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 

The Sales Controversy

www.complementary-solutions.com

info@complementary-solutions.com

@salescontrovrsy

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




www.complementary-solutions.com
info@complementary-solutions.com
@SalesControvrsy

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

www.complementary-solutions.com

info@complementary-solutions.com

@salescontrovrsy

Where is your motivation?

Motivation can be described quite simply as the desire to do things or to get things done. It’s the difference between getting up in the early hours to hit the swimming pool on a regular basis or choosing to laze around the house plugged in to a games console or TV. Motivation is the crucial factor in attaining the goals you really want and there is much evidence to suggest that you have considerable influence over your own levels of motivation and self-control. 

When you think about your own motivation have you ever considered how much it is affected by factors that can be labeled as external and internal?  External factors are things like praise from your line manager or colleagues, securing a deal, hitting your monthly targets, having to meet your mortgage and bills by the end of the month or getting a raise. 

Internal factors are things like your own values system, your own personal set of beliefs, your “internal dialog”; that is to say the way that you talk to yourself inside your own head.

In our pressurized world, external factors are becoming less and less dependable as a source of motivational reward. The culture of your company or organization may be driven to focus on the “glass half empty” model in which no achievement is ever good enough. You may have a manager that lacks an appropriate amount of emotional intelligence or ability and only has one model of motivation for you…threat, fear and lack. 

It still amazes the number of people promoted into positions of managing and motivating teams that show extremely poor levels of understanding about how people motivate. That’s the danger if you are more reliant on external forces to support and enhance your levels of motivation. You give up responsibility for a significant part of your internal world to other people and become increasingly dependent on them for your sense of success and productivity.  

In behavioural terms, external rewards have the effect of narrowing our focus. Hence reward driven behaviour tends to be more effective when tasks are straightforward and require a logical approach governed by simple rules…surely that’s not got a lot to do with relationship building does it?  As far as tasks involving even moderate levels of cognitive input, external rewards as a source of motivation have been clearly demonstrated to have the entirely opposite effect and lead to far less creativity and productivity.

This “external locus” of reliance is pretty much a default setting for most of us. It’s a mindset that we seem to absorb from our society, from our education systems and from families but it’s a model of behavioural influence that is fraught with pitfalls and difficulties once rewards exceed a threshold of attainability. Once goals or targets are missed, the associated rewards are not secured and the feedback system begins to falter. 

For the courageous, there is another way, but it involves a fair amount of personal work and self-development.  It can be a difficult task to shift your external locus of motivation to an internal framework but the benefits can be enormous. 

According to Dan Pink in his wonderful TED lecture on the Surprising Science of Motivation

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Pink talks about these internal mechanisms centering around three key elements:

Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. 

Your internalized system is far less vulnerable to external disappointments and negative impact.  This has the benefit that your motivation remains more consistently intact so that your levels of effectiveness are more likely to be sustained or enhanced.  You stand a much greater chance of being successful in accomplishing a complex task such as building a sound business relationship if you are motivated by the belief that this is a healthy way to conduct business rather than looking to score another sale.

One important characteristic of people who maintain a healthy internalized system is that they dream big and in detail. Take time to “daydream” about some aspect of your life that you want to achieve or improve and when doing this make sure you notice the detail of your daydream. 

The Sales Controversy

www.complementary-solutions.com

info@complementary-solutions.com

@salescontrovrsy

Ego in B2B and CRM

Dreadful thing, isn’t it? The “I am”, the “this is me”, the “look at me and who I am”. Can be really helpful and can also really get in the way.

Example 1: Sales people. In order to be successful, a lot of ego is needed. It’s where the drive for recognition comes from, it’s where the ability to compete sits. “I’m going to win, and don’t you forget it”. Indeed, without ego most people will fail at selling. It’s a fundamental part of the character make-up. “I, that is me, am going to succeed and I will not accept anything less”.

Example 2: The sales manager. Lives vicariously, through his or her sales people. Is driven by a need to make them successful. Is involved in all of their deals but not to make himself or herself look successful but to add value and to create a culture and climate of success. In the successful sales manager, ego is quashed, put on the back burner, put to one side.

Example 3: The successful sales person who is promoted to sales manager. Oops. The very thing that made him/her successful (ego) now needs to be repressed and channelled into something different – lack of ego. If the new sales manager doesn’t have the strength of character to a) recognise that ego is no longer needed in the same way and b) is able to work for the good of the team then maybe, just maybe, you’ve promoted them into the wrong job.

Only those with highly developed egos need respond.

The Sales Controversy

info@complementary-solutions.com

www.complementary-solutions.com

@salescontrovrsy

Bidding for Business: How to improve your chances of winning

Bidding for business (B2B) often but not always public sector business, is difficult. It always involves risk: financial risk (the cost of the bid); sales risk (what chance do you really have of winning this?); the risk associated with making up the numbers (how do we know that the customer hasn't already made the decision but needs to be seen to be going through this procurement activity?); and the risk associated with the opportunity cost (if we devote company resources to this project, what other projects are there that we might have better spent those resources on?). 


As a general rule of thumb, if the first thing you know about a bid or tender document is when it lands on your desk then you should bin it. It's highly likely that it has a competitor's name on it and you'd be wasting your time and resources if you went for it. So, clearly, the ones to go for are the ones that you know about and which you are expecting. Ideally, you'll have had the chance to influence what's in it and, in a perfect world, it's got your name on it. 


Even better, you've had the chance to run it through whatever sort of qualification matrix you use and it's already scored more than 70 out of 100. So, however you've arrived at your decision, you've decided to go for it. In a larger organisation you will have appointed a bid manager or director, in a smaller one you'll be responding to it yourself/with your team, etc. All good stuff, but what are the tips and tricks that you can use to improve your chances of winning? 


First of all, you need to decide what theme you are going to use. In a large organisation it may well be that you will be collating parts of the response from different parts of your organisation from around the world. In a smaller one, you might have asked the FD to contribute a piece, the Engineering Director to do a chunk, etc., etc. 


To reduce the amount of work that you will need to do when it comes to incorporating different parts of the response together you must ensure that everyone understands the theme that you are using. This could be as general as “cost reduction” or as specific as “cost reduction through the use of lower cost manufacturing techniques”. Once you have developed your theme, you should think about the specific language you want to use. You can develop your own glossary or lexicon where you can suggest particular words that you want to use and others that you want to avoid. In this way you find that when everybody submits their own section of the response the amount of work needed to stitch it all together will be much reduced. 


The next step is to create two different teams to review the bid. Ideally you will have four or five people in each team and with a specific role (finance, engineering, etc.) but in a very small business you could have a team comprised of one or two people. One team, let's call it the Red Team, is responsible for pitching or selling the bid to the other Black Team. The Black Team's job is to find as many reasons as possible not to buy, to pick as many holes in the bid as possible. These holes, flaws, errors then need to be corrected and the process gone through again until the Black Team feels that it can find no fault with the bid documentation. Then, and only then, is the bid document ready to be sent to the client. 


One of the tricks that vendors can utilise is in the accompanying letter. Basically, some ITT's (Invitation to Tender) are written in such a way that they require yes/no answers and little else. This is deliberate and it is meant to exclude you from putting the sort of free form text that you would like to include. Answer? Put it in the accompanying letter. There may be instructions restricting you to the number of characters or pages that you can supply so you need to be creative! In an ideal world, which this isn't, you will know in advance which potential clients are about to issue ITT's or RFI's (Request for Information) or RFP's (Request for Proposal). All public bodies will have a date on which the shutters will come down and their ability to talk to you will cease. Know this date, and complete any discovery activity prior to it.






The Sales Controversy


www.complementary-solutions.com
@SalesControvrsy