I’ve been writing a lot about changing the conversation, about challenging our customers, about getting them to think differently.  A lot of readers have been sending me notes, asking for advice on how to do this.

While I agree with many of the principles outlined in Challenger Selling and Provocative Selling, I take a little different view on things.  The basic premise of many of these approaches is that we have to know our customers businesses better than they do, we have to have better ideas for their business or function than they do.

I tend to think of this as a little arrogant and misplaced.  I also tend to think this short changes our customer and us of some opportunities.

Don’t get me wrong.  To engage in these business conversations, we have to understand business—both business in general, but more specifically our customers and their businesses.  We have to analyze their businesses, we have to look at opportunities they are missing, things they can do differently, things they can improve.  It takes research, high levels of business acumen, and deep understanding of what’s going on in our customers.

Often, as I’m preparing to approach a prospect and engage them in these types of conversations, I think, “What would I do if I were running the business?  (or the function that we might focus on)  What would I change?  What new opportunities might I consider?”  I try to put myself in the customer’s place, seeing things through their eyes and develop some ideas on issues, opportunities, possible solutions.

It’s a great exercise, it gives you the opportunity to start to develop some premises around shaping the conversation.  Now here’s where it starts getting interesting.  First, customers tend to like these conversations–as long as you’ve gotten them at the right moment.  No one is having conversation like this with them.  No one is bringing them new ideas.  They’re hungry for ideas.

Here’s where I have a departure from many others writing about this topic.  Many say, you have to know your customer’s business better than they do, you have to have better answers than they do.  It strikes me a both a little arrogant and unrealistic.  If we truly knew better than they, then we should be looking to run the company, not sell to it.  But the real issue is we always view their businesses from the outside.  As much research as we do, as great as our ideas, we never have a perspective from the inside.

The real conversation starts at the intersection of these points of view–our outside perspective, experiences and idea–unhindered by “legacy experience,” and that of the customer who is, after all most knowledgeable about the internal dynamic of their companies.  It’s this combinatation where the real magic can happen.  It’s the combination of the best thinking from the inside and the outside that enables us to help the customer achieve more than they could ever imagine.

There’s an interesting dynamic that happens–the conversation no longer is challenging–it’s collaborative.  It’s the customer and us worling together to determine a solution that neither of us could have come up with separately.

It sounds kind of idealized, but I see these happening all the time.  I have them weekly with my clients–some of the highest performing executives in their functions in the world.  I see great sales people having these conversations about problems they can help their customers solve.  Clever sales people are working with customers to create solutions–leveraging the customer’s ideas and capabilities along with their solutions.  I’m working with a small company in the health services sector.  They support some of the back office functions in hospitals.  They are engaging their customers in some different conversations about their function.  Completely changing what how they deliver services and the services their customers acquire.  Another client, a company that sells commoditized electronic components is having conversations with some of the largest mobile telephone manufacturers in the world.  They aren’t talking about electronic components, but re-looking at the way mobile phones are designed and manufactured.  Another client in the bulk chemicals industry engages their customers in conversations about the future of detergent, or foods, or other things.  Still another, a provider of enterprise software is talking to their customers about a different way of running their companies.

These conversations are happening everyday, they aren’t idealized conversations, but they are sales people who want to talk about more than their products, and their customers who want to explore different ideas to grow.

I’ve written before about sales people as solution creators—but in reality solution creation is really the result of a collaboration between the customer and great sales people.

These conversations can be remarkable.  Whether it is looking at running a function more effectively, whether it is about something people have viewed as commodities, but changing the perspective of the customer.  We can have great ideas and great solutions.  We can challenge our customers and present things they should be doing. 

But the real magic is not having the customer buy our ideas, but engaging the customer in a discussion and collaborating to develop even better solutions and approaches.  To do something neither of us could have done individually.

Perhaps the real conversations need not be challenging conversations, but collaborative conversations.

Related posts:

1. What Conversations Are You Starting?
2. Challenging Idea
3. Sending Your Sales People Out Naked, The Problem With “Challenger Selling”

There has been an important revolution in marketing thinking over the past years.  The move from thinking about campaigns to rich content programs and nurturing is important.  It recognizes something important, that customers want to learn, they want to be educated.  These programs enable us to develop “relationships” with customers and nurture them up to the point of their deciding they need to take action and start a buying process.

In our nurturing programs, we design them to have the customer take different actions through the program that help us gauge their level of interest, their urgency, and their readiness to buy.

This is important and needs to be the cornerstone of our marketing programs.  But there is a problem with this–it requires a customer to have an interest–to want to learn–to want to consider a change, to be thinking about their needs.  Not necessarily to do something today, but to be thinking, “perhaps we need to change at some point in the future, I should start learning and looking around now.”  In essence, nurturing works best when the customer raises their hand.

But what happens when the customer should be raising their hand, but isn’t?  What about the case where the customer is so busy just surviving day to day?  What about the customer that isn’t looking to learn, that isn’t thinking about the future, who isn’t thinking about how they might improve their business?

They may never be a part of our nurturing programs because they don’t recognize the need to be nurtured.  They may be part of our programs, but they aren’t taking the actions they should be taking—but aren’t.

Pull is an important part of developing the customer need, knowledge and enabling us to enter a buying cycle when decide they need to buy.  But I think push is still critical.  But it’s push in a very different sense.  It’s helping the customer recognize that they need to change.  It’s helping them understand they are missing an opportunity.  It’s helping them understand that them see new ways of running their business or function.

Sales people must bring ideas to their cusotmers!  Sales people must provoke and challenge their customers.  Sales people must create the reasons for customers to raise their hands, to say–I need to do something now–entering into a buying process.  Alternatively, to say–that’s something I need to start looking into.  I might want to do something later.

I get concerned as I start to see the sales pendulum swinging to “pull” oriented sales strategies.  I think exclusively relying on pull–which I see many organizations seriously considering is irresponsible.  It’s not because we “aren’t” driving our sales growth as aggressively as possible–though that is irresponsible.  But it’s really irresponsible because we see that our customers are missing opportunities to grow and improve and we aren’t taking action to help them understand this.  It’s irresponsible because our customers often look to their sales people for ideas–to understand things that are happening in their markets, best practices for their functions, how to be more efficient.

We have to help our customers understand new opportunities–if we are truly customer focused, value based, trusted advisors, we need to get them to raise their hands.  Our nurturing programs may not do this.

Creating great value for the customer, developing meaningful relationships requires a careful balance of push and pull.  They can’t exist by themselves–we can’t have push only strategies, nor can we have pull only strategies.  We have to purposefully execute both.

Related posts:

1. The Importance Of Push And Pull In Sales
2. Who Owns The Customer?
3. Moving From Customer Acquisiton To Customer Engagement

I’m taking a bit of a departure from some of the “rules” I have established for myself and this blog.  One thing I have avoided is taking political positions, using this blog as a bully pulpit for those types of things—though I use it as a bully pulpit for a lot of other stuff.  In this post, I have no intent of taking a political position, but there are some important pieces of legislation that impact virtually every business and organization for which the Web is a part of their strategies.  I think it’s important for people to understand these and take an active position with their congress people–regardless your stance.

Many blog sites and web sites are going “dark” today to call people’s attention to the SOPA and PIPA bills.  Clearly, this site hasn’t gone dark—but that’s just a comment on my lack of technical capabilities.

I first started seeing the term SOPA coming up in the social media world a couple of months ago.  The conversation seemed to have dominance in the technical communities, I initially blew it off thinking it was some great technology.  More recently, as I kept seeing more discussion, I decided to look into it.

SOPA stands for Stop Online Piracy Act, or House Bill 3261.  It’s related to PIPA, the Protect IP Act.  Look at some of the articles on these bills.  The spirit of the bills is great, who wants to encourage Piracy or stealing IP.   However the implications of the bills and the related enforcement issues are profound.  There is an impact to virtually every business — seeking to leverage the web, build online communities and better connect with their customers.  It will impact virtually every individual’s web experience.

The responsibilities organizations have in ensuring their sites are in compliance can be overwhelming and will inevitably impact all our experiences on the web.  Social Media and Web X.0 strategies are critical to all businesses and organizations, so legislation that can have such a profound impact  on our abilities to leverage these is important to understand.

I’ll keep my position to myself, though you might guess my position.  But I think every marketer, strategist, and top executives should look at the legislation, understand it’s impact on their strategies.  Whatever your position, you should write your congress people making your position known.

No related posts.

Not long ago, my wife had to be away from home for a week. It happened to be a week that I wasn’t traveling so, I had to fend for myself on meals. The first day, I struggled with what to do. The easy answer was to go to a restaurant. But I spend too much time on the road in restaurants. I considered take out, but that seemed to be a variation on the same theme.

Then I discovered something amazing—and it was less than a half mile from our house. It was this thing called a grocery store. It was an amazing discovery (I’ve led a sheltered life). I walked in and found all my meal and eating problems had been solved!  I could get everything I wanted.  Imagine that, all the answers to my food and eating problems right there–less than a half mile from my home.

As I’m prone to do, I started thinking of the broader implications of my discovery.  Did others know about this?  Perhaps so many people are blind to the fact that grocery stores might be just around the corner.  Perhaps the solution to world hunger was at hand, I just had to make this visible to the world through my blogging, writing, and speaking!  It was so simple….

When I read many of the books, blogs (including my own), or listen to speakers on sales, marketing, leadership and business strategy, sometimes, I think we have just discovered the local grocery store.  We do some thoughtful research, but on a very narrow set of premises, discover some patterns, some things that work, then immediately declare, We Have The Answer To Your [fill in the blank] Problems.

It could be a prospecting approach, how we present our elevator pitch, developing our value proposition, winning deal strategies, how to coach, how to lead.  It could be about how we measure and compensate our people.   It could be new approaches to marketing, or any number of other things……

Sales 2.0 companies and many of the “solutions providers” do the same thing.  They have something that helps certain situations, certain parts of the process.  These solutions truly provide value but to a certain small set of problems and customers.  Too many, however, position themselves as the answer to a sales person’s success or a sales manager’s performance problems.

We all tend to position ourselves as having “the answer,” but after all we are selling something as well.

I was reminded of this the other day by a very thoughtful reader.  In my post, Order Taker or Solution Creator, a very bright commenter wrote, “but Dave, sometimes all a customer wants is to know features and functions and to place an order.  When they want that, I’ll be an order taker.  Sometimes they want to be challenged, when they want to be challenged,  I’ll challenge them.”

Sales, marketing, and business is complicated.  There are no simple answers or miracle cures.  There is no right or wrong way.  There are lots of bright people who have great ideas, tools, approaches.  Things worthy of reading, understanding, applying.  Some solutions and approaches help some of us — for example, I tend to write a lot about complex selling situations, so hopefully, my advice and experience is valuable to those involved in those situations.  But it’s probably not very useful to those who are involved in transactional sales situations.

What I learned from Natalie’s comment is that great performers are truly adaptable.  They learn lots of different approaches.  They  are skeptical, they know “one size does not fit all.”  They don’t blindly drink the latest batch of Kool Aid, regardless of how popular it may seem.  They know there are no miracle cures or get rich quick solutions.

Great performers are constantly reading, learning, evaluating, and adopting.  They take a great idea, combine it with other great ideas, and execute what’s appropriate for the situation they are involved in.  For another situation, they do something else, leveraging other ideas that are more appropriate.

There are lots of great books, bloggers, speakers.  There are great tools and great ideas.  The variety of ideas and approaches, in fact, inform us there is no single path or approach to success, but there are many different ways.  Great performers look at, study and understand all of these.  They continue to learn, they continue to to explore.  Most importantly, they adapt approaches that are appropriate for the situation.

Be skeptical.  Don’t look for silver bullets.  Don’t accept someone’s cure for every problem you have.  Collect lots of approaches, tweak them and own them for yourselves.  Think about each situation and use whatever is most appropriate for the situation.  Realize there is not just one path to a solution, but there are different paths–choose the one that works best for you.

Hold me, and people like me accountable.  When we start talking about the miracle cure, push back.  Make sure you understand the specific circumstances where it works.  Make sure you understand the limitations.  We’ll all grow, learn, and improve our effectiveness.

No related posts.

The other day Seth Godin offered a short post on Sold or Bought.  It offered an interesting perspective, but he didn’t go far enough on selling.  We can further refine this view in a number of ways.  One of the major splits I see is sales people who are really order takers versus solution creators.

Order takers focus on their product.  They can be very customer service oriented.  But the quality of their interaction is very different from a solution creator.  In prospecting, they call the customer asking about their use of widgets, their satisfaction with their current widgets and whether they need new widgets.

When they find a customer who needs a widget, they are very good about providing the customer all the information about their widget and why it’s better than other widgets.  They can even read through their lists of features and benefits.  They ask the customer if they have any questions about the capabilities of their widget.

They can be very customer oriented and very polite.  After they answer the customer’s questions, they ask for the order.  The customer probably isn’t ready, so they call them back a few days or a week later and ask, “How are things going?  Do you have any more questions about our widget?  I’m delighted to answer any questions you might have about our widget.  When do you think you will be making a decision?”

Then they wait.  They forecast it in closing, they say the order will come in any day now, and they wait.

They call a week later, “How are things going? Do you have any more questions about our widget? I’m delighted to answer any questions you might have about our widget. When do you think you will be making a decision?”

Then they wait. They slip the close date another few weeks or a month.

Then they call again…..

I see order takers in all industries, selling all kinds of things–products, services.  They could be big ticket items.  Order takers worry about their order and are oblivious to what the customer is trying to achieve.

Solution Creators are different.  They’re idea people, they’re results people–not just for themselves but for the customer.  They help their customers envision a new future.  They help their customers think about their business differently.  They help their customer change and improve.

When they prospect, they never ask about their needs and requirements for widgets.  They talk to the customer about what they are trying to achieve.  They present ideas, “Have you ever considered what might happen if you did this…..?”  They analyze the customer and say, “Do you realize if you did this, you might improve this much in these areas?” 

When they engage the customer they talk about what the customer is trying to achieve.  They don’t spend a lot of time on what their solution does, it’s features or capabilities.  They know it’s not about the product but what the customer is trying to achieve.  Instead they focus on outcomes and results the customer will achieve.  They quantify these results, so the customer can clearly understand the impact it will have on their business.

They create a sense of excitement and urgency in the customer to change.  When the customer slows down, they refocus the customer on opportunity costs, on what they are missing by delaying a decision and implementation.  They focus on when the customer will achieve results, not when they will get the order. (But they know when the order has to come in for the customer to achieve the results in the desired time frame).

They don’t compete on features, advantages and benefits because they know they rarely lose because of a feature.  Instead the focus on results the customer will achieve.  They focus the customer on achieving those results and not whether they are missing a certain feature.

Order takers are being threatened with extinction.  Prospects and customers can get information about products elsewhere.  They can get answers to their questions in other ways, without the annoyance of someone constantly asking for an order.  The value order takers used to create is no longer needed because customers and prospects have more efficient means of getting that information.

Solution creators are treasured.  Customers need ideas.  They are often so busy, they are blind to opportunities to improve.  Customers welcome solution creators because they create value.

Things are bought and sold.

There are order takers and solution creators.

Which are you?  How do you know?

Related posts:

1. How Did You Arrive At This Perception Of Our Solution?
2. After You Ask For The Order, Don’t Forget To Get It!
3. Relationships Don’t Get You The Order!

I’ve been reading a number of different posts on the topic of “Who Should We Be Coaching?”  There seem to be a variety of views, most of which I struggle with.  Some say focus on the middle, suggesting the return on coaching time for both high performers and low performers is not high.  Some focus on the high performers and middle.  In general the low performers lose out.

I’m struggling with some of the ideas, these ideas, frankly, I think it’s the manager’s job to be coaching everyone.  This doesn’t mean each person requires the same amount of time in coaching.  Nor does it mean we have a cookie cutter approach to coaching everyone on the same thing.

Also, I think too many people tend to view things as relatively static.  If competitive sales practices stood still and we didn’t need to improve or innovate, then perhaps we could reduce our coaching for top performers.  But things are always changing, everyone needs coaching and development to continue to improve and innovate.  Without this, top performers soon become mediocre performers.  The bar on selling is continually being raised.  In fact a large part of our job as managers is raising that bar–continuing to innovate and improve, consequently, helping our people develop new capabilities, skills and coaching them in these improvement initiatives.

It seems to me, that coaching needs to focus on several areas for each person:

• Top performers:  No one is perfect, top performers, in fact, always look for the little edge or the little improvement.  Managers need to spend time helping these top performers discover these improvements.  The world of selling never stops–leveraging your top performers for constant improvement and innovation is an important aspect of coaching–managers should be leveraging top performers to help innovate and improve, taking what these top performers discover and leveraging this across the sales organization.  Finally, part of the manager’s job is to coach people not only in maximizing their performance today, but to maximize their potential contribution in the future.  Manager’s need to look at developing top performers to take greater responsibility–whether it is moving to a higher level as a sales person, moving into management, or moving into some other role.  Coaching is not just about today, but it is about preparing people for tomorrow.
• Mid-range performers:  There’s no argument here, we want to see continued improvement in the performance of our mid range performers.  Unlike our top performers, there is clearly a need to improve what they are doing today.  As managers, most of our time will be focused on performance in their current roles.  At the same time, we must also prepare them for the future–if the bar is being raised, we have to prepare these people to meet these new challenges.
• Low performers:  We can’t afford to ignore them, we can’t write them off.  As managers, we need to coach them—getting them to improve their performance, meeting our expectations.  Alternatively, we have to move them into a job where they can be a top performer (sometimes that’s moving them out of the company).  All of this is part of the manager’s role in coaching, doing nothing is not an option, that is if the manager is doing her job.

As managers, we are responsible for the performance of all our people.  We have to make sure each person is performing at the highest levels possible in their current roles, we have to prepare them to grow in their job and to grow in their ability to contribute to the company.  If we can’t get them to reach the levels of performance required, we have to move them into areas where they can perform.  All of this is part of what managers do in coaching.

I wish it were simpler, but they aren’t.  Managers have to coach everyone.  The time we invest has to be appropriate for what we are trying to achieve with each person.  We can’t “schedule 15 minutes of coaching” for each person–it doesn’t work that way.  What we coach each person on is different–we have to coach to maximum impact for each individual.

What do you think?  Am I missing something?

Related posts:

1. Sales Coaching, Dirty Secrets Or Misunderstanding What Coaching Is About?
2. Coaching And Being Coached
3. Do You Trust Yourself And Your People Enough To Let Go?

There is an interesting discussion on Focus on transforming sales organizations from Push to Pull.  I can see the reason for the discussion, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard a comment about “pushy sales people,” I’d have a huge pile of nickels.  It’s also both fashionable and realistic to talk about the customer’s buying process.  Customers are in the driver seat, social business can provide customers a lot of information that sales people previously provided.  Marketing is developing rich content strategies to nurture and develop relationships with customers–theoretically enabling them to “pull” when they have a need.

There are a lot of important changes that enable us to engage customers in different and more impactful ways.  However, with all that said, I remain an unabashed proponent of the sales person’s obligation to Push!  I don’t believe sales can afford to be Pulled–in fact it’s irresponsible to be Pull only.

The problem is sales people (and businesses) have always gotten the notion of Pushing wrong.  It’s always been focused on the wrong thing:  What’s our elevator pitch?  Let’s go pitch our product!  I need to get this order now!  It’s been almost exclusively focused on the sales person, the sales person’s goals and the sales person’s company.  It should be clear why customers react so poorly to this, it’s not about them.

Push is important, it’s the obligation of sales people–but it must be correctly focused.  It has to be about the customer.  It has to be focused on them and what they can achieve.  It’s the obligation of the sales person to help their customers think differently about their businesses, to discover new opportunities, to discover opportunities to improve–operations, customer satisfaction, quality. profitability, reduce risk, or whatever.  Customers are sometimes buried in the day to day, losing perspective about opportunities to grow their businesses.  Often, as prisoners of their own experiences, they don’t realize that they might try something new, there might be a different or better way that improves their results.

Whether it’s called “Challenging,” “Provocative,” “Solutions Oriented,” or “Customer Focused,”  top sales people bring new ideas and opportunities to their customer.  They create a vision and engage their customers in owning the vision.

Push doesn’t stop there, it continues through the buying process, helping the customer engage the right people, structure their process, and make a decision.  Great sales people help the customer keep focused on the goals they are trying to achieve.  As the buying decision stretches out–as it often does, the great sales person pushes the customer–helping them realize the lost opportunities and opportunity costs of delaying the decision and implementation.  The objective is not the order, but helping the customer achieve their goals on as aggressive a schedule as possible.

Push is critical, push is important–but only if it is focused on the customer and pushing them to achieve their goals.

But Pull plays an important role in supporting Push.  Pull is a measure of customer ownership  and engagement in the opportunity, and the business result.  If the sales person has done the right job in Pushing, all of a sudden the customer starts to Pull.  They embrace the initiative, they get actively engaged in the opportunity and in owning the results.

Great sales people look for their customer to Pull as a result of their appropriate Pushing.  By itself, Pushing can be slow, but if the sales person can get the customer engaged in Pulling as well, the entire process gets accelerated.

A Pull only strategy is the kiss of death for sales people.  However powerful our customer nurturing and development programs, if we wait for the customer to Pull, we are in a seriously disadvantaged position.  The customer has already done their research and arrived at some decisions.  They have evaluated alternatives (correctly or incorrectly) and narrowed alternatives to a short list.  At this point the value the sales person can create is seriously constrained–primarily to responding to the customer need.  At this point, too often, the difference between alternatives is very small–often leaving the key differentiator to be price.

Pull is bad for the customer, as well.  It puts too much responsibility on them.  They probably can never be a knowledgeable in solutions as the people who build those solutions.  While there is a wealth of information in the web, the customer in their research may emerge informed, but not well informed.  They may emerge mis-informed.  Pull is even worse from another perpective–it puts the onus of recognizing opportunities on them–they may miss opportunities, or be late in recognizing them.  Customers get great value from others making them aware, challenging them, Pushing them.

Push and Pull, artfully combined is the winning formula for the customer and for sales.  They work well with each other, but to my mind, it all starts with a little Push.

What do you think?

Related posts:

1. No Sales Model Is Forever, What To Do When What Worked Isn’t Working
2. Strategic Thinking, Getting The Big Picture
3. Sales Professional 3.0

Top performers–whether they are individual contributors, managers, or executives are always looking for new ideas.  They are driven for improvement and innovation.  But too often, our efforts are stymied.  It’s hard to improve or innovate.  Often, I think it’s a result of looking in the wrong places.

When I get into discussions about this with people, I pose the question, “Where do you look for new ideas?”  Often, the response are, “We look at our competition!”  Sometimes, it’s, “We look at others in the industry.”

When I hear these responses, I’m reminded of the terrific quote from Gary Hamel:  “Ideas that transform industries almost never come from inside those industries.”  There are dozens of examples of this–the start up that has a completely different take on things, the game changer that was never on anyone’w radar.  The Amazon’s, Apple’s, Facebook’s and others.  It’s a dismal but too accurate observation–but we can do something about this.

Benchmarking our competition, looking within our industries is an important element of our business, sales and marketing strategies.  We have to have competitive practices, we have to understnad the critical issues in our markets.  But at the same time, it limits us.  We restrict ourselves to the familiar, to the known, to our experience base.  We become prisoners of our own experience, blind to what is happening outside our worlds.

The good news, our competitors and our customers do the same things!  They are also blinded and limited.  This creates a tremendous opportunity — both to outcompete and outperform our competitors, and to bring ideas and innovation and value to our customers.

If we just started looking in non-traditional places–the web and social media may be one of those new places for us to hang out.  Different industries, different regions, different cultures, different business models all give us new ideas.  The ideas we may be looking at could be old and stale in their own industries or regions—but they could represent great innovation in our own.

Innovation doesn’t need to be tough, it just means looking in different places, exposing yourself to new ideas.  If you live in a B2B world–look at retail and B2C.  If you live in a box/product solution world, look at services, subscriptions, knowledge based industries.  If you live in high tech, look at high fashion.  If you are a Boomer meet some X, Y, Z’s (and vice versa).  Expose yourself to different things–different art, different music, different people, different ideas.

You could learn a lot.  You might find ideas that twisted, tweaked, artfully adapted could have great applicability for you and your customers.  They could set you apart from everyone else.  You might also get a chance to see your new competitors–perhaps before they become competitors.  That opens a whole new realm of possiblities.

Are you looking for innovation innovation and ideas in the right places?

Related posts:

1. Why Don’t Managers Think Deeply
2. Are You Committed To Upsetting The Status Quo?
3. Prisoners Of Our Own Experiences

As we finish the year and get ready for next year, it’s time to look at our personal performance metrics a little differently.  Each of us has to take responsibility for our own personal development.  Sure managers should be helping us improve our performance through coaching and providing the right training, but fundamentally, we are responsible for making sure we develop and improve as sales professionals.

Personal development comes through all sorts of formal and informal experiences.  We learn through training programs, through books, articles, blogs we may read (hopefully you’re learning some from this one).  We learn at conferences, by sharing ideas with our peers, and through mentors.  It’s a mistake to limit ourselves to one form of learning, but we should mix it up, seeking as many different experiences and points of view as possible.

Take a moment and reflect on what you did to develop yourself as a sales professional, business professional and human being.  Grab a sheet of paper and write down what you did for yourself this past year.  What training did you go through, did you get as much as you could from it?  What did you do outside of training your company may have given you to improve and learn?  What books did you read?  Were some of them outside pure business or sales books?  What blogs did you start reading and commenting on?  What online communities did you start participating in?  How did you expand your network and what did you learn from them?

Now take another sheet of paper and write a plan for next year:

1. What formal training programs are you going to take?  Are you looking at programs outside of those that are just for your job?
2. What are 2 skills that you want to sharpen?  What will you do to improve them?  How will you know when you reach the competency you want to achieve?
3. What 1 new skill do you want to develop?  What will you do to acquire the skill?
4. What 1 new thing are you going to learn that will help you become more valuable to your customers?
5. What books to you want to read?  What blogs or other materials do you want to read?
6. What communities will you participate in to learn from your peers?
7. What do you want your direct manager to do to help you achieve your personal development goals?  How will you get your manager to commit to that support?
8. Do you have a mentor?  What is your plan to leverage your mentor most effectively this year?
9. What else will you do to improve yourself in 2012?

The best professionals never stop learning or developing.  They set tough goals and commit themselves to achieve the goals.  They know that no matter how good they are, how much they have learned, that if they don’t continue to learn and develop, they’ll become irrelevant.

Take some time to establish the plan, write it down, carry it with you, review where you are at least weekly.

If you are a manager, take one more step.  What are you going to do to make sure each of your people has a personal development plan in place?  What are you going to do to help them achieve that plan?

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1. Innovation And Improvement — Whose Job In Sales Is It?

A number of years ago, I was prospecting.  It was a mid-sized company.  I had a very good referral to the CEO.  In researching the company, I discovered some fairly big risks to their growth. I also discovered some opportunities they were missing in addressing certain part of their market.  I prepared for the meeting with the CEO.  My goal was to discuss their priorities and strategies, to use these risks and opportunities as potential discussion points to stimulate the discussion and to explore things that our firm could do to help them grow.

I met with the CEO, we started discussing a number of things about their business strategies, challenges, and goals.  I posed some questions about the opportunities I thought the were missing.  The CEO was intrigued by the discussion, we went longer than the allotted time.  Toward the end of the discussion, we came to the conclusion, that while the opportunities I had presented were interesting, the CEO felt they had better opportunities in other areas.  I had to agree, based on their priorities and capabilities, that was the right choice.

I was starting to feel a little disappointed, I had built my strategy to work with them around these provocative ideas.  While we had a great discussion, it was clear that it would be wrong to go further.  Then the CEO said something really interesting to me.  He said, “Dave, it’s rare that I have conversations like this.  It’s really important to me and to our company.  Even though the ideas we discussed don’t make sense now, I’m certain you can help us with the issues we are struggling with right now.  I’d really like you to help us on these issues, perhaps we can later work on some of the intriguing ideas you presented.  Would you be willing to consult with us?”

The CEO’s comments blew me away.  I had come to him with some provocative ideas, but they turned out to be wrong for them—at least at that moment in time.  But the CEO still wanted to hire me to help his team on some other ideas.  I was all wrong, but I got the gig!

A few weeks later, I learned more.  I was starting the project and meeting with the EVP of Sales.  He started the meeting by saying, “Dave, I’m really excited to be meeting with you and have helping us with this project.  Our CEO has been talking about you constantly since your meeting.”  I  was a little embarrassed,  I replied, “To be honest, I’m a little surprised to be here.  When we met, it turned out I was completely off target on some of the ideas I presented.”

He laughed and said, “Ken (the CEO) didn’t care about that, he said he had never had a discussion like the one with you.  He said you clearly understood us, our industry, and our challenges.  He said he really liked the way you think, he liked your perspective you had and that you helped him look at things differently.  He knows we need help and is absolutely convinced that you can help us think differentely and implement the new strategies we are considering.”

We struggle with ideas about how to help improve our customers businesses, how to help them achieve things they had never imagined.  We struggle with “what’s that killer idea?” 

The experience above and a number of others have taught me something important.  It’s great to have a killer idea the customer immediately embraces and wants to go forward with.  But more often the killer idea is not what the customer buys.  It turns out what’s more important is the conversation and using the conversation to jointly discover opportunities to help them move forward.  The ability to focus on the  customer’s business, to discuss ideas as peers, rather than suppliers, the ability to partner with the customer in moving forward is the real value we bring and what the customer is looking for.

Our customers are struggling in growing their businesses, improving their operations, identifying and addressing new opportunities.  They need help in doing this, they need partners with insight, ideas, and solutions.  Our provocative ideas are just the starting point–perhaps they’re the entrance fee.  What we really want is to engage the customer in a conversation, to engage in a process of discovery about what they want to do, what our ideas are, and how we might help them attain their goals.  Ultimately, I think it is rare that we bring that slam dunk idea the customer buys.  I think what they really buy is our ability to help them.

Have you ever had a similar experience?

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