Mastering the Complex Sale

I just finished Jeff Thull's bestselling book, Mastering the Complex Sale. 

I highly recommend it for individuals focused on complex and exploratory sales.  It gives some excellent perspective.  It points out that there have been three key phases in selling over the years. 

Era 1: Cold Calling, Presenting Your Features (me, me, me), Answering Objections

Era 2: Consultative Selling: Asking questions that lead the prospect down a path into your solution

The third era, and the one that Thull promotes, is around truly understanding a prospect's business and key business process and to diagnose problems and their impact.  Much like a doctor, Thull encourages you to spend time asking questions to determine whether the patient (prospect) has a problem at all and what is its impact.  Only after you and the prospect have a detailed understanding of the problem and the impact can you discuss a solution.  And in many cases, you may find that the prospect doesn’t have a problem or it isn’t a material problem, and you should walk away.  Just like a doctor wouldn’t operate on someone that didn’t need an operation, you shouldn't make a sale if there isn't a problem.  

Here were some of the key insights I took away from the book.  

• Don’t present.  Always have one foot out the door.
• You don’t want a decision on the solution, you want a decision on the problem
• There’s no such thing as a decision maker – there are multiple people involved in decisions.
• People make decisions based on emotion (Boeing is based in Chicago because the CEO wants to live in Chicago)
• There isn’t a decision to buy, there is a decision to change.
• Credibility comes from asking questions about the prospect's environment or situation that they haven’t thought of themselves.
• Most prospects have a positive present state, they don’t feel they need to change.
• Key question: How does the absence of my product manifest itself in my customer?
• Procurement creates a framework for a decision and they always make the right decision within their own framework.
• Most salespeople are selling with 90% of their product’s value behind their back because the problem isn't understood by the prospect.
• Include all costs in your ROI analysis – including the cost of their resources to implement.
• Talk about your top 3 pieces of value, but know all of them.
• When diagnosing, get to the people that are closest to the data.
• Don’t be a person that makes a sale, be a person that transforms your client’s company.
• Take the customer backwards to get them to move faster, focus on the problem.
• Don’t focus on bringing the prospect a positive future – a positive future implies they’re incompetent now.
• Good salespeople mention the side effects or potential negatives of their solutions (like a doctor).
• Don’t get emotionally involved, always be leaving.
• If you can’t quantify the cost of the prospect's problem then there is no problem.
• The decision to change is made during the diagnosis of the problem.
• Don’t talk about your value proposition, talk about value hypothesis (e.g. net profit).
• If you’re feeling pressure during the sales process you’re doing something wrong.
• Go for the no.
• Crisis drives change.
• You cannot sell a group.
• Find out out who owns the business metric that is impacted by your product and work with them to diagnose.
• The hardest part of a psychiatrist’s job is getting the patient to see that they have a problem.  Same thing for salespeople.
• When reaching out to someone cold, be sure that the message you send could not have been sent to anyone else in the world.
• When a prospect goes cold, use the rule of two to give them the opportunity to tell you the truth.  “When I don’t hear back from someone it’s usually for one of  two reasons: 1.) they’re really interested in moving forward but they have some legwork to do internally to get the pieces in place or 2.) they’re really just not interested.  Either one is fine of course.  Which one is the case here?”

The Start-up of You

I read Reid Hoffman's (LinkedIn's co-founder) new book last week, the Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself and Transform Your Career.

The thesis of the book is that everyone (from CEOs down to the lowest level employees) should view themselves as entrepreneurs.  It argues that you need to manage your career the same way an entrepreneur would manage a new enterprise.

I agree with this concept completely, and for those that haven't been exposed to this thesis, it's worth the read.  If you're already familiar with this career approach, you won't find much value in the book.  It describes the concept effectively, gives several practical tips and action items to help get you there but largely it comes off as a long advertisement for LinkedIn.

That said, there were a few valuable insights that I took from the book.  Here are two:

The first is about managing your network and asking for help/favors.  When you ask someone for something like advice or an introduction, try hard to give that person something first: a link to an article they might be interested in, an insight you picked up that might help their business, a connection or recommendation that might help them do their job better.  Also, give them some thoughtful and insightful context on what you need.  Once you've done this, then ask for the favor.  Give them a "gift" before you ask them for help.  This is a neat approach to managing your network.

The second is about risk.  The book cites a Neurophysicist that explains that to keep our ancestors alive, Mother Nature evolved a brain that routinely tricked them into making three mistakes: overestimating threats, underestimating opportunities, and underestimating resources (for dealing with threats and fulfilling opportunities).  This caused our ancestors to be very good at avoiding dangerous tribes or animals that could kill them in favor of seeking out opportunities for more food or shelter or resources.  While this was a practical approach at the time (they had to avoid death), this instinct is far less applicable to the world we live in today; a bad investment or a poor career decision isn't going to kill us.  The book encourages the reader to keep this instinct in mind when navigating your career and to try to resist it.  You're likely vastly overestimating the risk and potential pain that could come from most career decisions.

In short, the book is a fairly engaging and quick read and the message is spot on.  If this is new concept for you, I'd definitely recommend picking up a copy.

Stop Stealing Dreams

Seth Godin just released his free ebook titled, Stop Stealing Dreams. It's an excellent book. I highly recommend reading it and passing it onto your friends -- especially those that work in education. It's basically a series of blog posts so it's an easy read. Here are some lines from the book that I liked the most:

Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn’t a coincidence—it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child-labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they’re told.

Large-scale education was not developed to motivate kids or to create scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system. Scale was more important than quality, just as it was for most industrialists.

Every year, we churn out millions of workers who are trained to do 1925-style labor.

Are we going to applaud, push, or even permit our schools (including most of the private ones) to continue the safe but ultimately doomed strategy of churning out predictable, testable, and mediocre factory workers?

There are so many examples in the mainstream news of companies not adapting and failing as a result (Research in Motion and Kodak are a couple of the most recent examples). The markets change, competitors take market share and the companies that don't adapt fail and fail fast.

There's no secret here. In fact, I would bet that most school administrators and politicians could explain exactly why Research in Motion is failing. But our schools -- possibly our most important public institution -- are doing exactly what RIM did, and to some degree are experiencing the same fate.  

Evil Plans

I've always believed that most business books never should have been written.  Instead, the ideas in the book could have been summed up in a couple of blog posts or a long-form article.  I prefer to digest business content in the form of a blog rather than a book.  Too often business books are stuffed with superfluous examples and repetitive fluff in an effort to turn a somewhat simple concept into a 300 page, $14.99 book.  Like most people that are apt to read a business book, I don't have the time or the desire to read a lot of fluff.

Hugh Macleod, the blogger, artist, and writer must share this opinion.  He's an excellent business writer.  He writes a bit like he's paranoid that the reader is going to get bored.  He knows how to write books for people that are busy.  He makes short and simple points (often with a real life example) and moves onto the next thing.  He almost forces you to read faster than you normally would.  He did this extremely well in his first book, Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity.  Ignore Everybody was one of the best business books I've ever read.  It's full of insightful ideas that are communicated concisely, without the fluff.  I wrote a post on Ignore Everybody a while back where I called out some of the best tidbits.  I highly recommend reading Ignore Everybody.

Over the weekend, I finished reading Hugh's latest book, Evil Plans: Having Fun on the way to World Domination.  While not as insightful as his first, it's just as inspiring.  In short, Hugh asks his readers to develop and act on an Evil Plan.  What's an Evil Plan?  Hugh sums it up well in this line from the book:

"It has never been easier to make a great living doing what you love. But to make it happen, first you need an EVIL PLAN. Everybody needs to get away from lousy bosses, from boring, dead-end jobs that they hate, and ACTUALLY start doing something they love, something that matters. Life is short."

The book is written with a sense of urgency that suggests that the writer has some personal interest in getting you to move on your plan.  Now.

The book is a great reminder that with nothing but a laptop and an internet connection, we all have the power to shape our lives and careers and link up what we do each day with what we love and are passionate about.

If you're looking for a bit of inspiration to get off your butt and start moving on what you love, I'd recommend picking up a copy of Evil Plans.  It won't be a waste of time and I guarantee that it'll at least make you challenge whether or not you should be working on what you're working on.

Poke the Box

I just finished reading Seth Godin’s new book, Poke the Box.  Much like the book, I'll try to keep my thoughts concise -- it's only 96 pages.

Like most of Seth’s books -- I’ve read most if not all of them-- Poke the Box promotes a very simple concept.  Seth probably could’ve communicated what he was trying to communicate in a couple of blog posts; actually, he could’ve summed it up in a word: “Go!”

Poke the Box means make change, make it happen, start, don’t wait, ship!  Shipping is what matters.

It was a  quick read and I’d recommend it if you have a few hours to kill on a plane or if you're feeling like you could use a good kick in the pants.  The book wasn’t all that insightful -- most of what Seth had to say most of us already know,  but it was filled with good reminders that can help motivate.

For me, the two most notable reminders were:

1. Get started and iterate like crazy.  Sometimes the best thing you can do is simply move.
2. Most initiatives don’t work so don’t be afraid of failure and don‘t get frustrated when they don‘t work.  Real failure is when we don't start.

Of course sometimes the hardest thing about starting is knowing when to quit.  Seth tried to answer that a few years ago in The Dip.

All in all, a solid, quick read.

The Management Myth

The management consulting business has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Something just doesn't add up. Matthew Stewart just wrote a book about this called the Management Myth, where he chronicles his time as a management consultant at a major firm. I think these two quotes from the book sum up my confusion nicely.

Can you think of anything less improbable than taking the world's most successful firms, leaders in their businesses, and hiring people just fresh out of school and telling them how to run their businesses, and they are willing to pay millions of dollars for their advice?

With my overpriced advisory services and profligate spending on luxury travel, I was a grossly inefficient efficiency expert, a parody of economic virtue.

Ignore Everybody

I ordered Hugh Macleod's new book Ignore Everybody from Amazon and read it cover to cover in one sitting after getting home from work tonight.  Great book.  There were a lot of really cool ideas and observations that I felt I could really relate to.  Some of his lines about New York were right on. ..

Anyway, here are the lines I liked the most and I hope I don't forget.

• ...most team members are far more concerned with the power relationships going on inside their immediate professional circle than with what may be actually interesting and useful to the customer.
• Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.  You may never reach the summit; for that you will be forgiven.  But if you don’t make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow line, years later you will find yourself lying on your deathbed and all you will feel is emptiness.
• Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me.  Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on a antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would seriously surprise me.
• Art suffers the moment people start paying for it.
• Never try to sell a meteor to a Dinosaur.  It wastes your time and annoys the Dinosaur.
• Quality isn’t Job One.  Being totally f***ing amazing is Job One.
• It’s hard to sell if nobody has bought in.
• Stay ahead of the culture by creating the culture.
• Nobody moves to Ne w York in order to survive.  Of course that’s what most of them end up doing.
• A lot of people in business say they have twenty years experience, when in fact they only have one year’s experience, repeated twenty times.
• The biggest mistake young people make is underestimating how competitive the world is out there.
• "I don’t need a lot to be happy," said Eric.  "Just enough to pay the rent and enjoy a beer with my friends.  I don't think that’s asking for too much."  Eric was obviously a deranged lunatic.
• Work hard.  Keep at it.  Live simply and quietly.  Remain humble.  Stay positive.  Create your own luck.  Be nice.  Be polite.

Bloglines

I visit Bloglines more than any other website. Probably 3 or 4 times a day.

Bloglines is a free service that aggregates all of my favorite blogs onto one page for easy reading. They're plenty of these sites but Blogines is a very user friendly site that can be easily navigated on my laptop or BlackBerry. I'm not sure how they make money (my guess is they're charging for premium services or will be soon) but if you read a lot of blogs like I do they're definitely worth checking out.

Meatball Sundae - Initial thoughts

I just finished reading Seth Godin's new book, "Meatball Sundae."  It was excellent and I have a lot of thoughts on it that I'm sure I'll post over the next couple of weeks.

The book brought to mind a great podcast the other day from the Harvard Business Review.  It was an interview with a professor from Columbia's business school (I think).  Anyway, his thesis seemed to be an attack on Seth's thesis -- though I'm certain this wasn't his intent.  For the record, Seth's thesis goes something like this...

Forget about interruption-based marketing.  Instead build what he calls a "permission asset."  That is, build a list of people that want to hear from you.  How do you build this list?  Basically through word of mouth.  How do you get word of mouth?  Build a product that is "remarkable" -- i.e. something that people will make a remark about.

I love this theory.  I love it.  I have to admit, though, that this seems a little bit too easy.  And that is the point that this professor trying to make.  That is, while Seth's theory is nice, it's not necessarily that easy.  For every example that Seth gives in his new book, from iPods to Send-a-Ball's, there are probably 1,000 ideas that didn't spread.  The Columbia professors theory combines a little bit of interruption-based marketing with an easy way for people to spread the word to dramatically increase the chances of a win.

More on this in the coming days...in the meantime, I should include a link to Seth's blog.  He's a large inspiration for this one.