As a boss, is being right your first priority?

Does being right improve employee engagement?

My last blog I wrote on how to improve engagement by assessing your people based upon how well they fit the organization: Do they Get it? Do they Want it? and Do they have the Capacity to peform the job?

Are your people really engaged?

Understanding Key Business Risk issues

Revenue, Expenses and Risk

In all business purchases, there are 3 main business drivers that business owners and managers have as their core. The last 2 blogs I dealt with revenue and expenses. This one is on risk. There are two types of risk - general business risk and risk in the buying decision. General business decision risk is related to running the business. Buying decision risk is related to "Am I making the right decision and what will it cost me if I am wrong?" Both relate to business, but the buying decision risk has a lot more emotional factors involved, such as fear and ego.

Managing or reducing risk is huge factor in a buying decision. A business leader deals with risk in many areas. Risk to: data, people, buildings, general liability, financial, and business continuity to name a few. There are many ways managers try to reduce risk from insurance policies, data backups and cloud computing, physical security using ID badges, to having multiple people engage in the buying process. A buying committee is used to reduce risk, not necessarily get the best option with the most features.

I have a client who sells data services to banks. He reports that over the last seven years the focus has shifted from what revenue new software can deliver then to expenses reduction and now, the biggest concern is risk. The banks are evaluating contract terms, reputation of company, costs to get out of a contract and even data center uptime.  To reduce vendor risk, flexibility  in contracts is becoming a big issue.

In sales, you must understand what the core drivers are for a business owner when he or she is making a business decision, especially about buying your product or service. In the business owner's mind, they are relating everything they evaluate to three key core business drivers: revenue, expenses and risk. They are asking these fundamental questions when looking at an offering: 

1) Does this offering protect or increase my revenue? 2) Does this offering control or reduce my expenses? and 3) Does this offering reduce or control my risk? 

As a sales rep, understanding those core issues and tying your offering into how they impact those areas, will greatly set you apart from other sales reps who are just selling features and benefits and making promises. The way to tie your offering into those areas is to ask lots of questions such as "Mr. Business owner, how do you see our offering impacting your revenue stream?" or "Others have seen a 10% reduction in expenses by implementing these new processes; do you see yourself getting a similar benefit? "  "One of the key focuses of our software is to reduce the chance of a customer falling through the cracks and you losing the business or having a liability charge for negligence in serving your customer. Share with me how you see our offering impacting your business in this way."

Last week I focused on revenue. This blog  will expound upon controlling or reducing expenses as the major buying criteria.

Revenue, Expenses and Risk is What Matters Most

Getting People to Embrace Change

As a business owner, you know that the business world is ever changing and you must adapt to the new environment or die. You may see the need to change and see all the benefits to change, but your people may not. Even worse, is that they may resist the change. To many, change equals uncertainty and that leads to fear. Humans like consistency and situaitons that are predictable.  The Whole Brain Model can be an effective tool to help your people plan for change and implement change.

Salesforce.com released interesting data on the quality of leads and how fast they convert to deals. The data shows that leads coming from referrals have the shortest sales cycle and the highest percentage to close. Social media referrals/leads came in 2nd. Surprisingly, leads coming from tradeshow events and marketing and advertising were low on the scale in terms of converting to actual clients.
The reason being a referral and social media work so well is that the relationship begins on Trust. A cold call, website, or even tradeshow lead does not begin on Trust. Trust must first be established before the customer is willing to truly engage.

In the book Achieve Sales Excellence Howard Stevens developed the seven rules of the customer from conducting 80,000 customer interviews over 14 years. This research also included 7,500 sales reps.  Neil Rackham’s research with Xerox, IBM, and other companies with over 1500 sales transactions, agrees with Steven’s research. From my own anecdotal experience: (Being a right brain thinker, I am not the analytical type who does such research), they are right on the money. And, if you learn and apply these 7 rules in your sales processes, you will succeed. I will cover the 7 rules briefly. 

To truly understand and apply the full meaning and impact of these rules, I highly recommend studying Achieve Sales Excellence. (I have read the book 17 times!) If you are a senior leader, the last section of Steven’s book asks eight questions for identifying world class sales organizations. These are some direct and tough questions, but ones that should be addressed. Your analysis will help you assess whether you are in the 20^th, or 21^st century; in terms of your sales strategy and processes.

 The 7 rules of the Customer are: 

• You must be personally accountable for our results
• You must understand our business
• You must be on our side
• You must bring us applications – not just products
• You must be easily accessible
• You must solve our problems
• You must be innovative in responding to our needs