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Selling Ourselves Better – Part Two

By admin on November 21, 2011 in
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Selling Ourselves Better Part Two In Part One of our blog http://stewart-cg.com/blog/?p=92, we discussed pre-planning and the first two key steps in meeting with someone – building rapport with your audience, and asking questions about their needs and confirming the reason you are there. Now, here are the three remaining steps needed for selling yourself effectively.

Step 3: Make a strong presentation. People learn and are receptive to information differently. Most like visual explanations, some enjoy auditory informational discussions and a few are kinesthetic, meaning they like to experience what you are presenting. I have found in my presentations that most people have a dominant style but are also receptive with the others. So, if you have the opportunity to use all three in your presentation, there will be more power in your outcome.

An example of that is a PowerPoint presentation where the audience is listening and seeing the slides and at the same time letting them make notes on a copy of the slide presentation that you provide them. This also provides them with a reference they can use as needed once your presentation ends.

Step 4: Close the deal smoothly. Closing a sales presentation can be tricky and probably offers us all the biggest challenge in this process. If throughout the presentation you have asked plenty of smart questions, paid attention to the body language and hit the right points, then the best way to close the presentation is to ask for the business. Ask if they are ready to move forward and sign a contract. This is a bit assumptive, but it is the reason you are there in the first place.

Another method is the Ben Franklin approach, where you would weigh the options, the positives on one column and the negatives on the other, clearly showing why going with your products or services has many positive reasons. Or ask them a question about what needs to happen for them to say yes and move forward. You need either a yes or no answer before leaving – a maybe is not acceptable.

Step 5: Handle all concerns and objections before you close again. If there is hesitation or an objection about a point, pause, welcome the issue, and in doing so, confirm that that is the only issue to be resolved. Then pause again and ask one of these questions: “If we can come to an agreement on this issue, will you move forward with the agreement? If I can meet your requirement here, are you ready to sign? Let me help you, do I need to clarify this point in more detail?”

Negotiate on the point. Then close again, and thank them for the business. Once the deal is closed, let your client know what happens next – basically, you are combating buyer’s remorse. Follow up soon after the meeting with the contract, any other necessary paperwork, instructions on how to fill the items out, with information regarding schedule, deliverables, etc. and so on.

Finally, hold a post-evaluation to include a self-assessment of the process. What went well? What would you do differently next time? How can you improve the delivery next time? As I stated in Part One of this blog, practice always improves your ability in selling yourself effectively.

For our next blog, we will discuss the discipline of service.

 

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Selling Ourselves Better: Part One

By admin on October 26, 2011 in
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We are always selling ourselves. We try to convince our supervisor that we deserve a raise, request a free airplane seat upgrade at the gate and ask a potential client to hire us for his or her next project or service.

If we are always performing this task, why not look at a process that works most effectively in generating beneficial outcomes and incorporate it into your life, both at work and outside of work? I will focus here on this selling process and its implementation in the business setting, but it can easily be adapted to just about all we do in life.

Our goal is to make an influential contact where we desire a positive outcome, one where at the end of the day, the result becomes a win-win for all parties involved. The process involves five distinct steps, in addition to pre-planning and post-evaluation. I will discuss pre-planning and the first two steps in this blog.

Once we use this process a number of times, it will become natural and its successful effectiveness will become obvious. As with most things that are worth following, practice will make sense once implemented.

In pre-planning, before making a sales call or approaching someone for an appointment, research him or her in advance. These days, you can find a tremendous amount of information about potential clients from the Internet – what their duties are, how they perform them, who their competition is, who makes the decisions and what they like.

For example, I once received a bottle of Italian wine in the mail with a request for a meeting. After thinking hard about how this person knew that I liked that, I realized that is was in my web bio! This person earned an appointment from me thanks to that.

Also, often you know someone that is friends with the person you are meeting. These “allied resources” can provide you invaluable information about the person that you can then use to build rapport in your introduction.

Pre-planning pays. Research can make the difference between getting in the door or not. Once you succeed and are in front of your potential client or of a selection committee, do the following:

Step 1: Build rapport with your audience. It is imperative to know your audience. Building rapport is a subtle and natural way to help lower defenses and understand the person’s natural behavioral tendencies before proceeding with the presentation. Basically, it gives you an opportunity to learn how to pace the presentation, or in other words, customize it to your audience behavior.

If the person is in a hurry and seems impatient, then your presentation needs to be paced fast, arriving at bottom lines quicker and engaging with short questions and answers. It is very possible that this person will also arrive at a decision right there on the spot. On the other hand, if the person appears relaxed and patient, pace the presentation with more details and examples to help him or her in considering you.

Step 2: Ask questions about the needs and confirm the reason you are there. Ask broad, open-ended questions – the basic who, what, when, why and how. Discover their level of compromise and the process of their decision making if possible. You may be talking to the wrong person!

Before making the presentation, do a communications check-back, basically restating the issues addressed to make sure you have a clear understanding of what was discussed. Hopefully by now you have gained insights on the audience and then gear your presentation to their behavior, not yours.

Next up will be the presentation and follow through. We will discuss this in Part Two of our next blog.

 

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Your Bull’s-Eye in Life

By admin on September 12, 2011 in
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Target planning is basically converting your dreams to goals and developing a plan to accomplish them. These goals become your target, your bull’s-eye in life.

This process is nothing new—the idea of goal setting has been around forever, but very few actually do it. Studies have shown that only about 5 percent of the population is focused on where they want to go in life and seriously plan how to get there, creating their circumstances and their future. The rest exist as a sailboat without a rudder, going where the wind blows them.

Earl Nightingale, famous radio personality and motivational speaker from the ’50s, said that the Greatest Secret regarding the key to success is that “we become what we think about.” He describes success as the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. Therefore, to be successful in our endeavors, we have to plan, we have to set goals, and we have to progressively work toward their realization. We have to set coordinates in our sailboat and adjust the course as we navigate toward the destination.

In the promotion of a balanced life, I encourage goal setting in the following order:
1. Family - Spending quality time with your significant other, with your kids, with extended family.
2. Self – This includes your mind: feeding your brain with intellectually stimulating activities; your body: exercising, eating healthy, doing things in moderation; your soul: having a daily quiet time of prayer, meditation, time; and
finally, your community: giving back and helping those less fortunate or in need.
3. Work - Working effectively, using management tools such as problem solving, and havinga clear direction of where you want to go.

Since target planning is determining what you want in your personal and professional life and developing a plan to achieve those goals, the best way to go about this is to plan from the future to the present and implement in the reverse.

Plan From the Future You Want

To begin with, think about your “someday” goals, both personally and professionally. Look out 10, 15 years and think that if you had a magic wand, what would your ideal life look like? Think about your Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs). What are they? Or think about regular, smaller goals that fit your desires. WRITE THESE GOALS DOWN!

Then look out three years from now; what needs to have happened in the next three years that will put you on course toward your someday goals? WRITE IT DOWN! Now look 12 months out, what needs to happen, what goals need to be accomplished that put you on track to meet your three-year goals? WRITE THAT DOWN!

Now take the yearly goals and break them down into three-month goals, and write down what you need to do during the next 30 days to accomplish your quarterly goals. You can even define your weekly goals for the month and detail them down into a daily to-do list.

It has been proven that it takes doing something 21 consistent times before it becomes a habit. So start your goal setting today. Put the coordinates in your sailboat and captain it to your predetermined destination. Trust the process, it works!

 

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The True Cost of Errors in the Hiring Process

By admin on August 8, 2011 in
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There are few things more devastating to a company than to making a bad hire. When taking into account the tangible and intangible costs of hiring the wrong person for a job, the cost to the company is immense, and the number multiplies depending on the level of management and decision-making the individual has experienced.

In the recruiting and selection conference I teach twice a year, I ask the attendees to think of a bad hire, and I then give them a form with a table of tangible factors on one side and intangible factors on the other. I ask them to try and guess at the cost of each factor and then add it up. The factors used are as follows:

Tangible factors – recruiting costs, salary, benefits, management time, training costs, overhead, lost production, lost clients and lawsuits.

Intangible factors – damaged reputation, loss of goodwill, staff morale, turnover, lost of candidates, uncaptured business and reduced productivity.

I go around the room and ask everyone to give me their numbers and write them on an easel page. I then average them all out, and usually, to everyone’s surprise, the number is consistently in the $400,000-$500,000 range. And this is just for one bad hire! Sometimes the number can be in the millions, based on loss of clients and future opportunities and will continue to add through the years.

Yet we often hire people with little understanding of the real behavioral requirements of the job or the natural behavioral tendencies of the candidate. We select them without checking references, without knowing how someone will respond to different management styles, office environment, decision-making ability, and other important factors that will minimize making a bad hiring decision. We also tend to promote individuals out of their expertise and job comfort to a job where there is no behavioral match, and then wonder what happened to the person!

The recruiting process must be conducted by the person to whom the individual will report – it is the one thing that can’t be delegated! The first and most important point in the recruiting process is understanding the candidate’s natural behavioral tendencies and their match to the behavioral requirements of the job.

For example, if the job requires extensive interaction with people like a salesperson, then the candidate should have a high social vector. The opposite is true if the job requires long periods of data entry, programming or engineering, in which case the candidate needs to be have a high calmness vector which will allow for patience through the activity.

The AVA (Activity Vector Analysis) is a behavioral assessment instrument, similar to the DISC, which can accurately predict a person’s behavioral tendencies. It measures an individual’s four behavioral dimensions: assertiveness, sociability, calmness and conformity.

Once you find a candidate with job compatibility, the real investigative and interviewing process begins, because the AVA measures who the person is and how they will react in a certain environment –  it doesn’t measure intelligence, ethics, values, education, or skills. The strengths and weaknesses of these characteristics are found through an in-depth comprehensive interview after first making a thorough check of the individual’s references. The manager will conduct this comprehensive interview, and after an agreement of mutual expectations between the candidate and the manager, the job is offered.

This is an extensive and intensive process but keeping in mind the cost of errors, it is one that cannot be taken lightly!

 

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What Does A Balanced Life Look Like?

By admin on April 26, 2011 in
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Living a balanced life; for some, that thought just doesn’t compute. Too much going on at work, too many alligators to wrestle and too many items on my to-do list; who the hell has time for exercise, kids, spouse, eating well, the community, and a spiritual life when all I can do is keep up with work; you’ve got to be kidding! That was my life many years ago. I clearly remember being at an entrepreneurship leadership conference around 1999 in Chicago and as we went around the room we had to introduce ourselves and say something about what we did. I remember boasting that I owned a small engineering company and was busy and had been working on an average 65 hours per week for the last few years. I was proud of that fact; I am a hard-ass working man, until a man sitting on the adjacent table, described his company (ten times bigger than mine at the time) and made a point to look at me and say that he build it and manages it in 40 hours a week – it is not how much you work but how smart you work that counts. Needless to say, my chest deflated quite rapidly; he taught me a lesson that day.

In one of my training conferences, I show the participants three equal circles touching each other with the words Work, Family and Self. I ask them to think about their lives and to draw the relationship of their circles with each other. Ninety percent of the participants draw their work circle three times the size of their family circle with the self circle being very small; some don’t even show a Self circle! We have created a culture where success is measured by your output at work and not by the happiness of your spousal relationship or how your kids are being nurtured and whether you are taking care of yourself. We have self-sacrificed family and self for the corporate ladder to find out, most of the time way too late, that it was not worth it. In no way am I advocating living in a world of mediocrity or wasting God given talents; I am strongly suggesting that a balanced life is possible if we understand and accept the importance of the concept. I am not naive to believe that we can just turn an on-off switch at will, but like everything that is worth it in life; you have to work at it. At times, integrating the three circles work really well; the idea is to be conscious of that fact. I will attempt to share personal experiences and thoughts about the concepts of self, family and work. I will first outline the essentials for the Self and will dive into more details in the next blog, followed by Family and Work.

SELF: Mind, Body, Soul, Community

Mind: keeping the mind sharp, staying on top of trends, understanding politics both local and national, culture, the difference between the boomers, gen x and millennial, reading interesting books, exhibiting intellectual curiosity about nature, the environment, sports, the arts, staying on top of the news, the economy, the world… and so much more.

Body: it is your temple and you should take care of it. Exercise regularly, stay fit, stay in shape, participate in sporting events, in races, in triathlons, eat organics, the farm-to-table concept, farmer’s market, lower your cholesterol, your blood pressure, regular physical check-ups, drink in moderation; do it all in moderation.

Soul: are you connected to a higher power? Take time to pray, to meditate, to connect with your inner being. I am a Christian, I do a morning devotional as part of my spiritual growth, and it is my private time with my God, recognizing that there is a command to do and be good in this world helps understand our purpose in this world.

Community: at the end of the day, we are part of something bigger and we have a duty to give back. Get involved with your church, the boy scout troop, the soccer team, the community kitchen, the many non-profits in need of volunteers, serve on these boards, contribute your time, talent and treasure. There is more pleasure in giving than receiving!

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The High Performance Company Requires a Disciplined Culture

By admin on April 18, 2011 in
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The High Performance Company requires three specific characteristics to set itself apart from the average and from just being “good.” A great company must have the following three elements:

  • Clear Vision
  • High Performing Teams
  • A Disciplined Culture

This blog discusses discipline in more detail.

Basically, discipline is just doing what you said you are going to do. Discipline involves delivering on your brand promise every single time, such that it is ingrained and woven into the fabric of the firm, and is second nature and expected. In fact, over delivering on the promise, within financial constraints, is more the norm than the exception.

All companies talk about quality, excellence, on time/on budget and being the best, but most fail to deliver on these claims due to a lack of consistent discipline in the organization. There are four characteristics required to achieve the level of discipline needed to build a High Performing Company (HPC): plan, demand, execute and share.

PLAN

A plan is a method of acting, doing, making, proceeding, etc., developed in advance. Prior to executing what you agreed to do, all the T’s are crossed and I’s are dotted; nothing is left to chance or interpretation. How many times have we disappointed a client because our deliverable wasn’t what they expected or wasn’t exactly what they wanted? It happens all the time! We start work without a contract and with a verbal understanding that both of us think we clearly understand, only to find out later that wasn’t the case. Our own personal biases and historical experiences get in the way of exactly understanding what was agreed upon. This can all be avoided with a signed written agreement with clearly identified expectations of cost, quality and schedule. Disciplined companies have effective management tools and systems in place that are an integral part of the process in planning the deliverable to the client, always!

DEMAND

When there is a high level of confidence in the product or service, management can make demands, both internally and externally. From those within the organization, we should demand a commitment to excellence in all the actions necessary to deliver on the brand promise, whether it is a six sigma quality program, Llean manufacturing, ISO certification, OSHA safety, design excellence or optimum construction. Without a healthy bottom line and reasonable profits, there is no way to invest back into the organization, so we need to demand that our associates work smart and efficiently, communicating that profits are good thing! From the clients or others external to the firm, we can then demand on-time payment, on-time responses on information needed, trust and loyalty.

EXECUTE

Here is where the rubber meets the road; are you delivering on your promise? Are you executing your agreement to the client’s expectation, and more? Are you doing what you said you were going to do? A culture of meeting and exceeding goals, of keeping clients happy and relationships strong through performance leads to repeat business and being referred to for future opportunities. Having been in business for 27 years, I understand that sometimes bad things happen. But when they do, hopefully it is an exception, and you are known primarily for delivering quality, on time and on budget!

SHARE

I am a firm believer that success needs to be shared with those that help create it. Obviously what comes to mind first is sharing the financial success of the company with everyone involved through bonuses and incentives; however, it is very rewarding to also recognize those who led the charge in front of their peers, both inside and outside the organization. This can actually be accomplished in a genuine and humble manner, always recognizing that it usually is a team effort led by a leader. Jim Collins talks about mirror/window maturity: as leaders take the blame when something wrong happens (looking in a mirror), and give the credit to those in your team when good stuff happens (looking through a window).

Dan Sullivan from the Strategic Coach Program explains that there are four referability rules:

  1. Be on time: respect everyone’s time.
  2. Say please and thank you.
  3. Finish what you start.
  4. Do what you say you are going to do.

It is really that simple!

 

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The High Performance Company Requires High Performing Teams

By admin on April 4, 2011 in
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The High Performance Company requires three specific characteristics to set itself apart from the average and from just being “good.” A great company must have the following three elements:

  • Clear Vision
  • High Performing Teams
  • A Disciplined Culture

This blog discusses high performing teams in more detail.

We all hear that a company’s biggest asset is its people; and that is an absolutely, unequivocally true statement. Yet most companies fail to capture the exact notion of what that statement means, and do not know how to maximize the efficiency of their human capital in a productive and balanced way. Thomas Jefferson said, “If I had a universe to choose from, I could not change one of my associates to my better satisfaction.” He definitely had a high performing team!

A high performing team is one where its members are passionate about what they do. They have clarity in their roles, there is a great amount of cohesiveness between the members, and there is an understanding of the need to live a balanced life. When all these characteristics are blended together, the outcomes of their decisions propel the company to a higher level.

This type of team arrives at decisions more quickly; they debate passionately, trust each other deeply and hold each other accountable for performance.

Passion. Clarity. Cohesiveness. Balance.

People that are passionate have a powerful enthusiasm about what they do. They love what they do and are very good at it; they are energized and will do their job and not get tired. These individuals operate with unconscious competence and are working in their area of expertise where they are uniquely qualified and are experts in their field. People who are passionate about their job wake up every morning excited about the new opportunities their day will bring.

Only when individuals have a crystal clear understanding of their roles, their expectations and their goals can they be held accountable for performance. In order to hold someone to a certain level and measure their achievement, we must have metrics in place against which we can benchmark their performance. For an individual to succeed, exceed preset goals, and consistently operate at a superior level, he or she must have “job comfort.” This happens when the natural behavioral tendencies of that individual match the behavioral requirements of the job. In other words, the person has the right amount of assertiveness, sociability, calmness and conformity required by the job.

Individuals of cohesive teams like each other, trust each other and hold each other accountable. They discuss passionately their ideological differences and they challenge each other, always keeping the company’s ultimate success in mind. Once a decision is made by the team, they support the decision wholeheartedly and align themselves like iron filings to a magnet. It is clear to the members of this team that egotism, sarcasm and cynicism are not allowed. Period.

Living a balanced life means having all the things that matter in perspective, in balance, and that would be your work, your family and yourself. As corny as it sounds, we only live once, and we should live to the fullest. We should be relational with our spouse, we should spend quality time with our kids, we should share time with our parents and siblings, and enjoy the company of friends. We have to make time for ourselves and take care of our mind, body, soul and community. We need to have intellectual curiosity, to exercise and eat healthy, to connect with our Higher Power, and we need to give back to the community. In order to have the time to do all this, we need to work efficiently and effectively with a tremendous amount of discipline.

Discipline is the third requirement of a high performance company, and I will cover that next.

 

Photo Source: Bev Trayner

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High Performance Company

By admin on March 28, 2011 in
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A High Performance Company

What differentiates a good company from a great company? As I heard the other day, “good is the enemy of great.” So true. But being a good company is not a bad thing, and most companies are just that. Moving to the next level requires work, discipline and consistency.

There are three specific characteristics that set a company apart from the average and from just being “good.” A great company must have Clear Vision, must be made-up of High Performing Teams and must have a Disciplined culture. This blog discusses the first characteristic.

Clear Vision

Companies with clear vision have a compelling mission statement and employees that understand why the company exists. They plan for the future with specific goals, understand their brand and what makes them different, and finally, they give back to their communities through a culture of civic engagement.

A mission that is supported by guiding principles, or core values, describes what matters to the leaders of the company, and when a company’s mission is understood and believed, it provides a blueprint for decision making. The mission statement, in a simple sentence, should articulate the company’s overarching goal, what it does and who it works with. The guiding principles explain how the mission is going to be accomplished and what is important to the leaders of the company.

I like to compare a company’s vision to a sailboat about to leave on a long sailing trip. The company needs to have an idea where it may want to be 10 years out. Obviously, there are an incredible number of obstacles to overcome—some that can be controlled and others, such as the economy, impossible to predict. But if you are sailing to China, you better be heading west.

Next, the company needs to have in place some very achievable three-year goals based on today’s capabilities, human capital and services. You are not only going west, but you have a destination in mind, say Hawaii.

And last, the company’s one-year goals need to be crystal clear, with action plans in place to achieve them and a timeframe for each of the goals. You have set sail, you have your coordinates locked-in and will adjust as needed while keeping your sights in the destination. Unfortunately, many companies lack a rudder and can’t even get out of the harbor. They are unfocused, without a clear understanding of who they are, where they want to go and how to get there.

High performing companies have a deep understanding of their brand and their differentiation in the market. Brand is the soul of a company, it is everything in a company, from how the receptionist answers the phone to the on-hold music to the CEO’s last company communication to the products developed and the services offered. Brand includes the last marketing campaign, how clients are viewed, how employees are treated, how the office looks and how much you share with the community. Brand is the Alpha and the Omega.

The best definition of brand I’ve heard is “brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product or a service, and when enough people get the same feeling, then you have a brand.” So brand should evoke an emotional response from the person receiving the message. Think about Nike, WalMart, The Ritz or Apple—each creates an emotional connection with what they do:

  • Nike: “just do it”
  • WalMart: low prices
  • The Ritz: personal service
  • Apple: leading innovator

Do you know your brand? Can you articulate it in a couple of words? Do you have the pieces in place to support it? High performance companies do.

And lastly, these companies are committed to the communities in which they exist. They sponsor events and contribute time, talent and treasure as part of their mission. The leaders are involved and lead nonprofit boards, the Chamber, community initiatives, education programs, civic groups, church activities and others. They have a deep understanding and desire to share and to give back to others less fortunate. In return, they are admired, respected and trusted by the communities they serve, and loved internally by the employees they support.

Like a sailboat with a captain and crew, a high performance company needs to be led by a visionary leader who is supported by team members that trust each other, hold each other accountable and are passionate about what they do. I will go into the essentials of a high performing team in more detail next time.

 

Photo source: Ross

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Behavior and Job Comfort

By admin on March 14, 2011 in
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With many people blogging out there, how do you filter through the incredible amount of cyberspace information to find something relevant to you and your business? I will attempt to do just that, to deliver concise but informative business ideas and concepts to spark a thought, feed your curiosity and perhaps a call to action. As a quick introduction for those of you who do not know about Stewart Consulting Group; I am working with CEOs and senior leaders of companies by helping them develop a High Performance Company that integrates the concept of a balanced life with high performing teams of individuals that have clarity in their roles, have excellent job match, trust each other and use effective management tools and systems to reduce stress, yield higher productivity and improve the bottom line. The services are explained in more detail at www.stewart-cg.com.

So what is excellent job match? It is when the natural behavioral tendencies of an individual match the behavioral requirements of the job, basically job comfort. Jim Collins, in his book “Good to Great”, talks about getting the right people on the bus and in the right seat on the bus, but he just didn’t explain how to do that. In order to do so, one must have a basic understanding of behavioral analysis and how it affects what we do, how we do it and why we do it. Behavioral analysis was first introduced back in the 1920′s and has come a long way since then. Today there are dozens of behavioral assessment tools in the market such as the AVA ( activity vector analysis ), the DISK, Myers Briggs, Predictive Index, Caliper, Colbey Index, MBS and many more. Most of the tools use four dimensions to assess someone’s behavior: 1. assertiveness or dominant, 2. sociability or influential, 3. calmness or steadiness and 4. conformity or compliance.  Typically everyone has two controlling dimensions that shape their actions, decision making and how they relate to others. Behavioral analysis tools do not measure intelligence, skills, ethics, education, attitude, morals and beliefs. So the goal is to match the behavioral requirements of the job with the strong dimensions of the individual; this will not guarantee job success, as there are other factors to consider for that, but it will dramatically improve the chances of job performance and satisfaction that leads to less stress and a happier employee.

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