A truly effective executive keeps his/her time commitments. Regardless the industry, position one holds, function you are in, or size of company, it is critical to take being on time seriously. In addition, I believe that if you do not get to most meetings at least 15 minutes early you are losing huge opportunities. While being on time and keeping your meetings is necessary, being 15 minutes early can be a gold mine. I have had clients partially apply this secret, and the results were automatic.

Every time you reschedule, cancel, miss, or are late to a meeting, you generate direct and/or indirect costs. If one looks at the situation objectively and follows the chain of impact from rescheduling, cancelling, missing, or being late in order to quantify the costs, you would see that some examples of the problems include:

• Reduced employee loyalty/satisfaction because of frustration, disappointment, or even anger, which in turn leads to decreased productivity and/or increased employee turnover
• Reduced customer loyalty/satisfaction because of frustration, disappointment, or even anger, which decreases revenue
• Increased errors, which can reduce customer service or product quality, leading to a rise in product returns, reduced revenue, increased charge-backs, etc.
• Decreased productivity while people wait around for meetings to start, or stop for recaps of material already covered for the benefit of latecomers
• Increases in the length of time it takes to make critical decisions, sometimes by months, which costs you revenue and sometimes extra expenses.

The culprits always justify their actions with comments such as:

• My biggest customer needed me.
• An emergency had to be dealt with.
• I had too many phone calls/e-mails to return.
• Another matter was more important.
• Traffic was bad.
• The other meeting ran too long.

 

The comments above may be reasonable responses on occasion, but, in most cases, they are excuses for not being responsible, and they are costing you, others, and your company even if you cannot isolate and measure the cost.

Think about your own experience. What are your true thoughts about someone who is late? When your doctor keeps you waiting for 45 minutes, are you happy when he finally sees you? Does he seem more qualified, somehow better than other doctors, worth paying more to see? Is this someone you would want to refer to a friend, invite over for dinner, do a special favor for, or maybe work until midnight for? Of course not! Amazingly, though, bosses somehow think it is okay to make employees stand outside their offices for 20 minutes while they take a phone call, or have them wait in the conference room until they’re ready to make an appearance, or ask people to cancel other meetings to attend theirs. In the end these executives are ineffective and are causing their team to be ineffective as well, which is costing their organization big money.

Regardless of what people tell you, if you are late for meetings by more than 5 minutes twice a week, reschedule or cancel meetings more than twice a week, or miss meetings twice a month, you can be more successful merely by improving your time management.

Another aspect of the importance of keeping meetings and being on time is trustworthiness. Salespeople have learned that the first step in the buying process is to get the prospect to “buy” the salesperson. If the buyer does not trust the salesperson, it will likely not matter how good the company or its products are. The salesperson will go home without a sale. If the salesperson does not show up on time it lowers trust.

Well folks, everyone is in sales. We are selling to employees, bosses, boards of directors, shareholders, children, customers, vendors, and so on. If you are on time and keep your meetings with someone, you help earn trust, which in turn helps earn power with someone, and then the sales process has a chance of happening. On the other hand, if you cancel meetings, make people wait, show up late, and constantly reschedule, you lose their trust. You lose power with that person, and there is no deal. It is that simple!

Even better than being on time is the “15 Minutes Early Plan.”  Have you ever noticed that when you arrive at someone’s office to have a meeting, that is when they start preparing for your meeting? This is especially true if you are in sales. The prospect is never ready, so by getting there just in time, you lose at least 10 minutes of your allotted time. Arriving early usually gets you 10 more minutes of productive time. And if the prospect is someone really important (like the CEO), it might be weeks or months before you get “face-time” again, so those are 10 big minutes.

Another benefit of the “15 Minutes Early Plan” is to lower the impact of road rage from the horrible traffic in Miami and South Florida. Estimating a just-in-time arrival requires PhDs in geography, quantum physics, and mathematics, and a lot of luck. By planning to be 15 minutes early, you can bring less stress to your meeting and your life.

Even if you do not have to drive, it is just no fun to rush around. It is nice to have a few minutes between meetings to have a glass of water, call your significant other to say hello, or take a few deep breaths before running to the next meeting. You will find that you get more done, and your input will be much better. In addition, it gives you an opportunity when you get to the meetings to have some time to develop rapport with others without having to waste valuable meeting time.

As I’ve already mentioned, all of this is linked to success. What is meant by success? Success is defined by the individual, and typically defined in terms of money, friends, possessions, colleagues, status, power, prestige, customer satisfaction, strong family, etc. At the end of the day, I leave it to you to find your definition of success. Use the “15 Minutes Early Plan” and you will have more of it.

A common complaint of many business owners is that their employees lack motivation. The real problem is that employees are under-engaged, and there is plenty of research to support this. Many employees are singing “My Give a Damn is Busted”? 

The most common reason for under-engagement is the very owners who are complaining. These leaders have accomplished much in their careers and have confused accomplishment with competence. Truth be told, the leader is often the direct cause of many daily workplace problems. 

The best way to illustrate my point is to share with you a story about the worst case I have encountered. One thing that made this case particularly challenging was that the business had done well in spite of leadership shortcomings. This leader measured performance based on what had been accomplished rather than what should have been accomplished. Worse, his only measurement system was his own financial net worth, which did not take into account the number of “dead bodies” he left along the way. As in most situations, the CEO caused a majority of the damage.  

 According to “Top Grading” by Bradford D. Smart, the cost of having a poorly performing CEO is 24 times the CEO’s base salary. Interestingly, I had estimated that my case company was operating at one-quarter of the profit it should have made. This shortfall was equivalent to 24 times the CEO’s base compensation. 

Mr. Smith, CEO of XYZ Company, embodied many of the reasons why employers find their employees working far below their potential. This CEO had two partners, and the business had existed for almost 20 years. Mr. Smith came to our firm because he was “having trouble with one of his partners.” In other words, he wanted me to fix his partner. In addition, he had read a book about customer service and wanted to build “extreme” customer service into his business.   

As is customary, I met with all the partners and some key employees. Based on their input, we concluded that the CEO was the real issue. To put it bluntly, if Mr. Smith died in his office, almost every employee, particularly his partners, would be suspects in his death. While I do not believe this to be Mr. Smith’s true self, his actions were perceived by others to demonstrate a very poor value system. 

The following are some examples of Mr. Smith behaviors:

•  Competed with his employees – Whenever someone in the organization appeared to have a lot of influence/power with others or was more knowledgeable in certain subjects, Mr. Smith would go out of his way to denigrate them or directly reduce their power.
• Lacked follow-through – Chastised individuals for their lack of follow-through when he was typically the least reliable when it came to delivering on a commitment.
• Stifled innovation – Encouraged employees to “think outside the norm,” but penalized and publicly humiliated anyone who had an idea he did not agree with.
•  Handled mistakes poorly – Became overly emotional when people made mistakes. Worse, it was impossible to become a star employee as one mistake was all it took to have you marked as a problem employee. Two years in a row, an employee recognized for exceptional performance in one year was let go or driven out of the business the following year.
• Lacked commitment to goals­ – The CEO consistently lacked commitment to goals and regularly changed them. When new initiatives were launched, it was not unusual for employees to not take them seriously. They expected things to go back to the old method within 30 to 60 days.
• Rewarded the wrong behaviors – Rewarded people on how well they pleased him rather than on actual work performance.
• Talked behind people’s backs – Regularly talked poorly about people behind their backs in order to try to boost his own image.
• Divulged confidential information – When people shared personal/confidential information, they could rest assured he would not keep it to himself. He would also demand and pressure employees to do the same.
• Lacked integrity – Insisted that his employees read books about actions and behaviors he did not practice. 

If someone is guilty of one or more of the above actions on a consistent basis you may rest assured they are reducing organizational performance. In the end, it comes down to the values you project to others by your actions, not your words. Unfortunately, many leaders do not consistently display the values that drive top performance and in most cases are the cause of their employees singing “My Give a Damn is Busted.”

Too often the Chief Human Resource Officer or Director of Training and Development calls to ask for a price to conduct a training session before giving enough thought to defining the company’s real issues at hand and how to best address them. The main issue is always how to maximize some aspect of a company’s growth performance, so before one can decide on whether to invest in training, one must first determine whether that training will hit the intended target.

One also must weigh the cost to implement that training against the projected increase in growth to determine if there is adequate return on investment. Not doing so commonly leads to failure in targeted outcomes. Typically, a company under-invests in proper training because they do not realize the magnitude of the issues at stake. They go to the cheapest bidder (and usually the least effective program), or they invest in the wrong program altogether.

Investment dollars are a coveted resource, and it’s always prudent to utilize them in way that will result in the greatest return on investment. Management typically –and mistakenly – views returns on investment from training as intangible and does not allocate resources to their intellectual assets (“people”) in the same way they do to their hard assets (e.g. plant, real estate equipment, etc.). The returns on investment from training both can and should be measured. In addition, when it comes to investing in people, the decision is even more critical. Many times your return on investment can be much greater because your people make the decisions that affect hard assets and, more importantly, your strategies, customers, and products/services.

Investment in developing your human capital is necessary to continue to drive your business growth. The stronger the team is, the more likely it is that deliverables are achieved.

Another common mistake in the approach to training is to use cookie-cutter systems, a “one size fits all” approach to people development. In other words, we assume everyone is the same and provide the same solutions to all. For example, if you contact a company for a training cost estimate, and they readily give you a quote without doing substantial due diligence, you may rest assured that you will get a subpar outcome. In addition, if you send your people to training programs conducted with homogeneous groups of people from other companies in a “cookie cutter” program, they will gain some knowledge, but you will again have a subpar outcome because the program did not address your company’s unique needs.

Amplifying the problem is the business trend to create job descriptions that define a position’s responsibilities based on the abilities of the ideal candidate. However, the reality is that new hires are usually less than ideal, and the definition of the ideal candidate often describes less than 1% of the population. So now you have employees that are less than ideal, and are great at some things and not at others. This can be said for everyone on the team. Reality is that people are unique in what they know, how they feel, and what they do. The leader’s responsibility is to know the team and what they do well, and to leverage them accordingly to achieve the desired business outcome. Each player excels in different areas, so doesn’t it make better business sense to partner skill sets to achieve common goals rather than to expect everyone to excel at everything?  

When assessing how to maximize your growth performance you have to look at each individual in terms of “strengths” instead of “weaknesses.” Think about the things you do well. They’re fun! You enjoy them! You can do them all day! Time flies by! They’re exciting! Exhilarating! Refreshing! You’re motivated! You’re infused with momentum! You’re in the “zone”! Now take a moment to think about the things you don’t like doing. You dread doing them! You procrastinate! You feel burdened! You feel tense! It’s a chore! When people are doing things they don’t enjoy, they complain, move slower, produce less, procrastinate, and are less engaged. So even if you train someone to be better at things they find less appealing, they still won’t achieve the goal of maximum performance.

To create an effective training program and to get your return on investment, you have to look at the outcomes that are not happening and evaluate your players. The big challenges faced when looking at a team are: 1) whether the right people are on the team; and 2) whether the players are in the right seats. Many times it is important to replace some of those players because they are destroying the team’s ability move up to the next level, and no amount of training will change that. Training can teach people some new skills, but it won’t remake the person. Very often the personality makeover is exactly what owners are hoping will happen, and that is just not realistic.

Once you have the right players, and they are in the right seats, you then need a training program that will help them strengthen and bring out their true abilities and neutralize their weaknesses. For example, Shaquille O’Neal will never be a good free-throw shooter. If his coaches hinged the future of the team based on his making 90% of his free throws, they would never win a game. However, once you’ve helped him maximize his footwork in the paint and learn some nice short-range shots, he is unstoppable.

When a team is executing the aspects of the job in which they are strong, their results are explosive! People are motivated, excited, enthusiastic, optimistic, and driven. They take initiatives, stretch them, and achieve results. The objective then is to leverage strengths and actively look for others who are strong in areas in which your current team is weak. The investment of time and money here is much more strategic and results-driven. Unfortunately, most leaders spend a tremendous amount of time and money developing people in areas in which they are underperforming (the weakness) with the hopes of raising the skill level in that area. It’s a noble effort, yet a poor business decision.

It is so easy to send mixed messages to an employee. The best way to discuss this is to share a real live example where a client hired me to coach a partner. Then my client unwittingly made several decisions that totally demotivated his employee.

In my initial meeting with the Managing Partner he indicated that he had a person leading one of his practices that used to produce double the revenue compared to today. He could not understand why, as she seemed to be working hard, had proven capable of producing, and he thought she could produce more. He assured me he was totally committed to helping her succeed, acknowledged some personal style issues he would like to see her change, but it was imperative she get back on track.

After meeting with the coaching candidate (“Sarah”) I concluded that she does have a lot of potential and desire, so I took the assignment. After 3 months, I found that I had a lot more than a partner to coach. In the first 30 days we made tremendous progress. As is usual with a willing, able and motivated person we see immediate results. The first thing we focus on is time management. We allocate specific time to business development, collections, billings and how to remove unproductive time. In the first month, billings for her and her staff were up, collections were amazing (it was year-end), and the pipeline for new business had started to form.

So just when I was thinking, “We are going to do great,” the “Firm” kicks in and begins to send the mixed messages. Strike one happened when they took away 1 of her staff of 2 without discussing it with her. When she tried to discuss this issue, the answer was that the firm needed to make cuts, and she was was overstaffed for what she was producing. The lesson here was not whether the personnel cut was wrong or right, but how the firm should have handled this decision relative to the partner’s sensibilities and what it did to motivation. Through her eyes, it made her look bad with her team because she did not know what was happening, showed a lack of confidence that her production would get to the needed levels, and did not make her feel like she was running her own practice. In the end, not including her in making the business decision knocked the motivation out of her.

Through my continued coaching, ”Sarah” realized there was no point to fighting futile battles, She moved away from the distraction management had thrown at her and worked on securing a quiet deal with another partner in the firm to have part-time access to the person she lost, should she need it. However, there was a lot of productivity lost while all of this was going on.

No sooner did we get done with this distraction when the Managing Partner made another move without talking to Sarah. He hired another partner to work in “her” practice. His thought process was that creating a little competition would “get her going.” The message from Sarah’s perspective was that the Managing Partner obviously had no confidence in her and that she was no longer running this practice. You can imagine the work it took for me to help her get motivated again, to get undistracted, and to get back to working at 100% again. It took 2 weeks before she calmed down, just in time for her to take her 10-day vacation.

At this point, 90 days had past since I was hired, and the Managing Partner was to review how we had done and whether we should continue coaching this person. His initial impression was that he was not sure that he was seeing enough results. By the way, despite all of this nonsense, we were still able to increase her billing run rate (with taking a 10-day vacation) by about 20%. The real question is what would the numbers have been without the distractions and real thoughtful commitment to this Partner’s motivation?

It may be a surprise, but in most organizations there are not enough good meetings. You might be saying there is no time for any more meetings, but when properly executed, good meetings will save you time and will make you more money!

This article focuses on how to develop good meeting rhythm in your organization in order to save you time and money. When you conduct a series of meetings that build upon each other, they allow management to see patterns that will help them to make better and faster decisions. In addition, by communicating in focused, structured, and organized fashion, you cut a lot of the inefficiency out of the organization.

The meetings every organization should have and their purposes should be as follows:

• Annual Meeting – Discuss progress on last year’s goals, and set and get alignment among your management team around the goals you plan to achieve for the next year.
• Quarterly Meetings – You measure progress toward your year-end goals and discuss what you need to do in the next 13-week race to stay on track.
• Monthly Meetings – Focus on monthly learning. These are opportunities for the management team to start developing the next levels in the organization. This should be a two- to four-hour meeting for the extended management team to review progress with everyone, discuss financial results, and to make appropriate adjustments. It is also a great time to do an hour or two of specific training.
• Weekly Meetings – These are issue-oriented meetings and strategic gatherings. At these meetings you discuss progress toward the top 5 critical initiatives in the organization (you have identified these right?), look at leading key performance indicators, customer and employee feedback, and spend 30 minutes on one single big issue. A big mistake made at weekly meetings is covering everything every week. As a result, weekly meetings tend to be too shallow. It is recommended that the management team pick a focus for the month or quarter to be the priority for your weekly meetings. By moving that one large priority for the month or quarter, you make a big impact on driving your business forward.
• Daily Huddles – These are 5-15 minute stand-up meetings for everyone in the company, but not necessarily everyone in the same meeting. The purpose of these huddles is to help make sure that everyone is focused on the right activities, identify where people are stuck, create peer pressure to achieve key deliverables, and create daily contact among all team members. Companies that do huddles have found that it has made their days much more efficient and weekly and monthly meetings much more productive.
• Specific Purpose Meetings – These meetings only include those people necessary to get something done, remove a bottleneck, and/or are designed to make a decision.

Do your meetings result in everyone feeling good after they leave? Does very little get done in your meetings? If so, your meetings function like most, and they are probably worthless!

Most often leaders are concerned with there being too many meetings, or meetings being too long, or some other wrong measurement. I would like to suggest that you change your measurement systems. For example, a good leading indicator that something important is being discussed is conflict. Other indicators of good meetings are the number of decisions made and the number of people held accountable for decisions made at the prior meetings. These are real indicators that your meetings are worthwhile. If you have a really good meeting, then everyone leaves feeling uncomfortable because there is so much more to be done, and they have a stake in it!

There are 7 critical factors that when managed correctly result in great meetings and top results for organizations:

1. Conflict – Conflict is a necessary part of good meetings. There should be good healthy conflict in every good meeting, and people should feel pressure. When there is a lack of conflict, it is an indication you are not talking about anything that requires any real discussion, failing to emphasize the hard-to-achieve goals and key performance indicators, not holding people accountable, not talking about the “elephants in the room” or the real issues going on the in company. If you are not having this type of regular conflict, you have a problem with your “team,” and I recommend reading “Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni. The lack of conflict can be an indication that the foundation of a strong team, trust, is missing. .
2. Purpose – Every meeting should have a purpose, and you should define that purpose before you enter the room. By the end of the meeting you should answer the question “Did we achieve our purpose?” For example, if your purpose was to decide whether or not to do an acquisition, you need to determine if a decision was made. If there was no decision at the end of the meeting, you need to determine the specific action steps needed to make that decision, and what alternative decision deadline is acceptable. You need to determine how often your meetings fail to achieve their purpose and why. If this is a regular occurrence, you need to challenge your team to identify whether it is a failure in preparation or some other symptom causing the organization to be ineffective. Do not allow yourselves to get off the hook.
3. Time – There are two elements to time. Making sure that you schedule your meeting on a day and at a time when you will get the team’s undivided attention is very important. You want to get as many people physically in the same room as possible. You also want to make sure that you schedule plenty of time to support your agenda. For example, I know of a company that regularly schedules a monthly meeting with an insufficient amount of time to cover the their agenda. As a result, they fail to finalize decisions, think through all the issues going on in the company, and hold people accountable for past decisions. The result is definitely showing up in the income statement, cash flow, and stress level. If you have covered all that you need to, it is okay to end a meeting early. If you did not cover all that you need to, you need to extend your meeting or reschedule the remaining items for a later time so everyone does not feel stressed because you are running over.
4. Preparation – All participants should know what is going to be covered in the meeting and what needs to be prepared in advance. This will allow for a more productive meeting.
5. Interruptions – Whenever possible, it is recommended that your monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings be done off-site. This will reduce and/or eliminate interruptions as much as possible.
6. Responsibility – Make sure that the responsibility stays in the room, and you do not play the blame game. Your meetings need to be about solutions. Leave excuses to the rest of the world.
7. Accountability – It is critical to agree on who is the one person that is accountable for each item, and to make sure that person is held accountable. Review key developments, assignments, and deadlines regularly until an assignment is completed.

We help clients achieve quick, efficient and profitable growth through the easy implementation of proven methods. Contact Howard Shore at (305) 722-7216 or shoreh@activategroupinc.com to find out how a business coach, our consultants and trainers can help you accelerate your success.

Timidity has always been a factor that has cost companies a lot of sales. This has become an even bigger issue in this economy as owners and salespeople want to do everything they can to make their current clients happy and to put smiles on the faces of prospects.  However, now more than ever you have to push back.

Let me explain what I mean by pushing back. When you get into that sales call where the owner says how bad things are, and that they have no money to spend on your products and services because of the economy,  that is a time to push back. You need to be prepared to discuss how your products and services will help his company become more profitable in this economy, and how not having them will make his company even less profitable.  While this may not be true for every product and service you provide, my example is only to make the point that if you do not push back, your conversation is over.

Pushing back with your customers and prospects has several benefits. First it gives you an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise, it lends you credibility, and it shows you have confidence in your knowledge, products and company. All of this adds value to your conversation with your prospects and clients and provides more of a reason for them to talk with you. Too often owners and leaders are surrounded by “yes” people, and it is refreshing for them to have someone that can offer them some valuable alternatives. They like having good people around them who can act as sounding boards.

Now the question becomes, “WHEN should one push back”? The rules are:

• When you can
• When you must
• To gain control of the meeting
• To get more than enough compelling reasons to buy your product

When assessing salespeople, we find this is one of the areas we need to develop. Many have “need for approval.” This gets in their way of asking the tough questions that are necessary to getting more business.

I consistently see management frustrated that their sales force is not producing. They will tell me there are enough sales out there, but their people are not getting it done. When I ask where the problem is, they cannot tell me. The reason they can’t tell me is that they are not tracking and measuring the right numbers.

The key to understanding the success of a salesperson is to measure as far upstream in the sales process as possible. Too often we ask salespeople to provide a list of their prospects, with an estimate of the dollar value of the contract, and they keep giving us the same people and deals. In order to properly track your sales activity and to predict sales results, you need to track the following for every salesperson:

• How many calls they make daily, and break those down to:
  • Messages Left
  • Returned Calls
  • Conversations
  • New Suspects
• How many meetings they have, and break that down to:
  • New Prospects
  • Referral Partners/Centers of Influence
  • Suspects
  • 2nd and 3rd Visits
  • Presentations
  • Deals Closed
• In the Pipeline
  • Number of suspects – Scheduled and/or had first meetings
  • Prospects – Prospects need what you have, and there is a compelling reason to take action; you have developed a relationship, and they see you differently from your competitors.
  • Qualified Prospects – They are completely qualified to do business with you, and you are qualified to do business with them.
  • Closeable – You are ready to propose and close the deal.
• Close ratio

It all starts with phone calls and prospecting activity. If they do not do enough there, you are guaranteed to not have enough sales. In addition, with each individual, you can start predicting the amount of upfront activity it takes to achieve the desired sales targets, which will be different for each person. Some people are stronger closers and thus do not need as many deal opportunities. Some people are prospecting machines, but are not as good at closing. In the end, a certain amount of activity leads to a certain amount of productivity, and the math adds up.

I participated in a group discussion around the X-factor people look for when selecting new sales people. You have to be skilled in interviewing sales people as even the worst sales people can talk their way through and interview if you are not careful.  A sales person need to prove their track record.  They need to tell you specifics.  Did they meet quota every year and how was quota determined?  How did they get their leads? What did their cold call sound like? When they got deals how did they differentiate themselves from the competition.  Do not except fluff and ask for real deals? Sales people that do not have a track record will give you hypothetical scenarios. Stars will tell you war stories.  They love to brag.

After they have proven to me they have performed in the past then I want to know that they still have strong Desire, Commitment, and Outlook.

Have you sat down and thought about what makes you product or service different from your competition? If you are finding that you are regularly competing on price and not finding it easy to steal share from your competitors the market is telling you they do not know what makes you different. Or what makes you different is not important to them in a way which will get them to pay more or switch.

If you want to help your sales force and ignite your top line growth you need to look at your business through the eyes of your target customers. Ask yourself the tough question: are you really a better alternative to your competition, essentially the same product or service or (god forbid) and notch down.  This may be the answer to what has been hold your growth down.

Do you want to increase your earnings by 50% or more? Who wouldn’t? The challenge is how to do that and work less at the same time. Many of the ultra-wealthy in our country have figured out how to do just that. After all, the person now earning $20 million a year probably earned $200,000 or less at an earlier point in his/her career. That same person is not working a 100 times harder today. That person has learned to maximize their own productivity and to help others in their teams do the same.

There are 7 secrets to time management that can make you wealthy: 

1. Top 5 Organizational Priorities – The management team needs to agree on the top 5 most important things that must be done in the next 12 months and the next 90 days in order to achieve its goals. These goals need to be put in rank order and communicated regularly to everyone.
2. Top 5 Personal Priorities – Each individual needs to identify their top 5 priorities as they relate to the organization’s top 5 priorities for the next 90 days and put them in rank order. The status of the priorities should be reported back on a weekly basis.
3. Daily Task List – Each individual should have a daily task list that should be prioritized into to 2 categories: “must do” and “should do.”  The “must do” category should have no more than 5 items. To make sure the “must do” items can be realistically done that day, a person should estimate the time it will take to complete each task. Add up the time for all the “must do” tasks and all the time scheduled on the calendar. If that time exceeds 80% of the available day then it is unlikely that all of the task will be accomplished, since e-mail, phone calls and unscheduled interruptions must be taken into account in the schedule. The task list should also be compared to the individual’s “Top 5” personal priorities list to make sure that they are making steady progress and not wasting energy and time on the wrong activities.
4. Create Weekly Goals – At the beginning of the week, decide what it is you want to accomplish by the end of the week. Determine what tasks will be necessary to complete these steps and delegate as necessary. Put an estimated time next to each task you will need to complete and block out time on your calendar to complete each task.
5. Control Interruptions – While open door policies and responsiveness to customers are good qualities, they can backfire on you. Research tells us that every time you get interrupted, it takes 20 minutes to get back to full concentration. Allowing people to come in at any time, constantly looking at e-mail and BlackBerry, answering the phone whenever it rings, and other common habits cause executives to use 3 to 5 times more time to re-create their original levels of activity. You should create time windows where you are going to accept interruptions. Look at your schedule and identify good break points in your day in which to answer e-mail, return phone calls, and have unscheduled meetings. By getting into the habit of having discipline in these areas. you will create discipline in others. Now they will have to consolidate their questions and condense them into 5 minutes. If they need longer ask them to schedule a regular meeting.
6. Touch it Once – Whether it is a hard copy document or e-mail, people are touching things 3 and 4 times before they do something about them. This is tremendously inefficient. The rule should be “do it”, “dump it,” “delegate it.” or “file it.” The goal at the end of the day should be to have no piles on your desk and nothing in your in box. If you accomplish this you will save a lot of time in the long run.
7. Closed Time Management System – Whatever time management system you use, it must be closed. In other words, the same system must take into account your goals, time, tasks, and notes. If your keep these items in different systems you will likely have alignment problems, and important items will slip through the cracks.

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.

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.