You! With the Face….Come Here!

Did you just read about the CFO of Freddie MAC being found dead of an apparent suicide?

Good God almighty, I can only imagine the darkness in the state of mind that views suicide as a viable alternative. 

Our prayers are with David Kellermann’s family.

So let’s talk about our world.  While rewarding, sales, especially in these times, can be a dark, lonely, depressing pursuit. 

These conditions worsen if the following are true:

• Historically, you are an under performer in relation to the rest of the team
• Your boss and/or management has no firm grasp on the reality of your marketplace
• Management has added unnecessary levels of scrutiny to you and your performance 
• You work remotely with minimal contact with other people

If you are battling a bout of the blues or self-doubt is worming its way into your pitch, here are two recommended remedies:

1. Update Your Resume

In our world, your resume should never go 6 months without being freshened up.   Trust me, there are days when I update mine ever 15 minutes.

In addition to needing it for a job search, especially if your boss catches you writing a blog post during business hours, updating your resume provides the benefit of reminding yourself of just how good you are.  If you haven’t done so, make room and add a list of your major accomplishments to the front page.  For example:

·         Over the past ten years, consistently placed in the top 10% of performers across multiple sales teams selling complex IT solutions and financial services

·         Help lead sales team from startup to annual sales of $10mm, personally leading the team three out of five years in new license revenue and follow-up customer sales

·         Introduced sales team to Strategic Account Management and the benefit of using a structured sales methodology, multiple reps shorten their sales cycles by 20% to 30%

·         Assigned to lead a troubled business unit; able to grow fee income by 25% in the first six months and lower client attrition rate by 50%

 

If you do this excercise, you will feel better about yourself and will gain a better sense of control over you current situation.

2. Go Learn Something New

I read, on average, one business book a month.  I started this practice during the dot com meltdown as a way to help keep my head as times got slow.  My first books where the ones I would see on the shelves of the “C’s” of my clients.  If you would like to do this and don’t know where to start, read a Jack Welch book.

Along these lines, our friends over at Meeting to Win have clued us in to a free webinar on Sales Leadership from a group that usually commands a premium for their content and insight.

Do yourself a favor and attend “The Sales Leadership Imperative”  on Thursday April 23rd at 1pm EST.

They will discuss how you can:

• Leverage your personal strengths as well as the hidden talents of your team.
• Communicate, connect and captivate your team during each meeting or conversation.
• Utilize a proven coaching model to impact performance immediately.
• Engage in daily revenue-generating activities and stop doing the things you shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
• Master the language of leaders, to get people into action without resistance.
• Build internal coaching program and ignite a power team.
• Develop the infallible confidence of a true champion to model what you want your people to achieve.
• Recruit, retain and motivate your top producers and turnaround underperformers.
• Turnaround or terminate an underperformer in less than 30 days

We highly recommend this session.

 

Good Luck.

Ode to the A**hole

The word “A**hole” gets carelessly tossed around these days.  I personally have used this colorful and flexible adjective to describe everything from ill-performing Redneck drivers to Spongebob Squarepants.

For the record, I have a managerial man-crush on Jack Welch.   A managerial genius who, throughout his career, was regularly portrayed in the press as a world-class A**hole.

One of the reasons Jack was awarded this label was because he insisted on being honest with people about their performance.  Brutally honest.

He insists, that while A**holish in nature, the application of targeted, focused “Brute Honesty”, can be the difference in an organization excelling above expectations vs. languishing in mediocrity.

I witnessed a “collision” of sorts of when this Welch Lesson, the thesis of “The No A**hole Rule“, and a managerial situation recently came together.

We had an employee who, for the sole reason that no one had ever informed them otherwise, labored under the impression that their job performance was on par with expectations.  When a new manager came in and delivered a substandard evaluation, it was devastating and was met with great amount of emotion and anger.

“I could have been working on improving myself and my performance all this time, if someone had only told me.”

Very few managerial sins loom larger than failure to provide your employees with regularly-scheduled, sincere and brute honest evaluations that are based on comparison of employee performance vs. clear, quantifiable goals.

To do otherwise is gross negligence, because when time gets tough, your management may be forced to cut those who are delivering the least amount of value.  If you have to cut someone you have routinely given a “meets expectations” evaluation and told that they were “doing a great job” only because you wanted to be a nice guy (or woman), then you are severely damaging your employee.

Brute Honesty - “Bob, you have missed your numbers three quarters in a row, you need to improve next quarter or we will have to make a change.”

A**hole – “Bob, you have missed your numbers three quarters in a row, but times are tough right now, hang in there and we’ll get them next quarter.”

In “The No A**hole Rule” Robert Sutton actually maps out the areas of the country with the highest and lowest occurentences of the A**hole affliction.  With my last three employers being in Boston, Princeton, and Atlanta I concur with Mr. Sutton’s findings that the highest rate of affliction occurs in the Northeastern part of the country, with the lowest occurrence in the Southeast.

The upside of the A**hole affliction is that  “incompetent attitudes” do not survive long enough to infect others.  The sales teams of my Northeastern employers were the most well-managed.  Forecast reviews were painfully honest, with clear accountabiilty leveled on every member fo the team.  Anyone who tried to “BS” their way through their pipeline were called out publicly.

There was never a question about where we stood and what we needed to do to move forward.  While there were uncomfortable momemts, each member team, especailly those what were performing, felt comfortable in knowing where they stood in the eyes of management.

Regardless of the 700bil bailiout, we got some tough times ahead.  If you are leading a sales team, I strongly recommend you have a heart to heart with every member of your team.   Let them know where they really stand, if their numbers stink, let them know.  If thier attitude is counter-productive, let them know that a bad attitude is worse than bad numbers.

In Memoriam: Eddie Murphy’s Career

The other night, my son walked in the room as I was watching Coming to America, the last funny movie staring Eddie Murphy.

Watching the scene below, my son pointed and asked “Whose that?”.

I replied “That’s a comedic genius that decided to waste his talent by taking on any script that was thrown in his direction”.

“But, I thought Dan Aykroyd was a white dude.”

So then I had to explain the difference between comedic genius and riding John Belushi’s coat tails.

Some Language in the Clip is Not Safe for Work.

What happened to Eddie Murphy has happened at IBM, GE, Microsoft, and countless other organizations.

Success. Specifically, a lot of success very early.

IBM, GE, and Microsoft all enjoyed the 800lb gorilla position in their dominant markets for years. However when new competitors and new technologies threaten their positions, their past success had built a collective “ego” that resisted change.

Read the bios of Jack Welch, Andy Grove or Lou Gerstner, and you will find that these men spent the majority of their careers eradicating complacency in their organizations and building a sense of urgency that mandated that change was to be embraced.

One of our Sales Warriors recently changed careers prematurely. He shared that his former employer had the best product on the market, great reputation, and was loved by analysts. However, the way the team sold was very disturbing.

“When I was criticized for doing a needs analysis with a prospect, I knew it was time to go.

The mandated process was to immediately schedule a demo with any prospect, and then show every feature of the system, then ask for the order.

The demos were one size fits all. Every prospect received the same demo.

When we started losing deals because our system was reportedly “too robust”, it confirmed my suspicions that we were overwhelming our prospects with too many details.

When I shared my concerns with our VP of Sales, the response was that I need to get with the program”.

You will usually see this type of mind set in an organization that is benefiting from a first-to-market advantage or has been deemed “the next great thing”. Most who enjoy this experience fail to realize that their good fortune is only temporary.

A couple of warning signs that your sales team is following in the steps of Eddie Murphy:

• They actually believe that “This thing sells itself”

• When asked about target market “We sell to everybody”, which really equals “We have no clue who would buy this”

• When asked about advantages over competitors only replies are “Customer Service” and/or “Lowest Cost of Ownership”

Eddie, if you are reading this, we are rooting for you, but if you are thinking about doing “Coming to America 2″, I will hunt you down and beat you silly with a copy of a George Carlin HBO Special.

Review of “Jacked Up”

During one of our weekly conference calls our SVP asked “How much time do your on site presentations usually take?”.

One of our team’s response was twice as long as the rest.

The team lead explained that in their meetings they like to share our company’s history, our vision for the industry, the history of the product, and then finally, the demonstration.

Man, if only they had read “Jacked Up”.

Bill Lane’s claim to fame was that of Jack Welch’s lead speech writer. In his book, he shares his experience in joining GE, learning the ropes on how to work with Jack Welch, and spends a great deal of the book explaining how GE transformed the way business meetings are conducted.

Before there was Powerpoint, there was the slide projector. As a manager at GE, you were obligated to give presentations to your subordinates, members of upper management, and other business units. A culture emerged of measuring managers by the size of their slide carousels. For the really important presentations, one slide projector would not do, three were needed. And why say something in one slide, when 3 would make you look more important?

Then Jack showed up.

In this book you will learn how Jack mandated that the crap be cut from presentations. The fluff, the self promotion, the minutia, all were outlawed. The only words allowed in a presentation were those that had a direct impact on the major topic at hand.

Bill shares the story of an engineer giving a presentation to other business units, who had 60 minutes of slides with pictures of pipes at his plant. Instead of discussing how the chemicals in those pipes impacted operations, he focused on the plumbing. The presenting engineer was eventually pelted repeated with spitballs and forced off stage.

While the presentations were mean and lean, the presenter was expected to be a savant on their topic, and Lord help those who came up short. Those who presented to upper management who did not have the expected level of mastery found their careers “stalled” or, in some cases, retreating. Those who exceeded expectations were put on the fast track to greater things.

This book is an excellent, quick read for anyone who needs to effectively communicate with C-level executives. I enjoyed the peek inside the World of Welch. I added the link to amazon on the graphic above.

If you have an opinion on this book, or have a suggestion for a similar book, we welcome your comments.

Good Luck