you start to practise yourself. In social or work gatherings make a real effort to notice some of the markers of rapport generation. Don’t try to track them all at once, start with simple sitting positions or arm positions. While keeping up with what is going on in the room, give your attention to the posture adopted by the “leaders” of the group and notice who and when others begin to adopt similar body positions. The time lag between a leader shifting position and others following suit is important. If it’s done too quickly it becomes obvious and tends to “break the spell” and can if overdone become a pattern-interrupt and become very intrusive. 

Just give yourself a chance to notice the gentle ease with which people find themselves being subtly influenced to change their posture. Once you feel confident enough you should be able to get a good impression of the pattern of change and be able to operate this yourself in a fluid manner. Give yourself a few weeks of practice in just this area before moving on to focus on another aspect, say voice intonation or patterns of speech. 

What this gives you is practise at noticing more quickly the patterns exhibited by other people, which will be very useful when you visit prospective clients. Matching is a process of adjusting your own behaviour patterns to increase the level of rapport. This is a subtle process that should be out of the awareness range of your client. If you just try to “copy” what they do you will appear to be very artificial and can end up making the encounter very uncomfortable for both parties. The adjustments have to be soft, subtle and barely perceptible to the other person. You could choose just to focus on one particular aspect, say hand movements and practice over a period of time in matching gestures. 

Once you become more self-aware and aware of others’ behaviour you can even use differences in viewpoint to serve as a nucleus for building rapport. For example, if there is an item of information that you don’t know much about but the other person does, you can drop into a pattern of open-questioning which elicits information for the other party. This subtly tells them that you are interested in their knowledge/opinions and gives you an extended opportunity to pace and match their dialogue to strengthen rapport.

With enough time and practice you will become better skilled at developing rapport with a very wide range of people. What often happens is that after consciously practising these skills, you start to operate them more easily and almost without having to give it much thought, having taken your learning from conscious incompetence (i.e. having to deliberately think about every step) to unconscious competence (doing it without having to focus much). At this point your rapport skills will appear to be very genuine and congruent with your personality.

Start practising today!!

The Sales Controversy

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Win / Win...is it a winner?

Win / win…is it really a winning formula? If it is, who exactly is the winner?  Surely with targets, budgets, margins and productivity milestones to achieve and surpass, it’s the fast moving, agile, aggressive competitor that’s going to come out top. Well, you only have to look at some clear examples from the natural world to begin to realize that collaboration and community-oriented behaviour can yield significantly better results over a mid to longer-term period.  Over time the “herd” usually does much better than the singleton operator.

There is much more focus in the sentient sales environment now on creating stronger relationships between B2B and B2C participants but when you peel back a couple of layers of the methodology, what can we notice about the underlying philosophical framework that is meant to support positive relational behaviour?  When you think about your company or work environment can you clearly identify “how” co-operative and mutually productive activity is fostered, encouraged and rewarded? Do you have any measures in relation to “relational quotient”? I suspect you do not, as is the case with many business environments. You can even take it back to the recruitment and induction stages. Are organizations selecting for team members who have current skill sets or aptitudes for collaborative approaches to customer relations or are they still trying to recruit people who have a default setting of aggressively competitive and expecting them to change their “spots” overnight?

One of the core competencies of an emotionally intelligent and effective salesperson is the capacity to think of the win/win as the normal setting.

Win/Lose only works once and has nothing to offer in terms of developing a long term, trust-based relationship. From the customer perspective the lose position tells them several important things about you and your company. One, you could not come up with a win/win scenario. Two, they came off worse in the arrangement so from their perspective you attempted to “do them over” in the deal. In reality, the chances are you will not even be considered the next time they are looking to purchase services or products.

A Lose/Win scenario from your perspective isn’t too good either. One, you have failed to achieve a mutually beneficial arrangement so there is a trust and respect imbalance in the relationship. You may have secured a deal to help you move towards a short-term goal but at what cost to your professional standing and the reputation of your company? There is also a concomitant danger in that it could become habit-forming as a legitimate ‘strategy” for winning business. Heaven help you if you decide to take this route.  You should also consider how the buyer might regard you if you demonstrate that you have little respect for yourself in the situation.

You can however, decide that if you can’t achieve a win/win outcome then it could be better to walk away from the deal. Actually, this can be a very strong element in building a stronger trusting relationship with your customer if you tell them that you are deeply committed to finding the win/win answer and if you can’t accomplish that it would be better for both of you to decide that in this instance it’s not going to work.

This takes a huge amount of transparency, personal integrity and emotional intelligence; and if you genuinely can’t make the deal win/win then at least these are some excellent qualities to demonstrate to your customers.

But best of all is win-win-win: a win for you, a win for your customer and a win for their customer. You’ve started the process of delivering value right the way up the chain. When their customer says ‘nice job’, you’ve begun the process of cementing your relationship with your customer and his relationship with his customer.

The Sales Controversy

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