1. Only Positive. You know you aren’t perfect, so how come this boss won’t tell you how you can improve, or what didn’t go well in that last project. Then, when performance appraisal time comes, this is the boss who constantly delays and eventually skips giving you one. On one hand, it is nice to never be criticised, but you know you are missing some personal development insights.
2. Only Negative. I like this boss better than the ‘only-positive’ boss. You learn and grow, but it can be emotionally tough at times. Especially when you know you did something well and the boss ignores it. Maddening!
3. Say Nothing. This is probably the worst type of boss. You get no constructive feedback and no positive strokes when you do well. You just get to do your job. This is also the boss who is usually always too busy to talk and rarely walks around to casually find out what is going on and chat about things.

Constructive advice

Here are two tips so you don’t become a hard-to-read boss:

• Regularly review with each of your direct reports what is going well and what is not. Make sure time is allotted on a regular basis, like every two weeks or so.
• Initially serve up your feedback as observations and ask the direct report to give you his or her assessment. It is surprising what you sometimes learn if you listen carefully. Also, it allows you to confirm they really understand what didn’t go well and why.

Individuals more creative than groups

Or will it? New research conducted by Nicholas Kohn and Steven Smith from A&M University in Texas shows that group brainstorming is not nearly as effective at generating novel ideas as
most business people think. Two key findings arising out of the research show that people are likely to generate more ideas, and more creative and varied ideas, when they brainstorm on their own individually (individual participants produced 44% more ideas than groups).

In addition, an interesting thing happens when people brainstorm together in a group – instead of producing a range of different ideas, as one might expect, people in a group tend to mirror the ideas of others in the group. The net result is that the group produces fewer ideas and the ideas it does produce are less varied.

The need to conform

Researchers call this tendency to conform to one or few similar ideas ‘collaborative fixation’. As Nicholas Kohn explains, “Fixation to other people’s ideas can occur unconsciously and lead to you suggesting ideas that mimic your brainstorming partners. Thus, you potentially become less creative.” Such conformity could be the result of something known as ‘evaluation apprehension’, the fear that others will criticise your wildly creative, left-field ideas. Interestingly, the researchers also found that the rate of conformity increased as the number of ideas exposed increased. In addition, groups that were exposed to more ‘typical’ mainstream ideas produced fewer novel and unique ideas.

Taking a break helps

Another interesting finding that emerged from the study flies in the face of normal brainstorming practice which throws people together in a room to ‘thrash it out’ for hours. “There is a decline in the number of ideas over time,” say the researchers. They found that when groups were given a break in the middle of the brainstorming session, it appeared to revive them and stimulate a fresh outpouring of ideas.

Designation: CEO, Verimark

Sales Organisation & Distribution: Products are still marketed through DRTV, but can be purchased in the stores of most of the large retail groups, as well as through Verimark-branded stores located throughout the country and in the major shopping centres.

Offering: Innovative products in health & beauty, homeware, cookware, cleaning, DIY, automotive, toys and exercise & fitness.

Career: After completing his articles, Michael joined his brother and a 4-year old Verimark with an annual turnover of R1 million, as financial director and 50% shareholder. Together they grew the business until Michael became the sole shareholder and CEO 18 years ago. Verimark was listed on the JSE in 2005. In the past financial year it delivered its best sales performance in its 34-year history, with sales totalling R461,7 million and 144,1% growth in profit before tax to R49,3 million.

Verimark pioneered Direct Response Television (DRTV) selling in South Africa. Talk us through the sales process in this medium. Initially, before we had the extensive retail network that we have today, DRTV was responsible for generating 90% of our sales. The key was to take the viewer from a position of total ignorance about the product, to a buying position where they would pick up the phone and give their credit card details to purchase the product. To do this we concentrated on the AIDA marketing technique, which stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. You need to start off by grabbing people’s attention, then build on this attention to create an interest, which should be converted into a desire to buy the product, and finally action, where the customer picks up the phone to buy.

What are the ingredients for success? Scripting is incredibly important, and is something I have had the opportunity to learn about over 18 years. During this time I’ve been closely involved in writing the scripts for the DRTV campaigns. Scripting is a highly specialised field but there are some basic ingredients. The most important thing, and I think this applies to any sales pitch, is to get the sales message across in a simple way. Don’t use drawn out, over-complicated language. Say what you want to say clearly and simply, in a way that the customer can relate to.

The other critical factor is demonstration. Customers need to see the ‘wow’ factor in the product, and the best way to achieve this is to show them what it can do. But you have to carefully select what you are going to demo. One example from our product range is the Bauer pan demonstration, where the lady blows the pancake off the pan to show its non-stick ability.

You’re a CA by training. Did sales come naturally to you or was it something you had to learn? In the early days of the business I was the finance and operations guy, but then I bought my brother out 18 years ago and became CEO. It was then that I realised I would have to dramatically shift my skills set and start to learn how to sell. I went to many overseas exhibitions to experience different selling techniques and I learnt a tremendous amount from the American ‘pitchmen’. These are the masters of persuasion and have sales pitching down to a fine art – they’re the people from whom I learnt how to
take consumers from total ignorance to buying action. They really understand about presentation to an audience, and how important it is to watch your audience closely and respond to the real-time feedback you are getting from them. I also learnt from them the importance of immersing yourself in a product, and really getting to know it, before preparing the pitch script.

Your advice on what to avoid while selling? Creating a perception that you or your product can’t meet. You should never over-promise. Allow your passion to come through but sell the product on its own merit. A huge part of Verimark’s success has been selecting products of a high quality that are unique. When the product is truly good, you don’t have to oversell it.

A recent study of the experiences of former executives of Fortune companies and start-ups who captained the ship through the ‘70s stockmarket crash to the ‘90s dot-com bubble, reveals some useful home truths.

The perfect storm

They report a range of signs that it’s time to rethink how your company sells:

• Tenders appear to be an exercise to justify decisions that are already made, and not a serious opportunity to win the business
• Key customers slash budgets or rationalise their number of suppliers
• Deals you thought were ‘hot to trot’ go ‘off the boil’
• Your pipeline bloats with opportunities stuck in a holding pattern, with the seller not achieving any forward progress for several months
• Decisions become more complex, involving more people and taking longer to get across the line
• Price and risk mitigation become main topics for discussion in the negotiation phase
• Sales are for amounts far less than forecast
• Sales people spend time on low-yield activities like prospecting because the quality and quantity of leads from marketing is too low or dries up
• Your forecast is murky when you look out further than six months
• You win deals, but can’t repeat success across the sales force
• You lose deals and don’t know why, or when they became irrecoverable
• Good sales people bail out into management roles in other departments or leave the company altogether

Typical Reaction

Asked how their organisations dealt with these challenges, they said the typical gag reflex is to:

• Spend more on advertising
• Cut back on sales people
• Cut back on training and coaching
• Cut back on pricing
• Tell sales people to “work harder and smarter”

So what happens next?

• A downward spiral commences
• Managers focus on activity metrics and demand more calls, more leads, more proposals
• Sales people chase anything that moves, filling their funnel with unqualified, low potential deals to meet the activity targets
• Forecasts fill with fiction
• Managers start weighting the forecast report, which sends the message they don’t trust their team
• Sales people invite managers to help close their big deals, knowing that if the manager can’t win, the sales person is off the hook
• Customers invite managers to attend the final pitch, knowing they can approve larger discounts
• Coaching stops as managers don the cape of ‘SuperRep’
• Non-standard promises made in the heat of battle are off menu for what the delivery team actually does, establishing a gap between the customer’s expectations and what they then experience
• Repeat business drops as promises are not met
• Margin and market erosion begins
• Managers focus on even more activity metrics, more calls, more leads, more proposals
• The downward spiral gets deeper and deeper

If any of these danger signs look familiar, you’re in good company. Most executives who turned their companies around in former recessions first fell into the same traps because they represent a natural response in times of uncertainty. People focus on risk and get tactical. But these same executives report the secret to pulling out of the nosedive is to act against the natural impulse, keep your head, and take a contrarian path. Those that did so achieved stability and even growth while their competitors fell by the wayside.

Five dangerous mistakes

They cite the five most dangerous mistakes as:

1. Ignoring the problem. Fear and panic can cause indecision. When they do, business leaders can fail to evaluate options rigorously, and so make inappropriate decisions to maintain the status quo. Poor choices – or safe choices made too late – cause a company to go backwards. When the warning signs appear, take swift action.
2. Increasing advertising. For fast moving consumer goods, brand advertising can sway preference and so take market share away from competitors in the short-term. But in complex B2B sales, advertising does not lift short-term revenue because institutional buying decisions require a protracted period of assessment that outlasts most advertising campaigns. So don’t advertise and expect an impact on B2B sales this year. Instead, convert advertising budgets into ‘demand creation’ programmes that turn buyers with latent needs into buyers with active interest. Also, PIMS Associates1 reports how companies that maintain advertising presence end up growing faster over the long-term than firms that drop off the customer’s radar, seemingly swallowed by the downturn.
3. Cutting the price. Buyers in a tight market will naturally gravitate to low prices. But this simply reduces your margins, which must be paid for by cutbacks to operating expenses elsewhere. It leads to short-term gain but long-term pain; the loss of sustainability. Conversely in the B2B space, higher prices positioned as necessary to reduce the customer’s risk, actually play better to executive perception than ‘getting a cheap deal’. Sometimes putting your price up is the best way to build your market with the right customers who can help you grow, not slow.
4. Freezing sales expenses. Putting a hold on sales costs such as travel, entertainment and training are typical areas targeted by nervous CFOs. But a study by Mercer reports: “Only 27% of companies that indulged in intensive cost cutting were growing as a result of their pains.”2 As Tom Peters observed in his book The Circle of Innovation: “You can’t shrink your way to greatness.”3
5. Pushing more calls. Pressuring sales people into making more intrusions on the same number of prospects actually reduces sales. Speaking on studies of leading companies across thousands of sales people for three decades, Neil Rackham (author of SPIN Selling and Rethinking the Sales Force) concludes: “The least successful people are the ones making the most calls. Increasing the call rate results in fewer orders, not more.”4

Five winning ideas

Spotting and dealing with the danger signs is one part of the equation. The other is engaging in new activities that drive success. Past recession-beating executives suggest the following:

• Create value. A tight market will change the priorities of your target customers. As they face new challenges, they look for answers. So equipping your sales force to shift from ‘value communicators’ to ‘value creators’ becomes a key part of your growth strategy. The ‘talking brochure’ type of selling no longer works because it adds no value. By thoroughly doing your homework on target accounts, anticipating the issues they’re about to deal with, and approaching them with answers even their own people don’t have, you stand out in the crowd, and show your organisation to be relevant. The goal is to make the type of sales calls your customers would want to write a cheque for because value was exchanged. When you end a sales call that produces no excitement and leads to no mutual commitments to move forward, it’s a sales call that fails both companies at the table.
• Chunk your offer. When customers face uncertainty, fewer high-cost projects clear the launch pad. Therefore, helping clients acquire your offerings in smaller modules that can be signed off at lower levels of the organisation has been shown to produce more revenue, as well as serving as a foot in the door for expansion and consolidation when the market rebounds. This doesn’t mean the product manager needs to invent anything new. It means sales people need to be selective about what chunks of their offering they emphasise and package to each customer. Consider trimming mentions of aspects of your product or service that aren’t core to the client need (the ‘nice to haves’). At the same time, emphasise ‘must have’ features that add to the client experience, sell them value and even justify a premium. Or seek out partner products to combine with yours in dynamic new ways. Involve your customers when refining your messaging. Enlist their guidance and engender a ‘we’re all in this together’ esprit de corps. When doing so avoid any language that smacks of desperation. They must understand your motive is in placing their needs first.
• Map your funnel. Gain a laser focus on the dynamics of your sales funnel. Enlightened leaders use difficult times to take stock of the mechanics of where sales come from and how to improve the system they pass through. They map their sales process by getting answers to the following:

1. What problem do we solve better than anyone else (differentiation)?
2. Who has that problem and where do we find them (targeting)?
3. What are the cognitive steps those prospects go through from being unaware of their problem, to being a satisfied customer (buying journey)?
4. What ‘ah-hah’ moments propel a prospect from one stage in that journey to the next (sub-sales)?
5. How can Marketing and Sales help those sub-sales happen (roles)?
6. What does average, fast and slow look like through each stage (velocity)?
7. How many move forward and how many leak from the funnel, at each stage (planned attrition)?
8. What is the average contract size (revenue)?

When you know these metrics, you’re able to start with the revenue figure you need to achieve this year, next year and the year after that, and can calculate backwards to know how many opportunities you need stacked at each stage of the sales funnel, each month, for the right number and value of deals to close each quarter. This informs how many new leads are needed monthly, and going back even further, how many new contact names Marketing needs to start connecting with at the very start of the demand creation process. It also informs when hiring is needed to keep reps at the optimum person-to-customer ratio, and can track forward to show when new problems and prospects will be needed to offset peaking in the initial target market.

• Circle the wagons. In a recession when pickings are lean, you will face increased assaults on your customer base by hungry competitors. So protect your clients – especially those that provide high margin. Identify the clients you cannot afford to lose, and initiate specific programmes to retain their loyalty. Get away from vague solutions and get known for delivering tangible results. This means agreeing outcome metrics for the work you perform, and showing your accountability for achieving these. It infers an agreement with these clients that you will track and communicate the value delivered, and deal with any shortfalls. 2010 data from executive buyers who swapped suppliers indicates that in most cases they didn’t churn because of price or any particular dissatisfaction, but because they just didn’t know if money spent with existing suppliers was well spent… because nobody had bothered to close the loop with them after making the initial sale.
• Coach performance. Doing this is difficult if sales managers do not go into the field to observe their sales people in front of customers. They cannot divine their team members’ strengths and improvement needs from behind a desk. Here are suggestions successful managers use to drive growth:

1. Map the activities that help customers move through the funnel. Agree with sales people what actions they can take to achieve those progressions.
2. Focus them on achieving this, along with the qualification, planning and presentation needed at each stage.
3. Give new hires specific but realistic metrics to achieve that. Take into account the fact that the average ramp-up time is now 7,4 months. Catch them doing things right and reinforce the positive. When improvement is needed, provide context, examples and suggestions.
4. For experienced sales people, focus performance coaching on the 60% of sales people in the middle of the bell curve (not the top 20% and not the bottom 20%). The middle of the bell is where the biggest gains will be made.
5. Set clear expectations for an accompaniment day and agree that the sales person will remain in control so customers don’t staple themselves to the manager. Managers should never hand out their business card or be seen approving any decision – they defer everything to the sales person.
6. Brief before and debrief after every call. What outcome do we want? Why would they write a cheque for this call? What went well? What could have gone better? Managers offer motivation and direction as needed. Always gain and give commitments and follow through.
7. After spending whole days with team members, trends will be spotted. Common needs are best dealt with during sales meetings in a peer setting. Every sales meeting should include a training component based on observations in the field. Push the administration and company news to emails. Use face-to-face time with sales people to hone their skills.
8. Run a quarterly performance appraisal one-on-one and always in person (never via webcam or telephone). Review performance to date. Plan what the sales person needs to create a sustainable, rhythmic approach to revenue attainment. Direct them. Enable them.
9. As unique needs arise, partner with human capital specialists and training departments as appropriate (but don’t abdicate the training role in sales meetings). The argument that sales managers must have first been successful sales people is less true than saying they need to understand the levers of sales performance, and be trained to identify gaps and coach their sales people to greatness. This requires deliberate, systematic process thinking skills; a blend of engineer, analyst and psychologist. There is increasing evidence that the role of sales management favours staff with a left-brain bias where the dominant traits are reasoning, speech, writing and number skills. This is in contrast to the right-brain processes of creativity, imagination, quick wits and visual processing that are more suited to the sales person. It doesn’t mean sales people should not be promoted to the management role, only that in the absence of properly profiling if a candidate exhibits the right behavioural fit to the role requirements, doing so blindly can be a risky proposition where mistakes are magnified by the number ofpeople under each sales manager’s stewardship.

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel

To avoid reinventing the wheel, learning from executives who weathered past recessions is a sound approach to reducing risk. In your own organisation, your alumni, or your online social network, there may reside active or emeritus officers with deep experience to share. Talk to them. Pick their brains. But one thing is certain when an ailing economy mimics a black hole: piecemeal remedies fail to achieve escape velocity. Cutting back on cost, though logical, is the opposite of what has pulled businesses through recessions in the past. Increased investment in the sales process, governed by greater discipline, is a more reliable approach for achieving sustainable revenue growth, even in difficult times.

Notes
1. What Strategic Investments Should You Make During A Recession To Gain Competitive
Advantage in the Recovery? by Keith Roberts, Journal of Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 31, Issue 4.
2. Wall Street Journal, Europe
3. The Circle of Innovation, by Tom Peters, Random House
4. Strategies for Hard Times, by Neil Rackham, Huthwaite

Presentations are one of the most direct, intimate and personal extensions of your brand. They are the heart and soul of all sales pitches and the foundations of excellent leadership. To truly do your brand justice; to have your organisation represented in the market by confident, competent speakers; these are the guidelines to prioritise:

1. No mission statement, no presentation

Write down, in one clear sentence, the goal you hope to achieve with your presentation. If the entire talk boils down to, ‘Make my prospect see that dealing with us would be better than dealing with the competitor,’ then that is your mission statement.

Until you’ve done this, you’re not ready to begin work; what exactly would you be working on?
This guideline also minimises your workload by keeping you from developing extraneous content (See the Oxford Concise, under ‘Waffle’). If you’re focused on your mission statement from the outset, your presentation will be tighter, more professional and in line with your objectives.

2. Do the ‘who cares?’ test, then perform surgery

One of the most common errors in corporate presenting, and one which is particularly endemic to sales presenters, is giving all of the facts. Dating back to the dawn of time. One grand data dump. Kaboom!

They are not necessary. Facts are merely there to support your message; nothing more. Present all of them and your speech will become a litany of squiggly lines and incomprehensible graphs, or even worse: a history lesson on your company. Audiences and prospects don’t need every dreary dot and dash. History lessons don’t sell products. Audiences need to be told what it all means and then persuaded that your ideas for action represent their best option. Informing is only one part of your job. Persuasion is the balance. Think of information as your tool-kit. Think of messages as the structure you’re trying to build. They don’t need to see your tools; they want to play on the completed jungle-gym. That’s the interesting part.

3. Turn it into a conversation

You’ve prepared your presentation. Now prepare the delivery, because that is what your audiences and prospects will ultimately experience. A lecturing style is out. A conversational style is in. And always ensure that you’re on their side. Replace, ‘You must,’ with ‘We will.’ You don’t want your presentation to degenerate into a ‘me versus the audience’ dynamic.

Also, remember that if you haven’t delivered it out loud, it’s not yet ready for a live audience. Ever tried to tell a joke, reached the three-quarter point, then realised you’d ruined the set-up? The same can happen in a boardroom pitch with your critical point… unless you’ve practiced delivering it out loud a few times.

4. Make it shorter

Your presentation is sitting at thirty minutes? Great. Now try to get it down to twenty. The more you can condense your ideas, the more succinctly you can express them, the clearer they will be. Draw them out and their impact will be dissipated by the ‘fat’ surrounding the ‘meat.’ With effort, you can always make a presentation shorter, and it will almost invariably be stronger for it. Persuasion happens swiftly, not by the weight of a thousand words.

5. Prepare the least number of visuals possible

Think about this logically. If you were shown 35 charts in a presentation, would you remember them? What if you were shown one single, emotive image of, say, an atomic explosion, or an extreme close-up of an orange being squeezed and the juices squirting out? Think you’d remember that?

Charts and graphs are great for creating seat-zombies. Emotive visuals, which illustrate a point, are the way to go when you want them to stay awake and buy from you. And the less visuals you have, the more each image will stand out and be memorable.

I am immediately not interested. If what you sell for a living means you have to pick up the phone – either to set appointments, call prospects back, or return calls to clients, then you have to learn how to sound natural and avoid putting your prospects, gatekeepers or assistants on notice that you’re trying to sell something. And the way you do that is by learning how to sound like you’re not selling anything, and you do that by learning how to disarm prospects, sound natural yet professional, and be friendly without being phony. Use these five techniques to not only sound natural on the phone, but to also close more business:

1. Always use the prospect’s first name

I know that there are two schools of thought on this, one being that you should show respect for someone you don’t know and use either Mr. or Mrs., but I don’t agree. I think you can show respect for someone by being courteous and professional, and I think you’re going to make a lot more progress if you use a person’s first name. Here are the two reasons to do so:

• First, by using a person’s first name you aren’t immediately signalling that you’re a sales person! I mean how do you feel when someone you don’t know calls you and addresses you by “Mr.” or “Mrs.”? Also, when you use a person’s first name, you are starting the call equal, without giving them all the power.
• Second, everyone likes the sound of their own name. In fact, psychologists have found that everyone’s favourite word is their first name! By starting with that you are immediately making a connection, and a personal one at that.

2. Be polite

You’d be surprised by how many sales reps still try to trick or get around gatekeepers and assistants, and how many are even rude in doing so. Always, always use please and thank you when speaking with anyone over the phone (or in person for that matter).

Words like “please” and “thank you” go a long way when trying to make a connection with a prospect, and they work especially well when you’re trying to get through to a prospect. Examine your current scripts now and do all you can to insert the proper courtesies wherever you can.

3. Be brief

Most reps go into pitch mode the moment they reach their prospect and it’s no surprise they can’t wait to get them off the phone. I review scripts all the time that essentially read the company’s brochure to the prospect the moment they reach them.

You can turn that around and sound so much better by briefly delivering your presentation and checking in with your prospect. Try things like:

• “Briefly, (prospect), the reason I’m calling is that we’ve been working with many companies like yours, and I just wanted to see if we can help you as well. Can I ask you just a couple of questions to see if we’d be a fit for you?”
• “(Prospect), you probably get a lot of calls like these, so I’ll be brief. I’ll just ask you a couple of quick questions and if I think we can save you between 15% to 20% I’ll let you know. If not, we’ll part friends, is that okay?”

Get the idea?

4. Make a connection

This is one of the easiest of all and it’s a great way to get your prospect talking. All you do is find something that you know is affecting your other clients (like new laws in their industry), and ask how it’s affecting them as well. Try:

• “You know (prospect), a lot of my clients have told me of the changes they’re having to make because of (the new law). How is that affecting you?”
• “(Prospect), what are you planning to feature at the September trade show?”

By addressing something that they are dealing with now, you can instantly make a connection and get valuable information. Warning: you have to fit this in after you’ve established rapport, and you have to address something that is relevant to them.

5. Listen more

This may not sound like a way to sound natural on the phone, but believe me, it’s probably the most important of all. First of all, most sales reps are so busy talking that their prospect has turned off long ago. They are just waiting for an appropriate pause to get rid of them.

By listening you actually create space for your prospect to speak (and to think), and because of that you are allowing the conversation to flow. When the prospect has a chance to get their thoughts and feedback out, they feel comfortable with you. And that is the best way for the conversation to unfold naturally. Hit your mute button after you ask a question and count three 1 000s to see how well it works.

Make connections, close deals 

There you have it – five easy ways to sound more natural on the phone. The good news is that they are easy to implement, and, once you do, you’ll make more connections and you’ll close more business.
Try them today!

You are invited to a meeting with a new account interested in your firm’s services. The person with whom you initially meet is not the decision-maker. This “influencer” wants you to bring them a proposal, so that they can take your recommendations to the person who has decision authority. You properly request a second meeting to include this person; that access is denied. You are told, “they want me to gather the information.” Or, “that isn’t going to be necessary”. Or, “they are too busy”.

Or…. any one of a number of other lame explanations.

You are left with two options

You can go ‘conventional,’ meaning that you do as you are instructed, and deliver your proposal to a person who is not making the decision. Or, you can go ‘nuclear’. You can simply go over the person’s head, and attempt to access the decision-maker yourself.

Which is a better strategy? Well, that depends. 

First, let’s look at the easier, conventional approach.

If you do as you are told, your proposal will be placed in the hands of a buyer who never meets you, knows next to nothing about your company’s value proposition, has a different set of issues than your influencer, gets virtually none of their questions answered, and makes a poorly-informed decision based solely on price. Put another way, this exercise has now become a waste of your valuable time, as you have less than a 15% likelihood of a ‘yes’.

Of course, there is one nice benefit – you avoid upsetting anyone. Second, let’s consider the Nuclear Option. If you essentially ignore the request of your influencer and attempt to deal directly with the decision-maker, you will probably offend your initial contact and impede whatever slim chance you initially had of doing business with the account. That’s a big risk to take. Under what circumstances is the risk worth it?

Do you go big or go home?

The following factors tend to favour the Nuclear Option:

• A large, complex sales opportunity. High-cost, complicated decisions require your having access to anyone with a vested interest in the outcome. In such cases, you cannot serve the account properly without this access.
• The level of your initial contact. Some ‘influencers’ have more of it than others. A manager or higher-level influencer has considerably more clout than an administrative assistant. The role of the influencer is therefore critical. A person acting simply as a delivery mechanism for your proposal isn’t going to help you much.
• Your relationship with the influencer. A cooperative partner is a valuable asset; an antagonistic stone-waller is a hindrance to both you and the business that employs them.
• The competitive playing field. Are you the only option being considered, or are you up against other firms bidding for the same opportunity?
• Lastly, and more importantly, what do you have to lose? If the answer is ’nothing’, then the decision to go Nuclear is made for you.

If you decide to go Nuclear, there is a way to minimise collateral damage: begin the process by writing a ‘following up’ letter to the decision-maker after your initial meeting with the influencer. In this correspondence, review the key issues that you discussed with the influencer. Bullet and bold these items. Ask the decision-maker to review the list. Let them know that you will follow up with them on a specific date to discuss these points and answer any questions they have. Lastly, and this is critical: copy the influencer on the letter.

Yes, you may get a phone call from the influencer, and yes, the tone of the person may not be what you would like. However, if your motives are noble – and, by the way, they are – this is usually a sound, and largely safe, strategy.

Will good sense prevail?

What you are banking on – and, in my experience, what you can expect – is for the following sequence to occur:

• The decision-maker reviews your list of key points
• The decision-maker does not agree with the points shared with you by your influencer, or sees that some critical items were left out of the mix
• The decision-maker contacts you to discuss these items.

This sequence is what should have happened to begin with, because it was always in the account’s best interests to involve the other parties. When this happens, everyone wins, including your influencer. You produce a proposal that reflects everyone’s needs, the account gets a set of recommendations that are customised to multiple concerns, and the influencer is no longer solely accountable for managing the entire decision process. Finally, in those cases – and, rest assured, they will happen – where you ruffle a few feathers, it is worthwhile to remember the old Jesuit saying: “It is better to ask forgiveness than permission.”

It isn’t easy to develop the skills necessary to engage in a strategic dialogue with C-Level executives. But there are some things that you can do to make it a lot easier – and to enjoy much greater success when you do.

Know How You Create Value

C-Level executives are consistently short on one thing: time. They are protective of their time because they have so little of it when you compare it to the demands of their organisation and its stakeholders, or against the results that they need to produce. This means you have limited time to get your C-Level executive’s attention. You are expected to know exactly how you create value for companies like theirs, and you are expected to have some understanding of what you can do for them – even before you speak with them.

This isn’t always about research; it’s about knowing who you are, what you do, and how you make a difference. When you call on high-level executives, you don’t have the same time to build rapport as you might if you were calling on someone lower in an organisation. Someone lower in the organisation may need more time for rapport building because you are going to work closely with them should they choose to move forward with you.

You also don’t have time to fish around for ideas that might indicate some dissatisfaction. That might work if you have time, but you don’t have that luxury here. You have to know how and what you can do to make a difference. This is why I believe it is a mistake to believe that you should always enter an organisation at the top (this is, of course, a generalisation and all generalisations are lies). You must be able to ask questions that demonstrate you know where the issues are, and that you know how to increase revenue and profitability, and reduce costs (all dissatisfaction ultimately rolls up into one of these categories).You need to know how to create value and get to the point.

Possess the Business Acumen to See Th rough Their Eyes

To sell and engage an organisation at this level, you have to possess the business acumen necessary to see the business through your C-Level executive’s eyes.

You may not ever be the subject matter expert that your C-Level executive is when it comes to their business, but you had better be able to quickly comprehend the big moving pieces that you touch. You have to understand what drives their business so you can relate what you do to the business. You don’t have to have a perfect understanding, but you should know how they look at their business. There are lots of C-Level executives who will be willing to give you an education (or the rest of an education), but you have to have a basic fundamental understanding of how business works so you can keep up; this means you need business acumen.
Your C-Level executive is interested in talking about business. You have to be able to keep up.

Prove You Will Own the Outcome

C-Level executives work for all kinds of shareholders. They have their management team to serve. They have their employees to serve.

They have clients to serve. They have a board of directors to serve. The last thing in the world that they need is another dependent. To get a C-Level executive’s attention and be useful to them, you have to prove that you are going to own the outcome. This is what they want from you, and this is what they are willing to pay you for doing it. To be interesting and useful to a C-Level executive, you are going to have to demonstrate that you are going to own the outcome that you sell. They aren’t hiring a sales person to work for them; they are hiring a manager who will own the result and do what is necessary to ensure that it is achieved. Explain that you are going to own the outcome, and that you will be there to see the objective achieved.

Own the Next Steps

What you want from a C-Level executive is permission to proceed. You own the next step. All you need from them is their blessing to move forward. If they have to do work for you to move forward, it isn’t going to get done and they won’t need you. Instead, you are going to end up with unanswered voicemails, unanswered emails, and a serious sense of disappointment.

If you need information, ask your C-Level executive whom you should work with to get it. Then get the information. If you need access to people, ask the C-Level executive to forward an email that you send to the parties you need to engage with. You aren’t interesting and useful as a dependent. You are useful and interesting as someone who is going to get things done while they move on to other priorities. You have to take initiative. You do the
work.

You own the next step.

At KreditInform, the credit management solutions company I founded with my partners, all senior managers were part of a super bonus scheme. The company shareholders worked it out as follows: we identified the top executives who had the greatest impact on profitability, and we agreed to give away a certain percentage of the company profits to the management team.

Mitigating the risk

The obvious risk was that as soon as these bonuses were paid out, the recipients would resign – not an unusual scenario in the sales environment, where people are constantly on the move. To counter that, we implemented a programme that would encourage our managers to grow and mature with the business. We took a certain percentage of the profits each year and put this into a trust managed by external trustees.

Everyone who qualified for the super bonus had a say on incentive payouts, so it was a democratic and highly representative set-up. We would say we expected margins of x amount, and we had a budget of y. When that
was attained and exceeded, a percentage of that amount (over and above their normal salaries and incentives) would be paid to the executives who were part of the scheme, but it would be paid into the trust on their behalf.

The shareholders and senior management would from time to time be in a position to bring other executives on board, provided the existing members were in agreement. Eventually we had in excess of ten executives who were sharing – at different percentages– the amount of money invested in the trust. This was paid out in tranches as the investment matured over time, and remained in place for the life of the business. When KreditInform was eventually sold, the trust was liquidated and all members were paid out in line with their shareholding.

The payoff

This super bonus incentive vehicle did some extraordinary things for the organisation. It instilled a great deal of belief in the leadership on the part of the executives who were eligible. They knew that we were not in business just to make a short-term profit for ourselves. The trust enabled us to demonstrate that we were prepared to share a significant portion of the profits with people whom we recognised as drivers of the business.

Because we paid this incentive over a period of three years, job hopping was curtailed. It’s more difficult to exit a company when you know you are leaving behind R100 000 in the kitty for someone else.

As the shareholders of the business, the leadership team had to think very carefully about which levels of staff we allowed into the incentive scheme. But the reality is that as the business grew bigger and bigger, and profits soared, we opened it up to more employees. We were careful though, about the number of years they had worked for the company and their level of seniority. We brought on board people who had demonstrated loyalty because we wanted to show them that we appreciated their commitment.

As a result, we had many senior level executives who stayed with the organisation for years. They were drawn to a programme that enabled them to share in the profits, and they understood why these would be distributed over time, as opposed to being awarded immediately.

Setting the tone of the busines

This type of scheme can be implemented in any market. Even in an economic downturn, a business has to make a profit to survive. Sharing those profits, though they may be less than they used to be, actually focuses your
entire management team on increasing the business’s profitability. It’s common sense.

Although the profit motive should not be the number one driver of the business at the expense of the customer experience, as a motivator it can ensure that your customers derive the best benefits because your team will go the extra mile to close the sale and ensure customer satisfaction. It’s also worth remembering that senior executives set the tone of the business – they create the corporate culture. When they go the extra mile, when they enter the business and commit to a long-term career, they encourage others to do the same.

This can dramatically lower the employee and executive churn rate, which is good news for any organisation. If you are thinking about implementing a super bonus incentive scheme, make sure you begin by defining the objective. It may be to reward longevity, or it may be to recognise those who are maximising profit. It’s imperative to define the objective so that you can balance the reward appropriately.

In the B2B arena, he says, surveys should not be limited to satisfaction. Instead, ask things like: Were you tickled pink? Did we wow you? Was this a positive, memorable experience in some way?

“Assuming you don’t have a monopoly on the market,” Liebenthal asks, “what goes on in the minds of your loyal customers who consistently return to purchase from you? What about those who buy from you less frequently? And what about those who buy once and never return?”

Liebenthal notes that Gallup Organisation used various techniques to probe the concept of customer satisfaction. Their studies delineated two types of satisfaction: rational and emotional.

• Rationally satisfied customers described themselves as satisfied with a company’s goods or services, but had no evident emotional connection
• Emotionally satisfied customers said they were satisfied, but the difference was that they also exhibited feelings of confidence, pride, passion and integrity for a company and its goods or services.

Customer Surveys

Some of the most popular online tools are SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, and PollDaddy. Surveys are often plagued with biases and inaccuracies. The really big problem is that the information they omit or obscure can be what’s most central to increasing customer loyalty. Here’s what to look out for:

• Augment satisfaction surveys with other measurement techniques. Measuring from a variety of perspectives with a variety of methods helps to confirm or deny the validity of your survey.
• Keep this question top of mind: Is our survey measuring how well we do on a survey or is it actually measuring the feelings and needs of our real customers when they are in real situations with our company?
• Be objective. Survey questions should be crafted to remove bias and reflect customers’ true concerns. They should be conducted by outside firms to ensure data accuracy. If this is not an option, work with a different department in your company to identify problems and gaps.
• Design your surveys and findings with the goal of facilitating next steps. Combine qualitative insights with quantitative facts and incorporate media clips, quotes and anything else that will help your team decide how to move forward with its customer satisfaction strategy.

Other Ways to Measure Satisfaction

Liebenthal advises companies to avoid measuring the entire customer experience in one fell swoop with one “does it all” method. Instead break the customer experience into distinct lenses, touchpoints and customer segments. “Try to reach customers before, during, and after their interactions with you,” he says. “Use methods relevant to each lens, touchpoint and segment.”

Feedback Cards: Feedback cards are cheap and allow customers to vent.

Interviews: Interviews explore rather than rate an experience. They allow you to probe the customer experience.

Mystery Shopping: Mystery shopping requires a company outsider to act as a customer. The ‘outsider’ then documents his/ her experience.

Experience Auditing: Experience auditing is a form of mystery shopping that involves the use of personas, scenarios and objectives to document and measure the variety of communication cues exchanged
between staff and customers.

Monitoring: Monitoring can be directed at phone, email, and chat communications. It gives a real-world glimpse into interactions between customers and front-line staff.

Performance Analysis: Performance analysis examines the real-world interactions between companies and customers, but with the use of criteria that has been detailed and vetted for each type of interaction that a company has with its customers.

Factors to Consider:

• How are you collecting data?
• Are your customers comfortable with giving you information?
• What are you doing with the data you are collecting?