If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Or, join our email list and get a free audio gift. Thanks for visiting!

With many thanks to friends and clients, we’ve made the top 25 list our 1st month out of the gate!

800-CEO-READ, a leading direct supplier of book-based resources, compiles a monthly list of best-selling business books based on purchases by its corporate customers nationwide. Here are the best sellers for October 2008:

23. “Relationship Economics: Transform Your Most Valuable Business Contacts Into Personal and Professional Success” by David Nour; Wiley.

You can read about the others here…

Is your sales compensation plan working? How do you know? Can you drive better performance by improving the plan? How can you adapt to more effectively support your strategic goals with the least amount of disruption to your business?

Often, the sales compensation program is the weakest link between an organization’s strategic goals and its sales results. Poorly designed and grossly overlooked, the compensation plan can dramatically move the organization in the wrong direction. This translates into missed critical objectives with a high recovery cost. Conversely, if designed and implemented well, the sales compensation plan can motivate exceptional sales professionals and drive exponential performance of the company’s goals and objectives.

So, what are some of the fundamental issues in sales effectiveness and compensation?

Read the rest of this entry »

Do your employees have a sense of the bigger picture?

There is a Persian story that goes something like this: A group of villagers is weaving a basket together. A wise man walks by and asks them what they are doing. The first says, “I am pushing one straw against another.” The second says, “I am making a basket.” The third answers, “I’m helping a man carry food to feed his family.”

Though they were all three working on the same project, they each saw their jobs very differently. How do your employees see their jobs? Is it as the same mundane pushing of one woven strip against another, or do they see a little bigger than that – which is the basket itself – or do they see a purpose for why they are doing what they are doing?

The difference is that the last villager was engaged. And similar to our notion of Corporate Relationship Deficit Disorder, for some reason, when we walk into our corporate offices, we leave behind many of the notions about personal relationships that we hold dear while we’re at home. Most people are more engaged in the Super Bowl than they are with their company’s results.

A very real sense of engagement is possible. We’ve seen several clients that have a very natural, sustainable, and incredibly magnetic manner in which they draw incredible talent. When employees feel engaged, they are captivated and mesmerized. They feel a strong sense of connection to not just what they are doing, but the purpose in which they are doing it.

Read the rest of this entry »

What are relationship savvy sales forces doing to get ahead and stay ahead in 2008? How are they not just creating, but commercializing their most valuable relationships that others can’t? How do you compare – especially if you are a publicly traded company with a looming monthly or quarterly quota expectation? Are you focused on transactions or transformations of your clients’ prospective businesses? Which relationship-centric strategies will you invest in in 2008 to improve your organization’s sales competency?

It is critical to focus on these and other fundamental questions in order to have a proactive understanding of the application of strategic relationships to sales performance. More importantly, is your organization willing and able to embrace that which it clearly understands is important – the value of relationships – as an asset that very few quantify?

In no other part of the organization than its revenue-generation engine should relationships be more intentional, strategic, and as such, quantifiable to the success of the organization. Here are our Top 10 Most Important Relationship-Centric Best Practices for Profitable Revenue Growth in 2008:

Read the rest of this entry »

Reputation Capital at work, compliments of Phil Cannon, a 40+ year Xerox sales executive in the Los Angeles area: 

AUTHENTICITY and TRUST-BUILDING

1. Always return every single call —ALWAYS —regardless of consequences!…BE ACCESSIBLE.
2. Exceed expectations of callbacks—BEAT THE FORECAST.
3. Keep everyone posted on all matters all the time—everyone on same page.
4. Be an honest broker—STANDUP GUY….make deals, keep deals …keep inside info down-low.
5. Build alliances within organizations versus seek breakage and conflict….compliment co-workers and peers….LEADERS ARE POSITIVE..
6. Admit lack of knowledge immediately and seek resources: knowing the answers not nearly as important as finding the answers promptly; FOLLOW-UP EVERY SINGLE TIME, even if it is to say no progress yet, but working.
7. Check after delivering answers to see if it worked as predicted….NEVER GET SURPRISED BY FINDING OUT YOU WERE WRONG….you will be often if you take risks….be your own best DEVIL’S ADVOCATE.
8. Call people spontaneously to say Hi or invite to lunch for no reason….have them know you like them as people….stop by to just say Hi.
9. When not talking business, let them know WHO YOU ARE….people like people that are open, positive, have interests, vulnerable, funny, mostly honest.
10. BE AUTHENTIC;  people remember and connect conflicting information, discrepancies in facts, contradictions….you do not have to remember your lies if you tell the truth and are true to yourself and others…we have no reasons to hide anything if we like ourselves and like what we do…
11. Always try to listen more than talk; listen for values, principles, personal preferences, dreams, fears, hopes, vision—-not just requirements.  Get to the person, not just the position…..what does he/she need to accomplish/ achieve?    BECOME A STAKEHOLDER.
12. Ask questions….if it seems too personal, preface your concern to get approval and permission before going there conversationally ….go there earlier than later.
13. Create situations where your follow-up is necessary in order to create more interaction plus examples of  timely responsiveness….build a box for yourself.
14. Have outcomes match expectations in most things or announce variance in advance….
15. The conversation is more important than the pitch…try to connect them….tell stories, refer to other similar situations, bring meaning to the exchange….
16. PROJECT PERSONAL POLICIES:
    1. Sell as if it is your best friend;
    2. Sell as if you will see them years from now and you do not want to hide or apologize…..you want people to be happy to see you years later, not think you a pariah for cheating them financially or selling selfishly…SERVICE THE SALE.
17. Give them BIG PICTURE OF YOUR EMPLOYER AND MARKET….provide with inside scoops of company and leaders…..showcase Mulcahy’s humble human approach every chance you get—she is one of a kind….ICONIC.
18.  Admit mistakes; BE ACCOUNTABLE….they know we are human, forget trying to be perfect….NEVER HAPPENS.
19. Seek to CONNECT PEOPLE:  referrals, introductions, lunch with 2 clients  with something in common; create synergies among clients/ customers to add value..
20. Do what you say you are going to do—-earlier than later….give instant gratification to stakeholders if no negative consequence to you.
21.  Get your partner to DO SOMETHING—create reciprocation and project ownership  ….REQUIRE action…it cements partnership.
22. Counting comp $$ before a deal gives you a bias which risks you perhaps not to fulfill the requirement by overkill hog ; if you do not count $$$ but fulfill the need,  you make ka-ching and keep your INTEGRITY so you do serial deals over time….SMART SELFISH…..

What’s the best way to spread a viral campaign as widely as possible?  Some hold to the idea of courting ‘key influencers.’ There is research that contradicts this idea before, but more evidence is out this week that confirms that the influencer matters less than the influenced. 

Science News online reports on recent research by two social network theorists, Duncan J. Watts of Columbia University and Peter Sheridan Dodds of the University of Vermont in Burlington. The researchers tested the conventional wisdom, that,

experts on a subject who love to talk… can convince dozens of others of their opinions. An excellent sales strategy, then, would be to find those few critical people, persuade them of the value of your product, and leave it to them to convince others.

Sounds good, but is it true?

The researchers compared how far an idea would spread depending on whether it started with a random individual or with an influential individual who was connected to a lot of other individuals. They found that highly influential individuals usually spread ideas more widely, but not very much more widely.  More important than the influencers, the researchers found, were the influenced. Once an idea spread to a critical mass of easily influenced individuals, it took hold and continued to spread to other easily influenced individuals.

Dodds compares the spread of ideas to the spread of a forest fire. When a fire turns into a conflagration, no one says that it was because the spark that began it was so potent… Instead, a fire takes off because of the properties of the larger forest environment: the dryness, the density, the wind, the temperature. 

So what’s the take away? “The best way to increase the odds of person-to-person transmission of an idea is to make it a good idea… Some things are just fun to talk about.” One of my favorite quotes by Seth Godin is to simply “be remarkable - that which is worthy of remark!”