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Day: March 25, 2019

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Best Practices Growth Leadership Personal Development

Are You Trying to “Keep Up” with Technology, or Ride It?

Across my 40-year career in technology, I have increasingly heard clients and others express to me their greatest fear, which is that they are not “keeping up” with technology. 20 years ago, I would hear that worry expressed a few times a year. Now I hear it a few times a week.

Honestly, at first I wrote it off. I thought that it was just a few Luddites who didn’t want to put in the effort to stay with the pace of change. But then I started to experience that feeling myself, so it became personal. And uncomfortable. I wasn’t “keeping up.”

And, it wasn’t just a feeling. It couldn’t be explained away that I felt like I wasn’t keeping up, but in actuality, I was doing just fine. No, I was convinced that I was in fact not keeping up. Technology was passing me by. And it started feeling worse than uncomfortable. It started to feel downright scary, because my business was about technology. I started thinking about how I rarely saw any 50-year-old programmers. And I started hearing about how venture capitalists would pour millions into a company founded by a 20-year-old, while companies were laying off middle-aged technologists left and right.

No, this wasn’t my imagination. There was a popular perception out their that technology was a young person’s game, and that most people can’t keep up. And the older you get, the more it’s true.

So, I started thinking about this attitude, and I began to realize that it doesn’t actually make any sense to try to “keep up” with technology. No one tries to “keep up” with a car or an airplane. People can’t do what those technologies do. You don’t need to keep up with them–you need to ride them. Technology is a tool that makes you better, not something you need to outdo, like some kind of modern-day John Henry hammering spikes.

That change in attitude changed the way I approached my job. I no longer cared whether I kept up with all the changes. I just focused on a constant search for tools–things that multiplied my effectiveness, making me better. When I found them, I rode them. And I ignored everything else, reasoning that if whatever I was currently ignoring in fact turned out to be important, then they would be brought to my attention again soon enough, and I could ride them then.

That change in focus also changed who I thought I was. In my first few years as a digital marketing consultant, I was named to a couple of lists as one of the “100 Best Internet Marketers” or some such monicker. And then they stopped naming me, which should have been upsetting, but it wasn’t, because my focus had changed.

I no longer wanted to play the game of keeping up and proving that I was keeping up by speaking on every new development or coming out with a new book that “explained everything you need to know” about some new development. Instead, I wanted to find the most important things to ride and teach my clients how to ride them, too. It was at that point that I changed my focus from consulting to software. Instead of manually analyzing problems and telling clients what to do, I started to develop techniques that automatically collected data and analyzed it, eventually using Artificial Intelligence techniques, because AI was the best technology to ride for the problems that I am trying to solve.

And I don’t worry whether I am keeping up with 5G or IoT or blockchain. They might be very important technologies for me to ride someday, but, for the moment, I am ignoring them, because I don’t judge them to be important technologies to ride in pursuit of the problems I am solving. At some point, I might change my mind because i can see how useful they are for the problems I am trying to solve then. And you know what? They will still be there waiting for me.

The truth is that human beings didn’t evolve at the pace that technology evolves, so none of us are designed to keep up. But the entire history of humans show that we invent tools to solve problems, and if you treat everything in technology as a tool that you should evaluate to see if it is interesting as a solution to a problem you have, suddenly it stops being scary and starts being fun.

I hope you go out and have fun with technology. Go for a ride.

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Entrepreneurship Human Resources Management Negotiations Skills Women In Business

Do You Know the Hidden Source of Your Happiness?

“To unveil your sources of happiness, you must know where it lives.” -Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert

He spoke with his website designer. After the call, he felt a heightened sense of happiness. As he reveled in his bliss, he assessed his state of pleasure and reflected on why it was in abundance. He realized that those feelings stemmed from that conversation. He thought, “My website will be updated, which means my services and skills will be presented better. That will bring in more business and create more opportunities for me.”

Do you note when you’re happy? Are you aware of the hidden sources of your happiness? Sometimes, we’re happy and we’re not aware of it. It’s usually because we’re not attentive to what put us into an elated state. Are you aware of what causes that lack of recognition?

Continue reading and you’ll discover why it’s important to pay attention to your level of happiness and the benefits gained from doing so.

Know Yourself:

Do you really know what it takes to make you happy? Or, do you leave it to chance? If you relinquish such an important force to chance, without recognizing it, you’re neglecting your wellbeing.

The more attuned you are to your emotions, your dreams, and driving sources of motivation, the easier it’ll be to identify those variables. That means, regardless of your state of mind, you’ll be able to alter it. But to do that, you must be aware of how and when to exercise that control.

The more aware you are of the environments that challenge your happiness, the more opportunities you’ll have to avoid negativity. First, you must know yourself, know what you want, and focus on constantly moving in the direction of your needs and desires.

Accomplishments:

When you sense you’ve made accomplishments, you feel the momentum of progress. And that makes you experience happiness. Conversely, when you’re not making progress, you may feel like you’re in a rut. That diminishes your happiness.

If you’re more aware of your environments and the people in them, you can make better assessments about the probability of outcomes. That’s another reason you should surround yourself with like-minded people. They can serve to help you strive for higher achievements. Their actions can have a profound impact on you and your degree of happiness.

What does this have to do with negotiations?

When negotiating, your emotions sway from one end of the spectrum to the other. At times, they’re like a wild and uncontrollable ride. At other times, they’re akin to a pleasurable stroll on the beach. In either case, your emotions will dictate your actions. Thus, the more aware you are about what causes you happiness, the better you can control your emotions. With that, you’ll be in greater control of your actions when negotiating.

Happiness is truly a state of mind. If you’re more aware of the actions that lead to greater happiness, you’ll be able to induce that state more readily. You’ll also be able to use that skill in times when you might otherwise feel besieged by others, which could lead to unwanted outcomes.

When you learn to control the occurrences that lead to greater happiness, you will have created space where more happiness can reside. That will make you the controller of your happiness quotient … and everything will be right with the world.

Remember, you’re always negotiating!

After reading this article, what are you thinking? I’d really like to know. Reach me at Greg@TheMasterNegotiator.com

To receive Greg’s free “Negotiation Tip of the Week” and the “Sunday Negotiation Insight” click here http://www.themasternegotiator.com/greg-williams/

#Happiness #Source #Emotion #Business #Progress #SmallBusiness #Negotiation #NegotiatingWithABully #Power #Perception #emotionalcontrol #relationships #HowToNegotiateBetter #CSuite #TheMasterNegotiator #ControlEmotions

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Best Practices Investing Marketing Personal Development Sales

So Close But Still So Far: Discounting while Perspective Selling

Conclusion of a Five Part Series.

Are you selling with great perspective but still find your sellers discounting to win opportunities?  Don’t worry, you aren’t alone.  Selling with perspective (or insight, sometimes challenging) wins revenue by uncovering value. In the right hands, that can deliver benefits all over your company. In the wrong hands though, it means producing unprofitable revenue: making your company work just as hard for less reward.

Throughout this series, I’ve discussed perspective,  knowledge or insight that expands a customer’s understanding of one or more business issues. When a seller provides perspective, they apply customer-valued (not just any) insights and expertise about unanticipated outcomes. That might mean improving a decision, or achieving a previously unknown outcome.

Selling with perspective breaks sales professionals out of a death spiral.  That spiral: “since salespeople don’t add value to my decision, I’m going to self-inform. Then, I’ll invite them to bid on my self-defined solution.  As a result, they will have a hard time adding any value”. Using perspective selling to break out of the death spiral is critical. Great, even.  It helps win more opportunities, which is critical.

The thing is, a great perspective seller is most of the way to being able win those same opportunities at much higher margins—combined with higher customer preference.  Perspective selling while discounting iso close, yet so far.

I maintain that any company (including a non-profit, if you think about it) has the same fundamental mission — the core purpose of business:

Any company exists to generate higher customer value than it cost to deliver.

To recap, perspective selling allows sellers to uncover and develop additional value – the very essence of a successful business. Since value is the basis of price (OK, strike “is”. “should be the basis of price”), perspective sellers are perfectly positioned to sell value-based prices. They just need to take their game to the next level.

The Three Pillars/Legs of the Perspective Selling Stool… and Value.

Remember the three foundational “pillars” of expertise (or three legs of a stool) a seller should master:

  1. Business Acumen...This was the focus of part two. Basically, business expertise helps evaluate a prospective customer’s (or any company’s) operational efficiency and effectiveness, then identify value gaps.
  2. Solution Acumen. Feature/benefit selling is dead.  As discussed in part three, solution expertise improves perspective selling by translating a product or service into results/outcomes for a prospective buyer.
  3. Customer Acumen…In part four, we described world-class customer acumen.  It’s expertise in facilitating a group buying decision.  At elite level, sellers incorporate decision criteria players from any (even unusual) role with a valued outcome connected to their solution.

The ingredients of selling a value-based price are all right there above…emphasized in boldface.

Perspective (plus insight selling, and to a lesser extent Challenger Selling) harnesses the most compelling buying process: causing a customer to visualize unrealized, desirable outcomes for themselves. Adding on, valuable outcomes are the foundation of priceable value.  Finally, priceable value is the base of value-based pricing (Unfortunately, this isn’t as obvious as it should be. For proof, just look at how many dollars in discounts you gave out last year).

Can You Please Just Finish the Layup?

Done correctly, perspective selling is uncovers customer-valued outcomes throughout the entire selling process.

Unfortunately, most perspective selling doesn’t explicitly teach asking that one more question: “what will this outcome mean to you…monetarily”?  The exact wording of that basic question varies depending on personal style and situation but could sound like:

  1. What is [this situation] costing you every [year/month/etc.]?
  2. It sounds like that [situation] is causing [other department/role] to spend [hours/dollars/resources] on [current work-around]. Can you tell me about that or get me in front of them to ask directly?
  3. I just saw this at another company. For them, [describe improved outcome], resulted in X% reduction in [risk/cost/waste/etc.] and a [savings/cost avoidance] of $Y.  What kind of result do you think might be realistic in your situation?
  4. …you get the idea. Express the outcome as a result preceded by a [dollar/euro/yen/pound/yuan/rupee/etc.] sign.

Thankfully, this isn’t a “keep selling until you lose” situation.  Perspective sellers uncover value early and often — way before the proposal/price negotiation stage.  Remember, that’s the whole point of being an insight seller. It’s like great perspective sellers are leading a fast break with the basketball.  They only need to finish the layup by helping the prospect monetize their already-expressed valued outcome.

The Three Pillars of Perspective Selling and Value Price Selling are the Same. They’re Just Used Differently.

Now, re-read the boldface text on the three pillars above.  Next, go back and read the typical questions just above.  Then, notice how the three pillars help a seller:

  1. Understand the cost impact on the customer’s business? (hint: business acumen, possibly solution acumen)
  2. Predict a secondary/related business result, (business acumen, solution acumen), then recruit a new buying influence with something to gain (customer acumen).
  3. Refer a prior success (solution acumen) into the current prospect’s situation (business acumen), then start one persona on the path to monetizing the problem in their own world (business, solution, and customer acumen).
  4. …you get the idea. It takes all three legs of the stool to support both perspective and value price selling.

Perspective selling carries your conversation widely and effectively around an organization. However, Value price selling can carry your conversation more effectively into the C-suite.

Perspective selling uncovers and clarifies value drivers. In contrast, Value selling monetizes drivers.  Full Value Selling pushes sellers to monetize every single value driver they possibly can.

Perspective selling wins opportunities.  Better still, Full Value selling builds so much monetary value for your solution that your higher price is a better bargain to the customer than the exact same proposal sold only with perspective.

Selling value is one of those areas where less is less.

More value is more price. Importantly, price is profit.

Your company exists to generate higher customer value than it cost to deliver.

If you aren’t happy with your current results, could it be because your sellers are trained — and compensated (that’s another blog post, or several careers) – to go after exactly the outcome you pointed them toward?

Contact me if you want to talk about it.

To your success!

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

Why Failing to Train Your Employees Costs a lot More Than You Think

Let me start this article by quoting a conversation between a CEO and a head of training.

The CEO says, “What if we spend all this money training our staff and they leave us?” And the head of training replies, “What if we don’t train them and they stay?”

The point of this adage is that if you spend a lot of money and they leave that is not great. But if you don’t train them and they stay, it costs you a lot of money.

***

Early in my career when I worked for CCA Global Partners, I supervised operations at a number of flooring stores that practiced a philosophy hiring philosophy that seemed logical. The company routinely hired salespeople who had worked at other flooring retailers, and then didn’t train them. The assumption was that experienced salespeople were “pretrained.” Training them would be costly and superfluous.

That assumption might have made sense, but it was flawed. The fact that those salespeople had experience didn’t mean that they came armed with the best selling skills. So, my team and I developed a blended program of live and eLearning that taught the comprehensive selling skills that our company needed. We trained salespeople on the products they were selling, on how to increase the size of the average order, on how to explain to customers what to expect when their new flooring was installed, and more.

The performance of the experienced people we trained was dramatically better than the performance of experienced people who were allowed to “learn on their own.” For every $750,00 in sales made by salespeople we trained, the “learn on their own” salespeople generated only $400,00 in sales, or only about 60% of what trained employees did. Another way of looking at it? Untrained employees contributed about 60% of what the trained employees did against margin (the amount of money they generated after subtracting the cost of commissions, the cost of goods sold, the cost of processing credit cards and other expenses).

And the advantage becomes even greater when you consider the additional cost of employment that include benefits, social security taxes, the cost of a desk and a phone, and other expenses.

In my years of analyzing training results, I have seen time and time again that the ROI on training is dramatically greater than most company executives believe it will be. In simple terms, if a trained worker becomes 100% productive and an untrained worker is only 60% productive, you are losing $40,000 in value on every $100,000 of business you conduct.

And here’s another statistic that should catch your attention. When you look at the amount of money that each employee contributes after commissions (the “contribution margin”), properly trained salespeople generate something on the order of $122,000 more for of $1 million in sales that your company makes. And when you tally those gains across a salesforce of five, 10, or more employees, you easily see that the gains are significant.

Why Trained Employees Generate More Income

There are many reasons. Trained salespeople . . .

  • Close more sales
  • Generate larger average sales
  • Sell fewer products at discounted prices, and more products at list price
  • Make fewer mistakes
  • Sell the right products, reducing the cost of returns and product replacements
  • Build customer relationships that result in more repeat business
  • Generate more positive reviews online
  • Increase your net promoter scores
  • Help keep morale and productivity high among all your employees, because people don’t like to work with untrained people who don’t know what they are doing

There are many more reasons why trained employees contribute more to the bottom line. Even if you have a company that attracts a small volume of walk-in traffic and only a small number of customers come through your door, for example, trained salespeople will increase profits for you, even if you do not increase the number of customers you attract, your business will still be up if you train them to sell each customer just a little bit more, to make higher margins.

Training Is Not Just for Salespeople

To cite another example from my years in the flooring industry, I was once responsible for creating a program that trained flooring installers the basics of customer service, such as explaining to customers exactly what to expect during the installation process. Thanks to that program, we took the percentage of customers who said they would not buy from us again from 13% down to less than half a percent.  We dramatically increased the likelihood of doing referral business by word of mouth advertising.

In Closing . . .

Not training is hugely expensive . . . far more expensive than training. In your company, I urge you to look for all the opportunities where proper training can dramatically increase profits, reduce waste and provide an outsized ROI for every training dollar you spend. If you start to look, I am willing to wager you will find many more opportunities than you expect.