In simple terms, you can measure your business success by how well you get customers, keep customers, and the efficiency of your operations. Many companies measure their success by revenues, income and other traditional accounting yardsticks. The problem is that the accounting approach measures how you did but not how you should have done. For example, take a company that grew 20% last year, and had $10 million in revenue. Its management team was weak, so it lost an additional 20% growth, missed out on another 5% in net margin, and had unnecessary turnover of 10% in client base. So this same company (assuming a 10% net margin) could have seen another $800K added to their bottom line. The one secret ingredient was “people.”

While I like the idea of coaching, training, and other means to develop people, these tools will never replace the sheer power of hiring the right people in the first place. You can not turn a chicken into a duck or a pig into a cat, which is what many owners try to accomplish. Much more effort needs to be put into hiring top performers in every seat and promoting the right people. The cost of not doing so is huge. There are all kinds of forms to calculate the cost of mistakes out there. In Brad Smart’s book “Top Grading” the cost of a mis-hire was calculated to be 14.6 times base salary. So to put that in to real terms, someone making $100,000 is going to cost your firm $1.5M over the lifetime of their employment in lost opportunities and mistakes that happen.

In tangible terms we can always see the difference between “A” players and the rest. The “A” players’ productivity is 3 times the productivity of the others. The higher the “A” players are in the firm, the better the consequences.  The easiest place to look is in your sales department. The top sales people do far in excess of your average and bottom producers. Go into programming departments. The top producer outputs far more than anyone else. You can go in to any department and position and measure the same difference; the top producers will give you 3 times the output.

Before I move further, let’s clarify the definition of “A” player because many owners say they cannot afford them. “A” players are those people in the top 10 percent of talent available at the pay grade you have defined, for the tasks you want them to do, and willing to do it in your market. In many cases organizations are already paying for “A” players, but the lack of discipline in their people processes allowed them to hire “B”s and “C”s.

Here are some signs their might be a problem with discipline around people:

• There are no measurable key performance indicators in place to know whether each person is achieving “A” performance.
• 90% of employees are not considered “A” performers.
• “B” and “C” players are not fired or redeployed when they cannot become “A” players.
• There are no talent reviews of people to see who are “A,” “B,” and “C” people.
• People are almost never fired, and loyalty is the most important value of the company.
• When there is an open position, the candidate pool has no “A” players.

There are a lot of justifications offered regarding the lack of performance. The reality is companies are making big mistakes in their hiring practices. They say things like “I have gotten my money back on this salesperson because we got enough deals to cover his/her salary.” This ignores the fact that the person did not reach quota, sucked up a lot of management time and energy, hurt company reputation, and created a hole in the organization when they suddenly left. Had the company hired correctly, the ”A” player would have met quota, still be there, and have a lot of momentum right now. Here are some good ideas to follow to dramatically improve your people processes:

• Move away from behavioral interviewing and use the “Top Grading” process for interviewing.
• Use assessment tools in your hiring process.
• When promoting employees use the “Top Grading” process.
• Have at least 2 KPI standards for every position, and if people are not able to meet them, redeploy or replace those people. For help on KPI there is a website www.kpilibrary.com.
• Do performance reviews annually and define whether someone is an “A,” “B” or “C” player. If they are a “B” or “C” decide how they can become an “A.” If they can’t, it is time to let them go.

Do you have absolute trust among your ownership and leadership teams? Do not answer yes too quickly. Every organization tells me they have trust, yet most do not. There has been no research around how much money lack of trust costs organizations every year, but I am confident that you can increase your revenue and profits substantially by facing this issue. If you have cracks in trust you are missing the foundation to teamwork and will find it impossible to achieve peak performance in your organization. 

Ironically, many owners will tell me they have trust among themselves that breaks down below that level, but they are just fooling themselves, which is why they have such a problem with the rest of their organization. This exact situation exists now with one of my client companies. Each of the owners has confided in me the concerns they have about the others. However, they have told me that I cannot bring the issues out in the open.

 “George” (who is CEO) thinks his partner is not competent enough to do his job or committed enough to the organization. He has been disappointed that “John” (VP of Sales) has not taken more initiative and in 7 years of business has not brought in a single new client. John, on the other hand, thinks George needs to be right about everything all the time and that discussing anything with him is futile. George becomes verbally abusive and impossible to work with if you disagree with him, so John has decided to just go along with the status quo since the company is doing well anyways. At this point they go week to week doing whatever the other wants, neither holding the other accountable. Luckily, they have a good (not great) business model, and the company has done well. In my experience, should the company face challenges the partnership will fail fast.

In his book Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Pat Lencioni points out that “trust” is the foundation to a strong team. He lists the five dysfunctions in a pyramid in the following order: 1) trust, 2) fear of conflict, 3) lack of commitment 4) avoidance of accountability, and 5) inattention to results. One way to find out if your group has a problem with trust and teamwork is to watch your meetings and ask yourself these questions:

• Does everyone on the team look forward to these meetings?
• Is everyone actively engaged in the meetings?
• Is there a healthy debate on the issues brought up, or are people just being told what to do?
• Are people really committed to decisions, or do you find yourself asking people over and over again to follow through on the decisions made?
• Are team members holding each other accountable?
• Is there a clear plan of action and scorecard created to hold each other accountable?
• How much attention is paid to individual needs (ego, recognition, etc) as opposed to the goals of the team?

Going back to my example above, I spent 6 hours with George and John talking about major issues I’d found within their business. John barely spoke. George disagreed with all of my findings, deciding in advance that none of the suggested remedies would work in his business or his industry, etc. These are common answers from people who do not trust and need to be right. However, when a recommendation was consistent with his opinion or something he had already concluded, he agreed. While all this was going on (for 6 hours) his partner almost never spoke. This is when you know for sure there is a major trust issue among your partners.

Whenever George wanted to disagree with me, he would hammer me. If arguing from a weak position, he would turn to John and say, “Don’t you agree with me?” With weak conviction and eyes averted, John would say yes. They are not willing to be vulnerable in front of each other. The clincher, at the end of the meeting, the CEO called me aside to ask for some additional information, which I agreed to deliver the following week. Before exiting, I went to John’s office to see if he could be available for next week’s meeting, and he asked, “What could he possibly want to do with that information?” When I pointed out that this was the list of accountabilities that George is going to agree to commit to assign to John, he murmured under his breath “that will never happen. He is a control freak and will never give anything up.”

According to Pat Lencioni, you know you have a good team when:

1. Everyone says they “unequivocally trust one another.”
2. They engage in unfiltered, healthy conflict around ideas
3. They commit to decisions and plans of actions.
4. They hold one another accountable for those actions and plans.
5. They focus on achievement of collective results.

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

The purpose of this article is to help business owners understand the key daily decisions that influence dependence on external funding and either limit or expand the growth potential of a business. There are essentially 4 decisions: 1. cash; 2. people; 3. strategy; and 4. execution. This article (#3) addresses strategy, which is the primary driver of growth. If you are not growing in the top tier of your industry segment you have a strategy problem.

The first and most common strategic move for most CEOs in a difficult economy or a sales stall is to “do nothing,” the definition of which is “insanity.” The CEOs won’t admit they’re doing nothing. They will make minor tweaks to their existing strategy, if they even have one, and delude themselves into believing they made significant changes. Or, their big changes only affect the internal company. Growth and sales are always about the customer. The root to a growth issue is the customer’s perceived value of your product or service and whether someone is willing to invest/spend their money with you. When customers stop spending money with you, what they are really saying is that they don’t see enough reason (e.g. value) to give their money to you. This is why this intense focus on cost control today is a big problem. While it is important to manage businesses in a prudent manner, we must balance that with addressing customer needs and wants. Many of the changes companies are making today actually exacerbate their growth problem, negatively affecting customers by reducing the quality of the products and services they receive. What their customers need is more value and service, but companies are moving in the other direction. Rather than cut costs, I suggest spending what it takes to address your customer’s changing needs. Otherwise someone else may get your customers.

In the typical “do-nothing strategy” leaders believe that their growth issues are due to external forces, everyone else is experiencing sales declines, or some other self-limiting belief. So they keep doing the same things, cut costs, and try to wait things out. This strategy has some hidden costs that are never measured such as:

• Lost customer goodwill;
• Increased mistakes from exhausted employees;
• Loss of good people;
• Sloppy decision-making from a tired management team;
• Missed business opportunities because the “cost control” mentality prevented an “investment” mentality; and
• Lost market share because new companies entered your market space, and old competitors took some of your market share.

The second path that many CEOs take is to try to redefine their business model. This strategy rarely works, is highly risky, and almost never necessary. It assumes that what the company currently does and its core competencies have no value in the marketplace. This is highly improbable.

The best strategic course of action for a company to take to reignite growth is to utilize strengths already possessed in ways that are important to a specific target customer base. Many times companies define their target customer too broadly or use the wrong criteria, such as company size, geography or some other inappropriate specification. The secret to dramatic increases in growth typically already lies dormant inside your company. You need to recognize it and match it up properly to customer needs. A book called The Inside Advantage by Robert Bloom has captured the essence of identifying more clearly your desired core customers and aligning their needs with your capabilities in a way that dramatically increases growth. If you have a strategy problem here are some thoughts from Inside Advantage and some additional ideas to consider:

• Can you describe your strategy in one sentence? If you can’t you do not have one.
• Can you vividly describe your core customer in one sentence? This may not represent your predominant client mix today.
• How can you adapt your unique offering to this core customer in a way that you can own and leverage and cause more of them to buy from you?
• What will your persuasive strategy be to convince your core customer to buy your uncommon offering instead of the competition’s?
• How does everyone in your organization need to change the way they do things to own this strategy?
• How are you going to make your strategy well known to your target customer?
• What are your brand promises, and how will you measure them?
• What is the X-factor/bottleneck/shortage/chokepoint in your industry, and how are you going to control it to give yourself an exponential advantage?
• What are your top 5 external opportunities and threats?
• What are your top 5 internal strengths and weaknesses?
• What are your core competencies?

Do you feel you’re in a constant battle with time? Does time seem to be winning, no matter which technology, process, and system one uses? While the amount of time in a day, week and year remains the same, people are attempting to fit more commitments into the same finite time spans. After many years of observing and working with senior management, I have found a fundamental flaw in how they approach time. This flaw causes significant bottlenecks in their companies. Worse, their poor leadership regarding time strategies causes others to have problems with time.

An example of the above is a company that never has time to create clear business plans. There are no clear specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based (SMART) goals for the overall organization and for each executive. As a result, the organization spends far more time than necessary reconciling their lack of integration and problems.

Typically this company has positions open for a year or more for lack of time to establish and perfect their hiring process. Consequently, current employees work significant overtime, mistakes in product development occur, sales returns happen, company reputation is damaged, employee productivity decreases, and people burn out. Lacking the training or the experience to hire well, they often take much longer than necessary to get good candidates and attract a smaller pool of good candidates than they should and could. Once it is time to choose a candidate, their process is so broken they fail to select an “A” player for the position. For a year, I suggested a solution to this problem that would involve approximately ½ a day of training for the management team and the head of human resources. The answer, “we do not have time” has come up each time. So goes the vicious circle.

Companies must narrow priorities to get to the root of “what is eating time to begin with.” CEOs have to be the most effective when it comes to setting priorities for themselves and the organization. When they fail, they become a huge bottleneck for the rest of the organization. Lack of prioritization and clarity at the top will kill your organization. This same discipline of prioritization has to be developed and aligned at every level. Without it, effective use of time is destroyed.

Here is a set of questions to ask yourself:

• What are the 5 most important goals of my company, and which is the top 1 of those 5?
• What are the 5 most important tasks I can do today to help move those 5 most important goals forward?
• Am I working on those 5 tasks?
• What are you doing that does not relate, and how can you stop immediately?
• What can you do to help accelerate the top 5 goals of the company?
• If you have more than 5 priorities, who can help you whittle that list down to no more than 5? Or how can you delay some of the other goals so that there are no more than 5 on your plate now.
• What is your number 1 priority now? How can you accelerate its completion?

Are you setting goals for yourself and/or your organization with conviction? Even worse, are you part of the audience at large that does not make a habit of setting goals? If I were to audit all the goals you set for yourself and your organization for the last 5 years, what percentage did you achieve? If you have success rate of less than 90%, you need to read this article.

Goals need to be mandatory targets rather than the desires or dreams they appear to be today. Too often I see leaders and their people establish goals without real commitment to attainment. They put goals in their business plans and don’t give them another thought until next year – when they set their goals again. This creates a culture of “I’ll try.” When you ask someone to do something, and they tell you, “I’ll try,” that usually means “forget about it” in a nice way.

When goals are mandatory you have a different mindset. The response “I’ll try” switches to “I must.” At that point amazing things can happen. We are resourceful creatures when we want to be. We find time that did not exist (or in other words, we stop wasting time). We reprioritize our tasks to focus on those things we deem more important. We find smarter ways to do things. In the end, we find ways to get things done one thought could not be done.

One of the reasons it is so hard to make the shift toward “failure is not an option” is that there are too many goals. In addition, not enough thought has actually been given as to which goal(s) matter most. For example, it is common for an organization to have a revenue growth goal and to have a lot of little sub-goals to achieve it. A better approach is to ask the question, “What is the one thing, if addressed, will have the biggest impact on accelerating revenue growth?” It is not an easy question, yet once answered it can be the focus of an entire organization. And one must be careful to not lose sight of the goal because it is not uncommon to identify the “one thing” only to have management throw little meaningless pet projects at their people, inadvertently preventing the most important project from getting done.

Once you have clarity around your most important goals you must establish data/metrics and meeting rhythms to drive the results. Data and metrics provide clarity and foresight to know that your goals are on track and that everyone involved is doing their part. Daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings, when well done, help to drive the desired outcomes. Effective team meetings provide communications clarity. They embrace the power of focused collective intelligence and leverage the power of peer pressure. The results are the ability to maximize opportunities and relieve bottlenecks quickly and effectively.

In the end, if you are not achieving over 90% percent of the goals you set, you should invest some time in understanding how you approach goals. The following may help you determine why you are not achieving more of your goals:

• When you set goals are they mandatory?
• When you define your goals are they specific enough?
• Is your goal measurable?
• When you set a goal do you write it down?
• Do you communicate goals to everyone who has a role in achieving them?
• Do you let everyone know how they contribute to the goal?
• Do you identify and address all obstacles to your goal?
• Do you have detailed action plans on how you will achieve your goal?
• Do you review weekly and monthly basis to see that those plans are being followed and hold people accountable for achieving them?
• Is there any consequence for not achieving the action plans?
• Are your goals achievable and realistic?
• Do you have a specific target date for your goal?
• Are your goals in alignment with each other?

I attended the semi-annual conference given by Objective Management Group and was in the room with 17O+ of the best sales development experts from all over the world. One question one my colleagues asked was whether any of us were working with clients that are growing in this economy. Everyone raised their hand. She then asked is anyone working with companies that are growing over 20% and everyone still raised their hands. So the message is very clear, companies can grow.  After spending two days with my fellow colleagues we all agreed that now more than ever it is important to focus on keeping our sales pipelines full.  While there is no denying that this may be more challenging then ever Dave Kurlan and our group of 170+ worked through ways to keep our pipelines full.  The following are ways that you should be using right now:

1. Contact all your past clients and current clients -  If you are currently doing business find out how you can start doing business again. If you are doing business find out how you can do more. Most importantly ask for referrals.
2. Hold executive breakfast or luncheons – Hold executives luncheons with target clients and give them information that can help their business. Of course, tie this back to what you do.
3. Networking events – attend networking events that are populated with the people you are trying to meet.
4. Personal networking group – Join and be active in your local chambers of commerce and other networking groups that will surround you with the right people.
5. On-line business networks – If you are not connected on-line using business networks like LinkedIn or are connected but are not using it to generate business it is time to get with the times.
6. Expert Sites – Write articles and get published on sites that published on sites like  http://www.evancarmichael.com and http://ezinearticles.com  to help you get known as an expert in your field. The more specific to your field the better.
7. Blog – Create your own blog and get your ideas out there.
8. Webinars – Offer webinars to share your ideas and make it easy for people to attend your seminars.
9. Boards and Committes – Join at least one for nonprofit or for-profit board. This will help surround you with people that can do business with you or can help connect you with potential prospects.
10. Book – If you have something unique to say that is different from what is out there in your industry than write a book and get it in the hands of your potential customers.
11. Speaking engagements – Get out and speak about things that are important to your target audience.
12. Cold call – No one is too successful for cold calling. If you have stopped cold calling you are leaving business on the table. A few calls a day will increase success dramatically in the long run.

Most importantly, prospecting needs to be a daily habit. It was surprising to learn over the last few days that even amongst our esteemed group. most admitted being sloppy when it came to prospecting and were not doing it enough and/or consistently!

Emotions were running high in the last quarter of 2008, with the banking debacle, stock market meltdown, the soaring foreclosure rate, jobs losses, poor earnings reports. and dismal projections. Finally, the admission by the government, which had long denied the obvious, that we were in an economic recession. Nobody wants to use the word “depression,” but that’s the word that best describes the mood of the country. The result was that businesses and consumers put on the brakes. Most everyone started operating in a “playing not to lose” mindset.  This mindset can be costly for your career and/or your business.

 

The mind does funny things when negative events occur. We have to look no further than what has transpired in our government over the last several years. I thought Leonard Pitts’ article in the Miami Herald entitled “Mindless Zeal not Conducive to Thoughtful Reasoning” really captured the essence of what has gone wrong in peoples thought processes. He gave the example of a reader whose letter to the editor attacked him for writing negative articles about President George W. Bush over the last 4 years. Without rehashing the article, the real issue at stake was Rush Limbaugh’s making the comment, “I hope he [Obama] fails,” as the prime example of what happens when people get so loyal to their own ideology that they lose sight of the bigger picture. They can create a lot of harm to themselves and those around them without meaning to, out of mindless zeal. I get e-mails from friends and family all the time promoting agendas that clearly have very narrow benefit (usually their personal short-term bank accounts). Once I have read the fine print and dig deeper, it is clear to me they have either not done their homework on the broader consequences of the issues at stake or they are too selfish to care.

 

Negative events are really causing people to fail too look at their businesses and careers in the right way. When you are playing with a mindset of preserving the status quo, it is not unusual for decision-making to draw some conclusions that many times look like this:

• Decide not to replace “B” and “C” players with “A” players, using cost as an excuse. This is a silly decision because one “A” player can do the work of 3 average players. If you hire the best team, your overall wage costs actually lower as a percentage of revenue as fewer people will accomplish more.
• Stop advertising. This decision results in a threefold increase in the acquisition cost per customer in the long run and dramatically reduces the amount of leads that come to the sales force. In other words, you increase your costs and reduce your sales.
• Do not do the things that create a positive environment for your sales people and cut off training. Salespeople thrive on positive energy; when they lack it, they do not do enough prospecting and are not at the top of their game. In the end your sales suffer.
• Management accepts the sluggish economy as an excuse for not meeting targets and stops holding people accountable. Fact: In South Florida most companies own less than 1% market share within their target market. Therefore, there is no reason not to grow and achieve targets. All that is needed is execution of a good strategy.
• Rather than being aggressive, executives become very conservative and adverse to any risk in their decisions. This usually means doing what they have always done. Well if you had a bad year last year, you know what you can expect this year. In addition, you miss challenging your people to see the opportunities that are right in front of them.

My challenge to everyone reading this article is to determine how you are allowing negative people and news to cloud your judgment. If everyone was “playing to win” within your value system every minute of every day, what would or should they be doing differently? What are the top 1 or 2 things you should doing right now to make a difference for your company? Are you spending the majority of your time focusing on that? If not, can you really say you “are playing to win?”

 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

A poor economy has too often become an excuse for poor performance of many businesses. While the current economic situation is a contributing factor, many of these businesses can perform much better. Most businesses in the U.S. are small and have sales that equal less than 1% market share. If your business has less than one percent of market share, it should be able to grow in any economy.

 

One hidden area in which to find more sales is right under your own roof. According to “Baseline Selling” by Dave Kurlan, 60% of all sales people are not prospecting consistently, and 50% of all sales people won’t prospect. Combine those figures with the fact that 60% of all sales people suffer from the habit of making excuses, and I think we have uncovered one of the secrets to bringing more sales to your top line.

 

Simply, if you get everyone responsible for sales to focus on prospecting better, you will increase sales. I recently spoke with the CEO of one of my client companies, and he was complaining about how his sales disappeared. So I asked him who is responsible for sales. He named three people. I went down the list, person number 1 did no prospecting in the last week, person number 2 did no prospecting in the last week, and person number 3 was prospecting only sometimes. Bingo!!!

 

There are nine rules about prospecting that I have learned over the years. If these rules are followed, they will give you the results you need:

 

1. Set Goals – It is very important for sales people to have specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based goals for each step in the selling process. One step most commonly skipped in the goal-setting process is prospecting. Failing to set goals for prospecting is a huge mistake. When setting prospecting goals, one must have overall prospecting goals and goals for each element of prospecting, placing greater emphasis on higher value activities. For example, it is a good idea to set up a point system (e.g. 4 points – closed deal; 3 points – proposal; 2 points – conducted a meeting; 1 point – scheduled a meeting). Each week, establish an overall goal for the week based on their schedules and what they believe is lofty-but-realistic, and they can then set their goals for each of the areas.
2. What Gets Measured Gets Done – Every sales person hates to report on their activity. However, research has proven that whenever someone collects their own data and reports it, their results increase dramatically. Whenever I work with a client who refuses to complete the tracking sheets that I provide and send me the “Week-in Review,” I already know that client is underperforming. What those people are telling me is they do not want to be honest with me or themselves, and they are not doing what they need to do.  The more detailed your activity tracking, the more you can learn and the more you can predict. Measurement can tell you how much activity it takes to produce the sales you want. It also tells you how you are being inefficient or in many cases when activity is lacking.
3. Be Prepared – Be ready to explain what you do in one simple sentence. In addition, your explanation must be from the perspective of the client. Lastly, you must be ready to explain to someone in one sentence what a good referral is for you.
4. Schedule Time for Prospecting – The best way to address a task that you do not want to do is to put it on your calendar like any other important meeting. You should put time on your calendar to make cold calls, call people that will give you qualified referrals, and to follow-up on referrals and leads. By blocking time you are making a commitment. Caution: This is not the time for organizing your client database or other administrative tasks. Also, do not fool yourself. Make sure that you are calling a fresh prospect list. I am amazed at how many people will beat up the same contacts week after week and think they are doing legitimate prospecting.
5. Avoid Leaving Messages – When prospecting, too many sales people are hiding behind voicemail, e-mail, and text messaging to avoid rejection. This is not prospecting. Statistics tell us that it takes 5-7 attempts to get through to someone. They will answer the phone if you have faith. Try calling at different times of the day, on different days of the week, but do your best not to leave a message. Once you leave the message or send the e-mail you are acting, sounding and will be treated like a salesperson.
6. Give a Reason For a Returned Call – If you leave a message or send an e-mail, you must be creative. If you call and leave a message of regarding your identity, company name, and purpose of your call, you are not going to like your success rate. I like leaving messages that keep them puzzled. Most times your message should be simply, “this is YOUR NAME. Call me when you are back in the office. My number is XXXXXXXXXX.” Say it with confidence and urgency. They may have no idea who you are and will call you back because they think they are supposed to remember who you are.
7. Prospect Consistently – This should be a daily activity. The only reason to miss prospecting on a given day is because there is no work that day. All other excuses are unacceptable. If there is ever a break in your sales production, you can always track it back to a time where there was a break in your prospecting consistency. Failing to prospect is the equivalent of failing to breathe. If you stop breathing, oxygen does not get to your brain and you die. The more consistent and healthier your breathing patterns are, the better your brain functions.
8. Have a System for Getting Referrals – Statistics speak for themselves. If you spend your day making cold calls you might get 2% as customers. If you network your odds may go up to 10%. However, referrals increase your chances to between 50% and 75%. Ask any salesperson and they will tell you that their highest close ratios come from referrals. So you would think that they would spend most of their time working on referrals. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Most sales people I talk to do not have a system for getting referrals, and what they call referrals, I call cold calls. In my opinion, getting someone’s name and permission to use them as a reference is not a referral. It is a reference. A good referral system consists of helping others uncover a potential client through a system of questions. Those questions help your referral source conclude that they know someone that has a problem, they would like to help that someone, and they think you are the right person to solve it. The referral source is then willing to contact that person and make the introduction before you make the call.
9. Give More Referrals Than You Receive – The secret to getting a lot of referrals is giving a lot of referrals.

 

If you want to get the sales needle moving in your sales department you probably need to look no further than the prospecting efforts of your sales people. One hour of daily effective prospecting in the right places will put you ten paces ahead of your competition.

 

Reference and excerpts taken with permission from online sales training and development tools developed published by www.myprofessionaldevelopment.com of which Activate Group, Inc. is a licensed distributor.

 

 

 

 

Networking should be part of every college curriculum, regardless of major. It is something that everyone should do while in college and continue to do from the day they exit. Unfortunately, many believe that networking is not for them, that it is only for those people that are very outgoing, those that are in sales, or those that have an immediate need for it in their position. However, networking is important for everyone. For example, at some point in their careers, many will experience being displaced from their jobs. Even owners close their businesses to move on and do other things. It is in moments like these that people who did not build their networks wish they had.

 

With proper planning and strategy, you can populate your network with the right type of people in a reasonable amount of time. People who make the effort to constantly develop and nourish their networks will find that it is fun and rewarding. The following are 7 ways to build your network whether you are in sales or just want to further your career.

 

1. Lunch – This is the most underutilized opportunity to build a network. I am amazed at how many people have lunch with the same group of people almost daily. In addition, many executives spend too many lunches eating at their desks. Not only is this not healthy, it’s bad for business and your career growth. One good habit to make is to have lunch with new people every week. Another is to try to never eat alone. By doing so, you are stretching yourself to build relationships with broader sets of people. It also allows you to get to know people from all departments and from all levels of the company. Outside the company, it affords you the ability to stay in touch with former colleagues and friends.
2. Exercise – Choosing the right gym allows you to combine a great work-out with running into the right people. Many have found that choosing a gym where many executives work out and going at the right times have proven to be very profitable.
3. Community Involvement – Another great place to build your network is through community involvement. Taking leadership positions in your community gives you an opportunity to be more exposed to others around you that have a common interest. If you are genuinely interested in the cause you are fighting for, you will create a bond with others that share the same passion.
4. Online – The Internet has created some great ways to get and stay in touch with former and current friends and colleagues. One of the ones I use is LinkedIn. LinkedIn is simple to use, has a large number of users, and helps people share ideas, get information, meet new people, get business, find service providers, find employees, find jobs, and collect testimonials in an efficient manner.
5. Professional Associations – This is one of the most common networking tools, allowing you to network with other people with similar backgrounds and interests to yours. Organizations like your local Chamber of Commerce bring professionals together to help each other. These organizations usually bring together 3 components: education, community, and commerce for its membership.
6. Join a Networking Group – If you are in sales and want to have your own marketing team from other industries, it is a good idea to join a networking group. The best groups are set up to ensure that you have no competing businesses (or limited overlap) among the other members. This way, everyone in the group is there to create referrals for each other. Business Networking International is one of the largest organizations, with many chapters in most major markets. There are a lot of benefits to joining these groups: They bring you an established organization, processes that work, and make it easier for you to form a group.
7. Build Your Own Networking Group – If you are a more seasoned networker with very high-level contacts and already recognize a formable group of other networkers, it may be more beneficial to establish your own group. To form one is not very difficult, and the benefits can be much better than joining the established networking groups. The advantage here is that you have more control over quality, as many networking organizations tend to compromise quality for growth because they are trying to make money.

Networking does not necessarily have to be hard, but it is work. By having a strategy and working your network regularly, you will find that building one can be fun, and anyone can do it.

 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

The purpose of this article is to help business owners understand the key daily decisions that influence dependence on external funding and either limit or expand the growth potential of a business. There are essentially 4 decisions: 1) cash; 2) people; 3) strategy; and 4) execution. This article (#2) addresses how your decisions about people affect growth and identifies 6 ideas for growing your business.

 

Some of the most difficult and important decisions a leader makes concern people. Decisions about people have a dramatic impact on growth. Great people develop strategies. These are the people who think about how to beat your competition. Great people execute strategy better than average people.

 

It is critical that a company try to hire the very best person for each and every position. The smaller your company, the easier it is to see your mis-hires. For example, if I have 5 employees and 1 is a mis-hire, that means 20% of my workforce is ineffective and is dragging down the other 80%. The larger you get, the less obvious your mistakes may become.

 

In the Harvard Business Review article “How Fast Can Your Company Afford to Grow” by Neil C. Churchill and John W. Mullins, the authors explore the precise calculation of how fast you can grow a business without running out of cash, discussing how using cash to hire the right people can play a major factor in your growth.

 

What is the Impact?

Too often there is a disconnect between the importance leaders attribute to hiring and the discipline they put into their hiring process.

• Responsibility for hiring is treated too lightly.
• Not enough time is invested in selecting each person.
• The right assessment tools are not used.
• Adequate direction to make the right decision is not given.
• People ignore facts that are right in front of them when making hiring decisions.

Consequently, companies typically hire less-than-ideal candidates, using “gut” and intuition instead of solid information. It is estimated that companies are lucky to hire a good person at least 50 percent of the time, and only get great people 10 to 20% of the time. It is no surprise that executives find themselves working more hours, having more stress, and feeling that they have to do everything themselves.

 

Based on extensive research published by Bradford Smart, PhD, in “Topgrading,” the average cost of mis-hiring someone whose base salary is under $100,000 is $840,000 (approximately 8 times salary), and the average cost of mis-hiring someone in the $100,000-$250,000 base-salary range is $4.7 million. Even if you believe your number is only one-half or one-third of Dr. Smart’s estimates, it is important to realize that getting and retaining top performers for every position from the receptionist to the CEO impacts your cash and growth in a significant way.

 

6 Ways to Improve Growth by Hiring the Right People

 

There are 6 ways proven to maximize a company’s growth potential through its people:

1.    Improve Your Interviewing Skills – Dr. Bradford Smart is a guru in hiring the right people. His program was used by Jack Welch and, to my knowledge, is the most used in Fortune 500 companies. Dr. Smart’s Top Grading process teaches unique interviewing and hiring principles, practices, and processes. You can access their information on DVD at Top Grading Tools so that your company can use these same strategies.

2.   Assessment Tools – Using assessment tools in the hiring process can increase your hiring success fivefold. The best tools allow you to create customized benchmarks for both your organization and the position you are hiring for. As you screen candidates, they take the assessments online and are compared against the benchmarks. We help our clients use Objective Management Group’s (https://www.objectivemanagement.com/) assessment tools for salespeople because these tools are 95% predictive and are the only tools we have found to be focused on salespeople.  For all other positions, we also recommend TriMetrix© (http://www.ttiltd.com/results.php) as they focus on the behaviors, values, and skills of the ideal hire. There are a lot of good tools out there – some a little better than others – but the most important recommendation is to use something.

3.   No Compromising – It is very common, particularly in smaller organizations, for leaders to justify promotional and hiring decisions based on time constraints, market limitations, or some other self-limiting issue.  In other words, the decision-maker will hire or promote a less-than-ideal candidate based on a short-term constraint that may or may not truly exist. However, even when a real constraint exists, the long-term benefit to the company is most times best served if diligence and patience prevail.

4.   Pay Above Average Wages – When considering trends (e.g. aging, education, competition, inflation, globalization, etc.) you compromise your ability to compete in the future unless you are willing to pay better-than-average wages. There is little doubt that we will face an employee shortage in the future, creating wage pressure. It would be better to be ahead of the curve on this front. Your goals over the next five years should be as follows: 1. double revenue per employee, and 2. increase wages by 50%.  My prediction is that companies that have strategies to keep wages low at the front lines and in their factories are going to have a really hard time in the future.

5.   Provide More Training – The first thing that companies do in a downturn is cut training. There should be no surprise that employee and customer dissatisfaction soon follow. Top-performing companies do not slow down training; they increase it. Every company should require a minimum number of hours of training per year for each worker. Achievement of training quotas should be reflected in performance evaluations and affect whether or not someone can be promoted. The results of training are measureable in terms of employee retention, employee productivity, employee satisfaction, and customer loyalty.

6.   Provide Coaching to Executives – Right Management Consultants recently revisited a detailed study on the benefits of business/leadership coaching. The study examined results realized by 100 executives/managers, mostly from Fortune 1000 companies, who participated in coaching programs that typically lasted from six months to one year. They reported that the employers received 6 times the value to their bottom line of the cost of these programs. In addition, the companies that provided coaching programs to their management and leadership teams realized improvements in productivity, quality, organizational strength, customer service, and shareholder value. They also received fewer customer complaints, and were more likely to retain individuals who received coaching. Individuals who received coaching reported experiencing better relationships with their direct reports, immediate supervisors, peers, and clients. They also reported better teamwork and job satisfaction, reduced conflict, and renewed organizational commitment.

 

In Summary

Hiring decisions have a dramatic impact on how fast your company can grow. Hiring and retaining the wrong people uses cash, while hiring and retaining the right people creates cash. Therefore, hiring and retaining people should be given at least as much thought, time and energy as serving external customers and developing products and services. By utilizing the suggestions in this article, you will dramatically increase your hiring success, increase employee productivity, improve employee retention, increase customer loyalty, and drive more growth.

 

Contact me today to learn how Activate Group helps individuals to increase their success and works with organizations to attain consistent revenue and profit growth rates of at least 20% annually. Call (305) 722-7216 or e-mail me at shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

 

Reference taken with permission from Gazelles, Inc. Growth Tools, “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” by Verne Harnish, and Gazelles Systems Intellectual Property release 4.0. Howard Shore is a Gazelles Coaching Associate.

The current financial markets have created a real dilemma for companies. In the last five years financing was cheap, easy, and plentiful. CEOs only had to dream about growth and “poof”– there was the money to finance it. Now, banks won’t even lend to each other, lines of credit are being frozen, and debt covenants that were never looked at before are now being scrutinized. Businesses now have to ask themselves, “How much growth can we self-fund?”

 

In the Harvard Business Review article “How Fast Can Your Company Afford to Grow” by Neil C. Churchill and John W. Mullins, the authors explored the precise calculation of how fast you can grow a business without running out of cash. They provide a detailed explanation of the formula and give examples. I recommend you download a copy of this article from HBR. They have done an excellent job, and I do not want to rehash their work in this area. http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml;jsessionid=AWKBIR0HXDPDAAKRGWDR5VQBKE0YIISW?id=R0105K&referral=2340.

 

The purpose of this article is to help business owners understand the key daily decisions that influence dependence on external funding and either limit or expand the growth potential of a business. There are essentially 4 decisions: 1) cash; 2) people; 3) strategy; and 4) execution. Article 1 of 4 will focus on cash.

 

The first key area that an owner should look at is reinvestment of earnings. This is particularly critical in a business’s earlier years. I work primarily with entrepreneurs, and one of the biggest mistakes I see is entrepreneurs mortgaging their future. Instead of limiting personal earnings to minimum requirements, they take all the earnings they possibly can out of the business. There are many reasons for this, including, but not limited to, maintaining personal life-style, need for status, short-term tax benefits, and earnings comparison traps. However, most of the time, these entrepreneurs can go with taking less out of the business. It is short-term thinking that is to the detriment of long-term growth. Every dollar taken out of the business in terms of salary and/or distributions for the owners can have a significant impact on growth. This is particularly true in the early years of a business, when you start compounding the impact. This is the reason why a lot of businesses get into too much debt and wind up in financial troubles; even the ones that grow rapidly.

 

When looking at optimizing cash in your business, you must examine each of the 4 cycles that use and produce cash in your business. Within each cycle a management team has 3 ways to improve cash: shorten cycle times, eliminate mistakes, and improve the business model.

1.     Sales Cycle

2.     Delivery Cycle

3.     Make/Production and Inventory Cycle

4.     Billing and Payment Cycle

 

The following are some examples of questions a management team can ask itself in each of these cycles:

 

Sales Cycle

How can you improve your sales cycle?

·         What can be done to train salespeople to shorten the sales cycle?

·         Is sales management having a positive impact?

·         Can the current salespeople transition from account management to hunting and closing?

·         Can the profitability of the bottom 10% of the least profitable customers be improved, or would it be more profitable to get rid of them?

 

Delivery Cycle

What methods can you use to improve your delivery cycle?

·         How can the number of errors in quantity of merchandise delivered be reduced?

·         How can the overall shipping and logistical cost for sales delivery be reduced and simplified?

·         Can clients be induced to come to your office instead of you going to their office?

·         How can the number and cost of claims from shipment damage be reduced?

 

Make/Production and Inventory Cycle

What can you do to improve the make/production and inventory cycle?

·         How can waste be reduced or eliminated?

·         Are there other materials that can achieve the same product needs for the customer at a much cheaper cost?

·         Is the cost of carrying older inventory more than it would be to just throw it away?

·         How can inventory turns be increased?

 

Billing and Payment Cycle

Can you improve your billing and payment cycle?

·         Is there an “A” player in the collection position? If not, if the salary or standards were increased and a superstar was hired, what would be the return on investment?

·         How can getting clients to pay all, a portion, or more of the purchase price in advance of shipment be justified?

·         What changes to pricing, billing, or invoice systems can be made to make it more likely for clients to pay earlier?

·         Is there a proper system in place to check the accuracy of vendor invoices (e.g. billing amount is correct, products and services were received), avoid duplicate payments, and ensure timeliness of payment (e.g. not incurring late charges, finance charges, and unnecessary interest charges, but not too early).

 

Cash optimization is a critical decision in running every business. A management team should sit down every quarter and look at each one of these cycles. Management should ask how you can improve these in one of 3 ways: shorten cycle times, eliminate mistakes, and improve the business model. By doing so, you will increase cash and the growth potential of your business.

 

Contact me today to learn how Activate Group helps individuals to increase their success and works with organizations to attain consistent revenue and profit growth rates of at least 20% annually. Call (305) 722-7216 or e-mail me at shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

 

Reference taken with permission from Gazelles, Inc. Growth Tools, “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” by Verne Harnish, and Gazelles Systems Intellectual Property release 4.0. Howard Shore is a Gazelles Coaching Associate.

There are many skills salespeople need to learn to be successful.  In teaching these skills I have found that there are two words in the English language that most salespeople fail to clearly understand in meaning and application: “sympathy” and “empathy.” Not knowing the difference, and not knowing which will help you earn sales success, can cause significant delays in deals or may break them.

 

Many of my sales coaching clients and group trainees believe the words sympathy and empathy are synonyms.  They are not.  The difference is significant in meaning and can have a dramatic affect on sales performance.  Sympathy means that someone “shares” the feelings of another person or group of people.  Empathy means a person “understands” the feelings of another but leaves themselves in a position of objectivity. In other words, as a salesperson, if you share their feelings you are weakened in position, but if you are empathetic you can still help them.

 

In order to illustrate my point, let’s take a real-life scenario. A salesperson named Mike from ABC Company is given a lead for George, the owner of XYZ Company that wants his services.  Mike meets with George to discuss the company’s needs.  After 2 hours of fact-finding they are able to mutually agree on company goals and the assistance Mike’s firm can provide.  However, what George contacted Mike for was only a small part of ABC’s services and would not help them fully achieve their goals.  To really achieve the outcome XYZ wanted, it would take $80K. George explains to Mike, “I like what you have told me, but I have never bought this type of product and service before. This is a lot of money.  Give me some references. I probably will not do anything until next month anyway, so let me think about it.”  If Mike is sympathetic, he would say, “Sure, I would feel the same way if I were you. I will get those references and call you next month.”  By being sympathetic, research tells us Mike probably lost his deal.  George, who was probably very close to signing a deal, will find many reasons never to meet with Mike again. For example, George will talk to friends or other nonexperts who were not in the meeting, have never purchased such services, will hear the price tag, and will tell George it is unreasonable.

 

An empathetic salesperson would have responded, “I understand, but let’s be honest here, what will be different between now and next month?  If my references were to tell you that this is going to work, then can we move forward?”

 

Sympathy rarely has a place in sales. Certainly, sympathy is appropriate in dealing with matters involving the death of a client or family member.  However, you need to be very careful when you want to share someone’s feeling. In most cases, however, there is no place for sympathy in sales.  It is usually death for the salesman.

 

Buying is an emotional experience. If you do not understand how your prospect feels, you cannot help them buy.  It has been said over and over again, “people like to buy, not to be sold.”  You can only do this if you master the skill of empathy. So next time you look at your prospect closing ratio and think it should be better, ask yourself how well have you mastered the skill of empathy!

Contact me today to learn how Activate Group helps individuals to increase their success and works with organizations to attain consistent revenue and profit growth rates of at least 20% annually by calling (305) 722-7216 or e-mail me at shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

The most powerful networkers I have met have learned the art of genuinely helping others. This art is called many things; in Business Network International (“BNI”) they call it “givers gain.” This is a very important concept if you truly want to get the most out of networking and day-to-day living. While helping others is an obvious key to success, many networkers are not very conscious about how well they maintain the ratio between their giving and receiving. Many are downright selfish.

 

Recently one of my clients, a lawyer, complained that the firm was getting little from participating in the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce. To protect the innocent, let’s call this person George. George went to most of the networking events every month and served on a committee related to his practice area. He is a nice person, has over 20 years in his field, and is one of the best in his area of specialty. So he cannot understand why he has not received any leads or referrals from the Chamber.

 

What George failed to see is that he has been selfish. When discussing this issue, I asked George the last time he gave a referral to any of the people he’d met. I asked how often he went out of his way for people at the Chamber when he had nothing to gain. I asked for a list of the remarkable things he did for the Chamber in the last 12 months? At first, his response was silence; then, he gave excuses. He told me how many hours he worked, that he did not meet the right types of people to give good referrals, that he is not comfortable with referring people he does not know well, and some other weak answers.

 

Actually, since I was his coach, I had gotten to know George well over the previous 6 months. He was someone to whom I had given several referrals, introduced to a lot of people, and for whom I went out of my way. In all that time, George had never done anything for me. I watched others also go out of their way for George and experience the same lack of reciprocity. It was obvious to all that George is a taker. Takers like George will get business once in while because they are good at what they do. However, after a while you get a reputation as a taker, and those opportunities lessen.

 

For those of you who are not already genuinely helping others on a regular basis, let’s discuss the main reason why you should change your ways. In Maximum Influence: The 12 Universal Laws of Persuasion by Kurt W. Mortensen, one of the 12 laws is the Law of Obligation. The Law of Obligation, also known as “reciprocity,” states that when others do something for us, we feel a strong need, even a push, to return the favor. Returning the favor rids us of the obligation created by the first good deed.

 

The adage “one good turn deserves another” seems to be part of the social structure in every culture. Well, this applies to business as well as our personal lives. I believe in “striking first” for as many people as possible and having a reputation as someone who helps a lot of people. Have you ever noticed that people who have a track record of helping a lot of people have no problem getting doors opened for them and have a lot of business?

 

Becoming a “giver” is not only easy, it is actually fun. Here are some ways to become a better giver:

1. Become a leader in every organization you join.
2. Whenever you meet new people, find out what their hobbies are; who they need to meet; what their professional goals are; what challenges they are facing; what charitable causes get them excited. Learn about their families and anything else you can. Make note of it.
3. Seek out new people and help them meet others who may be helpful to them. This helps them feel more comfortable, you make a new friend, and usually there are mutually beneficial connections, so now at least 3 people are happy.
4. I have a goal of trying to match at least 10 people per week. That requires that I keep good track of the information I gather in step 2 and stay in touch with my contact list.
5. Actively look for opportunities to help people. Opportunities to connect take many forms, so you have to keep your mind wide-open. The following are some of the reasons you may connect people: potential business partners, job candidates, vendors, referral sources, and knowledge-sharing.

In the end, being a great networker is directly linked to being fanatical about helping others. When you are good at one, you are good at the other, and when you are bad at one, you are bad at the other. Helping others is not only the right thing to do, it is good business.

 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com. 

 

 

 

Listening to the news and many CEOs, you would think the country is in a depression. At a minimum, these reports put listeners into a depression. While I’m willing to let a few individual businesses slide because of what they do (e.g. residential real estate in Miami), if your company is not growing the way you want it to, and/or margins are shrinking, the problem is inside your company. If you believe otherwise, you are deceiving yourself. In many cases, even in sectors where the group as a whole is doing poorly, you should still be able to do better than you’re doing. Just like Warren Buffet does in the stock market, you need to jump on opportunities when the market is down and be aggressive, not defensive.

 

Some great examples:

• I recently met with the Managing Partner of a mid-sized accounting firm who confided in me that he just came off a record year and did not believe his company could sustain the pace. He was already seeing a slowdown. However, one of his competitors, who also is my client, is having another record organic growth year.
• In the fitness and health industry, many companies see a drop off in memberships and attribute it to people spending less on “extras.”  I have a client whose year-over-year growth this summer was 49%, and gross margins have expanded as well.
•  Another client of mine has a business that services the airline industry. You would think they would be doomed. Yet based on their order backlog, they expect 33% growth this year.
• Staffing industry executives tell me their industry is down 30%, and many are laying off staff and otherwise cutting costs “until things get better.” I know of one company in the same market that entered the staffing business and in the last 2 years. They are growing in the high double digits and opening offices in several new states, having identified and pursued a segment of the staffing industry that is booming.
• The owner of an insurance company experienced a decrease in revenue last year and is expecting another decline this year.  Meanwhile, I work with a competitor that is tracking organic growth of over 50% this year.

 

The initial secret of success for the above four companies is the executive team’s attitude about how they see the marketplace. When the market gets tough, that’s when a management team needs to be aggressive. Top CEOs know that the best opportunities present themselves when competitors are weak. Right now, your competitors are weak. They are focusing on costs. This defensive approach can kill a business. It usually starts with staff reductions. If the company does not get lucky in short order, it becomes vulnerable in 4 ways:

1.  Many companies release quality talent. Research shows that 1 top performer produces the value of 3 average employees.
2. They reduce staff in the areas that are most important to servicing clients, causing a decline in customer satisfaction. Be very careful when reducing positions that interface directly with your customers or affect customer satisfaction. This will have a dramatic affect on their loyalty to your company and will make them vulnerable to your competition.
3. They stop investing significant time and money in strategic planning and research and development. This failure to innovate and take advantage of new market opportunities results in not seeing that customer needs have changed. For example, anything you can do to help reduce energy costs for business is a huge opportunity right now. If your competitor can add this on to their offering, you will lose your customer.
4. They extend intervals for maintaining equipment, have people working too many hours, or implement some other internal policy changes that reduces product quality. This causes another opportunity for you to lose market share.

Okay so what can your companies do right now to ensure 20% or more growth?

1. Planning – Have and work with a written business plan.
2. Core Customer – Identify who is your most profitable and loyal customer, and focus on those customers that will most likely buy your product or services in the quantity required for optimal profit.
3. Differentiate – Make sure that your company has an uncommon offering that is targeted toward your core customer that your business will “own” and leverage.
4. Invest in Your Sales Force – Get rid of your “C” players immediately. Invest whatever it takes to train and develop your “A” and “B” players to peak performance.
5. Improve Hiring Process of Sales Force – In our experience most companies do a very poor job in hiring salespeople. The assessment tools and interviewing processes they use produce a poor success rate. This costs companies a lot of money on the top line.
6. Find Top Talent – Evaluate every employee at least once a year. Get rid of your “C” players, and figure out which of your “B” players can be developed into “A” players.
7. Marketing – Great advertising and public relations is what attracts potential business to your sales force.

In summary, it is important that CEOs realize that a down economy is an opportunity.  Also, while I agree that all companies should always manage their expenses prudently, you cannot cut your way to prosperity. While focusing on costs, many companies inadvertently destroy their top line, requiring them to put more pressure on the cost line, thus creating a spiral effect. I would rather step on the gas and grow the top line while managing my costs well and never have to worry about layoffs.

 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com. 

The most common thief of sales growth is distraction. Based on my experience, I estimate that on average, employees lose 40% of their time to distractions. This number ranges between 30% and 60%, depending on the company they work for, and can reach as high as 70%, depending on the individual. Distractions can be classified into two types: 1) leadership and organization; and 2) individual-specific. The leadership and organization distractions can be categorized into poor sales support, customer service mishaps, products that do not meet client needs, bad sales management, and poor communications. “Individual-specific” distractions refer to daily mental or situational conditions faced by the salesperson. Part I of this article dealt with the leadership and organization, and this article will focus on “individual-specific” obstacles.

 

There are two facets to “individual-specific” distractions: 1) state of mind, and 2) quality of activity. State of mind is the primary culprit. To complicate matters, a person’s state of mind changes constantly. It is important that a sales manager stay in touch with their sales staffs’ lives and how they are feeling. As people transition through the different stages of life, their motivations and distractions change. In addition, daily, their emotions will dramatically affect their ability to become distracted.

 

I coach some million-dollar producers. It is my job to help keep these salespeople from being distracted by their emotions. Distractions hide themselves in many forms and often are invisible to the distracted individual. Everyone else can see them but not that person. You will have salespeople that are exerting half the effort and yet with much sincerity claim that they are killing themselves and could not possibly do another thing. They will blame the economy, their lack of experience in the industry, being recently inserted in a new geographic area, and a million other reasons why they are not performing. It is never their effort that is lacking.

 

While you may be content with your sales production, the following questions assist in maintaining that level. Also, it is important to have balance, and my list should not imply that you foul up your personal lives and neglect your family. Anything in excess is not good. In addition, timing is important. If you are at the beginning of your career, almost broke, starting a new job, or in some similar circumstance, your level of effort and personal sacrifice should show it.

 

The list below is designed to help a salesperson identify some of the common distractions that many of my clients have allowed to hurt their sales funnel:

• Do you have lunch and/or breakfast regularly with people who are not prospects and/or are not giving you referrals regularly?
• Are you scheduling personal activities (e.g. saleperson’s or children’s nonemergency doctor visits) at times that compromise your production?
• Are you taking family members or friends to doctor visits to make them (or you) feel good when someone else (that does not work on commission) can take them?
• Are you managing your meetings so that they are not longer than they should be?
• Are you allowing paperwork (e.g. expense reports) and organizing your office that can be done by others consume too much of your time?
• Do you work in teams, and do you allow all the deals the other people are bringing in mask the fact that you are not doing enough hunting, qualifying, and closing on your own?
• Do you have a favorite charity or committee that you allow to absorb too much of your time so that you destroy your return on investment?
• When you go to networking meetings are you spending too much time speaking with the same people instead of seeking out new ones?
• When you go to networking meetings do you spend your time talking, sitting and eating with people from your own firm?
• Are you meeting with too many people that are not really prospects?
• Do you target a prospect company’s decision-makers first so that you do not have to work your way up the organization?
• Are you on too many boards and committees and spreading yourself too thin?
• Do you work from home and allow things in the house to prevent you from doing what you need to do?
• Do you have friends that you like to exchange e-mail or phone calls with on a daily basis that are not helping you get any closer to making a sale?

 

In the end, your success can grow dramatically by managing distractions. We all have them and some avoid them better than others. The cost is great whether it is paid by a top or bottom producer. A career in sales is a tough job in any economy. While we cannot win every sale, every minute spent on a distraction is a guaranteed no sale.

 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how a personal or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

For a time, I attached the following quotation to my e-mails: “Never confuse activity with results.” (Lou Gerstner, CEO of IBM) While this applies to every person in your company, today I am going to focus on the sales force. During the last 7 years I have met and worked with hundreds of Chief Executive Officers. Regardless of whether their sales growth was high or low, all of them had the potential to double and triple that growth. The scary part is that most of them did not know it.

 

The most common thief of sales growth is distraction. Based on my experience, I estimate that on average, employees lose 40% of their time to distractions. This number ranges between 30% and 60%, depending on the company they work for, and can reach as high as 70%, depending on the individual. Distractions can be classified into two types: 1) leadership and organization; and 2) individual-specific. The leadership and organization distractions can be categorized into poor sales support, customer service mishaps, products that do not meet client needs, bad sales management, and poor communications. “Individual-specific” distractions refer to daily mental or situational conditions faced by the salesperson.

 

Part I deals with leadership and organization because these have a more dramatic impact on growth than most companies realize. Most companies’ systems and processes do not allow their salespeople to run at full stride, and in many cases hold them back. What is your senior management team doing to help remove distractions that interfere with the performance of your sales force? You should be holding weekly meetings to address the issues, and here are a few of the questions that need to be answered:

·         What product issues regularly come up that your salespeople have to continually address?

·         What customer service and account maintenance issues do your salespeople regularly deal with that you can assign to someone else so your salespeople can spend more time qualifying, hunting, and closing?

·         When you listen to your salespeople, can you identify some of the personal biases that affect their sales performance and could be remedied through coaching?

·         Does your compensation system motivate your salespeople, or is it a distraction?

·         Which of your people were hiring mistakes and are taking too much time to manage?

·         Is your sales manager demotivating your salespeople, and is he/she a good manager?

·         Does your sales manager spend at least 80% of the time managing, and, within that 80%, is the right amount spent coaching, motivating, holding salespeople accountable, and recruiting new salespeople?

 

Ultimately, your organizational processes and systems need to be established in such a way that you hire, develop, and support top performers. Success can grow dramatically by removing distractions and keeping your salespeople focused on selling. I find that many organizations unwittingly do the opposite, thus compromising growth. While we cannot win every sale, every minute spent by a salesperson on a distraction is a guaranteed no sale. Please stay tuned for part two of this article which will focus on the “individual-specific” distractions that affect your salespeople.

 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

Howard Shore has been chosen as the first local coach in South Florida to represent Gazelles International and to implement “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” in high growth businesses. Gazelles International Coaching Association is an exclusive, worldwide network of seasoned Business Coaches whose purpose is to provide access to continuing education and top thought leaders including facility members Jim Collins, Neil Rackham, Tom Peters, Robert Bloom, Marcus Buckingham and many more. Gazelles is led by Verne Harnish, author of “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” a Best Seller currently at #4 on Amazon.com’s best books on Strategy.

 

The first step in consistently growing revenue is strategy.  You know you have a good strategy when your revenue growth is over 20% and/or at the top of your industry group.  However, growth is not easy to sustain.  There are roughly 23 million firms in the US, of which only 4 percent get above $1 million in revenue. Of those firms, only about 1 out of 10, or 0.4 percent of all companies, ever make it to $10 million in revenue and only 17,000 companies surpass $50 million. Finishing out, the top of the list, the top 2,500 firms in the US are larger than $500 million, and there are 500 firms in the world larger than $11 billion.¹

 

Article 1 focused on the importance of strategy and having the right personnel on your team to help forecast the future.  While this is essential to building a high-growth organization, I have seen many an organization develop great strategy and forecast well and still not get it done.

 

Last weekend, my client and friend, Raul Segredo, CEO of Avionica, became the star of this article. Raul runs a very successful and fast-growing aviation company. He took me flying in a six-seat airplane. In our mission for the day – going to lunch – he took me through his routine, one that I believe exemplifies the way to consistently grow a business at record levels: having everything you need to see on one page, looking at leading indicators, and great communications systems.

 

Pilots regularly do exactly what the CEO needs to do. When we got to the plane, Raul had a routine that I will call leading indicators for a safe flight.  He inspected the entire plane to make sure that everything was the way it should be (equipment check, fuel check, etc).  He did not take off until he knew that he was not putting himself, his plane, and his passenger in danger.  He knew where we were going and had the flight charted on how to get there.  He had the proper training and knowledge to adapt to conditions if unexpected events occurred. . While we were in flight, he had everything he needed to see on one panel to stay on course and fly a successful mission. Lastly, had anything gone wrong, there was a communication system in place to address issues.

 

Goal Alignment

Goal alignment is a key to consistent growth. The best way to do this is to reduce your strategic and business plan goals to a “one-page” format.  Not only is this achievable, it is imperative.  The concern of many leaders is that there are a lot of moving pieces in their business and their tendency is to want to control all of those pieces.  This causes a lack of focus and too many unfinished things.  Rather than trying to feed the entrepreneurs’ desire, the one-page format forces them to focus only on what is most important to them “now.”  Using this methodology, everyone has the same control panel but with differing measurements, depending on their roles and responsibilities.  Some of the columns are the same for all, such as core values, vision, company targets, and brand promise.  However, there are columns on the control panel that are specific to the individual/department such as: accountability, actions, and measurements. On this control panel there should be no more than 3 key priorities and core measurements of focus.  In the end, all align with the CEO’s control panel.  By utilizing this method, you provide for complete alignment throughout the entire organization

 

Leading Indicators

As an affiliated coach with Gazelles, Inc. we are called upon to help the organization implement the growth tools talked about in “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” by Verne Harnish.  As part of its strategic planning processes, an organization must identify core stakeholders and processes that drive growth.  Once identified, it is imperative to have the 2 or 3 leading indicators that will let you know in advance (e.g. revenue and profit) that you are well on track to do well.  By focusing on these leading indicators you will better execute on your strategy and thus better sustain your growth.

 

A great example was a technology development firm that was growing over 100% per year.  After 4 years of consistent growth at incredible levels and being on the top of most highly recognized magazines’ (e.g. Fortune and INC) lists, they were seeing a decline in performance and turnover in employees who were considered stars.  Originally the CEO thought that the company was outgrowing his people. Ultimately, he realized that he was burning everyone out.  As a result, the company developed a new leading indicator of “Employee Hours.”  They looked at all of the projects and made it a company requirement that all projects were staffed and planned to fit within a “60-Hour Work Week.”  This became a critical leading indicator to their success and sustained growth. This goal actually revolutionized the way the company thought, improved quality, reduced cycle time, employee retention, customer satisfaction, and actually increased growth.

 

Another great leading indicator that is highly recommended for every business is Net Promoter Score (“NPS”).  In “The Ultimate Question,” author Fred Reichheld introduces the NPS as the way in which leading firms transform their customers into promoters.  The survey focused around one simple question, “Would you recommend us to a friend?”  The analysis shows that on average, if a company increases NPS by a dozen points versus competitors, it can expect revenue growth to double.  This is a radical change from the customer satisfaction score, which is totally ineffective in predicting success for a company.  .

 

Communication

You would think by the title of Patrick Lecioni’s book, “Death by Meeting,” it would be about companies having too many meetings. Actually, the point of the book is that companies have too many bad meetings. Your organization must have a system of daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly meetings that focus communications around what is critical to driving your businesses, preventing bottlenecks before they happen, and promoting teamwork. Design meeting agendas to discuss those topics that will drive your business, using the information you already prescribed in your “one-page” plans.

 

Summary

Growing consistently at record levels starts with strategy.  Once you have developed a good strategy, you may not grow as much as you should because of poor execution of strategy.  The key is to learn from my friend Raul to be a good pilot.  Have a good flight plan that you can fit on one page, use leading indicators to identify issues early, and have a great communications system so you are able address problems rapidly and maximize growth and profits.

 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com. We bring proven tools that lead to new ways of thinking that lead to better results.

 

¹ Excerpt from Mastering the Rockerfeller Habits by Verne Harnish.

There are very few CEOs that are not concerned with sales growth. Ninety-five percent of CEOs that I have spoken with this year described their sales growth as follows:

• Overall sales are below last year.
• Overall sales are about the same as last year.
• We are growing, but our growth rate is slower than that of our top competitors.
• Our growth rate is slower than last year.
• Our growth rate is not where we want it to be.

 

While this may not be a surprise, you’ll be interested to know that the solutions are easier than you think. Even more fascinating is that many companies are meeting sales targets that have been set extremely below potential. This article and the next will discuss how you can continue to consistently grow revenue at record levels.

 

One of the hardest and most important skills executives must learn or add to their repertoire is forecasting. It is most common to find two types of companies, those that fall well below sales expectations and those that meet them. Both should be concerns. The former usually miss their numbers because they are pulling numbers out of the air with no real plans. This group is under the common misconception that there is no way they can predict their numbers and believe they must guess. The main issue here is the harm this does to the company when you have no real measurements and standards to which you can hold people accountable. In these companies, hitting goals is no indication of good or bad performance because the numbers have no substance to them.

 

The typical excuse for failing to properly forecast is that the nature of the industry is too volatile and uncertain for accurate predictions. With the proper tools and talent management can conquer these challenges. The other excuse commonly offered is that the company is too small (or its margins are too thin) to hire adequate talent. The answer to this is simple. It costs far less to hire than not to hire. You must pay what it takes to hire the right person or person(s) or hire a consultant to come in at least quarterly.

 

Then there are the organizations that meet expectations. While it is possible that some companies set and achieve aggressively ambitious expectations, this is rarely case. In my experience, these companies use poor reference points (e.g. what they have done historically), allowing cultural norms to hold them back, fearing failure, and/or using ineffective incentive programs. A great example is a client that hired me because their historical norm of 8 percent in annual sales and profit growth had slowed to 3 percent. During the strategic planning process it was determined that their annual growth goal would be 10%, as they were concerned about harming their culture.

 

We developed a good strategy, and in the first year they grew 30% in revenue and 40% in profit, without doing any acquisitions or harming their culture. This sounds like an amazing success, but something stunning happened at about halfway through the year. The company was so far ahead of projections (actually 50%) that the leadership team stopped pushing and complacency kicked in. They lost focus on the business plan and failed to execute most of the business plan goals, even though they were achievable. At the end of the year one of the owners confided in me that it was very hard to get anybody focused when everyone was fat and happy.

 

I find that, regardless of the industry, if you are under $500 million in revenue and not consistently growing at 20% or more annually, you probably have a strategy issue. If you have a good strategy you should be growing at the top end of your industry’s growth rate, and in many cases your industry’s growth rate becomes irrelevant because you are far outpacing it. Many companies I encounter do not have a strategy. In other words, there is very little difference, if any, between them and their competition. These companies believe they do not have time for strategy and/or do not spend enough time engaging their best people in strategic thinking. If you are not setting at least 1 day aside per quarter for strategy, you are leaving revenue on the table. Most companies have great underdeveloped opportunities right within their organizations. They are too busy focusing on issues that seem important (and are not) and allow themselves to be taken away from truly driving the business to the next level.

 

Additionally, it is common to find companies with good strategies whose management unwittingly fails to understand what their strategy really is. In other words, they do not really understand the key reason why their customers have chosen them over the competition. Case in point, a company thought their customers chose them because of great quality. The economy turned, and they decided to cut staff to manage profits. Sales dropped almost immediately. As time went by, management noticed that sales were dropping much faster than expected. This was initially misinterpreted as the result of the bad economy rather than the staff cuts they made primarily in the customer interfacing areas of their business.

 

Eventually management started to realize that the company was losing market share, which meant that their sales were slowing much more than the competition’s. They decided to have a third party conduct a customer survey. From that survey they learned that the real key to winning customers in their business was great service. In the end, they refocused strategy around customer service, and the results were outstanding, with sales growth rates outpacing those prior to the economic downturn.

 

In the end, if growth rates in sales are not at the top end of your industry, or at least at 20%, look toward strategy first. In article 2 of 2, we will assume you have a good strategy and will address what you can do from an operational perspective to boost sales growth.

 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com. We bring proven tools that lead to new ways of thinking that lead to better results.

Millions of dollars are misspent every year on team-building exercises and programs that do not get to the core of unlocking the potential of team performance. Teams are sent to exotic places to participate in fancy programs and fun activities that fail to help them achieve peak performance. This article explores why team-building programs fail and recommends ways to improve your team’s performance.

 

A significant reason that team-building initiatives fail is that too much emphasis is placed on the misconception that team-building should be fun. The purpose of team-building is to improve the performance of a work group, thereby creating better outcomes. This requires change, and for most people change is not fun … it is hard work. To drive change, team members must develop skills and gather information connected to the critical business outcomes they must produce. Team-building can be fun… if the members of the work group enjoy the learning process and relish the opportunities that change will bring. Sometimes the most trying struggles produce the most satisfying lessons.

 

If you want to improve teamwork and performance in your organization you have to look at the four core elements to driving team performance: relationships, goals, roles, and rules. All four of these elements must be executed well for the organization to flourish.

 

Relationships

Ironically, improving relationships is probably the last area you should focus on. Yes, the area that most leaders spend most of their time addressing is usually the symptom, not the problem. Almost every organization that has team-building issues will find their root of their problems in goals, roles, and rules. In my experience, when we address goals, roles, and/or rules, many of the relationship problems disappear.

 

Once you are comfortable with goals, roles, and rules, you are then ready to tackle relationships. Many of these relationship issues usually stem from different behavioral styles and people not appreciating and knowing how to deal with people whose styles differ from their own. I recommend engaging a Certified Behavioral Analyst (such as myself) to help iron out the rest. 

 

Goals

The first step toward achieving success as a team is to state your goals properly. You know your goal is well stated when anyone who reads it knows exactly what you are trying to accomplish and in what time frame. The better a person states the goal, the easier it is to create the action plan. An  acronym commonly used for stateing a goal properly is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistically high, and Time-based). In my experience, most goals do not properly meet these criteria and thus diminish the success of teams.

 

The other Issue that dooms many teams is improper alignment of goals. On an individual basis, each goal may be SMART. However, when you add up all the goals, or look at them on a system-wide basis, they may conflict with each other. These conflicts distract the team as they spend more time dealing with the lack of alignment than actually working on achieving the goal. It is for this reason that an ongoing system for goal alignment needs to be established in your organization.

 

For a comprehensive discussion on goals please see my article “State Your Goals in a SMART WAY” to learn more on the subject of goals.

 

Roles

In order for a team to function properly it is important that every member of the team understands specifically the actions and/or activities assigned to them. This is not as simple as some make it out to be, which is why this is usually an issue for team. There are two different types of roles: task and maintenance. The “task” roles relate to driving the desired outcome of a team. The “maintenance” roles relate to managing team processes and relationships among people on the team. Many organizations take the latter for granted, as if processes and relationships will automatically fall into place, or underestimate the time required to do it well.

 

With regard to task roles it is important to break down the tasks required to produce the outcomes you want, and how much time each task will take. Many organizations only think about the big things and take the little tasks for granted. Those many little time-consuming tasks are what throw teams off course. Once all the tasks have been identified, roles can be identified and assigned to the appropriate people.

 

Rules

Rules are a very important component of teamwork. This is one of those areas many leaders, particularly in entrepreneurial and family-owned businesses have the biggest concern with. Everyone is fine with rules as long as they apply to others.  You cannot have one set of rules for some people and another set for others. Owners are particularly vulnerable to this one. They love to pull out the old trump card, “Well it’s my business, so I can do whatever I want!” While this is true, they also must realize that the “need to be me” costs them a lot of money in worker productivity every year. People do as you do, not as you say.

 

When you have people playing by different rules, it creates conflict and problems, causing your organization to spend valuable time discussing and dealing with conflict rather than achieving goals. By making uniform rules one can eliminate unnecessary conflict and wasted gossip around the office. Let’s use the stop sign as an example. Imagine an intersection where there is a stop sign for drivers going north and south, but not for drivers going east and west. If you can trust that when you are traveling east or west that people traveling north and south will stop, you can drive full speed through the intersection with nothing to worry about. However, if you can’t be sure that the north-south drivers will follow the rules, then you need to slow down or stop at that intersection to prevent serious consequences.

 

The same thing is true of your organizations. If people are not all playing by the same rules, it breaks trust. People feel the need to be cautious and slow down.

 

Conclusion

Next time you think you are not getting maximum productivity out of your team, do not assume it is a relationship issue. Do not assume that one of those fun one-day or half-day team-building exercises will change your results. Instead, hire someone who can help you take a more systemic approach to help drive the results you are looking for.

 

If you want to achieve more goals, make sure that you state them in a SMART WAY! Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

 

 

 

As I mentioned in Article 2, your success will grow in proportion to your network. At some point, like the Internet, it can just explode, and the growth of your net worth, both personally and financially, can be 20 to 50 times your network. One of the qualities that can accelerate one’s network is magnetism. The more magnetic you are, the more people are drawn to you.

 

Before we get into this more deeply, let me explain what I mean by magnetism. Like magnets, people have positive and negative or attracting and repelling abilities, respectively. In other words, using your positive abilities draws people to you. When a leader is positively magnetic, employees are motivated and more productive. When sales people are more magnetic, they have more prospects and thus more sales production. As an individual, you make more friends. When we exude negative energy, people are repelled, and the opposite happens.

 

Regardless of your career path, one skill you should always be working on is to improving your positive magnetism. While some people seem to have been born people magnets, it is really the environment they were raised in that has helped them to be more magnetic than someone else. Magnetism is something that evolves from things we do or do not do.

 

In the book How Full Is Your Bucket by Tom Rath and Donald O. Clifton, there is a simple but profound analogy of a dipper (or ladle) and a bucket that captures the essence of how to be more magnetic. It looks at every communication or interaction with someone else as an exchange where you are filling or taking away from someone’s bucket. In other words, is it emotionally a positive or negative exchange from the other person’s perspective? If it is positive, you fill their bucket and thus fill yours. If it is negative, you take from their bucket, but you are also emptying yours. When you fill someone’s bucket, you are being magnetic, and when you empty their bucket, you are losing your attractiveness or magnetic power.

 

The key here is a mindset to choose how we respond and react to situations and to make a mental choice to try to fill other people’s buckets as often as possible. The more buckets we fill and the more frequently we fill them, the more magnetic we are, and the stronger our network will be.

 

Here are some simple ideas you can do to fill other people’s buckets:

• Smile more
• Relax more and help others do the same
• Be more helpful
• Find others doing things right and compliment them
• Do not be a critic
• Do not talk negatively of other people (even if you are right)
• Do not talk about other people behind their backs
• Stay out of the blame game
• Stay out of wrong and right conversations

 

 

The more magnetic you become the more successful you will be. To be more magnetic you have to identify the behaviors that are causing you to detract from your magnetism and work on those behaviors that will create an environment where you are more magnetic. If you do, you will see your success skyrocket.

 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

If you study any organization that exemplifies sustained superior performance, you will find a remarkable culture. This culture is defined and constructed around the core values institutionalized by your executive team. In other words, the core values, when practiced on a daily basis, help top companies become more successful than their competition. This article discusses how implement core values into your organization.  

 

It takes discipline and diligence to create a culture. You must instill your core values in everything you do, every day, and in every way. The number one reason core values do not get ingrained in many businesses is that most senior executives do not live them. If the top three executives (e.g. CEO, COO, and CFO) are not role models, you may expect that the rest of their employees will not consistently exhibit the company’s stated core values.

 

Once you have developed your values, execution through spaced repetition and consistency is imperative. This is the most difficult and important part of forming your culture. Everything we have learned in life we have learned through spaced repetition. Think about how you learned the multiplication tables. Indeed, this is the method the advertising world uses to imprint the messages they want us to receive. Likewise, an organization must develop a system for all employees to regularly hear, see, and act the company values.

 

In Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, by Verne Harnish, in the chapter “Mastering the Use of Core Values,” he does an excellent job of identifying how to institutionalize core values into your organization. Mr. Harnish has put together the following checklist to make sure that you do not have a gap in building core values into your business. If you have not read this book and want to accelerate the growth of your business, I highly recommend it! 

 

Storytelling – Everybody enjoys a good story, and many great leaders have taught through parable or storytelling. Identify some “legends” and current stories that demonstrate each value. Stories can provide explanations for any core values that might seem unusual or cryptic on their own. 

 

Recruitment and Selection – Design your interview questions and assessments to test a candidate’s alignment with your core values. Then, rate the person in terms of their perceived alignment with each core value. Your goal, after all, is to make sure your new hires fit in to your organization’s culture.

 

Orientation – Once hired, your new employee must be brought into the culture. Like many social organization initiations, orientation (you do have one?) is when you can inculcate the company’s core values. Consider organizing your orientation around the teaching of your core values.

 

Performance Appraisal and Handbooks – Core values should provide the framework on which you build your performance appraisal system. With a little creativity, any performance measure can be made to link with a core value. In addition, organize your employee handbook into sections around each core value.

 

Recognition and Reward – Organize your recognition and reward categories around your core values. You also gain a new source of corporate stories and legends each time a reward or recognition is given that highlights a core value.

 

Newsletters – Why struggle to come up with a catchy title for a newsletter when some word or phrase from your core values will do beautifully? Highlight a core value with each issue, incorporating stories – yes, more stories – about people putting these core values to work for the betterment of the company.

 

Themes – Use your core values to bring attention to your corporate improvement efforts. Milliken, the textile manufacturer, takes one of their six core values and makes it the theme for the quarter, asking all employees to focus on ways to improve the company around the theme. The Ritz-Carlton chain goes to the other extreme and highlights worldwide one “rule” everyday. In either case, establish a rhythm that keeps the core values top-of-mind in a repetitive fashion.

 

Everyday Management – I’ve found that managers and CEOs can repeat core values almost endlessly without it seeming ridiculous – so long as the core values they’re using truly are relevant and meaningful to their employees. When you make a decision, relate it to a value. When you reprimand or praise, refer to a value. When customer issues arise, by all means, compare the situation to the ideal represented by the value. Small as these actions may sound, they probably do more than any of the aforementioned strategies for bringing core values alive in your organization.

 

Conclusion

 

One of the hidden secrets to maximizing corporate growth and profits is the establishment of core values. If you want to see employee satisfaction, employee retention, customer loyalty, new business growth, vendor loyalty, an improved pool of job candidates, innovation, and brand improvement, focus on core values. The rest will follow.

 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

If you study any organization that exemplifies sustained superior performance, you will find a remarkable culture. While it is true that you need products or services to make money, the prevailing attitudes and behaviors that characterize your people are what fuel success. In other words, the core values practiced on a daily basis have helped top companies be more successful than their competition.

 

 

A Case in Point – “XYZ Company”  

The best way to get your attention is through the eyes of a real company. This company seriously underperformed against its competition. Its curse was that its performance level provided an adequate income for its main shareholder and leaders. What it did not want to address was what everyone who visited the company could see.

 

XYZ Company had approximately $1 Billion in sales. I met with the senior management team to understand the circumstances faced by the company. They were looking for someone to conduct training with their sales force. While it would be nice for me to have an engagement to develop 150 sales people, I always first assess the company’s real need. What this company needed was more sales, not training and development.

 

The facts where alarming. I found that the company did not have clear goals, did not fire non-performers, did not have good hiring policies, did not tie compensation to performance, etc. In the end, I asked the magic question, “What is your company’s core values?”

 

Silence followed. The leadership had never defined and implemented core values to make this company great. What resulted were unwritten core values that were unflattering:

Mediocrity – Sales people were not working hard or trying to be the best. When selling to customers, they would give in on price because they believed they were second-rate compared to their competition. Very few sales people would proactively go to training and when training was offered by the company, they would not show up.

No Accountability –   If people did not hit their sales targets, it really did not matter, particularly if they had been with the company a number of years. They were just “forgiven” and still paid handsomely.

Mistrust – The organization would not follow-through on initiatives. They would talk big and act small. Consequently, when they said they wanted to create change, nobody took them seriously. In addition, while the leadership indicated they had a “consumer-oriented” strategy, 80% of its products were “commodity-based.” The company generally operated as if their strategy was “low cost.”

Disrespect – Senior Management would begin initiatives only to have the CEO come and usurp them.

 

XYZ Company was growing slower and had lower margins than their competition even though their product is just as good and in some cases better. Many of their employees, including senior management and sales people, came from the competition. While they thought sales training would solve their problem, they were not facing the core issue, which was values. My recommendation was to address the real issue first so they could get a real return on their training investment.

 

 

Find Your Core Values  

This does not need to be a long exercise, and I do not recommend copying someone else’s values. I have worked with many companies. Typically, we can bring together the senior management team and identify and define core values within 1 to 4 hours, depending on how large the group. It can be fun, and it is critical to really understanding what is important to driving your company’s vision.

 

As demonstrated above, if you do not plan your core values, they will happen anyways, and the results can be devastating. When it comes to a company’s culture, the longer you wait to define and instill the right core values in your organization, the harder it will be to achieve your ideal culture and thus maximize performance.

 

Here is an example of the core values of one of my small-company clients whose growth is greater than 20% per year:

• Responsibility – Take leadership for delivering our vision.
• Excellence – Strive to be the best.
• Integrity – Commit to doing the right thing.
• Stewardship – Fund the future.
• Respect – Treat everyone with dignity.
• Innovation – Approach challenges with an open mind.

 

Conclusion

As mentioned at the start, if you study any organization that exemplifies sustained superior performance, you will find a remarkable culture. This culture is defined by the core values that are established by the leadership. Once you have defined your core values, the hardest work begins. While it is important to know what your values are, it is equally important to institutionalize these values. Part 2 of this article will tell you how!

 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As mentioned in the first article of this series, there are three key accelerators to a person’s success: integrity, knowledge, and network. While other things contribute to success, these are the key drivers. A significant aspect of these accelerators is that they interrelate with one another. Therefore, one must build a network with purpose. If you build your network properly it strengthens knowledge and integrity.

First and foremost, you must understand that networking is about personal brand-building. Just like a company, you need to build your brand. It is a competitive world, and we must do all we can to stand out. The more people that know you and say great things about you, the stronger your brand becomes. When I see the way others act when they are out networking, how they treat others, speak to others, fail to follow up, and do not do what they say they are going to do, I wonder if they understand the negative impact this having on their personal brand.

It is important that you think about what you want your brand to be. As part of our coaching process, we suggest our clients identify their core values. These are the values that they want to project to the world. In other words, if I were to ask someone in your network to describe you, what qualities do you want to them to make the top five? These need to be top-of-mind every day and acted in every way to everybody. This ensures that when someone describes you to others they will present your core values.  

When networking with purpose, it is important to remember what a network can bring. While there are many reasons to have a network, they all fall into three primary buckets:

• Accessing Knowledge – By expanding your network properly, you can expand knowledge. Imagine being able to answer any difficult question by just sending an
  e-mail or picking up the phone because someone in your network is ready to help.
• Getting things done – Imagine being able to reach people other people can’t or accomplishing tasks that once seemed impossible.
• Finding Time – As implied above, having a strong network can help you save time.

Unfortunately and too often, people think short-term and selfishly when they think about networking. This very attitude compromises their integrity and stifles their capacity to build their networks. For example, there are people I call the Scorekeepers. They only will give referrals to someone if they get an equal amount of referrals or see some advantage to themselves (e.g. referral fee). They don’t count the goodwill that will be created by helping to put two people together that are both thankful for being connected. This gets back to my initial point of the interrelationship of the key drivers of success. The Scorekeepers may be at a crossroads with integrity. Are they referring the best person for the task at hand or because they have something material to gain from the person they refer?

When people network with purpose, they realize they are put on this Earth to serve. When you develop a service mentality, you become more selfless. Your concern is for others, getting to know them, learning about their unique skills and talents, their needs and desires, their interests and so on. You are then in a position where you can positively put people together in a productive way. By building your network with a service mentality, you wind up with a network that will help you expand your network effortlessly.

Lastly, the larger your network, the larger your net worth. According to Tim Sanders in Love is the Killer App, you should not screen anyone out. Sometimes people who appear powerless or insignificant are potential stars waiting to rise. Someday they may become a key connection in your network, and they will remember that you were on their side before they went large. Do not screen anyone out. People who judge their potential connections by present status may be kissing their future good-bye. You may never know where that one connection may lead you.

In the end, your success will grow in proportion to your network. At some point, like the Internet, it can just explode, and the growth of your net worth, both personally and financially, can be 20 to 50 times your network. 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.

There are three key accelerators to a person’s success: integrity, knowledge and network. While there are other things that are important to success, these are key drivers. However, without a personal network you are powerless! The larger and stronger your network is, the more powerful you become. Most people focus their attention on integrity and knowledge. However, the highly successful business people have figured out that building their network is essential to promoting their uniqueness as well as furthering a higher degree of success. You cannot build empires alone. Nonetheless, even if you are not trying to build an empire, it is always simpler to accomplish things with many people’s help than to try to go it alone.

I am very involved at Florida International University, my Alma Mater. As a member of a group called the Alumni Circle of the College of Business Administration, I helped a special committee called Business Readiness whose function was to work with the college’s Deans and staff on a special project to determine how to help graduates become “business ready” upon graduation. One of the areas that surfaced in our study was that college students did not how to effectively network. The school has subsequently created a series of seminars on networking, in which I was proud to be included as one of the “keynote” speakers. 

Networking is not just for sales people. From the day you enter your first job, you need to start getting to know everyone you can. Inside your organization, learn what the other departments do, who does what, and take a genuine interest in your co-workers. Have weekly lunches with people in other departments. You want everyone to get to know you and to be on the same team. This may not be important today but as you advance in the organization, these other people may become critical to your success. They may even become your bosses and/or subordinates. In addition, the higher you advance in the organization, the less important your technical skills become and the more important your people or soft skills become. Start developing them immediately! 

You need to work on networking outside the organization as well. This topic will be addressed in another article, but even if you are not in sales, this is very important. Many compensation and other business opportunities occur because of reputation built in a network of people. You will find big promotions inside or outside your company when a large group of people are acknowledging your assets. On a less happy note, many good and talented people have been laid off from a job because of things like company relocation, company being sold, or some other situation that has nothing to do with job performance. The higher you are on the totem pole, the more important the role your network may play in quickly finding work. 

Networking also provides resources quickly and efficiently. During any given week, we all need information, products, services, and people. I would much rather go to people I know and trust to find such important needs than to the Google search engine or some other unknown source. While these sources may provide leads, there is still a lot of due diligence work one must undertake to check out those leads. After all, just because a company has a big ad or is a first hit, it may only mean that their web developers were smart or that they had a lot of money to spent to get that position. In contrast, when our own network provides the needed resource we can feel comfortable that proper due diligence was undertaken. Utilizing our network saves us time and money. 

So if you want to increase your success, expand your network. Networking is important for many reasons and can benefit you no matter your title, rank, or function. You need to nurture your network just as you do knowledge. You need to work at it daily and continue to build it over time so it is abundant and diversified. 

Review our website at www.activategroupinc.com to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business, or contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com.