davidpoulos.com

Tag: leadership

  • The Power of a Question

    The Power of a Question

    Mitch Vandiver (at mitch@strategiescorp.net.) and The Strategies, Inc. Team put this together, and I thought it was perfect for my readers – it’s all about asking the right questions . . .

    Michael J. Marquardt, author of Leading with Questions: How Leaders Find the Right Solutions by Knowing What to Ask says, “You don’t have to have the answer to ask a great question. A great question will ultimately get an answer.”

    A school teacher shared this story. One day, as the children played at recess, a usually very calm, good-natured little boy hit a little girl, who was his best friend. The playground monitors rushed over as the little girl stood crying. One monitor immediately reprimanded the boy in an angry voice, “You can’t hit other people. That’s wrong! What were you thinking?! And, boys don’t hit girls!”

    Now, both children stood sobbing. The other playground monitor sat down with the children and asked only one question of the little boy, “Why did you hit her?” Through tears, he explained, “There was a bee on her and I didn’t want my friend to get stung.” The monitor glanced down and, indeed, laying on the ground by the little girl, was a bee.

    What a difference a great question can make! This true story is a brilliant metaphor for the times we should have asked more questions and didn’t.

    Effective and empowering questions serve several proposes:

    1. They create clarity – What did you learn about the little boy through one question?

    2. They construct better relationships – How did your opinion of the little boy shift when you understood his reason?

    3. They inspire people to reflect and see things in fresh, unpredictable ways and encourage breakthrough thinking – What would you ask the little boy to help him find other solutions to protecting his friend from bees?

    4. They challenge assumptions – What assumptions did the first playground monitor make? How did those change with one question?

    Open-ended questions do not seek specific answers. They allow curiosity and exploration. Good opened-ended questions can start with what, how, when, where, who, tell me, or I wonder.

    Great questions benefit organizations, teams, and employees by minimizing miscommunication from making assumptions, changing points of view, stimulating creativity, engaging critical thinking, developing ownership of issues, and encouraging problem solving ability.

    What great questions will you ask of others today?

  • Time . . . The Scarcest Commodity Executives Have

    Time . . . The Scarcest Commodity Executives Have

    When we asked 150 senior executives from Marketing, Sales, Operations, Administration, and Human Resources, what one thing they wanted to make their day more manageable, the vast majority answered with the same response. It wasn’t great software or IT support, it wasn’t higher salary, it wasn’t free sodas or a ping pong table in the break room, or T-shirt day, or birthday cake for all . . . the most popular answer was just one word – Time.

    Executives are starved for time – time to think, to contemplate, time to digest and cogitate, time to reflect, time to delegate, to mentor, to research, to connect on more than a cursory level with their colleagues. Prioritizing of their schedules, maximizing time efficiency, finding ways to do more than one thing at a time or to parallel schedule so that multiple tasks coincide, are the number one mental activity on a daily basis for senior leaders.

    Their plates are more than full.

    Between their own business responsibilities, outside Board affiliations, community and charitable organizations, sponsorship obligations, professional association activities, speaking engagements, family commitments and personal networking, the 18-hour day is becoming standard for senior leaders of national and global firms. While many would intone “That’s why they get the big bucks,” and “should have known before they took the job,” no amount of money or foreknowledge would have compensated or prepared the normal individual for that level of constant activity and commitment. It’s a grinding pace, and it can only be sustained for so long before their personal health and often the health of the firm suffer as a result. The average tenure of a global level, publicly held firm CEO is less than three years, and it stands to reason that the schedule, and the hunt for unscheduled time, might have a great deal to do with that. While capricious boards, fickle investors, vague and punishing financial markets add their own land mines to an already dangerous traverse, the level of personal energy required is virtually unsustainable by the average human.

    Ari

    For those who need access to, and engagement from, these top C-Suite officers, this insight could mean the difference between productive contact and being put in the “pay no mind” column. Long, rambling voice mails, five-page e-mails, 9-lb promotional brochure bombs, 40-page white papers, are just not in these guys’ future, and will not only deny you the attention you need, but irritate the recipient for not respecting the limited time they have available for such activities. It’s not that they don’t want to engage with you, or that they’re ignoring you, it’s just that you’ve come in at the end of a very long priority string, and have to wait your turn. The more hurdles you place in the way of that turn being productive, the lower your odds of connecting in a meaningful way.

    Short, sweet, decisive, get-to-the-point type communications win the day for these guys – strong, direct images, simple, direct language, compelling offers, real business cases that apply directly, and have relevance to them, are the key to success. Think about it: if you have a line of people waiting outside your office, a full calendar, a charity dinner and speech to prepare, and are flying to a board meeting later in the week, the last thing you want to do is wade through a long, rambling memo, a multi-page brochure with a barely comprehensible letter, with a tentative, limp offer that barely fits within the company’s “needs” basket. Poor choice of activities at best, when there are that many other, potentially more lucrative things waiting in the wings. A short e-mail promising a viable alternative and offering lunch next week, a few sentences at best, is more likely to get some attention.

    Time is one of the few elements of a person’s job that they have limited control over. Time can’t be manufactured, can’t be augmented, can’t be stopped or delayed, bought, coerced, finagled, negotiated or bullied. It marches onward, unbidden and unaffected by your need for more, or to speed up or slow down to make room for more tasks. So, the main goal is usually just to prioritize the time you do have, to maximize the return on effort expended, and meet as many obligations as possible. Where those priorities are allocated, how they are parsed and balanced, is often the difference between success and not, over the long haul. A famous executive has been quoted as saying “I have time for the important things. The questions is, what is important at the time?” Pick the things that are important to you long term, and prioritize them above the rest – success can’t be far behind, however you define it.

  • Selling Is Not About Relationships

    Selling Is Not About Relationships

    Reposted courtesy of HBR, copyright 2011
    Matthew Dixon is Managing Director of the Corporate Executive Board’s Sales and Service Practice. Brent Adamson is Senior Director of the Sales Executive Council, a division of the Sales and Service Practice. Their new book, The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation, is forthcoming November 10, 2011 from Portfolio/Penguin.

    This post, the first of a four-part series, is also part of the HBR Insight Center Growing the Top Line.

    Ask any sales leader how selling has changed in the past decade, and you’ll hear a lot of answers but only one recurring theme: It’s a lot harder. Yet even in these difficult times, every sales organization has a few stellar performers. Who are these people? How can we bottle their magic?

    To understand what sets apart this special group of sales reps, the Sales Executive Council launched a global study of sales rep productivity three years ago involving more than 6,000 reps across nearly 100 companies in multiple industries.

    We now have an answer, which we’ve captured in the following three insights:

     

    1. Every sales professional falls into one of five distinct profiles.

    Quantitatively speaking, just about every B2B sales rep in the world is one of the following types, characterized by a specific set of skills and behaviors that defines the rep’s primary mode of interacting with customers:

    • Relationship Builders focus on developing strong personal and professional relationships and advocates across the customer organization. They are generous with their time, strive to meet customers’ every need, and work hard to resolve tensions in the commercial relationship.
    • Hard Workers show up early, stay late, and always go the extra mile. They’ll make more calls in an hour and conduct more visits in a week than just about anyone else on the team.
    • Lone Wolves are the deeply self-confident, the rule-breaking cowboys of the sales force who do things their way or not at all.
    • Reactive Problem Solvers are, from the customers’ standpoint, highly reliable and detail-oriented. They focus on post-sales follow-up, ensuring that service issues related to implementation and execution are addressed quickly and thoroughly.
    • Challengers use their deep understanding of their customers’ business to push their thinking and take control of the sales conversation. They’re not afraid to share even potentially controversial views and are assertive — with both their customers and bosses.

     

    2. Challengers dramatically outperform the other profiles, particularly Relationship Builders.

    When we look at average reps, we find a fairly even distribution across all five of these profiles. But while there may be five ways to be average, there’s only one way to be a star. We found that Challenger reps dominate the high-performer population, making up close to 40% of star reps in our study.

    What makes the Challenger approach different?

    The data tell us that these reps are defined by three key capabilities:

    • Challengers teach their customers. They focus the sales conversation not on features and benefits but on insight, bringing a unique (and typically provocative) perspective on the customer’s business. They come to the table with new ideas for their customers that can make money or save money — often opportunities the customer hadn’t realized even existed.

     

    • Challengers tailor their sales message to the customer They have a finely tuned sense of individual customer objectives and value drivers and use this knowledge to effectively position their sales pitch to different types of customer stakeholders within the organization.

     

    • Challengers take control of the sale. While not aggressive, they are certainly assertive. They are comfortable with tension and are unlikely to acquiesce to every customer demand. When necessary, they can press customers a bit — not just in terms of their thinking but around things like price.

     

    We’ll discuss each of these capabilities in more depth in our upcoming posts, but just as surprising as it is that Challengers win, it’s almost more eye-opening who loses. In our study, Relationship Builders come in dead last, accounting for only 7% of all high performers.

    Why is this? It’s certainly not because relationships no longer matter in B2B sales–that would be a naïve conclusion. Rather, what the data tell us is that it is the nature of the relationships that matter. Challengers win by pushing customers to think differently, using insight to create constructive tension in the sale. Relationship Builders, on the other hand, focus on relieving tension by giving in to the customer’s every demand. Where Challengers push customers outside their comfort zone, Relationship Builders are focused on being accepted into it. They focus on building strong personal relationships across the customer organization, being likable and generous with their time. The Relationship Builder adopts a service mentality. While the Challenger is focused on customer value, the Relationship Builder is more concerned with convenience. At the end of the day, a conversation with a Relationship Builder is probably professional, even enjoyable, but it isn’t as effective because it doesn’t ultimately help customers make progress against their goals.

    This finding — that Challengers win and Relationship Builders lose — is one that sales leaders often find deeply troubling, because their organizations have placed by far their biggest bet on recruiting, developing, and rewarding Relationship Builders, the profile least likely to win.

    Here’s how one of our members in the hospitality industry put it when he saw these results: “You know, this is really hard to look at. For the past 10 years, it’s been our explicit strategy to hire effective Relationship Builders. After all, we’re in the hospitality business. And, for a while, that approach worked well. But ever since the economy crashed, my Relationship Builders are completely lost. They can’t sell a thing. And as I look at this, now I know why.”

     

    3. Challengers dominate the world of complex “solution-selling”

    Given the first two findings, it might be reasonable to conclude that Challengers are the down-economy reps and that when things return to normal, Relationship Builders will once again prevail. But our data suggest that this is wishful thinking.

    When we cut the data by complexity of sale — that is, separating out transactional, product-selling reps from complex, solution-selling reps — we find that Challengers absolutely dominate as selling gets more complex. Fully 54% of all star reps in a solution-selling environment are Challengers. At the same time, Relationship Builders fall off the map almost entirely, representing only 4% of high-performing reps in complex environments.

    Put differently, Challengers win because they’ve mastered the complex sale, not because they’ve mastered a complex economy. Your very best sales reps — the ones who carried you through the downturn — aren’t just the top performers of today but the top performers of tomorrow, as they are far better able to drive sales and deliver customer value in any kind of economic environment. For any company on a journey from selling products to selling solutions — which is a migration that more than 75% of the companies I work with say they are pursuing — the Challenger selling approach represents a dramatically improved recipe for driving top-line growth.

    If you found this valuable, you can have more like this delivered to your inbox weekly – FREE, just by subscribing to this blog above. And, don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Leadership Behaviors Gain You a Seat at the C-Table

    Leadership Behaviors Gain You a Seat at the C-Table

    I’ve long been an advocate of soliciting the help of marketing experts when developing, launching and branding new products, services or businesses. We’ve seen in our practice that the earlier you get the marketing folks involved in the process, the more likely you are to be successful. This is backed by study after study, both anecdotal and empirical, over the last 20 years. How many articles and references have you seen, including obituaries, that say something like “. . . successful business man was a marketing and promotions genius and applied his skills to creating and growing the company . . .” ?

    Clearly, the knowledge of the practice and theory of marketing is a valuable, nee critical skill to have in your bag of management tricks. And indeed, it seems the more input from the marketing folks you get, the faster and bigger the success is! Ramp up times are shorter, development and product lifecycles reduce, launches are more dramatic, and alternate applications and uses surface faster and are more often taken advantage of, when the marketers get heavily involved in the upper echelon decision making.

    So why has it taken so long, and required so much effort for marketers to seek and achieve a true place at the C-level of management structures in the U.S.? The newly-invented Chief Marketing Officer title was a hard fought battle, typically one that is won on an individual basis, and in only a small percentage of companies, often larger and older firms, where upper management is often tinged with risk spreading behaviors rather than overt leadership. Often this battle is won by only the most vocal, dynamic, personable, innovative and connected of marketers. One might say these are inherent traits in every good marketer, but you’d be surprised at some we’ve worked with who are impossibly poor at blowing their own horn while excelling at promoting the business they serve.

    I’m convinced, after working directly with over 100 marketers in the last thirty years, that those who market themselves as well as they do their firms are those destined to go the farthest. In some cases, it’s a matter of the squeaky wheel getting the grease, but that only really works on an internal basis on the way up the ladder in a contained environment. But in this case, they have to not only talk the talk, they have to walk the walk, too. You have to back up the swagger with bottom-line success time after time to truly gain legend status. Just plain visibility alone won’t do it.

    Business executives rise to prominence in their own small world through long-term, solid achievement, aided by public recognition of those achievements and a desire to be associated with those achievements. Which makes it even more amazing that marketers have had such a hard time gaining celebrity status in the business world, as marketers have an endless series of “wins” to point to on a given day.

    Some of the difficulty is that marketers tend to be collaborative, work in teams, even if the team leader works in a supervisory capacity – there’s just too much for one person to really do without spreading the load, and thus the credit. CEO’s get credit for the good decisions, and spread the blame for the bad ones among their top management team. Marketers tend to take it on the chin for the failures, while others take credit for the successes. That shadow tends to keep them in the background, slaving away as good corporate brand stewards, until there’s a regime change.

    The challenge before us as marketers is to loudly and often show the value we contribute to corporate success. We needn’t be shy about putting our names and faces behind the successes we create, because in reality, there is no success in business without something being bought or sold, and we’re the closest to the end of the sales chain and have the best understanding of what customers want and need. That makes our expertise not only critical but invaluable. Don’t be afraid to step up and take credit for the successes, spread the credit as far as you need to, to your team and beyond, but accept the success for what it’s worth without demurring or deferring. On the other side of the coin, never shirk responsibility for the inevitable misses, take them head on, learn from them and apply that education to the next situation. You’ll be applauded and respected for the integrity, so you win anyway.

    Stay the course, be visible, be effective, have an impact, and don’t be afraid of public exposure – you’ve earned every last bit of it. Be the corporate leaders we know you are, but do it in a visible way. Everyone’s a winner in the end when you do.

  • Be An Agent For Change

    Be An Agent For Change

    At it’s root, marketing is about change. Changing perceptions, changing appearance, changing buying behavior. But if marketers are to conquer the C-level chambers and earn a real seat at the management table, they have to be an agent for change in the business. Simply executing within the frame isn’t good enough any longer.

    It’s up to us as marketers to lead the charge into the future, to examine and adjust business models, to question the status quo and come up with workable solutions, without reservations, obstacles, roadblocks, and excuses. Lots of platitudes surround this type of behavior, but the ones that i prefer are “Better to ask forgiveness than permission” and “If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward, there is no standing still”. Food for thought . . .

    CMOs have it within their power to revolutionize their businesses, they just have to give themselves permission to do it. Use the powerful imagination you were blessed with and put it in gear to create the next step in the logical growth path of your business, or better yet, leapfrog the next step and go ahead by two! The competition will never catch up!

    Change effected is usually change managed. Making changes for change’s sake is a short-lived phenomenon, one that shakes things up, but doesn’t move the needle for long. To affect long-lasting change, the path must be plotted before it can be blazed. Note the spelling, Plotted, not Plodded. You don’t have to take a year to plan the next two – change can be made quickly and still be lasting. Better to try five or six different things now than plan one thing perfectly.

    Go forth bravely, boldly, and be a change agent – you’ll be surprised what just the change in mindset will bring . . .!

    For more on becoming an agent of change, subscribe to my blog above, or follow me on Twitter @docpoulos – let me know what you think! and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • Marketing Leadership Means Asking the Right Questions

    Marketing Leadership Means Asking the Right Questions

    Ever wonder how market leading companies got that way? Ever wonder who lead the way and how they knew to veer in the direction they did? Based on our analysis of hundreds of business cases, we’ve determined that there are some key decisions that top marketing executives make in common with market leadership, the result of which is moving that company to the next level of market penetration.

    5) Select Partners Carefully. Ask yourself this question: Would i want to do business with this company regardless if I made a profit or not? If the answer is no, then it’s probably not a good fit. For a partnership to work, both sides have to support the mission equally and enthusiastically. If you don’t enjoy your interactions with the partner and they’re not tremendously fruitful, cut your losses and dissolve it before things get bad.

    4) Know When To Call it A Day. Ask yourself: Is this effort as effective as it was the week it started? If the answer is no, is it fatiguing and lagging due to lack of support, saturation, market shift or getting stale? It may be you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns, and the ROI of continuing it is no longer viable. If that’s the case, you’re throwing money away, just pull the plug and initiate another effort. Clinging to a failing program costs you more than you imagine in lost opportunity, time, and it’s negative effect on your audience, staff and company morale has a measurable value.

    3) Have a Purpose. Ask yourself: Why exactly are we doing this again? If the answer resembles something like “we did it last year”, or “our competitors tried it,” or “The Boss wants it that way” than it might be time to rethink the effort from the beginning. Legacy programs whose rationale have changed due to altered circumstances can be doing damage to your brand, losing you money, and wasting time. If the purpose no longer exists, don’t do it!

    2) Are We Winning, and If Not, Why Not? One thing most market leading companies use as a mantra is that they have to be in the top 1-2 positions in each market they compete in or changes need made. They feel a need to lead, and they do everything in their power to lead their particular category for every product or service they offer. A quick analysis of the leader will tell you what you’re doing wrong, and you have to make a decision whether to fix it or bail out. The Cost/Benefit analysis should be performed regularly, and a market scan produced quarterly with ruthless honesty.

    1) Where Do We Go From Here? Market leaders don’t often have to ask this question, because they think 8-9 moves ahead and plan strategically each move and have three contingencies based on research and market intelligence. They ask “where do we go” long before they get there! Draw the roadmap before you leave the barn, leave room to be flexible to respond to unforeseen challenges, and stay the course, and you’ll be surprised how far you’ll go. The control and discipline it requires to do this is what separates the men from the boys, but you can bet that market leading companies spend more time planning than executing, and spend significant time asking “What if?”

    If your company wants to be a leader in their market, it comes down to asking the right questions, and probing until you get an answer that satisfies your needs. Keep digging . . .

    For more great questions you should be asking, pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”