Archive for category: Leadership Skills

This article was first published in Raintoday.com

The late comedian Chris Farley had a Saturday Night Live routine in which he declaimed, “I’m a motivational speaker—I live in a trailer down by the river.” For the SNL audience—which sees itself as hip, skeptical, and not totally pro-Big Business—it was a shared conceit, condescension about a certain approach to sales.

I once had a client who asked if I was a motivational speaker. I’d never heard that one before, and said, “well, I hope what I have to say is motivating to people, but that’s not what I’m setting out to do.” That client heard nothing after my first clause; I lost the job on the spot. Probably an SNL fan.

At the same time, there are hundreds of motivational speakers out there who are proud of that term, and plenty of clients who are proud to hire them. And many of those clients are sales organizations.

So—as comedian Jerry Seinfeld might say, ‘What is it with motivation and sales meetings?’

I think there are three answers: and one is better than the other two.

Three Kinds of Motivation

One type of motivation people seek is defensive. A pep talk fits in this category. Someone who speaks about overcoming tremendous odds. The amputee who learned to throw a football with the other hand. The war prisoner who endured, even learned.

This kind of motivation is an antidote to salespeople who are tired—tired of rejection, tired of not making quota, of being turned away. It gives them hope that their turn is just around the corner, and the energy to keep on keepin’ on. Don’t give up hope. Your dream will come true, just hold onto it. I did. You can too. If I can do it, so can you.

Another type of motivation is aggressive. Get out there and win one for the team. Yay for us, we’re gonna win this battle, then the rest of the war. The underdog team plays big in this type of motivation. Only the lead dog has a change of scenery. No one remembers who got second place. You are part of a winning team. We’re number one.

Those kinds of motivation have their place, but they have their limits. Both of them set up “us against them” mentalities. Defensive motivation is us against our customers—I’m not gonna let them wear me down! I’ll just keep banging on the door until they have to let me in.
Aggressive motivation is about competitors, not customers. Customers are simply the chips in a competitive poker game, the means by which we score the contest.

But there is a third kind of motivation: call it relationship motivation. It is about reminding us that we can accomplish great things for our clients. And it is inherently positive.

Relationship motivation is about reminding ourselves that we can improve our clients’ lives and their businesses; that we are in fact uniquely suited to do so.

The mantra of defensive motivation is “the clients can’t hurt me.” The mantra of aggressive motivation is “I can beat the competition.” But the mantra of relationship motivation is, “I can help my clients—and I can’t wait to start doing so.”

Both defensive and aggressive are primarily zero-sum games. Winning a job just means you finally won, and someone else lost. Beating a competitor doesn’t add value, it just picks a winner.

But relationship motivation is open-ended. By focusing on how to improve the client’s lot, we are open to value-adding ideas which are uniquely the province of joint, collaborative thinking. Relationship thinking is inherently better economics than is me-vs.-you economics.

Generating Relationship Motivation

There are, of course, motivational speakers, and they cover all three types of motivation. All have their place, but if your business and your sale are complex; if you think of your business as relationship-driven in large part; and if your sales process is high ticket and takes time, then you should over-emphasize relationship motivation in the speakers you invite.

Of course, motivation is hardly limited to inviting speakers to events. A major area you can influence is in your choice of motivational rewards.

Over the past few decades, we have seen a movement towards thinking of “motivation and rewards” as largely a function of monetary incentives. Sales people will always pay great attention to sales numbers—as they should. But there are important cautions.

First, monetary incentives are entirely about extrinsic rewards. If your entire motivational system is based on extrinsic rewards, you will reduce the importance of intrinsic rewards. Intrinsic rewards include pride, professionalism, peer respect, and client focus.

Alfie Kohn has written extensively about the negative consequences of overly focusing on extrinsic rewards. It has precisely the same corrosive effect as does focusing on aggressive or defensive motivation in speeches. It separates us from our clients, making client service only a means to a monetary end, rather than ends in themselves.

Secondly, the factor of time is important in extrinsic motivations. If your business development efforts are all aimed at this quarter’s numbers; if your metrics are primarily short-term, and tracking inputs rather than results, then you are suborning a non-relationship kind of motivation. Longer-term metrics and rewards more genuinely link client and professional, and better align the greater rewards that can come with collaboration.

Relationship motivation produces the best economics. Intrinsic rewards do the best job of encouraging relationship motivation. When extrinsic rewards are used as well, it is best to make them long term. There’s nothing wrong with measuring short-term results—the problem comes from managing short-term. The best short-term results come about from executing a long-term strategy, driven by a relationship motivation.

To answer Seinfeld’s question about motivation: it depends on which motives you’re talking about. And some are better than others.

This article was first published in Raintoday.com

Most client-serving organizations I know make a pretty big deal about client service. For consulting, law, HR, IT, accounting, software, and salespeople in complex businesses—client service is right at the top of their list of virtues. And rightly so.

But—sometimes, things can get a little twisted.

What do you make of:

• The administrative assistant who picks up the Officer’s laundered shirts and delivers them to him at the airport at 9PM. Regularly.
• The project manager who hauls the whole team in on Sunday to re-work the slide deck. Regularly.
• The senior officer who drops in on the staff meeting to “send a message about how much leadership cares,” but leaves early because “when the client calls, you know…” Regularly.
• The salesperson who cuts price at the drop of the hat when the client demands. Regularly.
• The VP who cancels his end-of-day wrap-up meeting with the new hire candidate on the final interview round because “I had no choice, the client changed our meeting date.” Regularly.
• The manager who joins the training session late and slips out to take calls between blackberry-checks, because “we’re in the middle of a really tough client issue.” Regularly.
• (The presidential candidate who, in mid-speech, stops to take a phone call from his wife on his cellphone from the podium. More than once.)

The key word is, of course, regularly. Any one of those examples can be held up as a case of client heroism. If, that is, it’s an isolated event. The problems come when it’s not isolated.

That’s when client service gets perverted into client servitude. And when we become servile, three things happen:

1. We continue to insist that we are in fact meeting the highest standards of service;
2. The client (or team, or associate) no longer respects us.
3. When respect is gone, our ability to be trusted advisors is quickly compromised.

Client Service Is Not Client Servitude

Great client service is doing things above and beyond; behaving in unusual ways when faced with unusual situations; and doing so selflessly, for the sake of the client.

An act of client service is an act freely chosen. In the long run, we do it because we believe in it as a way of doing business. But in the short term, in those cases where we might be better self-served by doing something else, and we still choose client service—that is true service.

Being servile is quite another thing. It means seeking out options to give faux service, so we can get credit. It means doing things not for their own sake, but for the credit it may garner us in the eyes of the client. It means getting our priorities wrong—seeing things as how we can help ourselves, not one’s clients or partners.

Synonyms for servile include sycophant, brown-noser, suck-up, flatterer, lickspittle and toady. Adjectives we use to describe the servile include obsequious, smarmy, devious, slimy, flattering and fawning.

We suspect those who are servile of dishonesty—of speaking falsely in an attempt at self-aggrandizement. Their motives are therefore bad. And ironically, their servility costs them in terms of respect from the very people they are most trying to impress. We don’t trust such people. And we don’t respect them.

We don’t respect them because they seem to have a low estimation of their own worth. They seem to need the approval of others to feel good about themselves. And if someone doesn’t value himself highly, then they could be wrong either about their worth—or wrong in their estimation. Neither is good.

What client takes advice from someone who doesn’t respect the worth of his own advice? What team member believes a senior who always subordinates all other value-adding activities to servility, calling it “client service?”

Clients take our advice for various reasons, but basically because they believe in our expertise, and they believe we have their best interests at heart. Being servile destroys both of those: because it is clearly self-motivated, it draws into question even our competence. After all, if our motive is client approval, might we not shade the data?

Most clients don’t want servants, they want partners. They want professionals who have self-respect, who have the courage of their own convictions, who can be trusted to speak the truth because it is the truth, not because it will get them approval.
It’s not that client service is unselfish. If I’m honest, there’s always a tiny touch of servility lurking around the edges of most client service I perform. It’s hard to be unaware of the value of being perceived as client-serving.

The trick is to not be overcome by a need for recognition as one who serves clients. If we become slave to that recognition, then we have to that extent abandoned client service.

To be client service oriented is to do the next right thing, and to be detached from the outcome; particularly whatever benefit might accrue to me from doing the right thing.

This is the heart of it, I think. Client service is doing good for the client. We are not surprised when we get credit for doing it. But expecting good from it is Station One on the slippery slope, where the End-Station is doing it only in order to get credit for doing it.

What’s the role of listening in the sales literature? Here are two examples culled from internet searches:

Successful sales are based on discovering what customers need and providing solutions to these needs. Always focus your questions on moving toward a greater understanding of your customer’s needs.

The secret to selling like a professional is to listen closely to the client. Find out as much as possible that might be relevant to your service. Ask questions about their expectations. Then when you have that knowledge, discuss only the aspects of your service that have a direct bearing on your clients stated needs.

By this view, listening is a key step in a sales process. We listen in order to discover needs. Having discovered the needs, we can then better tune our offerings, or our presentations, to those needs. This allows us to screen out unlikely prospects (improving efficiency) and to better address good prospects (improving effectiveness).

That’s the conventional wisdom. It probably sounds so obvious as to border on the banal. But occasionally, conventional wisdom is wrong. And this is one of those cases.

The greatest value of listening lies not in what is heard, but in the act of listening itself.
To see why, let’s explore the conventional wisdom.

There are three key assumptions in the conventional approach. Every one of them is misleading, and at least partly wrong. They are:

• Selling is about transactions, or about multiple transactions in sequence;
• The purpose of listening is to find out information—in particular, needs;
• The buyer has this information.

In truth:

• Selling is best understood (and done) by anchoring transactions in the context of relationships—not by treating relationships as a phase in a transactional process;
• The value of listening goes well beyond “finding out data;” its greatest value is in disposing the client to engage differently with both the salesperson, and around his or her needs;
• The assumption that the buyer is conscious of his or her needs and will part with them if artfully asked the right questions is a flawed assumption. Buyers aren’t fully conscious of their needs, aren’t necessarily disposed to reveal them, and direct rational inquiry is not the best route to either raised consciousness or enhanced revelation.

Let’s break this down to two issues—sales process models (how we think about selling) and buyer psychology (how buyers think about buying).

SALES PROCESS MODELS

Sales models are ubiquitous in corporate selling. CRM systems are built around them. Sales management is driven by data surrounding them. But almost all sales models are simple linear, sequential models—usually depicted as arrows. Early on in those arrows, we find listening.

The role of “relationships” in those arrows is either non-existent (the model depicts purely transactional sales “events”), depicted as a feedback loop (“go back and repeat from point B”), or is contained in the early-stage process listening step (“listen until rapport is formed; than move to needs-based questioning.”)

But that’s not how it really works. In the real world, relationships function as a substrate, a precondition, a context. Except for a purely cold call, sales do not happen in a vacuum. Farmers don’t plant seed in untended soil, no matter how fertile the ground. They plow it, turn it, fertilize it, water it, and wait for just the right time to plant. That is how really good salespeople treat relationships.

Really successful salespeople are always establishing and deepening relationships with people. Doing so earns them the right to engage in a different form of conversation, around a buyer’s needs and around selling. They use that right with some and not with others; and they use that right at once with some, and later with others.

A really successful salesperson builds relationships with some who may not end up buying. They may build a relationship with someone and engage in selling at a later date.

If you think the “purpose” of building a relationship is to lead you along a process of selling the client, then you are likely to ask questions in order to get answers. Your idea of “listening” will be in service to driving the process model forward.

And your prospect will get the same idea: “He’s listening to me in order to find an opening to best present whatever he’s selling. I’ll go along ias long as it suits me, but I’m on my guard.”

By contrast, if you think the “purpose” of building a relationship has a much looser connection with a sales transaction, then you are likely to ask questions more out of curiosity, aimed solely at getting to know the person or understanding the broader business context—without a specific agenda, transaction or “opening.”

And your prospect will get the same idea: “He’s listening to me genuinely, with some interest in me and in how I see things. This is good, he’s coming to understand me on my terms, not to sell me something. I’m willing to continue talking.”

If you work from a linear process model that makes listening a tactic to achieve a transaction, then you are only listening to hear your pre-conceived ideas. You are, in a nutshell, self-oriented. That is seller-centric selling. And it doesn’t promote trust.

BUYER PSYCHOLOGY

Ask a client what they want, and they’ll tell you “expertise; credentials; someone who’ll meet my needs.” Ask them what their needs are, and they’ll tell you.

But ask really successful salespeople (or honest clients with experience in buying) and they’ll tell you how it really works. Clients only ask for credentials and expertise because they’re not really sure what else to do. In truth, they’d rather get in range with expertise, and then decide based on their trust in the seller.

Clients will tell you their needs because they think they’re supposed to, and because they’re afraid if they don’t, you’ll take advantage of them. But if you can engage them in honest discussion, they’ll admit their uncertainties, and discuss, engage in and evolve their views of what their needs are.

It all depends on why you’re listening.

If you’re listening to hear an answer to a predetermined question, then you will hear the “canned” definitions of needs that clients have prepared for you. You’ll hear their request for credentials and expertise at face value, and not hear the undertone in the question, or in the bored way they listen to your answer.

Because what clients really want to talk about is what everyone wants to talk about. Themselves. When someone says, “tell me about yourself,” they’re just being polite—whether it’s on a date, at a social event, or in a sales call. The right answer is not to tell them about your vast experience with other clients—it is to get them talking about themselves. And to listen as they do so.

THE QUALITY OF LISTENING

The usual form of listening is conditioned by sales models looking for answers, and by flawed views of buyer psychology focused on surface dialogue. What is required is a different quality of listening.
The main reason for listening to customers is to allow the customer to be heard. Really heard. As in, actually being paid attention to by another human being.

This kind of listening is listening for the sake of listening. Listening to understand, period—no strings attached, no links back to your product, no refined problem statements. Because that’s what people in relationships, at their best, really do. They listen because they want to know what the other person thinks. About whatever the other person is interested in talking about.

This kind of listening validates other people. It connects us to them. It provides meaning. And—among other things—it sets the stage for sellers and buyers to interact—if that is the right thing to happen next.
Brooks and Travesano (“You’re Working too Hard to Make the Sale”) note that people greatly prefer to buy what they need from those who understand what it is that they want.

Read that over again, carefully. People prefer to buy what they need (stuff they’re going to buy anyway), from those who understand them on the basis of what they want (things in life they’d love to have—wishes, hopes, desires.)

You don’t even have to give them what they want; it’s enough to understand them.

To bring it full circle back to listening: Relationships are the context for successful selling. Relationships are based on trust; they predispose us to engage in qualitatively different kinds of sales conversations. And listening—unrestricted, unbounded, listening for its own sake—is the way we develop such relationships.

And therein lies the paradox. The most powerful way to sell depends on unlinking listening from selling—and instead, just listening. Listening not as a step in a sales process, and not as a search for answers to questions. Listening not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

The point of listening is not what you hear, but the act of listening itself.

MAKING IT WORK

Here are 5 tips to listening this way. Number five is the most powerful.

1. Ditch the distractions. You cannot multitask undiscovered. Being multitasked feels insulting. Close the door. Face away from the window. Blank the computer screen. Turn the blackberry over. Now—pay attention.

2. Use your whole body. Lean toward the speaker—even on the phone. Use facial expressions. Use hands and arms, shake your head, use ‘non-verbal’ verbals. This improves your listening—and indicates you are listening.

3. Keep it about them—not you. Use open-ended, not closed, questions. Let them tell their own story—don’t use them as foils for your hypotheses.

4. Acknowledge frequently. Paraphrase data, empathize with emotions. Make sure you are hearing both correctly; make sure they know you are.

5. Think out loud. The biggest obstacle to listening is your own thinking. Be courageous—postpone your thinking until they’re done talking. Be willing to think out loud—with the client. Doing so role-models collaboration and transparency, which reinforces trust. I hear you. I value you. I respond to you, with no hidden agenda. I trust you. You can trust me.

That’s the message of listening.