Leadership Book Review: Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?

Two months ago, I was asked to give a 45-minute presentation to 125 aspiring leaders at General Electric. As I prepared for the talk, I thought about the most important leadership lessons I had learned over the last twenty years. One of the most important lessons, and now a pillar of my leadership philosophy, is to be authentic. 

I sheepishly have to admit that this was not always the case. Early in my career I developed a misguided belief that I could be someone different at home than at work. This is not uncommon and often a symptom of early career maturity.  Eventually I found this exhausting, inconsistent and deceitful. 

In “Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?” Drs. Gareth Jones and his partner Rob Goffe present their findings on leadership from research they conducted over 25 years. Their conclusion is that eventually all leadership styles become fads and are unsustainable. Their solution is that the individual leaders must be themselves – authentic. 

 

3 Principles of Authenticity

Drs. Jones & Goffe invite us to be more ourselves, but with skill.  Here are general guidelines to help us get started:

1. Consistency between words and actions: Do what you say you’re going to do, all the time.  Trust is delicate. It takes repetition to build, but only one move to destroy it. This is a good reason why you cannot be two personalities—one at work and one at home—because eventually the inconsistencies materialize according to your nature. 
2. Provide a common thread in your role performance: Be consistent in your behavior, weaknesses and strengths. Unlike other leadership books, “Why Should Anyone Be Led By You?” encourages us to be vulnerable with our weaknesses, as long as they are not detrimental. Use common sense; be practically truthful, mindful that being authentic does not mean you share all your character defects. Yet, stay humble enough to let others see that you too are in a development path and do not have all the answers. 
3. Be comfortable with your origins: Remain true to your roots and whole persona.  We are all unique human beings, with our own life stories. Even if you had alternative beginnings than what you perceive to be the mainstream, be open about those. Being transparent will help people connect with you at a deeper level. 

Application of the Book

At first blush, you may dismiss the book’s insight as a “no-brainer.” On the surface the concept is simple.  But its simplicity, like a simple diet, is only realized by living it out every day. 

Today, I find myself extremely transparent at work and consistent with my character at home.  I’m comfortable with the non-duplicity this affords me. I believe that this has also helped me in my career, managing large, matrix and remote teams. It’s also helped me live a more fulfilling live, in and out of work. 

This book review will be published in the May issue of PM360. 

 

Related articles

• To Be Authentic, Look Beyond Yourself (blogs.hbr.org)
• Authentic Leadership: What value do you want to create in the world today? (beatrizadamsgarcia.com)
• What Women Know About Leadership That Men Don’t (ceo.com)

Sales Book Review : The Challenger Sale – Taking Control of the Customer Conversation

What are the characteristics of the high performance sales representative in the complex B2B environment?  To answer that, think of the sales representative that you seek advice from or would drop your next appointment to meet with.  If you need more than one hand to count these professionals, consider yourself lucky.  Then consider how you can help your organization develop these types of representatives to sell your product. 

The Research behind the book

In 2010, The Corporate Executive Board Company— where Mathew Dixon and Brent Adamson, authors of The Challenger Sale, consult — commissioned a study of 2,400 B2B decision-makers to understand what contributed to customer loyalty.  Surprisingly, 53% of the drivers were attributed to the sales experience, a category dependent on an individual sales representative’s performance.  In a nut shell, customers buy B2B products and services from representatives who “make them smarter.”  That means they provide uniquely valuable perspectives on the market, educate on new issues and outcomes, navigate the risk/reward trade-offs, and gain widespread support from all stakeholders.  These findings led to further research in order to understand what types of representatives performed best in B2B scenarios. 

Analyzing research on over 6,000 sales professionals, Dixon and Adamson developed three key findings:

1.       There are five types of sales representatives:

• The Relationship Builder: Gets along with everyone, builds strong coalitions
• The Hard Worker: Self- motivated, does not give up easily, goes the extra mile
• The Problem Solver: Responsive, detailed, seeks answers
• The Lone Wolf: Mercenary, difficult to control, generally gets results
• The Challenger: Understands customer’s business, debates, pushes customers

 2.       There is one clear winning profile. The Challenger scored the highest in performance ratings versus all other groups.  The top characteristics of a Challenger representative are:

• Offers the customers unique perspectives
• Has strong two-way communication skills
• Knows the individual customer’s value drivers
• Can identify economic drivers of the customer’s business
• Is comfortable discussing finances
• Earns the right to pressure the customer

3.       Challengers are the next evolution of the solutions representative. The more complex the sale, the more likely that Challenger representatives will be among the high performers. The challenger model has three phases which are designed to build constructive tension:

• Teach: Reframe the way customers view their business by providing unknown value-added insights
• Tailor: Link data-backed projected outcomes to stakeholder’s individual goals
• Take control: Pursue the sales agenda in a direct way at every phase, without being aggressive

Research into action

The good news is that Challenger representatives are made, not born.  The Challenger model is a set of skills.   Most representatives have the basics to build from.  Training, coaching and development will nurture these skills into behaviors. 

A caution: building a Challenger sales organization is a long journey.  The reason why the challenger representative can create constructive tension is that they intimately know the customer’s business and their products at a mastery level.  To achieve this end demands a comprehensive curriculum.  This is a not an easy or rapid transformation, it is one that requires both individual and corporate capability, resources and patience. 

Still, think back on the representative you envisioned at the beginning of this review.  If you want that type of representative selling your product or service, you can build it and The Challenger Sale offers you a great model.  In addition, The Corporate Executive Board, through their Sales Executive Council, offers many resources to help you along the way. 

Good selling!

Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader

Last summer, I took a course on enhancing one’s influencing skills and one of the speakers was Linda A. Hill, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Hill spoke about the need for leaders to assume the role of influencers and she challenged us to think more systematically on how we can achieve this seemingly elusive task.

Hill explores this subject in Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great Leader, co-written with business executive and author Kent Lineback. The authors provide a comprehensive and practical model for managers to follow. In fact, Being the Boss is a must read for anyone who has just started managing people, experienced managers who desire to become great leaders, and those seeking to improve their influencing or networking skills.

The book focuses on three imperatives: Managing Yourself, Managing Your Network, and Managing Your Team. For this book review I want to focus on the author’s analysis of how to influence through managing your network. Every experienced manager would probably agree that corporate America is extremely political because no organization has sufficient time, resources or homogeneity to accomplish its vision. I have found in my 15-year management career that an employee’s greatest source of frustration is the person’s inability to influence the political environment.

The phrase “company politics” conjures up Machiavellian notions, but that is the negative side of the equation. The naïve manager says, “Not me, I’m above that.” The experienced manager says “Not me, the organization needs to change.” Both of these responses are unproductive because we already live in the political environment that these responses often dismiss or disdain. Being the Boss challenges us to change our perspective, work through organizational conflict and weave our own web of influence—all within our moral and ethical principles— in order to become great leaders.

Being the Boss asks the following questions: Do you strategically identify people whom you and your teams depend on to achieve your goals? Do you systematically evaluate the strength of your networks to keep up with changes?

To answer these questions try this exercise:

1.       Write down the names of the people who have formal or informal authority over your work that are considered experts in key areas, whose work is important to the organizational objectives, or who are “plugged in.”

2.       Assess the importance of each person to your goals using a 1-10 scale.

3.       Assess the current quality of your relationship to each person using the same scale as #2.

4.       Contrast the two rankings.

This simple exercise can be profoundly revealing. It’s the beginning of your networking roadmap. In doing this exercise, you will find it worthwhile to categorize sets of people in to three segments:

• Operational: The people you need to do your group’s everyday work.
• Strategic: The people you will need to help you and your group achieve longer-term goals.
• Developmental: The people who help you grow professionally and provide personal, emotional support when you need it.

While I personally agreed with the philosophies, I struggled to see how they could be practically sustained. Being the Boss offers useful advice on making the initial contact, building networking into your daily work, sharing information, building coalitions, and avoiding unhealthy rivalries. Managing these networks takes focus, time and effort but the promise is an increase in influence, which will make you a better leader.

This book review was published in the November issue of PM360.

For more information on this topic, see this video:

Book Review: The End of Business as Usual

Last month, at General Electric’s Hispanic Executive Leadership Conference, I attended a session featuring sociologist, futurist, and author Brian Solis. My expectation was to hear this brilliant and bona fide social media thought-leader discuss the intricacies of new electronic tools and how I, as a marketer, could capitalize on those to reach my target audience. Instead what I learned was how leading companies are evolving from seeing social media as a tool to using it as a platform toward becoming more customer-centric. It was a welcomed view and it is the central theme of Solis’s new book that delivers a message that can connect to any business environment. 

At the heart of The End of Business as Usual (Rewire the Way You Work to Succeed in the Consumer Revolution) is the premise that commercial success rests on our ability to deliver a great customer experience. Underlying this call towards customer-centricity is the disruptive role of social media is playing in influencing customer purchases. The book details how digital culture is changing the landscape of business, consumerism and the workplace. Today’s customers rely on their friends, family and social networks—not companies—for purchase decisions. The marketer’s challenge is to design the appropriate customer experience, monitor feedback and address gaps or reinforce positive experiences through the relevant channels, including the right technologies. It expands marketing with an external focus on creating customer experiences that evoke advocacy.

Solis urges businesses to adapt to this new era of consumerism or die. He calls this phenomena “Digital Darwinism,” where companies that do not evolve as rapid as the evolution of consumer behavior and technology fail to exist.  In other words, it’s not necessarily the strongest who survive but the most adaptive. We live in an era of transparency, explains Solis, where the product value proposition cannot be faked. The word of mouth, benchmarking, blogs, ratings, etc, that are held at the customer’s fingertips (or thumbs) cannot be ignored or covered up. This transparency truly calls for companies to be customer-centric. 

Solis warns that any company that focuses on operations, margins, and efficiencies over customer experiences will hasten the erosion of market relevance. In order for companies to become more customer-centric, Solis offers a blueprint for change. It includes setting the need, and managing and reinforcing the change. Additionally he asks companies to connect the value propositions to personal values through accountability, authority and rewards. 

Solis’s insightful and well written book clearly communicate what can be a complex message. It is recommended as a primer for anyone looking to improve the customer experience and seeking to understand how to leverage social media toward that goal. 

You can follow Brian on twitter @BrianSolis, or join his blog at www.briansolis.com/. 

This book review will be published for PM360. 

 

 

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Book Review: The Go-Giver – A Little Story about a Powerful Business Idea

Are you as successful as you dreamed of being at this point in your life? If you are, congratulations! If you’re not, you’ve perhaps second-guessed your education or career choices. Maybe you think you will have to work harder and faster. But before you’re too hard on yourself, consider trying the old proverb: “Give and you shall receive.”

I realize that this can seem counter-intuitiveness in today’s competitive world. The Go-Giver, however, claims that the secret to success is giving. Authors John David Mann and Bob Burg know you’ll be skeptical: “Most people just laugh when they hear that the secret to success is giving…. Then again, most people are nowhere as successful as they wish they were.” Furthermore, they challenge the law of scarcity and say the 50-50 partnership principle as a losing position. Instead, they ask readers to think exclusively about helping others to a 100% win. It’s a business philosophy that places altruism before one’s own interest.

A story of reciprocity

This 127 page book is written in a short story format. It’s the tale of Joe, a young professional who is hard-working and ambitious, yet lately finds his hard work disappointing in sales results. Inadvertently, he finds himself seeking the mentorship of an older gentleman named Pindar.

The mentor—practicing the method he preaches—gives Joe his Trade Secret, with one condition; he too must give it away to others. Joe goes through a set of meetings that teach the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success and through that process achieves a transformational experience. In the end, Joe learns that giving is truly the secret to success and abundance.

The Five Laws of Stratospheric Success

The Trade Secret is found in these five laws:

1. The Law of Value. Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment. This book challenges us to not to simply employ this tactic for self gain, but to learn to embrace this as a way of life.
2. The Law of Compensation. Your income is determined by how many people you serve and how well you serve them. In a sense, you’re in control of your own compensation because you can always find more people to serve.
3. The Law of Influence. Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people’s interests first. This in turn creates a network of ambassadors who become personally invested in seeing you succeed.
4. The Law of Authenticity. The most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself. Be authentic!
5. The Law of Receptivity. The key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving. This is the byproduct of the first four laws.

Try each one of these for each day of the work week. You have nothing to lose. Hundreds of thousands of people have tried, and the book has achieved a core following.

I was given this book in 2009, by one of the general managers at GE. Since then I have distributed about 20 copies to direct reports, colleagues, and friends. I do believe that if people authentically behave altruistically, they will be more successful, regardless of their personal definition of success. The book is a simple and powerful reminder that the more you give, the more you get.

By the way, if you’re still skeptical, the book went on to become a national best seller, making top lists at BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal and Amazon, among many others. It has also stood the test of time, through continued book sales, current seminars, and a lively internet community (http://www.thegogiver.com). You can buy it in any books store, and it’s very likely that you’ll find it in your public library.  Enjoy!

This book review was published in the May issue of PM360.

Related articles

• It’s Not About You: Interview with @bobburg (philgerbyshak.com)

Marketing Book Review: Conversations That Win the Complex Sale

 

How can you achieve the highest return per dollar spent of your marketing budget? “Great messaging through your sales force,” said Tim Riesterer, co-author of Conversations That Win the Complex Sale, in a workshop he recently conducted for my marketing team. This makes particular sense in a complex sale, where your highest operating costs are in your sales force…and your primary competitor is the status quo. Riesterer and his co-author Erik Peterson provide us an interesting messaging model. Before you decide to invest in the latest marketing tool, think about how you can leverage messaging across your marketing tactics and to help you achieve a high return on investment.

This is an exciting time to be a marketer! In the 20 years I’ve worked in B2B commercial sales & marketing , we’ve never had more tools at our disposal to arm our channels and get our message to our target audience. We continuously innovate vehicles that help us deliver creative, multi-media and relevant messages. Unfortunately, tools is can be easily imitated. If you have enough budget, you can copy the tactics your competitors are using: marketers cannot differentiate on tools alone.

For all the tools we have at our disposal, specifically the complex sale, messaging is the critical component that sets us apart from our competition and makes our solution relevant to our target audience. Messaging is the thread that ties all tools together, delivers a consistent…well, message…and makes the most of our spend. It maximizes our efficiency to clearly communicate our value proposition, educate on our benefits and ultimately to persuade our buyers.

Point-of-View Pitch

Conversations That Win the Complex Sale lays out a messaging framework that’s easy to understand and can be translated through different marketing tools. Here are the components:

1.  Grabber. Generate a reputable third-party point of view that is relevant to your client’s core business objective.

2.  Pain. Shock the clients by showing them an unknown or underappreciated issue currently eating away at their their organization and threatening their core business objectives.

3.  Impact. Create urgency by appropriately quantifying the personal, business, and financial impacts of ignoring the problem,; follow up by showing the beneficial effects of acting soon.

4.  Contrast. Differentiate your unique strengths, and show how they address the threats the customer is facing; be clear about how your proposed solution differs the present situation…without offending clients who may have skin in the current game.

5.  Proof. Demonstrate how you have helped similar clients by implementing the solution you’re proposing, and show your approach’s positive impact on the client’s objective.

Commentary

From a marketing management perspective, the Point-of-View Pitch should flow from the overall positioning strategy. This model can help marketers create compelling messages for their sales forces, particularly in the prospecting phase. I particularly like the authors’ challenge to the status quo. But one strong caution: The model is only as good as the information you input, so the stronger the supporting data, the greater your opportunity for success.

Good marketing!

This book review was published in PM360.  

Marketing Book Review: Winning the Zero Moment of Truth

Do you remember the buying process you undertook the last time you made a large purchase? If you’re like most customers, your decision was made long before you hit the purchase button or walked into the retail space. Winning the Zero Moment of Truth, by Google’s Jim Lecinski, provides research and insights into this relatively new phenomenon.

Marketing history

Along with the 4Ps of marketing, business schools have taught the value of influencing decisions at the moment of purchase. Companies have invested billions in strategies designed to influence the customer at the moment they are staring at the options for buying a product within a category. That moment has traditionally been defined as the First Moment of Truth (FMOT).

In the history of marketing, sellers have focused a lot of attention on FMOT. Pricing strategies, packaging, shelf-positioning, product variety/mix, couponing, and many other tactics have been deployed to win the customer at that critical juncture. And while FMOT is still important, purchase behavior has shifted, providing marketers additional challenges to convert prospects into customers.

Zero Moment of Truth—ZMOT

The buying decision journey has changed. What was once a message is now a conversation. And for the first time in history, word of mouth is a digitally archived medium, available to everyone, all the time.

Between the awareness and purchase phase, people search on-line, read product reviews, use social media to ask opinions, and seek multiple pricing options. Americans now spend as much time online as they do watching TV.

This April, Google conducted a study of 5,003 customers across 12 categories of products and services. The goal was to show where influence takes place as shoppers move from undecided to decided. Here are a few highlights from that study:

·         Average shoppers used 10.4 sources of information, up from 5.3 in the previous year

·         84 percent  of shoppers report that ZMOT tactics shaped their purchase decisions

·         70 percent  of Americans look at product reviews before making a purchase

·         54 percent  comparison-shopped for products online

Given the audience for this publication, you’re probably thinking that this applies to DTC, but does not apply to a healthcare B2B scenario. Wrong: conversations about your product are already going on. Try this:  Google your product name and add “review” to the search query. Your ZMOT is happening on the first 3 pages of your search. Now type your product category and add “best” to your search query. How do you stack up?

Implications for Marketers

The good news is that you can immediately adapt ZMOT marketing strategies and incorporate them into your marketing plan.

7-steps to creating a ZMOT strategy:

1.       Put someone in charge—if no one is in charge, it won’t get done.

2.       Find your ZMOT—understand how people search for your product.

3.       Answer questions people are asking—use Insights for Search or Google Trends for discernment.

4.       Optimize for ZMOT—adjust your content for paid, owned, earned and shared media.

5.       Be fast—speed beats perfection.

6.       Don’t forget video—YouTube is the second-most-used search box in the world.

7.       Jump in—as you probably saw from your search, you’re already in ZMOT.

This complimentary e-book (http://www.zeromomentoftruth.com/) provides an excellent overview of an evolution in marketing. I believe this applies to any product or service. It even applies to companies and people.

Good marketing!

Interested in this topic?  Check out this video:

Related articles

• The Future of Marketing: Winning the Zero Moment of Truth (greatfinds.icrossing.com)
• What The ZMOT? (mediapost.com)
• Google Gives Away eBook on the “Zero Moment of Truth” (searchenginewatch.com)

This book review was published in the November issue of PM360.