Jesus and General Patton

In an earlier post, I shared my review of “Servant Leadership”, a modern leadership philosophy whose fundamental tenets can be found in the Bible.

I was surprised to find similarities in the teachings between this and another book “Patton on Leadership“. Most assume that General Patton achieved his success by brute force and a dictatorial style of leadership.  On the contrary, while is nickname was “Blood and Guts”, Patton was a pioneer in human capital management.

Patton designed and implemented the training programs for his troops, he ate the same rations as they so he knew how much energy that could sustain, and being directly involved in the battles, he knew that his men could march and engage in battle for 36 hours straight before performance degradation set in.

In short, Patton’s Key Concepts Where:

• Prepare Your People with Effective Training
• Effectively Plan and Execute Your Strategy and Tactics
• Know Your Enemy’s Strengths and Weaknesses, Exploit Them When Possible
• Prepare Your Battlefield to your Advantage

While it has been several years, I still hold the record for the largest license fee discount ever given at my former employer.

*Cough* 92% *Cough, Cough*

That’s right I knocked 92% off the license fee for our enterprise system.  The total deal was in the six digits, but still.

Why 92%?  Well, for one, I didn’t do any of the things mentioned above.  I flew in the night before, barely knew the name of the company, let alone why I was there, and flat out bought the business away from a competitor.

Six months later, same system, different company.  I knew the company inside and out, who the decision makers were, what was important to them, and how I could help them.  Discount 10%.

The defining moment came when the CTO, in the midst of our negotiations, stared at me “Sasser, your software is pretty damn expensive.”  My reply was “Good thing your top line revenue grew by 20% last quarter and with my system you will be able to penetrate deeper into your overseas markets, so you will look like a hero.”……silence……ok.

The good people over at zoominfo.com took me on a tour of their system recently.  I was really ticked that I didn’t have access during my sales manager days because this system could have saved me so much time and helped me to make so much more money.

Its one thing to call on the Fortune 1000, its another to call on Fortune 5000.

Within a few minutes, you can find out almost anything about Google, GE, GM, etc.  But what about those companies less than 500mm in revenues?  That’s where it gets tricky because a lot of the directory services out there only focus on the big guys.

I pulled my current company up on zoominfo.   We are 100mm in top line revenue, publicly traded.  Not only did they have all of the information on our company and our people that you could pull off our SEC filings, they had executives deeper in the organization, complete with profiles, listed.  Even I was listed.

With the tools and information sources that have come online in the past few months, there is no reason why you cant go into every sales meeting with the big questions: “who, what, where, and why” already answered for you.

Good Luck

Sasser