Ok, so before you get uppity or offended by the title of this post, it’s not some misogynist, racist, or other prejudiced rant against women, minority groups, or any other classification of workers.  I do believe the Glass Ceiling is indeed a very real issue that discriminates in all too many cases against the aforementioned – but that important topic is for a different day. This post is about overcoming the limits we sometimes place on ourselves as we compromise our ambition or self-belief.  I believe – or rather I have an idea, as beliefs are always less open than ideas – that each individual can achieve what ever he or she sets out to do, and with few exceptions, the level of accomplishment is within each individual’s control. If a Glass Ceiling exists then perhaps it is, in part, self imposed.  Your self-image, what you see when you look in the mirror each day, is often a more powerful determinant of aspiration and potential attainment than any other factor.

I write this post now in response to many conversations I’ ve been having over the last few weeks as (sales)people struggle with change, uncertainty, and the volatility that’s seems ever-present in the current global condition.  At times like this it may be useful to reflect on 7 key principles that you can fall back on to guide you through turbulent times in life and business.

You should only read on if you believe that you’re in charge of your future.  It’s not predetermined. Yes, it’s impacted and influenced by external events, but it’s not your government, employer, customer, husband or wife, bank manager or religious leader who ultimately determines your destiny. It’s you, and in difficult times, that’s the first principle that you have to accept. Then you can take control of your own journey.  Otherwise, like some pliant sapling blowing in the wind, you will be buffeted from side to side, and your future outlook will just be a matter to be determined by that irascible compass – lady luck.

If this seems a little like an extract from a self-help book, then so be it; but there are few professions where the inner strength of the individual protagonist is as critical as that  of the professional salesperson. During each sales call, he (or she) puts his own credibility – and that of his company – on the line; he is often the sole arbiter of success or failure, and he always faces the risk of rejection.

I’ve arranged these 7 principles in a mnemonic, so they are easy to remember.

1. Ambition
2. Commitment and Resilience
3. Honesty and Integrity
4. Inquisitiveness and Learning
5. Empathy and Perspective
6. Vision: Innovation and Leadership
7. Enterprise: Hard Word, Strategy and Execution

I will explore each of these in more detail in a future post, but let me give an outline of what I’ve experienced and observed.

Ambition: There’s that U2 song that goes “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.”  It’s implied that Bono at least has an idea where he’s headed, where the rainbow ends, and what’s in that pot of gold.  To achieve your ambition, you first need to be very clear as to what it is.  As a sales person you’re probably competitive. You’ve lofty goals.

I think there are two main questions you should ask yourself;  “Do I know what I really want to achieve?” and “Is my goal ambitious enough?” A ’shoot for the moon’ goal is a wonderful motivator. By figuring out your personal outrageous goal – conceived in a moment of suspended reality – guides you to realizing what just might be possible.  Then you get to thinking about how to achieve that ambition by breaking it down into attainable and realistic steps.  Winning sales professionals do this in a smaller way every day as they strategize how to maximize revenue from an account, or just win a single deal.  It then becomes the art of the possible, as they visualize the realization of the ambition – in the form of a plan.

Commitment and Resilience:  How badly do you want it? Will you stay the course? As you look around you will invariably see examples of seemingly ‘lucky’ people for whom everything just works out.  Evidence of their hard work is sometimes hard to see.  However, as the saying goes ‘The harder I work, the luckier I get’, and occasionally when things seem just impossible, you’ve got to dust yourself off and and step up again.  Enduring hardship is frequently the bedfellow of success, so you’ve got to be committed to your goal and both resilient and relentless in its pursuit. I’m not proposing continually chasing a lost cause – as you know in the context of selling, I’m a big proponent of qualifying out early – but when you continue to do the right thing, and stick with it, good things invariably happen.

Honesty and Integrity:  For me, these are two of the least understood, and most undervalued, personal and business assets. A reputation for being honest or having high integrity is priceless. It brings trust and openness, deeper relationships and more productive engagement.  I like defining trust as ‘truth over time’, and it’s hard to win but easy to lose. From a purely pragmatic perspective, always being honest means you never have to remember what you said or come up with different versions of the truth for different audiences.  In business generally, and particularly in sales, these assets cannot be over-valued.

Inquisitiveness and Learning: As any guy or girl will tell you, when on a first date, it’s more important to be interested than interesting. As a business professional you need to be inquisitive about what matters to others.  In sales that means you need to be inquisitive about what matters to your customer, and less focused on what ‘interesting’ stuff you have to tell him.  However, if you’ve been honest, and have a relationship for having high integrity, you will be come to be treated as a ‘trusted advisor’ and then you need to be interesting as well interested, and that’s where the learning comes in.  If you’re in the right job/company/industry, this should come easily for you.  You will have a natural passion for what you do, and reading the trade press or industry journals will be something you choose to do, rather than feel you must. Without this passion, you will find it hard to be naturally inquisitive and driven to learn more, and then you’re possibly in the wrong job/company/industry – unless you’re happy to settle for mediocrity.

Empathy and Perspective: In a previous post I quoted Alan Kay who said that “Perspective is worth 80 IQ points”.  Read that post for my thoughts on this matter.

Vision: Innovation and Leadership: Ambition without vision is dangerous and usually counter-productive. Vision elevates ambition to a higher place, one where your insight, founded on innovative thinking and thought leadership, propels you to the front. These twin tenets of vision are usually the issue of passion, but can only be fully informed based on Inquisitiveness and Learning, grounded in Empathy and Perspective.  Another post about this soon.

And finally …

Enterprise:  You’ve got  to work hard, really hard, no really really hard, – no I mean harder than that even!  You’ve got to come up with the right strategy to fulfill your ambition, and then through your own initiative and resourcefulness, determine how you best execute your plan. And then you must apply yourself.  Unless you’ve got Commitment and Resilience you won’t reach the uncommon heights you’ve visualized in your ambition.

Did I mention you have to work hard?

At times like this, you might be forgiven for wondering how you’re going to survive, not to mention thrive. Take a moment, look in the mirror, and honestly determine for yourself whether you want to be in control.  Then make the right decision.  You get to choose.  You get to decide if it is indeed a glass ceiling, or whether you can see a crack appearing through which you can determine your own future.

One of the most valuable quotes from the American computer scientist Alan Kay is: Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.  At least from my perspective it’s one of the most valuable.

I want to use this post to inform marketing and product development about the sales person’s perspective, and why sometimes sales is hard.  But first I want to look at the value of perspective in general and consider perhaps what we in sales could do better.
There are so many reasons why perspective is important in everyday life – but particularly in sales. Perspective is at the heart of communication.  You need to go beyond just listening to ‘active’ listening, to really comprehend the frame of reference informing the opinion of whomoever you are trying to communicate with. It’s not just important, it’s essential.

In sales, everything should start and end with the customer. Unless you understand your customer’s perspective, you can’t possibly appreciate what’s important to her. And then you won’t know how to progress the sale.  But your ability to serve your customer is often impacted by your own company’s velocity and your interaction with your colleagues, and it’s here that sometimes perspective breaks down.

Think about the last time you were frustrated with a customer ‘who just doesn’t get it’.  Remember the last time you complained to your sales manager about your marketing department, ‘I just don’t understand why we never seem to get ….’ [Insert 'leads', 'competitive analysis', 'better product positioning', 'easy to use sales proposal templates' or your favorite complaint here]. Have you ever wondered what on earth the product development team spend all their time at, when it seems the competitor has a feature in their product ‘that seems pretty simple to me for us to add’?  Surely it can’t be that hard!

When this lack of understanding happens tremendous friction occurs – and overall sales and organizational velocity suffers.  Usually when you start a sentence with ‘I just don’t understand why …’, it’s usually just that – you don’t understand.  And, more often than not, it’s worth taking the time to try to get the picture as others have painted it. Arrogance is usually bred from ignorance, and that’s never pretty or productive.

In was put in  mind of this again recently when writing a separate post on this blog, Early Failure is Better than Late Failure . In that post I linked to a post from marketing guru Seth Godin.  Seth has a wonderful ability to capture in simple words things we all think about but don’t necessarily articulate well. As I browsed his blog I came across another sublime piece of simplicity called Nine things marketers ought to know about salespeople (and two bonuses) - but more about that later.

In 2004, I co-wrote a book called Select Selling – Strategies to Win Customers by Defining the Ultimate Target Profile and Discovering what they Really Want.  The opening two paragraphs of that book went like this:

   There are few distinct viewpoints in business that are as polarized as those of marketing and sales professionals. Marketing is glamorous, sales less so. Sales are measurable, marketing less so. The uneasy relationship between sales and marketing is widespread and infects almost all types of businesses, particularly technology companies that provide high value solutions to large corporations. Marketing folks decry the poor sales conversion rate delivered by the sales team, who in turn abhor what they would characterize as the risible value delivered by expensive marketing campaigns.
During the production of this book, we interviewed many sales and marketing professionals. The polarity of perspective was striking. “Sales people are just quick-talking, quota-driven snake oil dealers” was the cant of the marketing quarter, while the sales constituency responded, “Sales draw the picture and marketing color it in!”

The truth of course is that mutual respect and understanding, and a shared perspective, between the sales function and their inter-dependent colleagues in marketing and product development is essential if you want to be sure you have the right products to sell, the right marketing messages to communicate with your customer, and ability to call on specialist marketing or product expertise or support when you need it.  When that happens, uncommon velocity occurs, and more deals are won faster – and that’s a good thing.
But back to Seth Godin’s post.  As mentioned about, it’s sublime in its simplicity.  Here’s the full text.

Nine things marketers ought to know about salespeople (and two bonuses)

1. Selling is hard. Harder than you may ever realize. So, if I seem stressed, cut me some slack.
2. Selling is personal. When I make a promise, I have to keep it. If you force me to break that promise (by changing processes, features or a rollout schedule) I will never forgive you.
3. Selling is interpersonal. I am not moving bits, I’m trying to change people’s minds, one person at a time. So, no, I can’t tell you when the sale will close. No one knows, especially the prospect.
4. I love selling. I particularly love selling great stuff, well marketed. Don’t let me down. Don’t ask me to sell lousy stuff.
5. I’m extremely focused on the reward half of the equation. Salespeople love to keep score, and that’s how I keep score. So don’t change the rules in the middle, please.
6. I have no earthly idea what really works. I don’t know if it’s lunch or that powerpoint or the Christmas card I sent last year. But you know what? You have no clue what works either. I’ll keep experimenting if you will.
7. There is no comparison, NONE, between an inbound call (one that you created with marketing) and a cold call (one that you instructed me to create with a phone book.) Your job is to make it so I never need to make a cold call.
8. Usually, customers lie when they turn me down. They make up reasons. But every once in a while, I actually learn something in the field. Ask!
9. I know you’d like to get rid of me and just take orders on the web. But that’s always going to be the low-hanging fruit. The game-changing sales, at least for now, come from real people interacting with real people.
10. (a bonus, switching points of view for a moment): I know that selling is hard and unpredictable. But if you’re going to be in sales, you’ve got to be prepared to measure and predict and plan. You need to give me sales reports and call lists and summaries. It does neither of us any good to keep your day a secret. If you don’t plan and organize, I can’t do my job of marketing.
11. (and bonus number two): The two worst pieces of feedback you can give me (because neither is really actionable or especially effective): a. lower the price and b. make our product just like our competitors.

Other than my fundamental disagreement with part of no. 3 (So, no I can’t tell you when the sales will close.  No one knows, especially the prospect), it might be useful to share 1-9 with your marketing and product development folks, and spend a little time yourself thinking about no. 10 and no. 11.

Remember Alan Kay’s advice.  Perspective is worth 80 IQ points.  You can get smarter by just thinking about it.

If you’re thinking about spending money on sales training, I’d like to ask you to stop.

Now this might seem a little strange coming from someone who is in the sales effectiveness business.  But one of the challenges for the industry I’m in is providing value to our customers that goes beyond the single sales training event.  Consider this statistic.  When sales people are trained in the traditional way in an instructor led workshop, within 30 days, 87% stop using what they learned. So, for every dollar spent, only $0.13 value is received by the customer! We call this the ‘Area of Missed Opportunity’.  Click on the image above to see this represented graphically.[If this seems like a little self-promotional, then I apologize, but I couldn't figure out any other way to share this with you without using our own experience.]

Now, at The TAS Group, we work with a lot of sales people all around the world, and this problem – of poor sustained value – has taken up a lot of my time, and that of others in the company since we took over the business in late 2006. Since then we’ve added one new TAS-maniac every 7 minutes, equating to hundreds of thousands of sales professionals.  That’s a lot of potentially wasted dollars, but based on the analysis we’ve been doing, we think we have figured out how to provide sustained value, and I’d like to share this with you.

Sales leaders and sales professionals (not to imply that sales leaders are not professional) understand that there are best practices that apply to sales, and when these are followed, good things generally happen. From my perspective that is true irrespective whether the best practices are our methodologies or those from our competitors.  If you apply a proven methodology from a reputable vendor, and apply it well and consistently, your revenue performance will increase.  This is a fact well documented by independent third parties.  The challenge, however, has been: how to make it stick, make it easy for the sales person to use, and the sales leader to manage. In our book that means understanding how people want to learn, how to answer the ‘what’s in it for me?’ question, and how to support the required activity with technology for sustained usage.

A recent study of 5,500 people, conducted by Ernst & Young, gives a good insight as to how people prefer to learn, and confirms for us what we have learned over the last few years. ‘On the job’ learning is by far the preferred learning mechanism, and as you move from Baby Boomer through Gen X and Gen Y, you can see in the chart here the antipathy towards classroom training increases.

Through our analysis, what we have found is that the optimum learning mix is 10/20/70; a combination of 10% formal instructor led training, 20% structured coaching, and 70% ‘on-the-job’ learning.  In many ways there should not be any surprises here – this is the basis of performance based learning paradigms long espoused by some of the leading thinkers in this area.

If you’ve been following what we do at The TAS Group, you will know that we invest a lot in technology, to reduce the dependence on classroom based training by separating knowledge transfer from knowledge application.  We don’t think that it is always appropriate or necessary to transfer knowledge in a classroom environment, and that by using appropriate sales 2.0 tools, sales people can learn new sales concepts virtually, at their own pace, and contextualized to their situation.  The technology exists to support that.

Also, when intelligent sales 2.0 tools are used, the need for coaching can be automatically and intelligently discovered, and the tools are available to support the sales manager in uncovering where coaching is needed and in automating some of that coaching for her. That’s where we think 20% of learning should happen.

But it is in the 70% area that things have really fallen down in the past – and this is where we are really excited about the progress we have made and the success (i.e. more sales!) being experienced by those companies we’ve witnessed adopt the right approach.  People like to learn as they do.  It’s as simple as that. And when you make it easy for them to go about their job, while learning almost subconciously, truly great things happen! We’ve seen consistent usage and adoption rates at the 90%+ level, and that’s a long way from the industry average of 13%.

So here is the key message.  Traditional sales training is expensive, not just in terms of fees paid to sales training providers, but also in terms of travel expenses and time, selling days out of the field, and perhaps most disappointingly on the sustained value received.  In today’s straitened economy you need to be sure every dollar you spend delivers maximum return – and the most effective way to grow through this difficult time is to have a productive and optimally effective sales team. You cannot save your way to prosperity!  If you are planning on investing in your sales team – and that is one the most important things you can do right now – dig for answers to the questions posed here -and consider for yourself how you will map the 10/20/70 optimum model to your sales effectiveness initiative.

The title of this post is of course very much tongue-in-cheek, but the speed at which information moves around the internet can, on occasion, continue to surprise.  It not just reflective of the global reach of the medium, but also highlights when an idea catches the imagination.

Take the instance of the most famous plumber in the world.  Ever since ‘Joe the Plumber’ became part of the presidential campaign, on foot of his questioning of Barack Obama, the website domain www.joetheplumber.com, has become one of the hottest internet properties.  The owner of the website, who yes, is called Joe, and yes is a plumber, is not however the same Joe who started all of this.  However, he’s not complaining.

His website, which up to this incident had been registering just a trickle of hits, is now being deluged with enquiries.  He’s started selling ‘Joe the Plmber’ T-shirts, and he is taking offers on the domain name.  According to Businessweek, the latest offer is … wait for it … $800,000!

And while we’re in the midst of election fever, a wonderfully clever viral campaign has been doing the rounds over the past week.  It let’s you automatically personalize a spoof TV broadcast, that pretends to be announcing, on November 7th, the result of the election, and the ‘real’ reason why McCain won.  It’s already had a circulation of 11 million over the last 10 days or so!

It’s a moderate piece, and it’s very funny, but it’s pro Obama, so if that upsets you, don’t look.  But if you want to see really clever viral marketing at work, take a look here.  I’ve customized it using my name, but you will be able to do the same yourself.

Here’s the piece: Obama’s loss traced to Donal Daly