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Month: July 2019

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Best Practices Investing Marketing Personal Development Sales

Does Your Customer Know Your Offer is Mission Critical?

If the statement below should resonate with your customer, you probably operate in a mission-critical sales environment.

 


“(What I sell) is Cheap. It’s Trouble that’s Expensive”.

 

The mission critical sale is when your offer can affect your customer’s business or operations in some significant way. Note the emphasis on “should” and “can”; I’ll get to that later on.

Examples might include:

  • Complex/Technical capital equipment
  • Medical tech and new technology
  • Custom & Semi-custom products & services
  • Differentiated components
  • Corporate software, including SaaS/cloud delivered.

The Mission-Critical Sale Moves Beyond Consensus Selling. 

Full disclosure: I’ve been selling and consulting in “the complex sale” (aka consensus selling) for decades. I understand it and am a huge fan.  I’m beyond “drinking the Kool-aid”. I’m marinated in it.

I also know what consensus selling methodologies are and aren’t.

They are for organizing opportunity pursuit strategy when a buying ecosystem — multiple personas – is making a group buying decision. Usually, this ecosystem is made up of personas somebody thinks should be included. Unfortunately, complex selling methodologies often assume that “somebody” defined the group properly.

Complex sales methodologies aren’t for expanding a buying ecosystem strategically (methodologies accommodate expansion just fine, they just don’t teach it). Typically, companies buy in organizational silos, applying a self-imposed set of blinders to their decision. Thus, they buy too narrowly, engaging prospective vendors constrained by their own narrow perspective. It’s not your customers’ fault: they aren’t experts in your offer’s capabilities and don’t understand all of its implications.

When One Silo Has Budget, But Many Silos Benefit

Unfortunately, selling organizations who blindly accept a predefined buying ecosystem almost always overlook potential stakeholders. This is for a variety of reasons, but the result is that sellers miss potential differentiation leaving value unrecognized. Consequently, opportunity strategy under-powered…a potentially mission-critical sale is reduced to a run-of-the-mill complex sale.

  • Imagine this scenario: You’ve gained consensus from your regular personas, to the point of mildly irritating the purchasing agent. Proudly, you know what every persona wants, and each feels your offer fits their needs. It’s smooth sailing until your coach calls: you’re on the outside looking in. Astonishingly, a competitor has penetrated throughout the organization — to departments you didn’t even know cared — and somehow to executives who told you that the personas you were working with were “the right team”. Worse, their proposal was higher priced than yours, but articulated business outcomes just too compelling to ignore. You followed your “consensus selling methodology” perfectly, but the competitor boxed you into a corner that you couldn’t even discount your way out of.

Again, consensus selling methodologies help organize all personas you identify. Unfortunately, they don’t teach anticipating and proactively adding new players to an ecosystem. In contrast to methodology, “buyer enablement”: helps customer organizations make better, more well-informed decisions.

Admittedly, expanding the buying ecosystem increases decision complexity. However, don’t make the mistake of thinking that’s always a bad thing.  Adding the right people means adding allies…packing the court in your favor.

As I said, I’m marinated in complex selling methodology. It does its job (organizing a given group decision dynamic) really well. For the mission-critical sale, though, today’s methodologies need a specific boost: understanding when, where, and how, and why to change the decision dynamic — and to what.

It’s Not Harder or More Complex. It’s Just Value-Focused

In some ways, value-focused selling is easier. For example, coaching simplifies down to one question “what’s the value?” (OK, sometimes asked over and over like a child asking “why?”) . If your sellers can articulate a complete value picture, they’ve probably performed all of the selling methodology steps just fine. Focusing on value yields a deep understanding of the motivations behind the consensus decision.

  • I’ve analyzed and coached perhaps thousands of Miller Heiman Group Blue Sheets. A recurring rep shortcoming is understanding persona-specific Business Results and Personal Wins. Critically, not understanding desired outcomes, and how customers value those outcomes means reps can’t genuinely understand the group decision.
  • Similarly, experienced TAS practitioners echo similar deficiencies in users of that methodology. Typically they uncover missing/incomplete Unique Business Value, Critical Success Factors, Compelling Event, and Economic Value Proposition. Again, these are all failures to understand customer value.

I could repeat for other methodologies, but the trend is clear. Salespeople capture groups, but not the value that drives their decision. Worse, they don’t build complete value high and wide in customer organizations.

What if, instead of switching to a new methodology (when the ones out there are fine for organizing a group buying decision)…what if you could just incorporate the missing value conversations into your existing process? Wouldn’t that be a high-value, low interruption, easy-adoption initiative? In fact, this is the elite selling behavior most mission-critical salesforces are missing.

Separately, for those without a methodology in place, what if you start your team at the core of sales–value–then work outward to managing the customer’s decision dynamic as needed? Remember, customer value is what moves all buying decisions — from transactional to mission-critical. Developing your sellers’ “nose for value” is the pivotal skill in any sales environment.

Not All Mission Critical Sellers Act Like It

Earlier, I promised to come back to the words “can/should” in “your offer can affect your customer’s business…”. Here’s the thing: many organizations who sell potentially mission-critical offers don’t sell like their offer is mission-critical. They don’t make it mission-critical for the customer(a la the seller in the lost deal scenario above). Rather, they go through methodology-mandated motions without connecting solution to value, building value, and extending value organization-wide. This leaves deal-winning value – and pricing power – on the table. I’ve managed too many P&Ls to accept this shortcoming.

One of the reasons I focus on the mission-critical sale is that the ROI on “increasing pricing power” is staggeringly high. Notably, this is because pricing dollars are profit dollars. Gaining pricing power is a conversation that CEOs, CROs and COtBs want to have, and I find those conversations a lot more rewarding (OK, valuable) than ones with sales enablement and L&D professionals comparing complex sales methodologies. One sounds more mission-critical than the other, no?

So, want to talk about it? Contact me.

To your success!

Categories
Best Practices Culture Entrepreneurship Health and Wellness Industries Leadership Technology

Future Insight: Changing the World with an Anticipatory Mindset

We are at a unique point in human history, marked by accelerating global change and enhanced by technological advances. We are always doing the impossible. Agile organizations learned how to change rapidly, but with change accelerating, we must go beyond agility and learn to anticipate disruptive problems before they happen.

A New Incentive

With over 500 known cycles that repeat, such as biological cycles, celestial cycles, and business cycles, and predictable linear changes, such as the retirement of aging Baby Boomers, there is a way to anticipate many of the problems we will have and pre-solve them before they happen. The good news is that there is a growing global supply of young, anticipatory minds paying attention to the Hard Trends with an interest in changing the world, now with a new incentive for them to anticipate ways to shape the future positively.

In celebrating its 350th anniversary in 2018, Merck KGaA of Darmstadt, Germany, pioneered the Future Insight Prize to stimulate groundbreaking science and innovative technologies for the benefit of humanity. With a targeted 1,000,000-euro grant, the inaugural Future Insight Prize winner of 2019 will be announced in July, marking the first of many prize winners over the next 35 years that both stimulate and honor achievements in science and technology key for humanity, namely health, nutrition, and energy.

The Pandemic Protector

The 2019 prize will be allocated in the field of pandemic preparedness, for work in anticipating a later realization of the visionary dream product coined as the “Pandemic Protector.” This breakthrough product begins with a clinical sample of a person infected with an unknown pathogen and produces an agent for cure or to prevent infection of others within a short, clinically relevant time frame. Researchers and entrepreneurs know we must anticipate, pre-solve and change in new, innovative ways in order to stay ahead of this problem.

First announced at Curious 2018, the first Future Insight conference, the event had more than 60 speakers, including six Nobel laureates, and was attended by more than 1,300 leaders from academic and corporate environments from all over the world. This announcement drew in more than 70 top scientists to the Future Insight Prize jury, collaborating to select the first year’s prize winner.

With antimicrobial resistance threatening the effective prevention and treatment of an always-transforming range of infections, this research is imperative for 2020 because the CDC estimates that in the United States alone, over two million people are sickened every year with antibiotic-resistant infections, with at least 23,000 deaths as a result. Worldwide, there is evidence of antibiotic resistance in bacteria that cause common and treatable infections, such as pneumonia.

The 2020 dream product is likely to build upon the 2019 “Pandemic Protector,” as innovators are already working to develop a series of novel, narrow-spectrum antibacterial agents capable of curing any bacterial infection without induction of drug resistance.

In yet another cumulative way, 2021’s prize is on the topic of dramatic population increase and how to sustain such an increase with innovative ways to produce food while avoiding compromising the integrity of our planet. Given the fact that the population is likely to hit 9.1 billion by 2050, overall food production must increase by 70% between 2005 and 2050.

The prize topics extend as far as 2022, which pertains to renewable sources of energy as to slow and ultimately cease the constant consumption of our natural resources for fuel. In conjunction with this concept, researchers hope to avidly avoid altering our atmosphere’s CO2, which will require us to utilize the sun in new and innovative ways.

Future Insight Prize

It is an honor for Burrus Research to partner with Merck to expand and advance the Future Insight Prize as a mainstream example of anticipatory innovation applied to the greater good of the human race. Professors and scholars of Harvard University, Princeton and many more Ivy League institutions are joining in to get as many innovative minds as possible focusing on pre-solving the world’s greatest challenges in the future sustainability of our planet by way of continuing research laying important foundations for the four published dream products as discussed here.

Change comes from the outside in, forcing us to react and manage crises. Transformation, on the other hand, whether it is business or personal, always comes from the inside out, and that gives us far more positive control while allowing us to actively shape the future. The Future Insight Prize is a perfect example of a company utilizing their available resources to anticipate and pre-solve global problems before they happen as they positively shape the future, not only for themselves but for the future of humankind. I believe it is imperative that attention is brought to this incredible opportunity for entrepreneurs and innovators alike.

The Curious2020 Future Insight Conference will take place July 13 -15, 2020 in Darmstadt, Germany, The Conference will run with plenary sessions followed by three parallel work streams with attendance from all over the world.

Categories
Marketing Personal Development

You Don’t Need a Bargain – You Need Value!

NYC Branded Lifestyle Portrait photographer John DeMato and Brian Lima reviewing photos

Look beyond the price tag when investing in portraits.

You don’t need a bargain – you need value.

While recently chatting with a client after our branded lifestyle portrait session, she told me that she booked a portrait session months before while in Europe for a speaking gig.

Once I got over the fact that she cheated on me – sigh, tear wipe – I leaned in to listen to her story.

She told me a photographer she knew through a colleague of hers was in the same city as her at the same time, so she decided to take advantage of the opportunity and get some portraits taken outside of the US.

The photographer charged an extremely low rate for her sessions, so why not, right?

Once they met, they spent time capturing portraits in my client’s hotel room, on the street, in the nearby park and a bunch of other locations.

After several hours together and a couple of hundred photos captured, I asked my client how many keepers she selected from the pile.

One.

Wait, what? ONE PICTURE?

Yup, just one photo out of that entire experience.

I was a bit dumbfounded, to be honest.

Mind you, this was moments after she and I went through the pile of photos we created over the course of a couple of hours. In our case, the difficulty, fortunately, was getting rid of photos because she loved so many of them.

The difference between these two portrait session experiences was staggering.

Now, I’ve been hired to clean up other photographer’s messes in the past, but honestly, the disparity that she described was hard to grasp.

I wanted to know where she thought the difference lied between the work we did and what she got in Europe.

So, my client obliged with a laundry list of reasons:

The other photographer is not specialized to serve speakers, authors, and coaches.

She specializes in fashion photography, which is awesome for fashion work, but, not for branded lifestyle portraits for thought leaders.

The goals for these two different genres live on completely different planets, and, as a result, the photos will not resonate as deeply – not only with my client but with her own audience.

All photographers possess different strengths and gifts behind the camera – hire the ones that serve your community specifically in order to maximize the value of the image content you capture as well as the experience of the session itself.

No strategy session beforehand.

While we spoke at length about my clients’ outfits, locations to shoot, the lifestyle activities we would capture, in addition to the overall mood of the portraits, there was zero conversation with the other photographer beforehand.

She just showed up and clicked the shutter button on her camera for a couple of hours and hoped for the best.

While this is a perfectly suitable mode of operation for an impromptu session or just having fun with the camera, this is not the way for any member of the speaker, author and coach community to acquire marketing assets that will promote their services to those they serve.

These images need to be dynamic, compelling and authentic to them, which is why it’s important for the photographer to understand who they are, who they serve and why they do what they do before they unpack their camera and lights.

They need to understand the goals of the portrait session for their client and how these images are going to be used throughout their online presence.

It’s a little more involved than hoping a handful of the images are in focus, 🙂

Reviewing the photos throughout the session.

While photographing with my client on the street, I walked over and showed her the way the images were coming out on the back of my camera.

And, mid-way through our session, I stopped down the session in order for us to review what we had captured up to that point on my laptop, which is a much bigger and better view of the photos.

She was extremely appreciative of the feedback I was giving with respect to how she could leverage these images both on social media and other marketing avenues. She also found it helpful that I offered my opinion as to which images better represented her brand and should be used as speaker submission photos.

We also discussed what we thought was working and not working with regard to the aesthetics of the images – lighting, locations, her facial expressions, and wardrobe – and we made notes to implement these adjustments for the second half of the session.

At one point, my client remarked how she not only didn’t do this before her portrait session in Europe, but she’s NEVER reviewed photos with any of the photographers she’s worked with in the past – and she’s worked with quite a few.

Normally, the other photographers simply emailed her a link to a shooting proof gallery and it was up to her to figure out which images she wanted to use, let alone see them mid-session.

Ugh.

Of course, it’s possible to make those decisions on your own, but, when you work with a professional photographer, it’s about optimizing the entire experience – from consultation call to the delivery of the images – in order to maximize the success of the session.

It was really interesting to hear about these differences between my service and the one my client received while working abroad.

Her experience highlighted the need to hire a photographer that not only understands her specific image content needs based on her niche, service offerings, and personality, but also to create an experience and hand hold throughout the entire process in order to ensure maximized results from the session.

Long story short, don’t bargain shop for this shit.

Find a photographer who can collaborate with you to create an entire image content library that you can leverage long-term for all of your marketing needs.

Also, remember one very important point; most people will be introduced to you through your online presence – your social media profile, blog and/or website. Make a strong first impression with images that present you in a way that befits your level of expertise and passion you have to serve those who need you.

You’re going to need a hell of a lot more images than just one to achieve that, 🙂

John DeMato is an NYC branded lifestyle portrait photographer and storytelling strategist who serves speakers, authors, coaches and high-level entrepreneurs across the country. His 50+ page e-book, S.H.A.R.E. M.A.G.I.C.A.L. I.D.E.A.S., lays out the how what and why behind creating a memorable and referable online presence – sign up to get your FREE copy today.

Categories
Best Practices Growth Leadership Personal Development

Motivating Leaders to Complete Difficult Tasks

Doing the Tasks that Need to Get Done

Just like eating vegetables you don’t like to eat, you have tasks and responsibilities as a leader that you really don’t like to do either. What can you do about them besides delegating them? We all have to do things that we don’t like doing.

Leadership is not just leading your employees. It also involves solving problems, challenges, and difficulties. This means you alone have some specific tasks that really only you can do.

I bet when you accepted the job as leader you didn’t expect to work on specific tasks you really hate or dislike! Well, here you are doing the things you need to do even though you would prefer to give them away to others-but can’t. As the leader of your company, how difficult do you see the tasks you perform? Some tasks are easier than others and some not so much.

 “When you come upon a difficult task…start.”
-Harbhajan Singh Yogi

Completing the Tasks on Your Plate

Completing the tasks you don’t like to do is not a new concept. Working on easy tasks requires a smaller mental commitment than if you tackled difficult tasks first. Most people believe this works best as you then have more time to spend on difficult tasks.

Successful leadership holds you accountable to the work you need to do just like with your employees. The best-performing companies have leaders instill confidence in their employees in doing the work they believe is difficult to them. Getting people to actually want to do the tasks you need them to do can be a challenge. People who have not fully committed to their tasks need the motivation to help move them forward. Many leaders need to be motivated to complete their tasks as well. This shows employees you have difficult tasks also that you have to do as well.

In order to be productive you need to accomplish things that may not be as fun as you would like, yet to get to the “fun” part of the job, the things you like to do, there are always things people don’t like to do as well. Prioritize what you have and start from there.

Procrastination or Delegating your Tasks onto Others

 

“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.”
-William James

Procrastinating what you don’t like or want to do actually keeps the task sitting right in front of you. Maybe the easiest thing to do is to complete the task so you don’t have to think about it and it will be done. Sometimes simple tasks get put off when you find it not to be to your liking. It may be an easy task, but if you don’t like doing it, it will be the same as trying to avoid the plague.

The work you have to do as the leader is not the same as what your employees do. In pushing off your tasks and responsibilities you are not just avoiding the task but you tell others you can’t do the job. Most likely you prefer doing things your own way because you know how to get the task done by your own standards. Every task has your own unique touch that is yours. Underneath it all, you take responsibility for the work that is considered as yours.

Break Down Your Task into Small Pieces

 

“A little bit of something beats a lot of nothing. Break the largest of difficult tasks into the smallest of steps and it can be done.”
-Dan Millman

Getting started is where things get difficult. We generally like to avoid tasks we hate for as long as possible. When we finally get started, we might get stuck for ages. Focus on only performing “the next step.”

Identify and take that all-important first step. Take small steps to make the task more enjoyable and always look for smart ways to optimize it.

“When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, suddenly the work will finish itself.”
-Karen Blixen

Inspire Others

 

“Approach difficult tasks with a positive attitude – you’ll inspire others and feel better about what’s ahead.”
-Denise Austin

Give me an example of a time when you had to motivate someone else who also dislikes doing the difficult tasks of their job.

When you love or hate a task that gets you down, that is your perception of the task. When you complete a task you like to do it tends to be because the experience is easy to complete. It gives you a sense of satisfaction. With this in mind, there are many different ways to achieve the same thing. Encourage yourself to do something you hate doing. Then change the task to make it more enjoyable. Essentially motivate yourself to complete the task by thinking of more effective and efficient ways to get the job done. After you complete your own task, give yourself a small reward.

Give It Meaning

 

“Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.”
-Theodore Isaac Rubin

Start with a task you repel and turn it into a task you are compelled to do by asking yourself an important question: “In completing this task what does it mean in the grand scheme of what I do as a leader?” You dread doing them and then don’t which leads you to procrastination. The only problem is that the task(s) still need to get done. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to get them out of the way. Don’t create any more stress on yourself than you already created to hated these tasks.

Make the Most Out of Your Time

 

“If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got.”
– Lee Iacocca

Know that the tasks you hate are essential to your overall success. You wouldn’t do them if they weren’t. Sometimes the most boring tasks are those you repeat over and over again. How can you best complete the task(s) you dislike or hate? You can give yourself a small reward when you complete them.

 “Remember that the most difficult tasks are consummated, not by a single explosive burst of energy or effort, but by the constant daily application of the best you have within you.”
-Og Mandino

Categories
Growth Leadership Personal Development

Create a Strategic Plan to Get to Where You Want to Go

by Evan Hackel

A strategic plan is an important tool that can help your organization grow, achieve specific goals on a schedule, and reach its fullest potential. To define the goals and timelines that will be part of your plan, you will need to consult with your management team, appropriate managers and employees, vendors, customers, and other stakeholders too. Also remember that a strategic plan should be grounded in your company’s vision and mission statements, which reflect your values, higher goals, and aspirations.

How far ahead should you be planning? Five years into the future is normally ideal. Your goals should be challenging and stretch you, while also being concrete and understandable. Goals that lie 10 or 20 years into the future become so esoteric that people cannot relate to them.

Now, are you really going to use one plan, accomplish everything that is in it, and then meet again in five years to write a new one? No, not really. I recommend creating a five-year plan, then meeting at least once a year to review it and ask some questions like these:

  • Where are we now in executing this plan?
  • Do we still want to pursue all the goals that it sets out, or have other priorities emerged that we should tackle first?
  • What specific tactics do we need to work on in the next year so that we can accomplish our goals?

The status quo changes quickly in business today, and you will need to revise your plan and keep your goals fresh. Yet there is great value in saying to people, “here are our goals for the next five years.” This is especially true when you create specific initiatives, assignments, and tactics that people will address in the year to follow.

Here’s an analogy that illustrates the importance of planning . . .

If you put 22 kids who have never played soccer before on a soccer field and you said to them, “Here’s a soccer ball, have fun playing soccer,” what kind of soccer game would it be? They wouldn’t necessarily know there were two teams. They wouldn’t know the rules or how to keep score. They might eventually start kicking the ball around, but the game of soccer wouldn’t happen. But when you explain the game and that the goal is to put the ball in the net, then people achieve and accomplish something.

The same is true in business. When you’re just doing the same things over again and no one has given you a goal or a plan, no one has told you how to score, you just keep doing the same things over and over again. You don’t know what you should be doing and it’s impossible to achieve any kind of success.

Concluding thoughts . . .

As the Roman philosopher Seneca once wrote, “If a sailor does not know to which port he is sailing, no wind is favorable.” Another way of saying that is that to get to the right place, you have to know what you and your organization want to achieve. That means defining your mission, vision, and goals.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Leadership Marketing Personal Development

Innovation: The Yin and Yang of the 21st Century

Innovation: The Yin and Yang of the 21st Century

Over the past 20 years, there has been an increasing interest in the topic of innovation, and virtually every business, organization, and country espouses the virtues of innovation.

This is reflected in a recent survey published in The Business Journals which showed that the second biggest challenge facing companies was Increasing Profit. It reported 45% of business owners surveyed were looking to improve customer experience, launch new products, and expand into new markets. Innovation is the key to accomplishing these objectives.

However, desiring innovation is like wanting good government—everyone yearns for it, but how does one actually put in place a government that properly serves its citizens?

As many of you know, I am a noted Innovation Expert and I regularly write and speak on the topic of Innovation. Because of a growing desire by companies to explore how to become more innovative, for the next 12 months each of my monthly newsletters will address a different aspect of innovation.

From an overall perspective, the problem facing business owners and leaders across the world is how to utilize innovation to develop a strategic competitive advantage?

While the benefits of innovation are manifold and alluring, this benefit stream is riddled with many questions, like:

  • What is innovation?
  • Why innovate?
  • How do you initiate innovation?
  • How can a company create an innovative culture?
  • What are the steps to developing an overall innovation strategy?
  • How do you sustain your innovation efforts?
  • How can a business avoid being disrupted by outside innovations?
  • Why do some organizations’ innovation initiatives fail?
  • How can a company get its employees truly engaged in innovation?
  • Are there tools you can use to facilitate and speed innovation?
  • How does an organization properly encourage and reward innovation?

During the next year, I will address the above topics and many more.

We Have Moved from The Information Age to The Innovation Age

Hardly a day goes by without a major innovation or invention being introduced. However, these innovations or inventions don’t just happen. The truth is that innovation is incredibly complex, and it encompasses a number of aspects and components. If innovation was easy, the news would be filled with success stories like Google, Apple, and Amazon.

There is a specific process that enables an organization to effectively innovate on an ongoing basis. These upcoming newsletters will address the 10 steps that can be taken to transform an organization by applying 21st-century innovation to it.

To stay competitive today, the objective for any organization must be to create an innovation environment in which ideas germinate, grow to maturity and then yield a bountiful harvest.

Various thought leaders say we have moved from the Information Age to the Innovation Age, and companies that innovate faster than their competition will be the future winners. We see that all around us. New innovative companies are springing up almost overnight while other, more established organizations are struggling to survive.

Innovation and Market Disruption

A downside of emerging innovation is disruption, which has become a major force in the business marketplace. According to innovation expert, Clayton Christensen, disruption is caused by an innovation that totally changes an existing market, creates a new one or causes an existing business model or company to suddenly be undermined or become obsolete. This results in displacing market-leading firms or totally unbalancing established markets, products, or alliances. Listed below are some examples of disruption:

  • Online retailer Amazon has created massive problems for retailers who have physical stores.
  • Uber has disrupted the taxi, limousine, and shuttle-bus marketplace.
  • Google’s new autonomous car technology is changing the entire automotive market.

“Disruption Won’t Affect Me”

You may be thinking, “Disruption won’t affect me. It only affects big companies, so it won’t significantly disrupt my small company or organization.” But that is not correct. Disruption not only affects large industries; it impacts smaller and mid-sized companies as well. For instance, one of our clients, several million-dollar-a-year family-owned companies that pioneered the Bermuda sod industry in Georgia, is being disrupted by new, innovative organizations.

These companies are buying up small sod operations, consolidating them, and deriving cost savings and efficiencies from combining them. They are then cutting the price on sod and using social media and other mass advertising to increase their sales volume. This is proving to be a huge challenge for our client.

It might be helpful to take a minute and consider your marketplace, then write down disruptions that are currently affecting your company. You also may want to do some research on emerging innovations that could affect your future operations.

There are only two possible responses that an organization can opt for in the face of this looming challenge of disruption. First, ignore the disruptive forces, and hope they simply go away. Second, acknowledge the disruptive influences, stay abreast of their ongoing development, and embrace the use of innovation as a counter-offensive to guard against disruption battering their company.

Next month I will discuss the topics of:

What is innovation?

The nine different types of innovation.

If you would like to discuss and explore how your company can become more innovative, please contact us using the below information so we can show you how to embrace a 21st-century approach to innovation.

Fountainhead Consulting Group, Inc. is an Innovation and Business Planning firm. During the past 17 years, we have shown over 1,200 companies how to achieve their goals by using our unique, comprehensive, and systematic FastTrak Innovation Program™, Innovation Academy™, and Structure of Success™ methodologies. Using the components in these methodologies, each month we examine an aspect of how to transform your business or organization into a true 21st Century enterprise.

Office phone: (770) 642-4220                                             

www.FountainheadConsultingGroup.com

George.Horrigan@FountainheadConsultingGroup.com

Categories
Best Practices Entrepreneurship Human Resources Marketing Negotiations Sales Skills Women In Business

“It’s Only A Moment In Time” – Negotiation Insight

“Time, something that you have as much of as you need – for the time that you have.” -Greg Williams, The Master Negotiator & Body Language Expert (Click To Tweet)

Click here and buy the book!

“It’s Only A Moment In Time”

Are you someone that has challenges with time?

Dammit, was the sound of exasperation that escaped her lips. She was going to be late, again. She wondered why she seemed to always have a challenge with time – she thought, it seems like I’m late for everything! I’ll probably be late for my own funeral. Oh well, I’ll deal with my tardiness later – she said into the air.

Here’s something to think about, everyone has the same amount of time. So, why are some people more successful than others? Answer – it’s the way they use their time. Successful people respect and use their time wisely – their use is to improve themselves and progress their goals. Sure, they take to relax, spend time with friends and loved ones. But, for the most part, they’re very respectful of how they utilize the time that they have.

Consider the following to improve your use of time. Doing so will improve your outlook on life. And, it’ll also allow you to become more productive.

 

Set Goals:

On huge waste of time is starting off to address something and not knowing if that’s the most important activity you should be engaged in. Sometime you may have ‘playtime’ that grips your imagination and steals you to another environment. But for the most part, if you have goals and you’re disciplined, you can’t combat those dastardly creatures. Plus, you’ll feel better knowing that you’re moving towards an end, goal, that will put you a step closer to a higher point of exhilaration.

 

Add Fudge Factor To Estimates:

Years ago, an associate said she always added a ‘fudge factor’ to her estimates when she estimated the time it might take to complete a task. She said, depending on the task she’d add a factor of two or three to her estimate – the range was based on her perception of the task’s difficulty. Thus, if she thought that a 10-minute task was easy to complete, she’d add a factor of two to her estimate – for planning purposes that allowed her 20-minutes to complete it. I asked what she did with extra time when a task didn’t take as long as she’d planned. She said that time was allocated to tasks that were in her ‘waiting to address’ folder – they were important. But not as important as the ones that had a higher priority.

 

Block Time:

To be more efficient with your time, when you’re engaged in an activity that requires concentration, set aside the amount time you want to address that activity and don’t let anything or anyone interrupt you during that time. You’ll save time by not having to restart where you left off from interruptions. That will allow you more time for other activities.

 

Time, it’s a fleeting measurement of movement. And yet, each moment of time is so important. Everyone has the same amount of it. What you do with it will allow you to progress to higher heights in life or not.  If you want to be someone that continuously moves forward, gets ahead in life, use time wisely. Don’t cheat yourself by misusing it. Once you embrace the usage of time in a more efficient manner, you’ll become more efficient … and everything will be right with the world.

 

 

What does this have to do with negotiations?

 

In a negotiation, time can be used as an ally or it can become your foe. It may quickly open a door of opportunity and slam it shut as fast if you’re not mindful of how you’re using it. Therefore, before engaging in a negotiation, plan exactly how you’ll use time. You might consider using it to apply a deadline for the other negotiator to accept an offer or make a concession – or to mark the timeframe as to how long you’ll negotiate.

Regardless of how you use your time when negotiating, measure it wisely as applied to the different stages you’re in versus where you thought you’d be. Doing that will give you a handle on time. Because it’ll keep you from negotiating past a point where doing so is less beneficial to you.

 

Remember, you’re always negotiating!

 

Listen to Greg’s podcast at https://anchor.fm/themasternegotiator

 

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 https://www.themasternegotiator.com/greg-williams/

 

 

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