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Embrace Your Detractors
I always strive to practice what I preach. If I write about it or recommend it, I always ask myself, “Am I doing this?” If the answer isn’t “yes,” I don’t write about it.
With that said, today’s topic is one that I admittedly struggle with. I admit, like most people or at least most highly competitive people, I fall into the “if you’re not with me, you’re against me” trap. And I’ve experienced what every other person who puts their ideas into the world experiences – simply that some people don’t like what you are doing.
Last week, when talking about blogging to the Baltimore Chapter of the American Marketing Association, I was asked about the fear of people saying negative things on a blog (a common fear) and my immediate response was, “the only thing worse than people saying bad things about you is people not saying anything about you.” I firmly believe this too.
I was talking with a client and friend of mine last week about going to the extremes and making a big, polarizing promise. He was, of course, concerned about what the response would be. I gave him the following advice:
Once you start, you can’t let your detractors scare you. You must embrace them. The detractors (or haters as my son calls them) come out first. It’s always easier to tell people what’s wrong with something or why you don’t like something.
You must know that the fans are out there, but in the beginning, they’re quiet and they stand back. They’re hoping you’re for real. They’re hoping you stand up to your critics. If you stick with it, they will begin to believe in you and that will make it feel safe enough to come out and embrace you. Once that happens, that’s when everything takes off. Most people don’t have the guts, discipline, or fortitude to do it – I think you do.
Don’t get me wrong. By embrace, I don’t mean that you cater to them. I mean you engage them. You should listen (often times they have very good points that can enhance what you are doing) and engage, don’t hide and don’t back track. Also, when you actually engage with a detractor, you’ll be surprised just how fast many of them turn into your first evangelists.
The Only Difference That Matters
A friend of mine is a regional sales director for a Fortune 500 (soon to be 100) company. His boss recently asked everyone at his level to provide a brief response to the question, what makes his company different/better than other providers. My friend’s response is one that all fast growth executives need to know and understand.
He said, “in a world where every product is the same, or at least perceived as the same, the only difference that matters is the salesperson’s ability to sell. Our company is better because our salespeople are better.” Don’t view this as an oversimplified viewpoint. My friend sells a highly sophisticated solution. His company has several proprietary offerings that they insist matter. What he understands is that no matter how unique your offering is, a) if the buyer doesn’t understand how it’s unique, and more importantly, why that uniqueness matters and/or b) the buyer has alternatives (and they always have alternatives), then you’re not unique.
He is absolutely right. Today, if your sales effort isn’t superior in a meaningful way to the buyer, then your margins will be under attack. If your buyers don’t feel a difference between how you sell and how your competitors do, then they are going to assume you are the same, and price will become the driving factor. As a matter of fact, there is no acute symptom more directly tied to ineffective sales efforts than price increasing in importance in the decision and/or your margins facing increased pressure.
Selling is the process of enabling buyers and potential buyers to, first, understand their problems and, second, to understand how one’s solution can solve the actual problem. Selling is not telling. Selling is far more than the ability to make an energetic presentation or to tell a story. While these skills are quite valuable, selling today is far more about diagnosing and consulting (not to be confused with “consultative”) than it is about the power to “close” or to overcome objections.
Selling and salesmanship, today, is about your ability to:
- Provoke the awareness of problems within your customer base
- Diagnose those problems in a collaborative fashion
- Have the business conversations to help your buyer’s translate your offerings into their results
- The ability to make them feel safe
The winners of tomorrow will be the ones who invest the time, the money, the energy, and the discipline into build a superior sales force.
Price is NOT the Reason!
Friday was a tough day for me. Lots and lots of conversation with selling organizations and I must have heard 20 times that price is the reason people change providers and price is the reason for the decisions that are made.
Let me be clear – Price is NOT the reason someone doesn’t buy from you. It never is.
I understand that buyer’s say it’s about price. I know that customer’s budgets have been cut, that discretionary budgets have been virtually eliminated and that competitors are only all too willing to engage in a “race to the bottom.”
As I wrote last month, the equation for price is to add the value the customer puts on the commodity with the price they place on your intelligence or approach.
So the reason people don’t buy from you is that they don’t feel that your approach creates enough value to justify spending more money.
Want them to pay more? Demonstrate that you can create results. Don’t just say you can – demonstrate it. Stop focusing on the stuff you do and focus, maniacally, on enabling your buyers to understand the results you can create.
Bottom line – customers won’t pay more for your stuff than they will for your competitors stuff, but they will spend more for better results.
The Demand Creator Minute – Preventing Objections
Welcome to a new feature on The Fast Growth Blog! From time to time, I will share with you what I like to call The Demand Creator Minute. Consider these short videos (1 -3 minutes) your personal coaching session where I’ll share with you the tips, insights, and discoveries that are enabling companies and salespeople to make more sales, faster sales, and more profit per sale.
In the first installment, I take on the age-old sales philosophy that objections are good and that great salespeople are great at overcoming them. Quite the opposite: great salespeople are great at preventing objections. I also give you an exercise so that you can begin preventing objections now. Enjoy (and please leave a comment telling me what you think).
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If you want another of my takes on The Myth of Objections, click here.
Don’t Have Time To Blog? Thanks!
Last night, I spoke to the Baltimore chapter of The American Marketing Association. The topic was blogging and its place for businesses. One of the attendees came up to me after the presentation and said what I’ve heard many, many times – “Everything you said was great and I agree with it all (okay, I don’t hear that all the time), but we just don’t have the time to do it.”
Side note: For purposes of this conversation, I will use “blog” and “content” interchangeably. I think a blog is a great way to distribute content and support engagement, but whether you or your company “blog” is less important than do you create meaningful, valuable content for your market on a regular basis.
For those that say you don’t have time, I share three simple responses and a bonus thought.
1. Today there are only two types of companies – which are you?
Best companies and people do things that me-too companies don’t – and they get rewarded for it.
2. There’s a HUGE conversation taking place…
… are you participating in it?
3. Here’s the difference blogging and content marketing has made for Imagine, you tell me – is it worth it?
Final Thought
If after all this you still can’t bring yourself to make the investment (of time and energy to do it yourself or money to have others do it), then on behalf of all those who are blogging, we say thank you. The more people who don’t take it seriously, the greater our advantage is.
What do you think?
Creating A Diagnostic Selling System
Think about your last five years in business. Ask yourself, what has the trend line in the following areas been for you:
- Gross Margins?
- Competitive Pressure?
- Pricing Pressure?
- Sales Costs?
- The economic value created by your sales team?
As I’ve written before, yesterday’s good is today’s nowhere near good enough. Yesterday’s solutions based selling systems are no longer enough to carve out a unique position and grow profitably and effortlessly.
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Faster Growth
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Greater Profitability
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Greater Equity Value
Do You Work As Hard as Drew Brees?
I admit it. I’m in the tank for Drew Brees and have been for a while. I think it started when he became a star at Purdue, even though he was not recruited in his home state of Texas. Then he fell to a second round draft choice and, despite the disappointment, he won games.
For whatever reason, the Chargers just never loved him and they let him go. For those of you that know Brees’ history, you know that in his last game with the Chargers he suffered a major shoulder injury, one that could have threatened his career.
He landed in New Orleans and, well, you probably know the rest.
There can be no debate about Brees’ talent, but that’s not why I love him. I love him because, despite his natural ability, he is a student (always) and he works his tail off. Through my friends and personal trainers, who work with Brees’ personal trainer, I’ve gotten to hear some first hand accounts of how Brees trains.
As I watched the video above, it got me thinking. Do I work this hard on my craft? I certainly think I’m talented , but I asked myself if I really put in the work (my answer, and you can ask my staff their opinion, was that I do).
Let me ask you – Do you work this hard? Drew Brees doesn’t just work hard at practice and in a game; he puts in the time. He studies. He’s always improving.
One of my favorites stories about Brees came during the Saints bye week (the one week during the season that a team doesn’t play a game). Coach Sean Payton gave the team the weekend off. On Sunday, Payton went to the Superdome (the Saints home field) to do some work. Brees was on the field, by himself, simulating plays.
Payton asked Brees what he was doing there. Brees responded that he was staying in his routine, playing a game on Sunday at 1pm. He had been going through the normal progressions of the game plan. As Payton walked away, he asked Brees, “So, how are we doing?” Brees responded, “We’re up 27-14, 3rd quarter.”
Wow! No wonder he won the Super Bowl.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that you have to be a workaholic maniac, doing nothing other than work. Brees is involved in a number of pursuits (least of which is that he has raised a tremendous amount of money for New Orleans revitalization), and when he talks, it’s clear how intelligent and interesting he is.
But good is not good enough for him. He wants to win, and he realizes that winning is not accidental. He works at it. He learns, practices, and plays – even when he doesn’t have to.
My bet – if any of us work half as hard as Brees does on his craft, we’d be great and we’d get the great results that come with it.
What do you think?
Why A Focus on “Buy-In” Destroys Performance
Note to readers: This article appeared in our monthly newsletter The Demand Creator. It elicited some interesting response and some wanted to comment on it. I am posting this article here, so the conversation can begin.
We’re interviewing to hire another coach to support our growth. A candidate asked me an obvious questions that elicited an interesting, unexpected response from me. What was my response?
“If you’re trying to improve performance from your sales team – buy-in doesn’t matter; actions do.”
“Ah,” you say, “but don’t you need buy-in to support the actions you want?” Over the last 20 years working with thousands of salespeople I’ve come to realize that the common answer is, “yes,” and the effective answer is “no, not really.”
At Imagine, we have a unique approach to supporting the growth of anyone – especially salespeople.
- Action: In our world, everything, and I mean everything, starts with an action. The reality is that nothing happens until someone does something. Talking about it doesn’t directly lead to progress.
- Results: Every action leads directly to a result of some sort. In our world, there are two types of results: Good results – the result of the action is what we expected.- Bad results – the result of the action is different from what we expected. This means something great, if unexpected, is a bad result. While this sounds counterintuitive, it’s a critical point. We’re trying to build purposeful, predictable performance. A great, yet unexpected, outcome means that further investigation is needed.
- Learning: From the result, good or bad, learning can take place, which plugs right back into driving the next action.
Most organizations focus on learning first. Focusing on learning first leads to a variety of barriers.
- It is at the learning stage where resistance occurs. The nature of “learning something new” triggers a fear response, which of course leads to a fight or flight action.
- At the learning stage, it’s all opinion. Sure, one may have experience, but experience is no match for the status quo.
- The biggest challenge in any change (and improving is a change) is that you are competing against inertia – a very powerful force. The only thing that overcomes inertia is movement, velocity, and ultimately momentum. Because there is no movement in learning, the initiative gets stuck or goes sideways.
- Humans, by and large, are not classroom learners. We are experimenters and roamers. When you focus on learning before doing, you are going against our natural programming.
Salespeople (and, usually, entrepreneurs) are action figures, they learn by doing. Every time (and again, I mean every time), we run into difficulties with our efforts, we are able to trace the cause of the problem to a focus on learning over action. While this sounds overly simple, the reality is that the action-result-learning process is a self-correcting mechanism.
Growth is spiral – it’s not linear. You don’t get better by dealing with a problem, situation, or stimulus once and then moving on; you get better by dealing with and constantly revisiting the issue and a deeper and more advanced level. As the wise saying goes, you don’t become a master by doing four thousand things; you become a master by doing one thing, four thousand times.
99% of improvement efforts are doomed to failure before they start. The reason is that step one is “get buy-in.” Management decides that something needs improvement then they start building the case. When they hit resistance, they must decide between two equally bad options:
- Engage the cynics, thus giving the resistance more credibility than it deserves grinding the forward movement to a trickle making it virtually impossible to overcome inertia, or
- Ignore the resistance, saying, in essence, we were just going through the motions.
Instead, focus on the action(s) that you want that represents the change you want to achieve. For example, don’t talk about the need to take a new approach to selling, instead develop a new questioning process and call for an increase in the number of the new questions that are asked.
When you focus on action first and learning last, buy-in takes care of itself.
Draw A Line In The Sand
I just got a pre-release version of Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (the founders of 37Signals). I’ll provide a deeper review when I’m finished with the book, but suffice it to say, if you like to read a series of ditties describing a contrarian business philosophy that works, you’ll want to read this book.
The section “Draw a Line In The Sand,” is worth it alone. Here are some of my favorite excerpts from the section:
- Great businesses have a point of view, not just a product or service. You have to believe in something. You need to have a backbone.
- Strong opinions aren’t free. You’ll turn some people off.
- Lots of people hate us because our products do less than the competition’s. (My note: This thought alone should dry some people’s heads and the ones that really grasp it will be the one’s that succeed.) …we’re just as proud of what our products don’t do as we are of what they do.
- When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious.
That’s just the highlights.
Where’s The Story
Once a year, people sit down to watch television and they’re (almost) as interested in the ads as the show. That time, of course, is the Super Bowl. As I watched the game and rooted for the Saints, I was struck by three things.
- First, I was struck by how virtually everyone who wasn’t a Colts fan was rooting for the Saints. Yesterday, they truly were America’s team.
- Second, I was struck by just how boring and useless the ads were – again.
- Third, it hit me just how much these two things have in common.
Why did so many root for the Saints? They have a compelling story. From the recovery of New Orleans, to the comeback of Drew Brees, to the characters on the team. The Saints, simply put, were are a great story.
The ads – not so much.
It’s unfortunate, because it hasn’t always been this way. Three years ago, I asked if your company would make a good TV show. Last year, I wrote about the importance of a powerful back story. There was a time that commercials did an excellent job of this. In 30 seconds, a great commercial told a compelling story that enticed and engaged its audience. Today, it seems as though commercials are trying to catch lightening in a bottle in the form of a catchphrase, rather than engaging the audience with a story.
To see the difference in commercials compare one of yesterday’s most popular commercials with a famous commercial from the 1980s.
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Notice that while the commercial is funny, it doesn’t really tell a story. As a result, people may remember the punch line (Don’t touch my mama or my Doritos), but it’s highly unlikely they’ll remember the product (even though the product is part of the punch line).
Now look at this famous Federal Express commercial:
The Doritos ad has far greater production value, and I think we’d all agree that the Federal Express commercial is far more memorable – and impactful. Why? Because it tells a powerful story.
If you want people to notice you, stop focusing on features and start telling stories. What do you think? What’s your story?
The Only Thing Worse Than No Social Media Presence
I don’t spend much time pontificating on social media. I leave that to people like Gini Dietrich who live in that world. While I certainly have readers who are actively engaged in and even counsel others on the use of social media, most of the readers of this blog are busy working in and on their businesses and focusing on new ways to grow. Most businesses are still confused by this “new world” and are taking a wait and see approach. Today, waiting is a mistake – but not the biggest one you can make.
In May of 2009, I wrote that a content marketing strategy was a must for every business. Social media is clearly a means to distribute content, so it is certainly good news that I see more and more companies of all shapes and sizes announcing, “We’re on [fill in the blank]” – so an “A” for effort. Unfortunately, execution is getting a clear “F!” The fundamental mistake lies in the idea that a company or an individual are “on” a social media platform.
Social media isn’t something you’re on – it’s something you engage in. While it’s become trite to say that tools such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (to name a few) are not a broadcast medium, apparently this old news hasn’t hit small and mid-sized businesses.
While some businesses engage very effectively, my estimate is that 75% of fast growth businesses are not. That 75% fall into two categories: one group ignores their platform and posts or updates very infrequently, and the other actively participates, but they tell, and act as if their followers should feel privileged to have access the company’s thoughts. Frankly, I don’t know which one is worse.
Social media and content marketing provide a tremendous opportunity for companies to clearly demonstrate their difference. It allows you to leverage your strengths and, in many cases, neutralize your vulnerabilities. Done correctly, it’s highly leveragable and can lead to a multitude of return in a variety of ways. The key is that is must be done correctly. Correctly means that it is open, honest, authentic, and collaborative.
Look, a business does not need to participate in social media to be successful. Apple has virtually no presence of social media sites or platforms. My best guess is that this is because they have no desire to collaborate and engage, and that’s fine.
I recommend social media as a great lead generation and cultivation tactic, but if you can’t engage – skip it.
What do you think?
Breaking Through The Noise
Anyone who has worked with me knows that I’m a maniac for messaging. In today’s world, where good is now nowhere near good enough, a solid message is no longer a valuable bonus – it’s an absolute must have to compete. The foundation of a great message is a well articulated value proposition. The challenge here is that creating a value proposition that resonates is extremely hard (it’s one of the reasons that The INTELLIGENT GROWTH Blueprint process is so valuable).
And, even after you’ve created a powerful message you have to translate that through the words and deeds of your salespeople. It’s no wonder businesses overlook these steps – wouldn’t just be easier to get in the market and sell? If you realize this challenge, I’ve got good news for you.
My friend, consultant, advisor, and author, Kevin Daum, is coming out with a new book Roar! Get Heard in the Sales and Marketing Jungle
Kevin is offering a free preview of his book (and he’s giving away his formula for creating a powerful value proposition – and please know this is must-read stuff). I realize that this sounds like hyperbole, but you’ll note I rarely say something is must-read, Kevin’s take on creating value proposition is. After reading this portion of the book, we refined our process as a result. Kevin’s given me permission to share the preview here, so take advantage and download a copy.
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Resources
Doug's Washington Business Journal Columns- Intelligent Growth Articles
Third Wave Selling Blog
Products to Grow
