2021 is here. Not a surprise I know. What I do also know is that today and its challenges look just like where we left off a few days ago. AND, that is the way it will be. Surprises will continue, challenges will rear their ugly head, just like ALWAYS! AND we will respond and conquer every one of them, just as we ALWAYS do! I make no specific forecasts, as my crystal ball shattered this past year. It had gotten pretty cloudy over the years and was due to be put out to pasture. It is key to remember that we are in control of our own actions. We cannot control the world around us, but our actions are our own. We will most certainly take significant actions this year to secure our current and future success. We will be tested and we will prevail. We will fight and we will win. We will be better for all of it! Your spirit will rise and we will grow because it is RIGHT. It is just simple.
As we march into this next season in our journey, let me suggest a simple perspective.
If you truly want to achieve your goals, learn to ENJOY the PROCESS.
Notice I did not say focus on, drive, or any other hard-charging metaphor. I intentionally said ENJOY!
Outcomes matter, PROCESS makes them happen, and if you want to get REALLY good at something, learn to ENJOY the PROCESS with all your heart! Excellence results!
And the PROCESS must be about serving those around us. Serving without reserve! Serving endlessly!
The time we find ourselves in the middle of right now requires more external focus than ever, at least if you want to make a difference. If you simply want to max out your commission, good luck, as the “buyers” of the world are looking right through your transparency, onto someone that is really there to help THEM.
More than EVER, the world needs our non-self-serving perspective in creating outcomes that make a difference with the people that we serve. Coin-operated thinking will not serve ANYONE, including the commissioned salesperson. You want to max out your quota and your commission, then MAX out your client understanding, MAX out your caring about helping someone get what THEY need. MAX out what you DO, for THEM, purely, simply, and completely.
Make the PROCESS of serving what you charge into each day. That’s a PROCESS worthy of your time, your passion, your focus…trust in that PROCESS. It will serve everyone well!
This next year will be a rough and tumble pinnacle of success for those of us that choose to make it so. I have complete faith in that fact!
OK, LET’s ROLL!
Mitch
As we approach the end of the calendar year, there is an abundance of folks loudly proclaiming good riddance to the current year with the hope that the next year will bring relief from the challenges of today. I understand the emotion behind both aspects. This has been a strange year for sure.
I choose to reframe that thinking a bit and I go back to the teachings of Eckhart Tolle, the author of The Power of NOW! When I found myself becoming an expert at making mountains out of molehills, mostly of things that had not yet happened, I looked for a resource to remove the clouds from my brain. Eckhart Tolle was there. I spent countless hours reading his writing and listening to the recordings of his oddly strange voice. That quirky voice actually helped to ingrain many of the points he was making. His fundamental tenant is that we ONLY have one moment in life and that ONE moment is NOW. The past is done and we can’t change it. The future is in front and we do not know what it will bring. We ONLY have NOW! A simple thought, but a complex position to take, and hold! Easy to say, VERY difficult to execute that focus. I give you a few of his quotes for your consideration….
With respect to the current pandemic challenges if you choose….
-“Some changes look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.”
- “The primary cause of unhappiness is never the situation but thought about it. Be aware of the thoughts you are thinking. Separate them from the situation, which is always neutral. It is as it is.”Staying in the current moment…
- “Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.”
- “Time isn’t precious at all, because it is an illusion. What you perceive as precious is not time but the one point that is out of time: the Now. That is precious indeed. The more you are focused on time—past and future—the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.”
- “Accept - then act. Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.”
- “Worry pretends to be necessary but serves no useful purpose”
- “The past has no power over the present moment.”And finally, a summary thought…
- “All negativity is caused by an accumulation of psychological time and denial of the present. Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry - all forms of fear - are caused by too much future, and
not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms
of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.”
So, regardless of how we view 2020 and the upcoming year, our singular challenge is to make the very most we can out of the one moment that we can work on… NOW! 2021 will have plenty of moments of all kinds! And we will take each of those moments and accept them as if we had chosen them, AND we will make the very best of each NOW! For that is ALL that we have! No past or future to control us… only our NOW. Take action, own your NOW!
Put your energy into SERVING. Serving others, everywhere, work, school, church, home, the street corner, everywhere you can find someone that you can help, NOW!
CARE greatly,
UNDERSTAND deeply,
SERVE endlessly, with
PURPOSE
This applies deeply in what is called “selling”. Do it from the heart, do it NOW, and focus on the outcome for others in your journey. A final quote from Eckhart Tolle…
“Don't let a mad world tell you that success is anything other than a successful present moment.”
OK, LET’S ROLL!
Mitch
Salespeople need them now more than ever.
Let me expand and explain.
As salespeople, we are told to “just go sell”. Get more face time (now video time) with our clients. Understand what they need and then deliver it. Simple, right? From that single perspective yes it is. And once upon a time that worked. In the world of the complex “solution” sell of today, it is no longer effective. AND it never was really what the best of the best did in any case. The very best “sellers” had a lot more internal knowledge, intellectual curiosity, and just plain cared more than the average bloke. And it showed. When the CEB produced their book on Challenger selling they did not invent a class of person that rose to the top. Their research simply pointed out a style that firmly and totally existed already, and that in fact was the best combination of attributes that made up the best producers. What the CEB team did was label things clearly and define them accurately so that we could finally figure out how to search for, find, hire, and enable more of what we wanted in our teams. We are finding that hiring for attitude as Mark Murphy (www.leadershipiq.com) has taught us is the most important shift in hiring that we have ever made. We now hire for traits, not skills. And it is making a HUGE difference. But… let’s go back to building blocks for the moment.
As we hire for attitude, train to teach, tailor, and take control, we also find that the new normal in the co-creation and delivery of insight with our clients requires that our team have a total and detailed understanding of all of the elements of business as the client sees it. Now to do the job we need to have all of the chapters of the book (Shiftability) engrained in our soul. The fundamental elements of the trade now consist of having a full grasp of :
The sales world that we thrive in today demands uniqueness, but only if you want differentiation from commoditization. And where once that was done by having the best products and/or services, it is now done by the sales professional and their approach to serving their clients. Now, more than ever our best sales pros have a complete grasp of all of the building blocks that are a part of the complex mosaic of today’s business. Building blocks are now for big kids if you want to make a difference!
OK, Let’s Roll!
Mitch
Continuing our exploration of Shiftability we step into the art and science of TRANSFORMATION. More than just change… this is where we change who we ARE at the core of our beliefs, not just changing our techniques. The journey continues with a bit of a story that we are all probably familiar with. While written before the “mandates’ of physical distancing you can envision this same situation playing out over ZOOM as our sales team all grab that “first cup” and cozy up to the big screen monitor on their desk at home...
Juggling her coffee and her laptop, Kristine pushed open the door to the conference room with her elbow, a few minutes late for the weekly division sales meeting. As she made her way to her seat she caught Dave’s eye. He made a small nod to the right. She followed his gaze. Three stacks of bright-colored hardcover books occupied center stage. Kristine’s stomach knotted and she looked back to Dave. He smirked and rolled his eyes.
Whatever it was, Kristine knew a couple of things for sure. There would be a few good ideas to get excited about but she would probably be told to abandon a few old ideas that had worked for her in order to get with the new program. And Dave would make some good beer money again, selling everyone’s new books on eBay.
Sound familiar? Perhaps your sales manager handed you this book to read over the weekend and told you to come back Monday ready to discuss it in your sales meeting. Please don’t sell it on eBay just yet.
Kristine’s sales manager, like so many others, is frantically trying to solve this problem: How does a sales professional stay relevant today? How do we equip ourselves to be successful in aggressive PICOS-style negotiations? How do we make sure we deliver value to our organization? To our clients? And ultimately, to ourselves?
So we are eagerly searching for the next best technique in selling, adopting and mandating new methods, changing focus, trying different incentives, and designing new programs. We get very busy doing new things, something, anything. But too often, even though we have changed everything, we get the same old results. We knock our heads up against the same problems and find ourselves right back where we started, still on the edge of irrelevance.
The whole effort becomes a change for change’s sake, without any real progress or improvement made. Several key misconceptions underpin this cycle of change that doesn’t change anything.
Out With the Old, In With the New
The first misconception is that a shift or change is always an either/or proposition. We will either adopt this new program wholeheartedly and abandon our previous methods OR we will reject this new idea and stubbornly stick to the old plan.
Neil Rackham, the author of SPIN Selling, calls this the “Armageddon selling formula” and describes it like this. “Everything you’ve ever learned about sales is wrong and, unless you stop doing it instantly, your sales efforts will shortly die in agony. There is, however, one simple cure that I have discovered. It is...” and here the author puts in a pitch for the appropriate magic bullet, such as “my prospecting method,” “my selection system,” “our funnel management process,” or “our trademarked social media analytics”—take your pick ...
This is probably the biggest failing of many sales formulas and usually what inspires controversy. The champions enthusiastically adopt the new program and throw out everything they have been doing up to this point. The detractors disdainfully reject the new ideas completely because they are unwilling to part with their old ways. In both cases, change is understood to be a net-zero exchange, instead of a process of building, growth, and evolution.
In this book, we would like to suggest that shifting is not binary, but instead mostly a both/and proposition. You will need to learn new skills, apply new ideas in selling, AND still maintain the old ideas that work well but perhaps understand and apply them in new ways. We don’t want you to abandon methods and skills that are successful for you. We also don’t want you to reject new ideas just because they are new and perhaps not yet proven in your own experience.
The challenge becomes choosing which changes to adopt, and which shifts to make.
We aim to show you a framework for putting the best of today’s thinking of selling into practice. We are going to help you navigate your way through the noise to six essential shifts we believe you need to make to stay relevant and be effective. But first, we need to help you answer this pressing question: How do I make changes that stick?
To Do, Or Not to Do?
The second misconception about change is that it is all about doing. When we are faced with a problem, usually our first thought is, what should I do to solve this problem? Then we get very busy doing things to solve our problem. We think that if we could just change our behavior, develop a new skill, apply a new technique, or start a new program, then surely we will be more successful. Hence the flood of books on selling that promise new ways to do sales.
We are going to show you why doing isn’t the right place to start for sustainable change. Rather, we need to start with changing who we are at the core of our beliefs, not just changing our techniques.
Before we get to showing you the things you can do that will help put you on the road to success as a sales professional today, we need to talk to you about your being. In order to do something different, you have to believe something different.
This is the heart of transformation. And, transformation is exactly what is required.
I was reading a blog, this morning, from a consultant firm that I consider to be very sound, until this moment, on this subject. The subject was the area of compensation for sales teams. They wrote all about making sure that the sales compensation drove the strategic objectives of the corporation. While that sounds reasonable, the baseline assumption is not valid. Because inherent in that belief is the fact that the only tool most management will use to keep folks in sync happens to be their personal income. Pure manipulation, not motivation!
But what really floored me was that within their assumption set was a metric about a world-class compensation system and the artificial barrier to success called a “quota”. This is not new, and we have all seen it for years. Their metric said that a great system has 45%-55% of the people NOT achieving quota. Again, that is not far from the reality of that statistics of what truly takes place…and that was stated to be OK.
Really? How can it possibly be OK that 45%-55% of your team FAILS? In those arcane individual commission-based systems the first hurdle to “success” is achieving an outcome where failure more than half the time is acceptable.
Would you really accept 50% failure of ANY other part of your team? 50% failure of shipping product on time… 50% failure of new products… 50% failure on a quality front… 50% failure of accounts receivable. NO, none of that would be OK. Yet we set up the “coin-operated” sales team with a hurdle to success that it is OK to miss… half the time. In no way does this even make a little bit of sense. That’s not even remotely close to being motivating. That’s just insulting! And sadly, it’s quite common in the world of compensation of sales teams.
Please go back to my earlier blogs on the Poison Known as Commission and check out the DATA that says this compensation methodology is highly flawed.
In this changing world, we truly need to shift our thinking into what we can do that will change the game for the better, and it is through true COACHING and LEADING that we can make a difference in the world around us.
Kill the commission systems… GROW the COACHING and LEAD the world to a better place.
OK, LET’s ROLL!
Mitch
