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April 18, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

10 Reasons Why Corporate Culture Determines Sales Success

10 Reasons Why Corporate Culture Determines Sales Success
corporate culture and sales
What kind of culture are you creating?

Corporate culture and sales.

Is there a connection?

Here are some observations about corporate culture and sales:

  1. Culture is important because it contextualizes your offer: Your corporate culture and attitudes affects the way you learn to use your product or service as a value creator for your prospects.
  2. Culture is important because it sends out a salesperson with a certain perspective: Is your sales team selling out of fear for their jobs or empowerment to make a different?
  3. Culture is important because it tends to drive attitudes: What attitudes and outlooks does your sales culture generate in the sales (and service) staff? Are you a pleasant group of people?
  4. Culture is important because it creates a mission for the salesperson beyond merely getting a commission:  Corporate culture can reach beyond the specific business that you are in. If done right, your business can be a piece of the overall change your company wants to create in the community.
  5. Culture is important because it provides a place where a person can be trained:  Does your culture assume everybody will figure it out on their own?
  6. Culture is important because it gives core values: Core values will be created whether by intention or not. Why not identify and commit to these values with intention?
  7. Culture is important because a salesperson without a strong culture is just a vendor: Bad corporate culture leads to a sales force that competes on price and, thus, becomes a vendor force.
  8. Culture is important because support is vital to people who get rejected on the regular: Salespersons endure their share of rejection. Quality culture can reset your mindset, realigning and refocusing on mission and core values, offering opportunities to learn why the deal was lost, and empowering you to get out there and give it another shot.
  9. Culture is important because quality culture means there’s a good sales process: Left to your own devices, you’ll not follow a sales process – at least when you’re new in sales. Good culture provides a proven process.
  10. Culture is important because selling something is also an invitation into an organization: Do you want to invite your client to be a part of your organization?

What would you add? What would you remove?

Filed Under: Sales Experiments

April 14, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

3 Productivity Lessons from the Movement Marketing Summit (So Far)

3 Productivity Lessons from the Movement Marketing Summit (So Far)

As I write this post, this is day 8 of the Movement Marketing Summit (4/14/2015 – but the lessons will be evergreen).

The Summit is a two week online conference put on by Aj Amyx and Andy Zitzmann.

I’ve been power listening to the videos during my morning and afternoon commutes (I wish online video players would make it possible to listen at 1.5X or 2.0X speed) and have noticed a few lessons popping up again and again.

These productivity lessons will transform your marketing efforts if you consistently implement them.

1. The 15 Minute Rule

Nearly every single presenter (from Aaron Walker to Sue B. Zimmerman) referenced spending around 15 minutes a day on something. From time spent meditating, to writing in a journal for a morning routine, to time spent engaging on social media or creating an image to post on Instagram.

The 15 Minute Rule kept surfacing. The rule is significant for two reasons:

  1. The 15 Minute Rule Overwhelms Overwhelm: One of our biggest struggles in implementing new strategies or personal or sales disciplines is that we get overwhelmed by all the time we’ll have to spend. Just take 15 minutes. Pick one thing. Do it. Then start doing something else (and if you happen to get traction, then keep on going).
  2. The 15 Minute Rule Leverages the Compound Effect: 15 minutes a day, everyday, will turn the titanic and start sending you in the right direction. 15 minutes of strength exercise. 15 minutes of sending value out via Twitter. 15 minutes of focused time with your children or your spouse. That 15 minutes will transform your life.

2. The 80/20 Rule

While I do not believe that the 80/20 rule is a universal law like gravity or the fact that there’s one tabletop or countertop that is required to be cluttered with junk mail, I do believe that it is a good starter guideline. (Check Web.Search.Social’s Carol Lynn and Ralph Rivera’s writing and podcasting on the 80/20 rule for there passionate, yet well thought-out, rebuttals to our lemming-like belief in the 80/20 principle).

If you are starting out in sales and marketing, the temptation is to try to get people to buy your stuff. Consequently, we spend 80% of the time asking everybody to buy, click, or signup and only 20% of the time adding value.

The 80/20 Rule in marketing is that you share and give value 80% of the time while spending only 20% of the time trying to capture value.

By keeping the 80/20 Rule in mind, you can shift your mindset toward bringing massive value 80% of the time, so that during the 20% of time that you do make offers, you’ll have more leverage with your audience.

You can apply this rule any way you want, but the long and short is that you need to go heavy on value. 20% is NOT a small percentage, so this still gives plenty of permission to serve people by showing them how to buy your stuff.  More importantly, this 20% time you spent pitching or selling? That’s not slimy, smarmy, gross, or dumb. It’s giving people an opportunity to buy a solution to their problems.

Therefore, it’s 100% value, just broken down a bit to help keep you from machine-gun pitching.

3. The Checklist Rule

One key discipline that most presenters seemed to have but didn’t make too much fanfare about is the use of a checklist or process.

The power of checklists is in three key areas:

  1. Your Self-Discipline: Self-discipline is a muscle. The more you have to use it during the day, the weaker it gets as the day goes on. When we have to use our short-term memories and that annoying nudge in the back of our minds to remember to keep disciplines around marketing, sales, or other processes, we use up that self-discipline unnecessarily. Using a checklist removes the need to access that limited resource.
  2. Your Trustworthiness: People do business with those they know, like, and trust. Trust isn’t only about trusting your character. It’s trusting that you’ll deliver content and value in a consistent way. Checklists helps keep your product (you, your content, your marketing) delivered in an expected, consistent format. That will build trust.
  3. Your Stress-Level: Checklists give your brain permission to relax. If you had to remember every process, every time, your stress level would go up. And that’s miserable. Another piece of awesome is that if you have checklists, you can further decrease your stress by outsourcing processes to virtual assistants (and those real-life assistants that work in your office).

A Bonus Observation

True confession: I’d never heard of Aj Amyx or Andy Zitzmann until I got an email from Jeff Goins about this Summit.

Apparently, these guys have quite the following. I thought I’d heard of all online marketers and coaches. I was wrong. By the way, Amyz and Zitzmann have put on a stellar online Summit.  They ask insightful questions and offer up some golden nuggets of knowledge, themselves.

The Lessons Here

  1. Learn from New People: Don’t limit yourself to the people you’ve heard of. Every once in a while, take in a new webinar or follow a new rabbit trail. Not only had I not heard of Amyx and Zitzmann (I fear that sounds bad, but it’s not. I’m an insurance agent. I can’t know it all), I hadn’t heard of the lion’s share of their guests.  Through these fresh voices, I found some new perspectives.
  2. Your Market Has Room for You: I don’t suspect that most of you will want to become online marketers or coaches. The space seems filled to the rim with talent. But the fact that I just now discovered about 30 new voices who are making online hay tells me that even this glutted market has space. Therefore, your market – whatever it is – has plenty of room for you, as long as you bring grit, determination, and your authentic self to the table.

To Wrap It Up…

Pick a discipline, create a process for it, and do it daily – for 15 minutes a day. Make sure that, even if you’re not specifically putting out 80% ‘generous value’ vs. 20% selling and pitching, that you tint everything you do with the generosity that the 80/20 rule represents.

 

Filed Under: Marketing Experiments, Mindset Experiments, Productivity Experiments Tagged With: 80/20 rule, marketing lessons, marketing productivity, online marketing, productivity lessons

April 9, 2015 by Brett Leave a Comment

6 Questions to Ask about Everything in Your Inbox

I’ve been attempting to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to ‘stress-free productivity’ for about 5 years now.

The gist of Allen’s approach is that your brain is a horrible place to keep track of your projects, tasks, and calendar specific reminders.

Therefore, we should all create what amounts to an external brain – an external hard-drive – that relieves us from the duty of having to remember what we’ll have to do tomorrow morning when we get into the office or the next time we run errands or to remind our colleague of the deliverable she owes us in a month.

One of the requirements of this methodology is to capture everything that comes our way and make sure it gets into our system, that we intentionally place that thing into our external brain so it doesn’t create that gnawing sense of ‘Isn’t there something I’m forgetting to do?’

Whether you go buy David Allen’s book or not (which was just updated and rereleased, we’ll assume without references to Palm Pilots and PDAs), there’s one very important element of his system that might help you take a step toward having less stress about the tasks and projects represented by the items in your inboxes (paper inboxes, voicemail inboxes, and email inboxes):

You must learn to capture all the work that comes into your world and handle it appropriately.

Here are six questions to help you at the tactical and mindset levels. They represent six habits that will help you deal appropriately with everything that comes into your inboxes (defined as any email, phone call, or piece of paper that comes your way and makes it into any of your inboxes).

1.  How do you define the ‘work’ represented by any given piece of paper, email, or voicemail that enters into your world?

Each piece of input requires you to assess what needs to be done. Every email is a request for your attention. You must define the work that each thing requires. The work might simply be to read a few paragraphs. The work might require an errand for your spouse or children. The work might be the next deliverable on a sales project. The work can be any number of things.

You must develop the habit of identifying what task or project is represented by each item that comes into view.

2. What does ‘done’ look like for that piece of work?

The second question is to ask what does ‘done’ look like for that piece of work. Is it a purchase at The Home Depot? Is it a call back to clarify a delegated task? Is it a difficult conversation or a reminder that you need to place in your calendar for 3 months from now?

You must develop the habit of defining what ‘done’ looks like for each thing in order to help you more easily close open task and project loops.

3. Who should be actually doing the work to get that thing done?

The third question requires you to remember that just because it comes into your world, a request for time or work doesn’t mean that you are responsible for that thing getting done. You must determine who should be doing this work and getting it to ‘done.’

If you’re like me, I assume that just because a task comes to me via email, that somehow I must actually do that task. That’s a time and energy-sucking perspective on one’s inbox. Just because it comes to you does not mean that you are ultimately responsible for getting it done.

You must develop the habit of delegating to the very best person in the world to get that work to completion.

4. How do you capture it and make sure it gets into the workflow?

After identifying the work represented, defining what ‘done’ is, and determining who is best responsible to do that work, you must make sure that you capture the task and put it into some kind of workflow or reminder system.

This piece is the most difficult part for me. Most pieces of work do NOT need to be done immediately. As a matter of fact, that is another killer of creative productivity. If you assume you must do each thing that comes into your inbox immediately, you will never pull yourself above administrative work into the world of creative work. Yet if you neglect the stuff in your inbox, your creative work will suffer because of the gnawing realization that you have a bunch of tasks that haven’t been defined sitting in your various inboxes.

Without diving too deeply into the weeds, you must set up a workable system that captures each piece of work and places it in your external brain and, thus, into your workflow. David Allen recommends having three basic places that you put your tasks:

  1. Lists separated by context: These would be lists such as ‘Errands’, ‘At Computer’, ‘Phone Calls’, ‘At Home’, ‘Colleague Name’ (for items you delegate and need to follow back up on), etc. The idea here is that when you find yourself in each of these contexts, you can pull out your list (or pull it up on your phone), and make a wise decision about which item you should tackle. You’ll make sure to review these lists regularly to make sure that every item is accounted for, finished, or deleted if you decide it’s not worth worrying about anymore (some stuff feels like necessary work and becomes expendable).
  2. A Tickler System: Some tasks don’t need to be done at any given time, but they do need to be done generally on a certain day or in a certain month, i.e. signing a child up for soccer might be 3 months out. Having a place where you can put tasks that don’t need to be addressed for a while gets them out of your brain and into a trusted system that you will check once that time period comes around (I have hanging folders set up by month, with individual 1-31 folders for when my tasks will need to be addressed or given a deadline within the specific month).
  3. A Calendar: The most specific place to capture a task is on your calendar. When you have appointments or tasks that need to be done on specific dates and at particular times, use your calendar.

Each of us work differently. Some prefer paper. Some prefer doing all things electronically. Either way, this habit of capturing each item and placing it into a consistent system is vital to make sure that you actually trust that you won’t forget or neglect tasks and following up on delegated items.

Develop the habit of putting each item into your system.

5. Can you get comfortable with deleting as much as possible?

This question addresses a mindset issue. David Allen’s system is wonderful, but my bone to pick is that many of us have so much input coming into our inboxes that any system starts to buckle under the pressure.

The only solution I’ve found is to ask the question, “Does anything need to be done with this email, piece of paper, phone call, at all?”  You must learn to throw stuff away and delete things in order to give yourself some freedom.

The habit of ‘saying no’ is vital to any personal productivity plan.

Say it often. Clarify your priorities and be violently loyal to those priorities. Slowly move things off your plate to others who would gladly take on those tasks and projects (if you’re in sales, this means having a target market and not selling to folks just because they can breathe and fog a mirror).

6. How comfortable are you with learning to capture ALL things?

This mindset is also important. Your ability to capture all things is directly proportionate to the decrease in stress in your life.

As you capture and delete or put into your system, you’ll feel a greater sense of control and peace. You will worry less about things going undone. You’ll be able to make better decisions about things that actually need to be done as you’ll become much more realistic about the time you have to get things done.

This final question represents the mindset habit of realizing that capturing all things eventually leads to doing fewer tasks.

It’s counter-intuitive, but the more you define all things, the less work you’ll feel responsible for. You will be forced to define your area of responsibility and make sure nothing that is NOT in your area of responsibility makes its way into your system.

This might sound selfish, but in the long run, everyone is served better when you are not worrying about doing things that you shouldn’t be worried about doing.

—————————–

This post represents my thoughts after listening to Todd Henry’s interview with David Allen (from Henry’s Accidental Creative Podcast)

 

Filed Under: Mindset Experiments, Productivity Experiments, Sales Experiments

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Hello!

Brett the sales experimenter and the challenge accepter Brett - Sales and Marketing Experimenter. I'm a reluctant sales professional. I didn't start out my career in sales and marketing, but I've grown to enjoy it. Here I discuss marketing, sales, productivity, and mindset experiments that will hopefully yield greater results and a more deeply satisfying sales career.

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Recent Posts

  • Is Sales Your Calling?
  • I Must Be Ruthless about My Time
  • 4 Ideas for Leaders with No Leadership Position
  • 10 Reasons Why Corporate Culture Determines Sales Success
  • 3 Productivity Lessons from the Movement Marketing Summit (So Far)
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Recent Posts

  • Is Sales Your Calling?
  • I Must Be Ruthless about My Time
  • 4 Ideas for Leaders with No Leadership Position
  • 10 Reasons Why Corporate Culture Determines Sales Success
  • 3 Productivity Lessons from the Movement Marketing Summit (So Far)

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