Why Listening Is The Master Key To Sales Excellence

God gave us two ears and one mouth. Why is active listening the meta skillset, the most obvious one to leverage, yet the hardest to develop? Rackham always talks about how if you're listening most of the time, the deal is likely to close.

Is your sales call so valuable that your client would write a check for your visit? - Rackham

I would challenge you to speak only 25% of the time. Buy the book Power Questions by Andrew Sobel. Come to the meeting prepared with the Who, What, Where and especially starting with Why. It's all about the quality of your informed questions coupled with your ability to peel the onion back to the root problems. This is why I've often tongue in cheek, compared question-based selling to numbers based accounting. I would argue they are mutually exclusive, even an oxymoron.

I've often wondered if I sent in a green salesperson who was an extraordinarily 'present' listener into a highly charged sales setting with the brass muckety-mucks and just encouraged her to interview the client, if she would literally perform better than a seasoned rep looking to take the high horse pulpit.

Listening is a muscle, mentally and physically because it requires will power and self control; and it becomes stronger the more you use it. I think the crux of this is being present in the moment; being fully there as I describe it within the context of my RSVPselling methodology. Excellence in execution and being there fully round out the wheel for complex B2B selling that is Relationships - Strategy - Value creation - Process alignment. Recently, a manager who had read my book was subconsciously applying this method in coaching one of his reps.

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. - Michaelangelo

Many would posit we were put on Earth to better ourselves in every way that we can. Sales is a game of infinite spirals where those that win, practice positive psychology to get in the 'flow' and then do the impossible – pulling revenue out of thin air. They make it look easy, what appears to be effortless mastery. The angel you are sculpting is really you, so if you were to look at 100 critical success factors that create the coveted sales eagle, mythical strategic selling Sphynx – listening would be the number one pick.

Master your ability to get to the root of problems, realizing that what clients mostly tell you at first, will be the symptoms masking the root problem.

We all recall the classic Dale Carnegie story where he takes the meeting, doesn't say a word and the executive later comments, 'You're the best conversationalist I've ever met!"

Brevity is the soul of wit. - Shakespeare

The best way to become a better listener is not to restrain yourself like Houdini but instead to work on the quality of your questions. SPIN is rife with great ideas as are books on consultative methods, as dismissed as consultative selling has become. Clients are intuitive and will sniff you out if you are disingenuous or do not truly care. There's been way too much emphasis placed on X or Y type of selling.

Relationships of trust, value creation, insight and interactive listening the entire way have always been the fundamentals. Even if the buyer is further along in the sales process, or we could argue the sales process has become a buying process, we must listen, 'seeking first to understand before attempting to be understood.' We now just have a leg up on our competition if they get lazy. We can listen before we even meet our dream prospects: to trigger events, to press releases, by reading an annual report and via myriad social platforms and filters.

Here's a formula that could double your income this year.

1. Be fully there – present. (Cell phone off)
2. Actually care. (Mean it!)
3. Speak 25% of the time – only ask insight provoking questions. (The classic probing techniques only make them feel like it's an interrogation and will backfire!)

4. Show that you understand by asking a question to the corollary concept. (Peel the onion!)

5. Don't talk about yourself, your company, your product or solution... just focus on them.

6. Keep comfortable eye contact versus undressing them with your eyes...

I read many posts about whether or not sales executives should take notes. The bigger risk is missing the finer points of the problem which inhibits your ability to craft a more coherent solution. If this is Evernote, Moleskine or even recording the call on your iPhone, make the questions count. Go deeper than the next competitor because you will then be able to craft a proposal that sells to your customer in their own words. Collaborate with several meetings as you craft the value hypothesis and work to build a strong business case backed by hard numbers – conservative ROI estimates.

Insights are all the rage right now. There are 2 bestsellers on them! But how can an insight penetrate the account when your dream client can't get a word in edgewise. Collaboration is the great secret to the modern strategic sale. When we co-create the solution with multiple stakeholders we render ourselves indispensable as trusted advisors.

Whether you sell services, products or a SaaS blend, listening will separate you from the wolf pack of aggressive proposal pushers. The most confident data dumper, walking brochure can't touch a thoughtful introvert armed with insatiable curiosity.

Social selling also hinges upon listening and powerful questions – create content as your currency to speak to these questions – proactively. IMHO, 75% of what you share should be reflections on OPC, as Jill Rowley sagaciously calls it – Other People's Content. It's all about them, it always was and always will be. Any President's Club Winner who has been off to the islands many times will tell you that with Mai Tai in hand while between karaoke sessions.

BuzzSumo is a phenomenal tool for listening to trends to figure out what you're going to write about. Any type of Twitter filtration or listening technology is phenomenal too. I prefer to make lists of Savvy Tweeps in TweetDeck. In the Enterprise, a full blown scenario of Radian6 is fully worth it to allow brands to listen and respond with high levels of customer services, 24/7 on every continent.

Now it's your turn: What are your secrets to improving listening on calls, in face-to-face meetings and even board room presentations? What are some books and strategies you've found to improve the quality of questioning? Would you agree that collaboration is the new key to winning the enterprise sale? Which social listening tools do you use and in what ratio do you listen versus posting about yourself or your offering? – I'd love to hear from you in the comments below.

Ad as a bonus for reading all the way to the bottom of this post, here is the best sales training video ever made on how to really listen... Amy is masterful.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: Beverly & Pack

Sales Forecasting To Within 1% Amidst Massive Complexity

This is not a theory... it just happened in one of the biggest and most complex companies on the planet... and the forecasting process has gone from a week to seconds.

During my corporate career, and more recently through my consulting clients, I've been on the inside of the sales automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) industry. CRM has always promised game-changing levels of efficiency and effectiveness yet so many companies who buy it just implement expensive contact databases and manage-up pipeline reporting tools.

Recently I've been engaged by Salesforce to speak at their upcoming World Tour Conference (topic: The rise of the silent sales floor is killing business) and also provide coaching with their sales teams. The experience has opened my eyes. It's rare to see a technology company drink their own campaign; usually it's a case of 'the builder's house never being finished'. But what I've seen with salesforce and some of their customers is breath-taking.

Nearly two decades of evolution has now been infused with artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to transform CRM as we know it. We have reached the tipping point where sales and marketing convergence is being powered by mature salesbots and Salesforce's Einstein is leading the way. Watch this one minute video...

A salesbot doing sales management and deal coaching... wow! But what if Einstein could also manage the single biggest problem in any sales operation... the forecast? I'm under NDA so I cannot reveal the name of the large enterprise who just piloted Einstein for forecasting but I can reveal the astonishing result. A quarterly global forecast was run with traditional means (CRM reports and data sucked into Excel, then massaged by layers of management and pushed up the line from dozens of countries to the senior executive to provide regional forecasts with 'commit' and 'best case'. Then a global number was rolled-up to the senior executive and board.

But in parallel, Einstein ran a forecast algorithm based upon myriad of factors that show probability of close based upon predictive scores assessing key win factors including whether key information has been obtained, if the right people have been covered, whether the amount of time in a particular deal stage has increased slippage risk, if frequency of deal updates is on track, whether number of calls made and received along with emails sent and received shows proof of active engagement, etc. All of this matters because the level of timely buyer/seller interaction absolutely determines the probability of winning a deal and the likelihood of closing on time. Michael Bonner calls this auto-generated score in his own salesforce add-on, Pipeline Manager,"proof of life."

Unlike a human sales manager, Einstein does not have 'happy ears', hope or fear. Nor does it seek to 'manage-up' ... it just tells you the truth and does not care what you think

So.. what was the result of man versus machine, of CRM extracts into Excel and layers of managers who massage and hedge versus the forecasting salesbot? Note that there were dozens of countries, thousands of sales people and massively complex products and services.

Humans +/- 20% (took a week and the data supporting the numbers was out of date when the report was tabled)

Einstein AI +/- 1% (took seconds, real-time)

Accurate data is the foundation on which accurate forecasting depends. Traditional approaches where people are 'held to account' for their number and told they will live or die based on their commit, drives either prayerful hope at one extreme and sand-bagging at the other. Having your feet in a freezer and your head in the oven does not mean that, on average, you'll be at the right temperature.

So often the business case for buying CRM is to improve forecast accuracy but the underlying data usually remains untrustworthy unless CRM actually enables sales process. If you want accurate forecasting it starts with CRM being an indispensable part of every salesperson's day. It must be where they receive their leads, how they make their calls, where they send their email from, where they create quotes and obtain approvals, etc.

CRM success is completely dependent on the leadership's commitment to transforming the way the business markets and sells, enables the sales process, and becomes the engine for delivering brilliant seller and customer 'sales experience'.

Successful sales transformation is available for those willing to invest and lead from the front with executive commitment to a customer-centric culture. The best focus on an integrated suite to manage the entire customer lifecycle with cloud platforms for marketing, lead nurturing, sales process automation, community portals and service/support for ticketing, complaints, etc.

CRM has come a long way since the days of silo databases and clunky interfaces on a PC. Game changing improvements have been achieved with workflow for process automation, integration to price books, configuration and quoting tools, content marketing with web-to-lead processes, lead nurturing programs, tailored dashboards and reports, forecasting and integrated qualification and opportunity management methodologies, close planners, organizational charts that also map the decision power-base. Add to this; quote-to-cash, customer lifecycle management with marketing, sales, service and support all being integrated. More recently, integration to social listening and pipeline creation platforms such as LinkedIn, along with widgets to sales productivity tools such as Lusha and Aeroleads... you get my point.

Any corporate sales team that is not fully embracing sales and marketing automation is in the process of failing by design. AI is taking sales to a whole new level

In my opinion, Salesforce is its own best reference customer. They run and incredible sales and marketing machine, and they blend technology and the phone along with inside sales and the field very effectively. Leads are followed-up professionally and in a timely manner (I receive calls from their reps the same day I download any of the reports or white papers on their website), metrics are captured and managed, leads are nurtured intelligently with seamless marketing/sales team collaboration, and they provide free high-value content in the form of web collateral and high-quality events.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image: Google: Salesforce - World Tour Paris

CRM: Graveyards of Information or Powerhouses for Improvement?

George Brontén from Membrain has been following my posts and regularly provides insightful comments. LinkedIn is an amazing platform for building relevant connections with thought leaders around the world and we decided to catch-up on Skype.

Membrain is a specialist in B2B sales enablement and we ended-up discussing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology. I found George’s views provocatively interesting and very cogent. I eventually ask him this question: Is it possible that CRMs aren’t well suited to do everything that their makers claim they’re capable of doing? We recorded our chat and here is a paraphrase of George’s response.

CRM vendors would like sales leaders to believe their technology is a one-size-fits-all panacea but they have added so much functionality over the years that if you ask ten people what CRM is, you are likely to get ten different answers. In many companies, the CRM has become a graveyard of information, instead of a tool that helps improve sales performance.

More feature creep to come: Feature creep isn’t about to go away. The market pressures to grow top line revenue will continue to drive CRM vendors to constantly add new capabilities and acquire new technology. But when it comes to complex B2B sales and other specialized needs, a new wave of cloud-based applications are emerging. They add functionality not available in traditional CRM systems like Salesforce without a lot of hard work; i.e., custom programming and on-going maintenance. [I agree with George that the age of mash-ups is here to stay and that CRM must evolve]

One-size-fits-all or none? The concept of “one system to rule them all” is appealing but has turned sales professionals into data-entry clerks and sales managers into report-creators. Everyone spends too much time gathering information and not enough time on activities and skill enhancements that will help close more business. CRMs typically don’t help sales professionals improve, although that’s what was promised when the system was sold.

Different needs depending on the complexity of your sales efforts:Some may be surprised that CRMs are not well suited for complex B2B sales. Can’t CRMs do almost anything? With a lot of consulting and programming, this may be true. There are certainly many excellent add-ons available but how do you turn a transaction system like CRM into a visual guidance, learning and coaching platform needed in the complex sales environment?

CRM products are best for selling low-risk commodity products which can be transacted but high-risk solutions usually require the consensus of multiple stakeholders and take months, or even years, to come to fruition. The more complex your sale is, the more important each action of your sales people becomes. You need a system that supports complex process.

List, lists, lists or visual guidance and coaching? Sales improvement software should let you implement any sales process you want, and visually guide sales professionals, step-by-step through a sales process and preferably using a specific methodology and sales linguistic. In contrast, CRMs were designed to capture and display large amounts of information, and because most CRMs are developed to adapt to the needs of different user groups and business units within a company, the graphical interface often has a generic – and frankly, a quite ugly - design. The output is often lists of information that look very similar no matter where you are in the system. This type of user experience provides little contextual feedback and focus.

Studies by Sales Performance International, a leading sales development consulting firm, emphasize that a visual overview of the sales process produces significant improvements in sales performance. In general, people can digest visuals better than text, making the graphical design of sales improvement software much more than just points of vanity.

Manage information or drive the right behaviors? While CRMs were originally designed to manage customer relationships and interactions, sales improvement software is designed with one goal in mind – win more business. CRM promises the same focus but rarely delivers in implementation. Sales improvement or sales enablement software takes a different approach by focusing on the sales process itself so that sellers truly understand the prospect. The best systems become a real-time training and coaching platform to drive success throughout the sales process.

The premise behind this new breed of sales improvement software is that most sales professionals fail because they aren’t selling properly. Sales improvement software helps the sales professional know what to do with whom, when and how. This is where you need sales process, methodology, skills and professional coaching.

The future is in “meshing”: I believe that we’ll see more “meshing” in the future, where the concept of data sharing between modern best-of-breed systems removes much of the golden luster of using the same CRM vendor for everything. It will continue to be the system of record, but there will be a limit to how far CRMs can reach into new applications such as sales improvement. [I agree with George here also and I often write about the new world of mash-up methodologies and technology].

The race is on and it will be a fun one: CRM will not go away and we’ll see marketing technology merge with sales technology. It’s not so much about disrupting CRM as it is about evolving the sales profession by developing specific technologies to improve sales results by better supporting sales people, frontline sales managers and leaders. My bet is on technology that will encourage winning behaviors and win more complex B2B sales by growing people and making complex processes easy to navigate.

Wow… George is not alone in his views and I speak with many who are developing complementary and competitive technologies and cloud software offerings that can change the game for CRM adoption and success. I see an exciting future ahead for sales people who embrace technologies that improve their efficiency and effectiveness.

Now it's your turn. Do you agree with George? Where do you see the future of CRM?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: Brian Smithson

Can Anyone Provide a (REAL) ROI for Social Selling?

A burning question on every B2B sales executive's mind... no doubt! Thought leader Sander Biehn, who writes the brilliant Thought Horizon Blog, asks, how will we tie back the ROI of all our finest social media efforts? Do you think this can be approached with futuristic CRM and CXM mashups? He was kind enough to contribute some provocative thoughts below so please let me know what you think:

No, this post isn’t going to end with a link to a new online tool that will profess to perfectly measure social selling. No, it isn’t going to be a rant about how others are getting social selling measurement wrong. No, it doesn’t have a cure-all training guide to scientifically prove the benefits of social selling.

Instead, it’s a plea for help.

How can it be that Salesforce.com and others can measure sales contacts,digital marketing campaign leads, and sales, but not correlate all this data to sales team’s efforts in social media? I have seen some Salesforce apps that profess to do this, but they are mainly driven by salespeople manually entering to what extent social media has been used to find and interact with buyers in the sales process. That’s called ‘cheating’ in the world of analytics.

The nature of social media is digital, so why can’t machines be built to measure social selling influence and automatically tie that back to CRM data? Why can’t Klout-type scores be assigned to sales people relative to their social interactions with key prospects and verticals inside a given geography?

Instead of trying to create these correlations, the social selling community has turned its collective back on trying. Even social hotshot Gary Vaynerchuk has thrown up his arms and asked: “What is the ROI of your mother?” in response to business people kindly asking for social selling measurement.

Sorry Gary, my mom and social selling are not in the same league. Mom taught me right from wrong. Mom fed me. Mom sent me cookies and words of encouragement when I was away at college. I think social selling is cool, but I am not expecting all that from it.

There’s big data and then there’s just bigger data. I think measurement of social selling is difficult but not impossible to measure, and the race is on for someone to create a de facto toolset for it. By mashing prospects, verticals and other CRM data against what a salesperson does all day on social channels, there is no doubt concrete conclusions can be drawn. Shoot, if Radian 6 and other listening tools can measure overall sentiment of a brand, why can’t we extrapolate this data down to the salesperson level?

Why do all this anyway? Until real ROI can be calculated around social selling, it will remain a cottage industry. CMOs and CEOs will not view it as scalable and any anecdotal upside to social selling (“Reps using social make quota 74% more often!”) will fall on deaf ears in the corner suite.

I am ready to solve this problem. Who is in?

Above is the comment that spawned this post after a healthy debate about whether CRM is a graveyard for information or powerhouse of improvement. Now it's your turn: What are your thoughts on how this can actually be done? Do you agree with Sander's pithy missive? What tools if any are out there to help with this? How can we collectively solve this problem or encourage the best vendors to posthaste? Do you agree that doing so would have a profound impact on B to B to C improving the entire 'smarketing' ecosystem and giving us firepower to empower companies to invest more heavily in strategic social selling initiatives (plus give it street cred creedence.) Please comment below and share your best insights on the matter.

Like me, Sander trains enterprises how to leverage cutting edge social selling methodology. Check out Sander's company Thought Horizon where he gets results like these:

Thought Horizon provides strategy and execution for B2B sales and marketing teams interested in employing or accelerating social selling. Sander is the founder and CEO of Thought Horizon. Author of "The 30 Year Paycheck: Destruction and Redemption in Corporate America." He consults with Fortune 500's on catalyzing and implementing change of all stripes.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main Image Photo by Flickr: Link Humans

5 Game-Changing Reasons LinkedIn Will Revolutionize All Business

Never underestimate the power of a big idea to change the entire world. Reid Hoffman's ambitious vision to map the entire global economic graph is coming closer to a reality in 2015. I have predicted that networks like Facebook and Twitter risk falling away but LinkedIn has positioned itself as the backbone of the new internet. In fact, it may even swallow the internet with applications and divergent web experiences running within it. Let's analyze this: Recruiting? LinkedIn - Specifically acquiring top sales talent (the engines of the modern global economy)? LinkedIn - Due diligence? LinkedIn - Content marketing at scales never before seen? LinkedIn - Paid advertising (PPC, native, retargeting)? LinkedIn - B2B sales, enablement and training? LinkedIn - BIG tick on all levels.

No, I do not work for LinkedIn but full disclosure: I do write for them. There's two overarching principles that made LinkedIn ubiquitous as a communications channel. Networks effects of Metcalfe's Law which in layman's terms, simply means the effectiveness and value of networks scale exponentially based on the traction (both breadth and depth) of the people that power use them. The other thing they nailed is allowing users to become prosumers: content creators mixing and mashing of the content.

From a technical perspective, their app and native responsive web experience is free of clutter and massively useful. Pulse is useful for news. LinkedIn's Connected app serves birthdays, anniversaries and trigger events. Sales Navigator enables enterprises with a tool for prospecting on steroids that goes beyond the boundaries of traditional CRM and MKT automation.

1. The Mapping of an Amorphous Economic Graph
2. The Bloomberg Terminal of Passive Due Diligence and Strategic Alliance Monitoring
3. Big Data & Predictive Analytics Driven Paid Engagements
4. Ability to finally harness top talent who are passively searching privately
5. Content Generation + Network Effects Transcends the capability of 1.0 and 2.0 Blogosphere going truly 3.0 (Context based)

LinkedIn represents a tectonic shift as a communications medium as it embraces social proximity, the ability to understand the interrelationship of nodes on the network. Reid Hoffman calls this concept "networked intelligence." Essentially, hiring a team of salespeople with a Social Selling Index score of over 70 (out of 100 possible), with networks of over 3,000 relative targets [geo-targeted], suddenly starts to link you to your entire industry vertical. 20MM to 50MM key prospects in your entire vertical by 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree is on your event horizon!

You could essentially corner your market and extrapolate out to maximum marketshare - competitive advantage - by simply bringing in the appropriate nodes.

Is LinkedIn then a bedrock for the Moneyball of business as we know it?

This is an entirely new value curve in a blue ocean strategy that shattered all previous constructs of a social network, building something much more analogous to how the real world has always worked: It's all about who you know. It also harnessed the amorphous power of the 'strength of loose ties.' It's not only about getting past gatekeepers, it's about getting out of your own way, out of your own silo of the people you know.

I recommend both of Reid Hoffman's prescient books for a deconstruction of where all this came from and where it is going toward Singularity.

Here are some of my favorite thought concepts from Reid that go into the Pantheon:

One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it's making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it's the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you're dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.

What makes the meaning of life is people, so you try to be good to people immediately around you and in your broader community. So a lot of my projects are about how I can affect the world in the hundreds of millions.

Your network is the people who want to help you, and you want to help them, and that's really powerful.

The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively - I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook - it sounds trivial, but people matter.

My belief and goal is that every professional in the world should be on a service liked LinkedIn.

I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.

If you can get better at your job, you should be an active member of LinkedIn, because LinkedIn should be connecting you to the information, insights and people to be more effective.

And people who take risk intelligently can usually actually make a lot more progress than people who don't.

You have to be constantly reinventing yourself and investing in the future.

Now it's your turn: Do you agree with what I've written? What game-changing ways are you or your organization leveraging LinkedIn? What do you think networking in the future will look like? How will LinkedIn evolve as a B2B enterprise sales tool and how do you plan to use it? What's the most memorable thing that's ever happened to you personally and professionally on LinkedIn? Please share below.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au

Main image photo by Flickr: Playing Futures: Applied Nomadology

Strohkorb's SMARKETING Manifesto

'Smarketing' thought leader Peter Strohkorb sounds off on this subject for the ages:

First a caveat: I have nothing against technology. In fact, I am a big fan of it and believe that it has delivered great benefits to humankind. This article is about the WAY that it is often implemented, not about the technology per se, because human nature is such that anything that is imposed on us will initially be resisted, or even become outrightly rejected.

In my opinion, most business technology implementations are conducted the wrong way around, i.e. focusing on the Technology first, not on the People using it.

A common pattern that I have observed is that business executives become excited about what technology vendors are promising from their latest “solutions”, be it CRM systems or any other kind of business process automation tool. In my line of work, I have experienced numerous implementations of CRM and sales enablement software, and this is how it all-too-often seems to work out: Eager to see the promised business benefits materialize the executive team approves funding and hands the implementation over to the technical team, who then appoints a project manager to coordinate the various project streams.Have you heard the saying that “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail?”

What I have seen is that at that handover point to the implementation team the entire project focus changes, from the broader perspective of delivering business benefits towards mostly just getting the technology installed on time and on budget. The project plan suddenly moves to reflecting milestones and deliverables that largely focus on the technology, while the end users often become a bit of an afterthought. “Oh, we'll give them training.” is an often-encountered response.

Why is that wrong? How many sales reps do you know who love filling in forms? I have seen CRMs that demand the sales reps to fill in dozens of fields for each client interaction. Are you surprised that they then balk at this task and that process compliance and technology utilization rates reach nowhere near their projected targets?

Let’s face it, sales reps don’t view CRM systems as a sales support tool. They see them as a sales management tool, and what's more, one that expects them to give up their personal knowledge and client relationship information. They often feel that giving up this personal information makes them more vulnerable to job loss when their employer organization decides to downsize its sales force. In their minds, filling in CRM data is not only boring, time consuming, taking them away from selling but also reduces their personal job security.

According to Accenture, 85% of technology projects fail to deliver the anticipated business benefits. Is it any wonder? Are you surprised to hear that most CRM implementations take two to three years before they start to deliver the business benefits that the vendor promised would happen in a much shorter time frame?

So, what is the solution? For a start, you don’t do what seems to be the standard way that consultants like to work and that many technology projects seem to be implemented. All too often, I have seen consultants and technology experts come into an organization, work predominantly with the executive team and with the IT department on a process and technology solution that is then imposed on the end users with only the barest minimum of consultation. The catch-all that I have witnessed, as far as the end users are concerned, is often just a group email addressed to them with a list of the proposed solution features, and the laconic offer to "Let us know if you disagree with anything."

Are you surprised then that when the new tool is switched on, the end users do not naturally embrace the change, and often outrightly resist the new solution, complaining it does not work the same way, nor better than the old?

I have even seen instances where the design of the new solution was changed at great expense and significant delay AFTER it was first launched, in response to belated end user feedback. As is so often the case, the people at the front line often have the best ideas but they rarely feel empowered to voice them, and only very few are ever asked for their opinion.

My recommended approach is to include those people early and comprehensively who are most immediately impacted by the new process and technology solution, namely the end users. What's more, the very people that help to craft the solution, will be far more likely to embrace it after implementation and they will be far less likely to resist change. So, in my opinion, most business technology implementations are conducted the wrong way around, i.e. focusing on the technology, not on the people using it.

One of my favorite sayings is this: “You can have the latest technology and the most sophisticated processes, but if your people are not with you, then it will all come to nothing.”

Why is it then that most business technology implementations, particularly as far as CRMs are concerned, seem to focus on the technology first, and on the people last? So, are most business IT solutions implemented the wrong way around? Are CRMs putting people last? What do you think ?

My team works with Sales and Marketing teams in medium and large B2B organizations. We hear all the time how sales reps complain that Marketing doesn't produce high enough quality sales leads. There are statistics around that, that say that Sales only follows up on about 15% of the leads that Marketing provides. That’s 85% of leads being wasted!

Sales says that Marketing doesn't produce “qualified” leads and Marketing says that it isn't their job to “qualify” them; that their job is only to generate enough general interest in their business offerings for prospective customers to just contact Sales. While they are really unqualified leads often Sales refers to them as “Cold Leads” or tire-kickers, rather than a real genuinely interested buyer.

That is the crux right there: Marketing may think that just a name and a phone number are a sales lead, whereas sales reps ideally want a ready purchase order and probably the accompanying payment for the product or service they are selling. Ideally, Marketing people argue, they want to be order takers, not sales people.

The old sales funnel is dying and the Buyers’ Journey is upon us, which means that the entire way organizations attract interest and sell things is changing dramatically. Organizations that do not adjust to the new paradigm really risk being left behind only to go the way of the dinosaurs.

My experience, with a lot of different organizations, is that there often is no coordinated effort between Sales and Marketing on how to manage leads. Instead of an agreed, documented and managed lead nurturing program often the initiative is handled solely by Marketing and then imposed on Sales without much collaboration between the two.

This results in sales leads of various quality being simply thrown "over the fence" for the sales people to follow up and then weave their magic. Marketing gloriously acclaims that they have successfully generated X number of leads. While Sales exclaims that they aren't worth their attention.

If the organization doesn't have a mutually agreed plan in place on what constitutes a lead and how to handle them, then the leads will most likely end up wasted with the response from the sales rep something like this: “I called them and they weren't interested,” or even worse “I called them and they didn't remember making an inquiry about our product.” I believe this is where the “Death of a Lead” happens, because what happens to a lead once it is handed over to a sales rep will demonstrate of how much value it was to start with.

In many organizations the quality of the feedback from Sales to Marketing is either non-existent, very poor or at best rudimentary. What is missing is a structured, measurable and - most importantly - consistent and constructive way for Sales to inform Marketing of what works and what does not.

Once Marketing receives constructive feedback from all Sales reps it can then make informed decisions on how to better support them. So, if we can close the feedback loop between Sales and Marketing we can create what we call a virtuous cycle of collaboration that stops wasting time, money and effort on both sides and allows both teams to live up to their full potential. We call that Sales+Marketing Collaboration, some call it Smarketing.

But no matter what anyone calls it, most would call it Nirvana. And wouldn't it just be a wonderful thing?

Sales and Marketing are two of the most customer-facing functions in any sales organization. As the key revenue-generators they are what a customer gauges the business on and they are the organization’s present and future growth engines. So you would think that there can be no higher priority to the senior management team than to ensure these two vital teams work together as effectively as possible in order to present the best possible image to the market and to entice customers to buy from us, rather than from our competitors.

Additionally, there is a whole lot of evidence that closer Sales+Marketing Collaboration lifts Sales Productivity, and I can show you that a lift of just 5% in Sales Productivity can yield a 20% increase in profit. So, Sales+Marketing Collaboration should be a BIG DEAL.

So, what stands in the way of getting Sales and Marketing teams to support each other more effectively ? The following is a collection of high level mistakes that we have compiled for you. Contact us for more detailed information.
Here are seven of the most common mistakes:

1. Ignoring the Problem and Doing Nothing
The worst mistake one can make is to turn a blind eye to problems. Yet, denying that there is a problem, that there is room for improvement, and merely accepting the status quo can magnify issues that would be otherwise manageable. For too many companies, sales and marketing departments are working in their respective silos, blissfully unaware of the need to adapt to the changing world that surrounds them. Too many organizations have taken this path and have suffered for it. How did Kodak miss the digital-camera revolution? How did Canon not see the threat from smartphones with in-built cameras? Show initiative and address the problem.

2. Relying on "Quick Fixes"
The world is increasingly impatient and our attention spans are becoming shorter. Combine that with the short term results outlook in many sales organizations and it is no wonder that when problems arise we look for quick fixes. However, shortcuts rarely work when it comes to sales and marketing collaboration. When sales reps do not make their targets, many organizations try to fix the problem with short-term solutions.

Let’s look at some of these quick fixes:

• Provide more sales training
This is a popular panacea but according to the nineteenth-century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, 87% of new knowledge is forgotten within 30 days. What do you think happens 30 days after sales training?

• Hire more sales reps
The rationale for this popular choice is as follows: if X number of reps bring in Y amount of revenue, more reps will bring in more. However, bringing more reps into a flawed sales and marketing environment will not yield the desired results .

• Generate more sales leads
Surely, this is the way to boosting sales results? Well, it would be if all your sales lead creation and management processes were perfect, if sales and marketing were working harmoniously together to generate, nurture, hand over, close and report on leads perfectly. If that is not the case, why would you want to spend good money creating more leads only to see them dry up and lead nowhere thanks to a flawed process? Stuffing more leads into a flawed sales process will not resolve a sales effectiveness problem. The best thing here is to fix the cause, not the symptom.

3. Having no one responsible for improving Sales+Marketing Collaboration
Sales and marketing obviously need to work together. For such cooperation to be possible, cross-functional processes need to be in place to make sure that both sides are in alignment. Not having a intermediary in place to intermediate between Sales and Marketing is a gross oversight. Get a referee.

4. Neglecting the Human Element
Collaboration is a deeply inter-personal matter, it relies on people doing the right thing. When attempting to foster a cooperative relationship between Sales and Marketing it is important to address the human dimension as a priority. Only then will it be appropriate to move on to HOW each department can support the other, what tools should support them or what joint processes and metrics we should use. People come first.

5. Believing that Technology will deliver a Miracle
I have nothing against technology, as long as it is deployed properly. It seems though that there are vendors out there that offer their latest whizz-bang technology by promising the world. It is pretty obvious that even the most sophisticated technology will remain ineffective if you don’t have your people and your business processes aligned first. Technology is good, use it wisely.

6. Trying to implement Change without Executive Support
When change touches on aspects of corporate culture, implementing reforms can be an uphill battle. As laudable as it might be for middle managers or junior staff to attempt to make cultural changes, such optimistic projects are often doomed to failure unless they have executive buy-in. Get the boss involved.

7. Expecting Immediate Results
Too often, we expect overnight results, and sometimes even that’s not fast enough. The fact is, any change must be given time to work its way through the system if it is to have any chance at producing the hoped-for results. Hasten wisely.

Now it's your turn, please go check out Peter Strohkorb's acclaimed consultancy: How are you aligning sales and marketing in your organization? How are you solving the age old problems of CRM with proper implementation and enablement? What are your thoughts on Peter's powerful thought-provoking contribution and advice above? Perhaps drop him a line in the comments below if you agree or have a different opinion. He's raised some critical issues that all business people must endeavor to collaboratively resolve in the information age.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo © 2015 Peter Strohkorb

18 Of The Most Sophisticated LinkedIn Techniques

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

Da Vinci said it best. It's never the tools, it's how we use them. Excellence is determined by the way in which we execute. I've found that with some subtle tweaks, LinkedIn can be exponentially effective as a prospecting, networking, engagement and CLOSING platform. The last is highly contested and debated as everyone is looking to tie metrics to it. I have closed business leveraging LinkedIn. Here are some advanced techniques and combinations that I haven't seen much written about. What advanced techniques do you utilize on here?

1. Start your own LinkedIn Group, invite all your connections into it and then every time you post a provocative question based on debatable insights in your vertical, push that question link out to Twitter.
2. Leverage Rapportive to reverse lookup a key email address of your prospect and then add them via the "other" radial with a customized message pertaining to their profile.
3. Mystery messages are messages with an unexpected subject line, colloquial tone, short and cause a click. You need to put yourself in the prospect's shoes, they're receiving umpteen brilliantly constructed templates in their LinkedIn inbox. The unexpected will get opened, something that is natural and screams "not written by a robot" will get opened. Leverage the power of mystery.
4. Advanced searches can be leveraged to show a few result pages of CXOs. This will allow you to aim high. If you can find people who used to work in that position, message them asking for the best way back into that account.
5. Use all InMails - The majority of people do not use all 25 InMails in a premium account per month. Do you? It's a golden opportunity. Each one is like making 10 to 20 cold calls. Lead with value and compelling insight.
6. Publish everyday. Most sales people wouldn't dream of writing every day or even twice a day on here. Do you know only 40,000 Publish posts come out each week when 345MM professionals are on LinkedIn? There is a huge opportunity cost if you are not publishing daily.
7. Watch who follows your Publish and views you everyday. Send invites to all of those that are pertinent with a personalized message.
8. Reach out to add people or message people through LinkedIn groups.
9. Amp up your participation in groups with provocative questioning. Max out your groups to 50 and be disciplined in posting different questions in 3 to 5 groups every day. Go into a group thread and speak your mind, answer all the questions. This will bring more views, LinkedIn invites and warm leads.
10. Follow industry thought leaders. In sales KiteDesk, InsideSales.com, Onalytica and countless others compile lists of the top social selling thought leaders, marketing thought leaders, you name it! Thought leaders are very open to connecting. Via their networks you'll get even bigger relevant networks.
11. Subscribe to all the thought leader blogs on Feed.ly as well as following them on LinkedIn. Don't just hit the like button. Share the articles from their blog and write a unique comment. Link your LinkedIn updates to Twitter so they kick back there and then link Twitter to push to Facebook. One update and you hit 3 social networks. For expediency's sake as a busy executive, this is mission critical.
12. When you perform due diligence on key prospects in accounts always analyze the lower right section called "People Also Viewed."A great way to go is to start with CEO and look at people also viewed. Sometime this area is hidden. But there is no faster way to triangulate the C-Suite and power base most closely connected to it then with this strategy.
13. Never ever contact a prospect by personal email even if it's listed contact me @gmail on their LinkedIn contact area. They probably just don't realize that's listed. Go reverse lookup a valid open B2B publicly listed address and reach out there. Cross reference this with Data.com so that you can call their switch, EA or direct line. Often prospects do list their cell phone numbers. I'm not opposed to calling cell to cell but have a hyper-valid, trigger-event based reason. Start with the why in the first 5 seconds. Be confident and have gravitas.
14. Rewire your entire social selling strategy as a real world appointment setting engine.
15. Be real-time responsive, always on, via mobile devices.
16. Use the Connected App by LinkedIn to acknowledge birthdays, work anniversaries or triggers to strike up conversations.
17. Invest the money in a Premium Account. As an enterprise, get LinkedIn Sales Navigator and work to make it an organizational competency. Build incentives that tie back to KPIs like the Social Selling Index - SSI - (Klout-like LinkedIn score/mechanism that shows the level of engagement of top users.)
18. Get training not just on the basics but in advanced "strategic" social selling to bring the old methods together with the new channels.

Now it's your turn: What are the most sophisticated LinkedIn strategies that you leverage? It's OK if it's a basic technique but you've found a way to turn it up. Jack Kosakowski came up with a whole series of LinkedIn based trigger events when a connection does something that is grounds for a personal LinkedIn email or InMail outreach. I thought that was brilliant. This was one of the best posts of all 2014!

What features do you think LinkedIn is missing? How do you get results in here daily? What specifically is helping you open, close and accelerate pipeline?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: Pic Basement

My Last Post On LinkedIn!

This is my last post on social media or blogging of any kind in the foreseeable future. It’s been a tweetin wild ride but I've made a fortune in social selling and I'm retiring to become an organic farmer and micro-brewer. But I’ll also be working with Professor Neil Rackham to create his biography and document the history of modern selling.

All this became possible with just 4 months of manic activity in LinkedIn where I made enough money from Social Selling to pursue my dream of living on an organic farm in Tasmania to brew a revolutionary beer infused with beetroot juice. It's a Blue Ocean strategy inspired by an Australian juicing documentary that I saw in 2013. Now I've literally 'bought the farm' to start a healthy alcohol revolution. Tasmanian Red Beet Beer will be potent in vitamins and antioxidants to transform the inner-health of millions while masking digestive realities, eliminating any stress caused by visible blood in the stool or urine.

But back to Neil and the book we will co-write in Tasmania on the farm. The tome will be titled: The Consolidated History of Modern Selling – From SPIN to Social Solution Challenger Value Selling With All You Need To Know To Sell Succinctly In The Digital Age.

Neil visits Australia regularly and I remember him telling me the story of when he bought a Driza-Bone coat in Adelaide many years ago while on a wine pilgrimage down under. He has a love of the country… and goats, but not in any sort of inappropriate way. Goats are an important part of the blue ocean strategy because they weed and fertilize the farm and they’re much cheaper than importing child labor from the third world. The goats on the beetroot farm will live on blackberries, themselves fertilized by the hops left over from the beer brewing process and goat fecal pellets. It’s a virtuous organic circle of goats-cheese-fertilizer-beer-blackberry-love-goats.

During the day, Neil and I will walk the hedgerows of blackberry bushes and beetroot stalks with loyal goats in tow, positing the future of B2B social selling spiced with challenger solution value techniques jacked with back-to-the future ninja warrior social principles. Every evening we'll riff over organic red ale gazing down the valley with Tasmanian Devils howling in the distance.

Organic beer will be the fuel for our writing; but Neil was initially skeptical about the benefits of beets and he told me that beet-beer is only a benefit if it solves a specific problem articulated by drinkers.

The SPIN Selling courses I attended earlier in my life enabled me to nail the perfect response: "Imagine that you're being intimate with someone and they ask you if they're bleeding. You can provide great comfort in simply telling them you're sure it's just the coloration of the beets. But the benefits are not just psychological, beets can do for beer what red grapes did for wine, but without the tannin. Guinness pioneered with black but now the new black is a darkish red."

Neil had nothing in response and then I hammered it home: “The benefits of combining beer and beets are compelling! We all know that with enough beer ugly people appear to be attractive but the properties of beets provide clarity amidst the fog of inebriation. Surely everyone would like the ability to articulate their wisdom in a more compelling way while also uninhibited by intelligible thought processes at the end of a rollicking good evening at the pub.” He was speechless. No objections – closed.

I plan to spend many evenings on the porch with Neil in Tasmania on the micro brewery beet farm with our goats, ideating the future of B2B professional solution social selling. Mentor and mentee masticating on goat cheese, chugging beet-beer, ruby red lips waxing lyrical about the tremendous cottage industries that are micro brewing and sales training.

Only wankers drink Corona with a pretentious little lime wedge shoved in the top but we'll each have a beet stalk hanging out of our brew which is actually the most nutritious part of the plant and provides valuable fiber... another benefit on top of your nasal hairs being caressed by the beet foliage as you sip away. Using your tongue to maneuver the stalk to the side while swallowing provides a playful challenge and the whole experience truly engages all of the senses to deliver a genuine drinking solution and the ultimate customer experience.

Every morning we will emerge from the homestead a little hung over and milk the goats before checking on the micro-brewery copper vats. Then we'll stroll back to dig-in to writing the book. When we need a break we'll turn to poetry... most people don't know that Neil is actually a poet and it's one of the reasons he was invited to contribute to The Challenger Sale (see page 82) with his SAFE BOLD sonnet. I've entered us into a poetry competition at the local town pub where we've instigated the Community Poetry Night and we've already made it to the final with this.

All that is told is not Twitter,

All blogs in LinkedIn are not lost;

The told that is true does not wither,

Deep beet roots are not reached by the frost.

From the likes in social we'll be woken,

A goat from the thickets shall spring;

Reviews and shares shall be spoken,

The crownless again shall be king.

The publican, Mike Blunt, is quite sophisticated and I helped him optimize his LinkedIn profile on the basis that we all sell naked these days on social. Now the other 17 people who live in town, plus the 43 who dwell in the shire, can see his personal brand and comment in his LinkedIn group about why he prefers eloquent pros instead of karaoke or open mic nights with people singing off-key. My first act of philanthropy will be to provide WiFi for the whole town so that we can end face-to-face talking and drive real connection through social.

I've begun ghosting his profile to drive engagement and we're promoting "Professor Neil Rackham – International Poet Laureate Sales Anthropologist" as the major draw-card. I'm confident we can quadruple numbers – who says there's no ROI in social. Mike has no idea and reckons the only social feed that matters is a good T-bone counter lunch sold to a mini-bus tour group. Goodbye and farewell for now. Thanks for following my posts here in LinkedIn over the last 4 months and keep an eye out for Tasmanian Red Beet Beer and Neil's biography later this year... I am not fit to tie his sandals but it's such a privilege to serve the sales training industry in this way.

Sayonara ~ TJH (12:01am April 1, 2015 in Auckland, New Zealand)

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: David Goehring

10 Telltale Signs You Just Might Be A Sales Change Agent

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.” ~ Pericles

1. Not only do you 'default to prospecting mode' [Weinberg], it's your favorite part of your job - talking to prospects, customers and clients. In fact, you'd always rather be dialing, skyping or inmailing rather than doing reporting for the reporting or endless admin or passive strategic process docs.
2. You're fundamentally proactive. If you don't get 3 major boulders moved by lunch, you know you failed so you always do this with gusto and that habit generates big commission checks this quarter and ensures rich pipeline for the next.
3. The status quo is like a challenge to you. You see the world through disruptive rose-colored glasses and this is a good thing. When you look at a business model your knowledge of the industry already plugs in 5 ways to stand the legacy paradigm up on its head.
4. You speak CXO, the language of outcomes and risk, the language of strategy. Your vernacular is about 'real business outcomes,' opportunity cost and risk mitigation.
5. 'I can't' and 'I'll try' aren't in your vocabulary. You abhor too much talk and not enough action. While everyone is busy strategizing how to get into the account or proceed to the next step in the sales cycle, you've already had multiple cell phone conversations with the key stakeholders.
6. Your CEO loves you as do dream clients. You're treated as a trusted advisor everywhere you go on many subjects way outside the realm of "selling" – branding, marketing, product innovation, scaling, forecasting, technology and 'big ideas' to take back to any discerning board.
7. Face-to-face contact is the root of your book of business. You preference meeting with real people above anything else, even if you run an inside sales team. Nothing happens until a sale is made and a customer is satisfied. You are the engine of the new technoconomy.
8. You don't follow a script. You riff off 10 scripts you're A/B testing in real-time until you've honed in on the chained lightning winner.
9. Your activity levels are off the richter scale. By 9am you've done more outbound hunting than the next 5 people on your team did last week. Serious! You understand the symbiotic relationship between leading measure activities and hard revenue outcomes. You're action oriented and detail oriented without being overly-fastidious. You practice economy of effort in your writing, speaking and body language.
10. You are confident to a fault but empathetic and collaborative. You're never afraid to challenge but do so respectfully. You see the world differently like Steve Jobs.You're not afraid to give candid feedback and speak your mind. Although you may not be the ideal manager of people,clients love and trust you because you tell the truth and that's literally 'priceless' in their business. Your deeper motive is aligned with helping them succeed with your solutions and navigate the complexity of the ever changing landscape. There is no need for a tactical 'social selling' distinction – only high quality strategic selling - Social has been in your DNA since 2004.

Now it's your turn: How do you personally relate to these 10 points? How and why do you see yourself as a change agent? How have you changed the company's culture you work in or that of a customer's? Where do you need to improve? I ask myself this last question every day. Please comment below.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr:  Gemma Stiles

Will LinkedIn become the next Google for professionals?

Ask yourself, don't you start your day in Linkedin? Maybe you check your email but isn't that just notifications from LinkedIn or notifications of InMails and LinkedIn emails? What about group digests and alerts or updates from Sales Navigator of important triggers?

Is it possible that reactive company email will be a batch process function and secondary to first logging into a tool like LinkedIn which becomes your uber-dashboard to the world of selling and business?

Growing empirical evidence that this reality could soon emerge includes:

• Sellers are performing the majority of searches in a given business day within LinkedIn.
• InMails are the new cold call. Targeted, they have exponential response rates.
• Referrals and studying the interrelationships of our own employees via TeamLink gives us a distinctive edge to understand how our internal networks overlay with that of our dream prospects.
• Traditional databases are less accurate as they often take time to update whereas the community on LinkedIn self updates in near real-time.
• When salespeople are studying organizational charts for account planning or whale hunting (power-base analysis), they literally check LinkedIn first.
• Trigger events are easier to track than ever before because you can perform advance searches to understand the relationship of where prospects came from. You can even track down prospects that left that company for intel on the best way to get back in.
• Alumni networks are thriving inside LinkedIn and connecting in via alums has an astoundingly high acceptance rate.
• Groups are becoming the chat rooms of the future where your contemporaries hang out in the field exchanging advanced knowledge and debating the finer points of cutting edge solutions. Customer-facing groups where executives hang out are accessible to the modern business developer.
• Pulse is now so deeply embedded in SEO and engagement so off the charts, that many Pulse stories hit the front page of Google News. To my knowledge, LinkedIn Publish gets crawled by the spiders and provides tremendous SEO value as there is so much interlinking, commenting and interactivity that sends key signals back to the [Google] Panda machine learning algorithm.
• LinkedIn is at the heart and epicenter of the social selling movement more as the hub than the spoke. (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube all duke it out there.)
• Passive candidate searches have never been easier so it's possible to now acquire top talent. This makes the entire paradigm of staffing a more efficient marketplace which is fundamentally a democratizing force in society and engenders meritocracy. [This could even have a profound positive impact on ameliorating gender inequality via it's mere technology approach].
• LinkedIn Navigator allows a second mailbox for business development to preserve personal privacy in one's own inbox so if you're un-engaged and unhappy like 80% of the workforce... go do something about it right now!
• The analytics engine behind LinkedIn is the ultimate matchmaking resource from a recruitment perspective. The better this big data crunching machine becomes, the more tailored the applicants it will serve up. This just makes LinkedIn even more fundamentally sticky and core to every startup and enterprise in the world.
• CRMs could literally melt away were Navigator to allow for just a few extra features like: Sorting of lead lists, designation of current contacts and opportunity management with minimal stage creation.
• Just a few basic classic CRM functions could help LinkedIn Sales Navigator be an end-to-end enterprise selling tool. Small startup companies will definitely begin to leverage LinkedIn as a complete replacement for CRM this year and with great results, I might add.
• There's a growing number of people that just connect LinkedIn to Twitter, Facebook & Google+ but only utilize LinkedIn as their core network. Just like TV, I'm trying to minimize time-wasting platforms so I curtail my usage of the internet to where the most additive value to developing my consultancy can be derived.
• According to Business Insider: "For the full year [2014], LinkedIn reported revenue of $2.219 million, an increase of 45% compared to 2013. Non-GAAP net income in 2014 was $254 million, compared to $192 million in 2013." Translation: They've cracked the code on making a social network into a profitable business model.
• They've essentially transcended the restrictions of "social networking" nomenclature / classification and become something entirely new: a human-centric virtual world mapping the economic graph.
• Who else is mapping the global economic graph? I'd be hard-pressed to answer that question [maybe ask BranchOut?] which further highlights the level of blue ocean strategy and divergent, focused and memorable value curves they've effectively exploited.

We can almost make the argument that the internet itself, Google searching and email are all secondary and tertiary channels. For many of the top performers on terra firma, they're a necessary evil and afterthought.

My challenge would be to see what would happen if a salesperson for just one quarter, had no email and simply utilized the full functionality of LinkedIn on desktop and mobile, without even having a traditional phone. Behold the transformative power of the entire suite of LinkedIn applications. How much business would it be possible to develop?

A lion share.

Like any system, we are only as effective as the quality of the data. That's what makes LinkedIn so unusual in how it's innovating the way we do business globally with a data driven approach at the fore. The fact that people are by and large who they say they are, in many industries all relevant companies are represented, and most core business functions from a recruiting, sales, marketing, business development and R & D perspective are achievable on here; would suggest a brave new world is upon us.

That's not to say the greater web or search engines will ever go away completely but for a variety of industry verticals, much of the utility represented by those past paradigms will simply live inside the LinkedIn system or ones like it. This is disconcerting for those that tend to perform Google searches religiously. I think the thing to remember is that 92% of all traffic is on the first page. So in essence, most of Google's function is to serve paid or semi-paid (lest we forget organic SEO strategy still costs a fortune when done properly) to the first page above the fold on a laptop.

I've had major warnings about blogging exclusively in here. What if they close and own your I.P. or go down and your blog is gone. My response is, the architects of this infrastructure are a) much smarter than I am; b) have a redundant system for a back-end technology stack; and c) run a reverse pyramid where my content in the system is the most valuable player. The more bestselling authors who migrate all their I.P. open source into the Publisher blogosphere, the more traction LinkedIn has as the leading publishing platform. And I'm OK with that... I get 15 to 50 inbound LinkedIn invites per week, sometimes even per day when a great article hits Channels like Leadership & Management or Sales Strategies. Many of these inbound touches have translated into training, speaking or consulting gigs. It's worth the risk but I do not believe that risk exists.

Weiner and Hoffman are in this for 100 years from my lens.

What do you think the possibilities and limitations are for LinkedIn? Could it replace CRMs? Could it replace Google? How about email? Will new forms of email be developed that run inside professional networks like this which render emailing and Googling on the open web, less necessary? Could the salespeople of the future get by solely with LinkedIn running on their smartphone and desktop, [perhaps in a smart contact lens] leveraging SlideShare for presentations and making cell phone or conference calls natively on the phone, or even with a simple edition of chat functionality they could add. They could add video-conferencing or partner with a Citrix or Skype to do so, fairly easily. Will traditional and cutting edge CRM vendors respond by supplying feature functionality parity?

One of the glaring things missing from LinkedIn which I've been talking about for years as the Magic Bullet for the entire system is LIVE Chat. Google+ has hangouts, Facebook has real-time 'always on' live chat interfaces. Now maybe there's a fear this is too obtrusive but if you were able to 'knock' just like on Join.Me – now that would be the killer app! Imagine knocking on a profile, spinning up a video chat and accelerating the deal.

LinkedIn is powerful in how it focuses and based on the many things it doesn't do but as it's expanded it's product and services offering, I truly believe the sky's the limit and every competitive tech company needs to be constantly vigilant.

Last feature I'll recommend, is around LinkedIn Publisher. Building out a vanity link to the corpus (or compendium) of posts would be excellent so someone could type in http://www.linkedin.com/tonyjhughespublish < or any customization here. The other side of this is building in more of a WordPress blog like index instead of a series of scrollable tiles. [Teaser copy would be great here too to attract relevant clicks and capture intent.] This would allow someone to search posts by month or search them by keyword.

Granted, few are getting near the 200 posting mark but some of the more advanced blog organization features would be great in the product roadmap. I actually like how responsive and tight the CMS is because it just looks so much cleaner than a traditional blog by maintaining one consisting format / theme across the entire ecosystem.

RSS is critical and many have adapted to Feed.ly so it's important for LinkedIn to enable RSS and feature it prominently for those of us that have pioneered a full blogging strategy within here.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: TechCrunch

The One Anomalistic Trait to Scout Out When Hiring Sales Falcons

Courage? Sticktoitiveness? Testicularity? Tenacity? Empathy? Resiliency? Amiability? Challengery? Strategery? Positivity? Attitudidinality? And the winner is...

D. None of the above.

Now before I answer this 64 million dollar question, I will quote Calvin Coolidge and Theodore Roosevelt:

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."

It is not the critic who counts; not the [hu]man who points out how the strong [hu]man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the [hu]man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if (s)he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his/her place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

My answer in 2015 with the axis of evil being commoditization, complexity and infinite cloud-based competition is... Survey says!:

The ability to develop sound business acumen in order to analyze businesses effectively and generate profound new insights that help customers reframe and visualize critical aspects of their business in novel, new and disruptive ways.

In a word: Insightfulness

Let's unpack this bold statement. No matter how much of a winning personality, positive attitude, team player and willingness to work hard would traditionally give a field salesperson an edge prior to 2010, it's unlikely to even land a meeting circa 2020. Why? Without a provocative insight to crowbar open the door against 300 extremely similar messages in a CXOs inbox, you're toast! The days of Dale Carnegie are a given. This is like touch-typing skills, it's no longer a profession unto itself, a certain level of computer literacy is simply expected as table stakes. Placing Microsoft Excel or Word on your CV is expected and frankly, not even necessary.

If you master insightfulness, which is defined as the ability to analyze business models from an analytical financial level, to a strategic level and even a technology cusp level and synthesize these crystalline insights into tangible actions in a plan that a client can take to improve even incrementally, you will have a Herculean edge.

Even if you've ever been a victim of agism, or patently you are competing in this still discriminatory world of gender and cultural bias, even if you are a self-described Luddite, or introvert: this quality of insightfulness alone will ensure that you not only land opportunities, but that you rapidly transition to meeting with clients and riding the light beam of trusted advisor status.

You don't need an MBA to accomplish this level of insight. Remarkably, books on insight selling and challenger methods can often simply reaffirm the importance of this skill-set over and over again without necessarily giving you a concrete set of steps to actually do it. You need a treasure map to the fishing rod which is the insight generator and creativity within your own head. Don't discount a mastermind group that meets weekly just to brainstorm unique insights in an industry grown stale with cacophonous white papers declaring the winners and losers in quadrants.

To develop this acumen I would recommend books like Blue Ocean Strategy and Bottom-Line Selling by Jack Malcolm where Jack stresses reading the balance sheet, gleaning insight from an annual report and ways to understand the true business situations customer's are facing from the corner office vantage point. Blue Ocean is a great way to leverage a strategic process called a strategy canvas to start thinking differently about unique and compelling value that is completely differentiated from the competition.

From a military strategy perspective, this is called outflanking. From a branding or Al Ries perspective, it's declaring a new market and being the self-proclaimed leader.

Other methods include First Principles thinking which Elon Musk is famous for and Design Centred Thinking. One great way to get here is to ask yourself consistently, "If placed in my customers shoes, how would I revolutionize their business model knowing what I know and extrapolating around the bend based on my unique experience in the channel?"

Studying disruptive innovation from Harvard Business Review, Geoffrey Moore of Crossing the Chasm, Steve Blank and Clayton Christensen essays may seem like the fodder of pedantic entrepreneurs but they're very much applicable to tuning your ability to see the world differently.

Building your insight acumen is not something that is typically trained on in a sales workshop where processes, scripts and question sets are drilled and rehearsed. How you sell, how you look at the world, how you approach business is your unique footprint on the ecosystem. This is the snowflake or prism of your mind that truly becomes your calling card over a long career inside an industry or even if you're brand new to a market or the market is white hot, it's the genesis of your personal brand.

The generally held idea is to assess your marketplace, become a subject matter expert (again, no advice as to how) and bring back insights to your prospects and clients in this way to in effect, chum the waters so the sharks bite. This is a traditional view but risks commoditization of even these insights. The top salespeople, the Falcons that are soaring past quota year after year, are actually advising clients at a high level on positive risks worth taking: hardware to the cloud, opex from costly capex, open source from closed, manual to automated, mobile computing paradigms, Internet of Things. Tectonic shifts. These technology megatrends that are rendering B2B environments a great deal more like B2C cannot be neglected.

I may be debated on this point. I think persistence is the old world standard. It's a given. Dale Carnegie to a tee is a must. It's the essence of beguiling, as Guy Kawasaki encourages.

But what's going to get you into the meeting? What's going to preference you in the RFI? As Ago Cluytens state: "Lead with value." I would say a heat-seeking key insight will stop them in their tracks.

If you can generate one unique insight, you can become a font of insights and become a resource for not just sound great ideas to satisfy the conservative spectrum of the audience, but big bold hairy moonshot ideas for those mobilizers and disruptors in the accounts.

Everyone is looking to be inspired and many are looking for a magic bullet. Strategic sales has become a collaborative process where those that lead with insight, help their prospects and clients unlock insight and build synergistic masterminds that spawn new realms of knowledge and innovation will rule the new world.

The modern sales falcon is indeed an anomaly. A merchant of insight, she alights on the air currents of fractal levels of technology singularity driven by insights only she can create and share.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: Stefan Groen

50 Shades of Social Selling

Social selling is the latest craze and the world is having a global love affair with it. OK, so maybe for many it's a love hate relationship but it all depends how you look at it: War of the Roses or Princess Bride!

I knew this post would get a million clicks just like a million buyers of the latest airport novel so I lured you in with good intentions. I wanted to speak briefly to the global movement that is both a technology progression and strategic evolution called 'social selling.' The term is everywhere you want to be in 2015 and many places... well, you don't!

I think this is a tectonic shift and I believe it's truly here to stay. I actually believe that the term 'social selling' will fall away and selling will simply be known as good ol' sales again.

We're reaching a saturation point with social selling however. We could look at this like 'social selling' has crossed the chasm or we're in the middle of that bell curve. It will be interesting to see how CRM and CXM respond to this by fully integrating these channels into their ecosystems or reaching feature parity.

Who will disrupt the disruptors?

My predictions for social selling fall within the realm of wearables. I have predicted that mobile phones as we know them will go away. Device based smart computing, contact lenses and Heads Up Display, holography of everything will replace the restrictive appendage that is mobile: social will simply be a fabric of how we interact in an increasing virtual society toward Singularity.

There have been some interesting shifts that have happened as a result of social selling that I want to call out:

• Twitter is almost primarily auto-responders. Any time somebody actually DMs me I'm almost shocked. Many times it's really an auto-DM in disguise.
• InMails have limited efficacy when everyone is now using them as email. It's buzzing a smartphone in pocket but the EA is now monitoring the CEO's LinkedIn account. Is this progress?
• We've reached full blown social selling meltdown just like we did with social media: This is the condition where there are more social media experts than those using social media. There are more LinkedIn and Twitter trainers than consumers can even transact with. I'm all for expanding the pie but it's getting way out of control.

• I've found a massive gap in the marketplace for the combination of traditional enterprise, and strategic selling with B2B methodologies with the social selling tools. There are a group of experts with decades in the field that are thinking differently about power-base driven methods of navigating enterprise accounts with social media like LinkedIn.
• Two camps have developed: The Social Selling Mafia (I accidentally inducted myself by dint of a spectrum of posts) and the Phone Slingers. Like the Wild West they are the old Sheriff in town combating the new and a bit ruffled that the social sellers are getting such great results. They even believe the results aren't real. Having tested life in both camps I can say that tools of any kind work with a strategic operator at the helm.

• The referral camp seems to love social for its power in referrals.
• Then there are the blended multi-channel folks that are looking to integrate all the channels together.
• Google+ is actually not a graveyard, it's where really smart people share things that would truly blow most business people's mind. Anytime I stumble in there, I find truly next-level content.
• There seems to be an issue with the quality of user generated content on LinkedIn. I'm learning by posting and asking for feedback. It appears that a greater degree of editing could be helpful to add to machine-based filtration schemes. I'm very curious how LinkedIn will solve this or if it's just growing pains. As Pulse and LinkedIn Publisher grow-up, will there be an algorithmic and human touch approach to improving the quality of the content.
• It might make sense to build a Pulse Channel or balance a certain amount of posts in the system, let's say 10%, that are brought forward by professional writers from publications like Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Inc., The New Yorker and The Economist. I think Publisher needs more balance. I know the Writers on here and they contribute but others who do 300 identical articles on Big Data can be a bit vexing to the average reader. What was so cool about Pulse originally was how it was similar to Flipboard in one's ability to monitor super high quality content that was shared.

• I say this tongue in cheek but there is a certain a subset of the population that should really never be on any social media whatsoever. It's a cry for help! They get sucked in and productivity goes to an all time low. This 'unfortunately frequently' LION crowd is REAL busy posting big cat pictures into LinkedIn's stream right now as we speak.

There's another extreme of hyper-productive folks that somehow are able to do it all. It would be cool to build in time management tools within LinkedIn - like a timer to regulate use - or some form of batch processing.

• From empirical observation and feedback from my readers, there's been great success in reverse looking up B2B emails and sending micro-targeted campaigns. Maybe even more so than InMail?
• I'm curious about Sponsored LinkedIn InMails. Are any of you finding them valuable? Are you running targeted LinkedIn advertising? How has your ROI been there? What about paid options in Twitter and Facebook? How are those working out for you?
• Let's talk about Facebook? Can it really sustain with the level of ads? Are you having a relevant experience in there? What about your Facebook Fan Page: have you seen a drop in reach with the latest changes of the sorting algorithm?

• There's been a cadre of folks that feel 'social media' ROI is purely faith based but it also seems that it's always been tricky to properly tie attribution toward it. I look forward to futuristic technology platforms that can track this.
• Since the latest UI refresh, I've been noticing more sponsored ads in the mainstream and actually let LinkedIn know because a few were completely taking up all the available space above the fold. Amazingly, they seemed to have adjusted this within weeks. There must have been a chorus of feedback on this issue.

• There's been an argument that sales reps should not be permitted to publish content every day. That's the camp that's in it for curation.
• There is fear and consternation about giving up brand control and conformity to social media policy and corporate governance. I've advocated a VP of Sales given Managing Editor status. I've also posited that with the shrinkage of traditional media models there will be a hyper-talented pool of journalists available to hold down this function in the enterprise.
• LinkedIn might revamp the Group functionality with allowing a Live Chat experience. This could be similar to a TweetUp or Twitter Chat. This is a very intriguing idea because the level of engagement would be off the charts. It could be like a big Google Hang Out hosted by Questlove.

I'm extremely interested in your experiences with basic social selling and advanced strategic social selling memes. I seemed to have stirred the pot by insinuating that LinkedIn could be the next Google but then many wrote in that they do indeed perform hundreds (if not thousands of searches) within LinkedIn each week.

Is there snake oil around? Is it all what it's cracked up to be? If you hate the social selling movement, what's the fundamental problem with it in your opinion and how could it be improved?

Where do you think the paradigms of social, mobility and selling are going toward 2020? Predictions perform outrageously well out here in LinkedInville. If I find any very prescient ones in the comments below, I will re-integrate them back into the post above.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au

Main image photo by Flickr: r: Turinboy

How many salespeople will be left?

Pundits and analysts have predicted the demise of all sellers by 2020. With 18MM sellers this is a bit of a Nostradamus hubris causing some serious cognitive dissonance. One CEO actually declared he'd never hire a salesperson again but then a second glance revealed almost comically that all his customer service reps are actually already doing some pseudo transactional selling. It's been posited that 30% of field selling will be going away very soon.

Would you agree? Is Sales as we know it going away to be replaced by AI or is it just morphing into something that is going to look a great deal more like a combination of sales and marketing?

Phil Fernandez, the founder of Marketo, talks about the rise of the Director of Demand Generation in his prescient book "Revenue Disruption." These futuristic specialists take a bold, data-driven approach to driving leads into the business. Perhaps the new roles that emerge toward 2020 will be something more towards this side of the spectrum and top of the funnel.

I unleashed a furious debate on this topic in the Strategic Selling Group so I wanted to bubble it up to the LinkedIn Publishing Gods. There are two camps that seem to be emerging on this topic:

Camp ONE: Let's just automate the blazes out of everything and run it all through a big dashboard! Spreadsheet jockeys rejoice in exaltation!

Camp TWO: Complexity and commoditization may actually render the field seller even more relevant than ever before. After all, who's going to navigate the prospect through the morass of data and confusing solution sets?

There's an executive management viewpoint of lowering cost of sales but we don't want to rob Peter to pay Paul here. It's critical that core high-touch functions within enterprise customer accounts not be eroded by short term gain.

I would posit a Camp THREE: The sales people of the future that win must be ninjas with Social Selling, analytics, consultative methods meet insight selling and have tremendous amounts of EQ meets business acumen.

Simon Gibbard describes the sales leader of the future as follows: "You get marketing. Marketing is the new sales, and you’ve got your arms around it. You write copy. You get SEO, paid and earned media. You know how to promote a post on Facebook and LinkedIn. You’ve got a Slideshare account and you use Buffer. Google alerts flag up opportunities to have new conversations. You speak the language of marketing and it makes you a better salesperson. The us and them days are over."

Do you agree that Marketing is the new Sales? Or, as Peter Strohkorb has coined in his stirring manifesto, the age of "SMARKETING!" has arrived.

One thing is for certain, it's a battle royale to stay relevant: relevant to your own CEO with SVP of Sales attrition at an all-time high.

Air Ross declared in his latest e-newsletter: "Studies have said the average B2B sales team loses 27% of its members per year – whether they quit or are fired. That is INSANE!"

So even before the Singularity emerges knocking us all out, we're already seeing enterprises hemorrhaging talent. Some of this could be chalked up to poor management and stratospheric targets coupled with an insidious lack of specialization, to be sure. It seems to be pre-quake jitters.

The modern sales practitioner must not risk becoming too specialized. Futurist Jacob Morgan extolls the learning worker over the knowledge worker as the knowledge worker gets paid for what he knows but the learning worker? She has the agility to adapt and constantly learn how to learn. That's what's so sensational about Jill Konrath's clairvoyant book Agile Selling, it truly allows a holistic approach to life-long learning and up-skilling in organizations.

Ability to learn is the meta-skillset of the perma-employed, ever-adapting sales lion of 2050. I have no doubt!

I've pulled some quotes from this debate for your reading pleasure. Please join the rousing global chorus in the comments below.

Michael Bonner sounds off: "Here's the problem. It turns out that the world does not actually get simpler over time. Marketing has no way to automatically assist someone with a complex decision. Even if they can come up with docs for every possible objection, the majority of people don't want to have to do all the study. How would they ever know when they knew enough. Complex decisions need discussion with experts. Review the studies that show that the quality of the selling experience was a major factor in many B2B and big-ticket sales. That probably won't change by 2020. Computers are a lot of things. Many of them wonderful. They are also cold, heartless, achingly stupid and insensitive (Okay, so it can replace some salespeople)."

John Smibert's contribution: "The sales profession won't die (although many sales roles may). It will change and adapt as the world, and buyers in particular, change and adapt. The profession will find new (or modified) ways to create value for the buyer - to enable a fair exchange of value in ways that cannot be done without human interaction. I believe the sales profession has an exciting and changing future. I predict there will be wonderful new opportunities for salespeople in 2020. As always, those who change and adapt will survive and grow - and those that don't won't."

Shelly Revivo believes: "Nonsense. Automation will innovate but the human element will always be critical. Automation simply helps with profitability and loss elimination of the 80/20 rule."

Adam Thorp explains: "The cost of sales is very very high. So what do you do – you automate. You automate to give sellers more time to sell and you automate to reduce the reliance on a large sales team. Using the 80/20 rule, in theory you can retain those top 20% or performers, still retain 80% of your revenue and see a significant increase in profitability due to the reduction in head count and cost of sale. Change in inevitable. You only have to look at the major players in sales performance management (ie CallidusCloud), sales enablement (ie SAVO), and sales automation (Insidesales.com) to see where the market is going. I remember less than 3 or 4 years ago people saying marketing automation was a just a fad and couldn’t be effective – just look at that space now.

Tracey Preston Cook's mind blowing contribution: "65% of all new careers that will be in existence 10 years from now, have not even been fully identified and many are not currently understood. Most are based on technology either emerging now, or disruptive technologies that are yet to be developed. The question we are asking about sales is one that taps into the fear of our selling futures (I've felt it too - it's normal to fear). It's why we pay attention to predictive statements...positive or negative. What you are selling will change many many many times...that's why you should learn everything you can about sales. Read everything not nailed down. Watch everything not obscured. Listen and observe the best. Learn. Learn. Then learn some more."

Ivonne Teoh reads the tea leaves: "With longer lifespans of 140+ (ask your insurance agent), I wonder what the governments have in mind with new advances of technology and AI for the population. Less people working (displaced by robots), how to support that lifestyle. Gschwandtner may be wrong about the exact year, but it is still on the cards? I don't like telemarketers! They ring at the wrong time, some even selling funeral insurance! Being forced to make a decision where I'm not given enough time to check the info, is a big turn off."

Now it's your turn: Is it just a little history repeating or will sales fall away? Do you believe field sales is toast to be replaced by holo-conferencing? Is the field of sales stronger than ever? What's your message to the CEO of tomorrow as she's looking to make the call on hiring sales leaders? What mix of live salespeople and sales automation is ideal?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: DDW Fotografia

Is SPIN still the best book on sales ever written?

Wherever I go around the world, speaking and training, the term 'spin' is ubiquitous. Granted, Challenger came along but salespeople in as diverse fields as electronics, manufacturing and even speculative verticals like high technology, still swear by it! It works in both B2C and B2B.

So what are your thoughts on this? Is the SPIN methodology still all you really need to know, the Holy Grail of selling and applicable in complex enterprise selling? Could it be that the level of real research that went into Neil Rackham's study is what made it withstand the test of time? There have been lots of shallow surveys, anecdotal observations, and manipulated 'research' that masquerades as 'empirical data and insightful findings' since, but in my opinion nothing has ever matched the integrity and depth of Rackham's ground-breaking work.

Neil Rackham is The Professor of Professional Selling, and his prescient methods fit into the DNA of Challenger Selling. His SAFE vs BOLD framework is included on page 82 of The Challenger Sale book and he writes the foreword. Is Challenger merely an offshoot of Rackham's thought leadership over decades? If you continue to study sales executives, won't the same patterns continue to re-emerge?

Has the sales cycle truly changed that much? Many argue that with increasing complexity and commoditization, and the difficulty in making a considered purchase, it's actually a preference of many senior level executives to seek out trusted advisors to shepherd them through the maelstrom of options.

I would define the SPIN acronym for you but I'm sure you're all very familiar. The book is about the quality of the questions we ask to uncover the deeper pain's implications and need-payoff scenarios as we peel the onion to the real root causes of problems. According to the data 'the result of millions in painstaking research,' that ability – which can be coached and trained on, thankfully – separates the winners in any sales arena from those that came in 2nd place or below. Unfortunately only one company gets to close.

I was pretty impressed that I can actually tag this post as 'spin selling' because it's that big. So this is a bit of a short punchy post:

1. Would you agree that SPIN Selling is the best book ever written on strategic selling? Why?

2. How has it impacted your life and career?

3. How are you using SPIN to manage, train and get world class results out of your team?

4. If not SPIN, what are you using instead?

5. If you were to go to a desert island, is there really any other book that you would need?

6. Is anyone having success applying SPIN methods to social selling? Sales management?

Now it's your turn. Please answer any of the above questions that inspire you and in regards to sales writings – What's your top 5 of all time? I have a big announcement coming concerning Neil Rackham but that's a post for a few days from now. More about Neil, please by all his books. He was gracious enough to review The Joshua Principle, Leadership Secrets of Selling:

"There are millions of sales jobs around the world today, but a large number of those are disappearing every year. As technology advances and consumer demands increase, the idea of a salesperson as a 'talking brochure' is no longer valid. World class sales forces understand this and are making every effort to adapt and maintain their positions of leadership in the marketplace. There is no greater authority than Neil Rackham on where the selling profession is headed and what individuals and organizations must do to distinguish themselves from their fierce competitors.

Having conducted the largest-ever study of professional selling – observing more than 35,000 sales calls in over 20 countries, at a cost of $40 million in today’s dollars – Neil presents objective, quantitative insights in a dynamic, interactive fashion that brings true learning to the audience. (The effectiveness of his teaching and training methods earned him the Instructional Systems Association’s lifetime award for Innovation in Training and Instruction.)

Many of of the Fortune 100′s largest companies in the United States, including IBM, Xerox, AT&T and Citicorp, have engaged Neil Rackham as an advisor on sales performance. More than half the Fortune 500 train their salespeople using sales models derived from his research. As a sought-after conference speaker, Neil has shared the platform with notable leaders such as Tom Peters, General Colin Powell, Philip Kotler and many others. Using his signature combination of humor, passion and group interaction, he stimulates and challenges his audiences to reach new heights in the world of professional selling."

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr:  Simon & His Camera

Could you function without your CRM?

Garbage in, garbage out. GIGO. The modern Customer Relationship Management system or 'CRM' is all too often a repository for the inaccurate. There is little way to enforce a culture where sales people are reformed citizens and tidy record keepers. The customer data is always changing. Here are some bold ideas:

• What if LinkedIn opened up its API to synchronize with all CRM systems so that the data is almost always accurate, up to the minute? Wouldn't this move alone revolutionize the space?

• What if LinkedIn launched its own CRM product. How many more features does Sales Navigator actually need to be an effective catch-all solution in this way?
• We're seeing more and more autofill via LinkedIn, so couldn't prospects just hit a single button from your front-of-site to download a white paper by filling in pre-populated, accurate LinkedIn credentials that transition seamlessly into your database of record?
• Is all the clicking and syncing and searching in CRM shredding our collective productivity? How many hours are we actually wasting on manual processes inside antiquated UIs?

• Could you theoretically function more effectively with just a white board, phone and email du jour? How about an airplane and a cup of coffee?
• Is there sufficiently advanced technology being built that will disrupt CRMas we know it?
• Could Social Selling, Web 3.0 – the web of Context, Big Data, Predictive Analytics and Automation play a far greater role out-of-the-box to help solve the above issues?

• When are marketing automation, drip campaigns and B2B lead gen actually going to get smarter and more sophisticated with personalization beyond the first name andfirmographic telegraphing to present key insights to each type of executive stakeholder?
• What if wearable technology could play a role? Google Glass could pull in real-time data to keep the CRM accurate. A snapshot with a smart contact lens of a business card could serve to update that file automatically after or even 'during' a meeting?

• Will wearables and machine learning technology take voice recognition and Siri to a level of an always-on, executive assistant keeping all our data straight?
• Is there a bright future for CRM or will the sector continue to decay behind the scenes while savvier marketing teams continue to put lipstick on a pig, shellacking an advanced-looking coating on a shell of an ancient engine?

• What is the role of social proximity to serve up networked intelligence based on geolocation, network node overlays and prescience about who we 'should be talking to?' We have the data, now how do we get to it?

These questions are mere icing on the iceberg cake of perplexing issues, no doubt. It will take bold, antifragile, resilient and innovative entrepreneurs within the legacy systems to disrupt themselves in skunk works-like divisions that crop up.

Or, a new breed of CRM and CXM will appear that starts to erode their grip on market share. We've seen these tectonic shifts in so many industries as of late. It's never been easier to launch a startup company and challenge incumbents because of the cloud, CapEx can be virtually eliminated with a controlled OpEx burn.

Who will be the next disruptors in CRM? There's one thing we can never doubt. Ideas are powerful and one big bold idea has the power to change the world and uproot industries in inexplicable ways.

How can CRM be re-imagined from the ground up, with First Principles Elon Musk Physics Thinking. Which portion of the features does your organization actually use? What is the 20% generating 80% of the results? What is glaringly missing? How can we tie back all the ROI of our finest social selling efforts and reflect this within a holistic picture of multi-channel outreach in the modern Full Funnel Marketing approach?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au

Main image photo by Flickr: Roland Tanglao

3 Lessons Business Can Learn From Sporting Winners

I was recently interviewed by Kelly Riggs on his BizLocker radio program and afterwards we had a great conversation where I asked him what he thought business can learn from sport. Kelly was himself an elite athlete and he has published two acclaimed books. In the Quit Whining and Start Selling book he provides a sales acceleration formula which is brilliant.

So, from someone who really knows; what can business learn from elite sport? Here is his insightful response with three very specific things.

First: Just like sports, business is a competition.

Since we compete for business, it is always in our best interests to hire competitors who want to win and bristle at the very thought of mediocrity. Sure, there is a line one can cross (in sports as well) when it comes to competition, but employers are often guilty of hiring resumes rather than competitors. The problem is that it is too easy to make a resume look good, and most companies have very poor hiring processes. As a result, they hire reactively, screen poorly, and consistently justify bad hiring decisions with the worst of excuses: "It's hard to find good people." 

In fact, there are only four ways to play a game on the field, on the court, or on the pitch: 1) Play to win, 2) Play to win at all costs, 3) Play not to lose, or, 4) Just show up and play. The only real option for long-term success is to consistently play to win - legally, ethically, and morally. Sadly, however, the vast majority of companies just show up and play. It's reflected in their attitudes about business, their lack of planning, and their approach to hiring and managing employees. Lesson No. 1: Hire better. Hire attitude and character first, skills second.

Second: To win consistently, you need an effective game plan.

Winning in sports is a function of leadership, game plan, and talent. Take any one of those out of the mix and your sports performance will suffer - and so it is in business. The thing is, all three are interconnected. Take any two and toss out the third and you have a serious problem.

The bridge between leadership and talent is the game plan, and it is amazing how often businesses today lack an effective, well-communicated strategic plan. In my experience, only 10-15% of companies have a working strategic plan that guides decision making and is consistently reviewed and evaluated.Consider the sports coach whose team was just handed a crushing defeat. Now imagine him or her standing in front of the press and responding to this question: "Coach, it was tough out there today. What was your game plan going in?" Now imagine this response: "Well, guys, to be frank, we didn't have a plan. I just told the team to play hard." Lesson No. 2: Create a strong game plan. Communicate it clearly. Review it consistently. Make sure everyone on the team knows the role they play in executing that plan.

Third: You will not win consistently without a great culture.

It is a truism that great players want to play on great teams. High-performance players, regardless of personality type, are driven to be their best. They won't play (for long) on a losing team or for a mediocre coach. If a coach is a weak leader and/or can't create a winning culture, great players just won't stay. Worse, if a coach can't or won't deal effectively with under-performers, great players won't stay. All of this is especially true in business. 70% of the time, when an employee quits an organization, he or she leaves because of the actions (or lack of action) of their immediate manager or supervisor.

High turnover is like giving away money, and the vast majority of the time it is created by poor leadership. Ineffective performance management is also a major contributor to disengagement and poor morale. Who is responsible? The leader, whether we are talking sports or business. Lesson No. 3: Invest in your leaders, especially at the mid-management level. You can have a great company and a single under-performing manager can ruin your culture.

Wow... Kelly is someone who can both inspire and enable sales teams with both strategy and execution. His radio program is on Mondays at 3pm CST (7am on Tuesdays, Sydney time, for those here in Australia). Here is the podcast library and his interview with me is episode 49. My interview starts about half way through the program (after Suzanne's interview).

Finally, here is an article about why cricket has a great culture... the response following an elite player's death (Phil Hughes) after being struck by fast ball delivery was incredible. Kelly is right on the money when he links the sporting elite to business leadership.

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo @ Kelly Riggs 2015.

Landing Your Dream Job Is Easy With LinkedIn If You Do This...

The old adage, it's all about who you know holds true. Some of the best roles that I've ever landed came through a trusted friend who had personally witnessed my exceptional execution in roles. You can pay it forward and be that person for someone else by giving an authentic recommendation.

But you can also be bold and do something in the spirit of massive action that is truly extraordinary.

Submit your CV to over 100 jobs.

That sounds completely bat-guano insane, doesn't it? The truth is, that you are the value and you can explode onto the scene of the gainfully employed like a bat out of hell! Why not put out a velvet rope and let employers line up to get to your contribution. You can lead the reverse auction, you can up your stock. At the end of the day, there are just too many companies that need high quality strategic selling talent.

So the caveat to this, is you must be phenomenal at what you do. I've written a multitude of posts to help you get there. So does it appear that I am advocating quantity over quality? No. There are hundreds of top roles that you can submit to in merely a few clicks. Is quality and quantity possible: Yes, here's how it's viable with LinkedIn.

Customize your resume and cover letter and really take the time to think about each role and write from the hip. I know one executive that literally took the time to apply to hundreds of jobs over a six month passive search and 5X'd her income. It requires radical openness and willingness to change, move anywhere in the world and wait until the match is made. Just like finding the perfect mate, you must wait until there is a mutual understanding of potential and value. They need to see your intrinsic and extrinsic value resplendently differentiated. Simply put: the feeling must be mutual.

Careers are a like a marriage, hopefully yours will be a good one. Needless to say, the divorce rate is pretty high. My philosophy is: Raise your standards and go after exactly what you want. Always play in a band or on a team where your contemporaries inspire you to be markedly better. There are several paradoxes at work here that are worth laying out in bullet points for job seekers interested in landing the 'perfect role.'

1. You must slow way down to speed up.

2. You must break out of your existing networks because even the ones you know who can recommend you in – it's all about who you know like politics and Tinsel Town – really will just limit you to what's come before. You must break the cycle!

3. Very few candidates will reach up beyond mediocrity. Stretch to fill the role that will accelerate you rather than being a huge fish in a small pond of your limitations.

4. Treat yourself like a product and service offering and literally hold dozens of qualified discovery calls with the recruiting organizations filling the buyer role.

5. You only get one chance to build a first impression so the irony here is that if you sound like everyone else, you risk being forgotten.

6. Non-traditional candidates who have struggled stand out, some of the top recruiters are looking for a mix of flexibility, agility and the indomitable human spirit.

7. Don't just apply to open requisitions on LinkedIn: find out who is doing the recruiting, study which team you'll be on and craft bespoke InMails to reach out with 30-60-90 day strategic attack plans. Study the company like a prospect that you will partner with and build a compelling, insight driven mission statement for how you'll move the needle once you come on board.

8. The enemy you know is better than the enemy you don't know is cowardice. There are great people out there and great cultures – believe it and make it real for you. It's worth daily fulfillment, believe me.

We underestimate what we can achieve in ten years and over-estimate what we can do in one. We need to choose a profession that aligns our passions with growth opportunities to be challenged and excel.

Breaking the fourth wall is a term I frequently use derived from the Shakespearean theater ethos which is the moment an actor turns and shares their inner thoughts with the audience. This goes back to the fundamentals of Dale Carnegie and how to influence others effectively. Your comfort zone is not the fourth wall. Five companies that auto-reject you because of some peccadilloes in your background where a machine read your CV, is not going to get you into the winner's circle. Honestly, you'll just never be happy if you don't go big. Just like prospecting, 3 precise accounts won't necessarily guarantee closing a million dollar deal, no matter what compelling the business insight you bring to the table: the status quo is just too gaping like a black hole with inescapable gravity toward nothingness. Deepen your bench with a cornucopia of opportunities that excite you to leap out of your bed and yell 'charge!' before the first bird tweets!

Organizations are often looking to play it safe, to not make a mistake, to fit a symmetrical piece in place of another in the machinery. You need to break the fourth wall, take massive action and build your own role in the organization where you land. Position yourself as a change agent and attract those to you in companies looking for your specific brand of awesome.

Your turn: What are your thoughts on the above paradoxes and strategies? Have you taken the easy route of who you know or built on the strength of weak ties within LinkedIn to transcend the limitations of your own network, however large? What do you agree or disagree with in this article? What additional value, tactics or strategies can you add that have helped you land your dream role, rocket your income and break the fourth wall?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au

Main image photo by Flickr: bradfordst219

Are remote employees as effective?

Only time will tell... or can effective hiring practices trump the inherent risks of a lack of supervision?

If you are proficient in hiring competent, trustworthy employees they will be so wherever they log-in from. There is a fallacy of an ineffective remote employee and a myth that increased collaboration automagically occurs when all workers are bundled together in an open office space. As august management consultant Ichak Adizes states, "MT & R" is the great secret to creating thriving organizations. This is a culture of Mutual Trust and Respect. This culture can be built in an office or in the cloud, across oceans or purely virtually.

There are countless tools to foster collaboration but nothing that will inspire a lone wolf to find synergy with peers. Jealous and manipulative people smile outwardly while creating toxicity in the ecosystem of companies of any size.

I believe we are asking the wrong question. What are the criteria that you can effectively use to bring the right talent into your organization so that it will thrive? Period. Anywhere, in any composition.

I believe the behavior and values of leader is the culture so you don't have to look too far from the corner office, to understand what you're getting into when joining the ranks of the up and coming hot tech start-up or legacy stalwart.

Flexible hours are supportive of equality and meritocracy, and fly in the face of top-grading / stack ranking and various other Draconian systems that require issuing demerits on a quota system to even your A players to appease the 'maximization of shareholder value', ego or just plain unwillingness to confront a downsizing masked as 'rightsizing'.

Ask yourself: Is the company you're creating a dictatorship, benevolent republic or democratic and open in nature? Really... ask yourself as a leader? Shouldn't leadership and power be a reverse pyramid where the employees come first, your customers and their experience forming the bedrock on which all else stands? The beauty of fundamental truths like these is that they tend to set us free.

E-learning, teleconferencing, collaboration and real-time communication have progressed so thoroughly that a vast amount of traditional person-to-person required roles can now be achieved remotely.

That's not to say there aren't exceptions across various vertical industries. It's unlikely you'll remotely build a battleship (or Collins Class submarine for those in Australia) but some parts can be assembled in various locations, granted.

There is a camp that rallies for coaching weakness out of people and a camp that rallies for playing to your team members' inherent strengths. A gifted introvert may be comfortable in a less social selling as an extrovert may seek camaraderie.

In sales, I'd prefer to see the time with customers prioritized and optimized. Regulating productivity is very difficult either way, unless you can build out an honor system and regular coaching so that the KPIs that you are measuring allow for various learning styles and paths of execution to achieve them.

Preceding revenue, there are various ways to gauge the progress of and contribution of personnel, sub-goals and sub-deliverables that can be celebrated and managed. "What gets measured gets managed" professed the late great Peter F. Drucker but we must manage the right things. There are not many human conceived systems where that doesn't hold-up in business and in life.

In some cases, remote employees may be even more effective. Proactive managers who are out in the field executing, may find it refreshing to get up and walk around in Jobsian stroll meetings or be with their families.

They may even decide to put in extra effort or be more efficient with their time. The top sales people you hire will ideally maximize face time in front of dream clients especially in a B2B complex selling world.

Inside Sales can even be revolutionized by localizing territories with remote reps dialing in from those regions. You can build a virtual calling team that spans the globe and can be responsive and time-zone aware.

These ideas are obviously not set in stone and there are iterations galore. There are unlimited edge cases like working on the next secret quantum computer, self driving car or aerospace marvel. It's 2015, wait, why are we still building cars? I thought they were supposed to fly? I'll save that diatribe for another post!

Humanity fears change. Maybe fear of remote working is just a sign of the times. Someday there may be interplanetary inside sales forces: GoToMeeting Astral Edition?

Now it's your turn: What is your opinion on this often controversial topic? How have you been effective managing people and teams remotely or being incentivized and motivated as you execute your job in the field? Are there gaps in training or communication? How would you improve this and which style of work do you honestly think is most effective overall?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au

Main image photo by Flickr: Pic Basement

Falling in love with helping customers and transforming their business

To many, sales is monotonous, an endless cadence of block and tackle, kick and punt; or ruck and maul if you're into rugby. This to me is the allure of strategic selling because you can fall in love with your customers. You can fall in love with the challenge of solving complex problems that actually require collaboration.

The solution provider no longer has all the answers. The journey is mutual. 

It requires a back and forth, meeting of the minds, and brainstorming of visionary ideas.

The modern enterprise deal requires executive sponsors on both sides to get done. 

A great secret to avoiding burnout and a tenured run in complex B2B selling is to simply fall in love with helping people. Consider the sale made when the solution has been stood up and you've executed with excellence. Consider your sales process complete not at closing, not at contract signed but at phase two of the implementation. When you're live and the customer is seeing return on investment, that's when the deal is really just beginning, isn't it? 

Thinking in terms of up-sells, cross-sells and down-sells is to bleed out organic growth into something sterile. It's what you'll do as a bi-product of continuing to add value. I call this a virtuous cycle of value creation. 

Love is a very strong word but if you love what you do, you'll absolutely never work another day in your life. All the mechanics, updating of CRM, note taking, strategic thinking, planning things out, brainstorming - all these mechanics and machine constructs just melt away when your prevailing focus is to...

TRANSFORM THEIR BUSINESS

Does that mean simply impacting the top and bottom line or is it something more than that? Is it beautiful destruction? Is it a controlled burn to open up the possibility of recurring, scalable and predictable new streams of revenue from various new and exciting key business lines? Is it penetrating new markets or capturing market share from legacy incumbents? Perhaps you're expanding the pie...

Loving people and being gregarious is not enough. This is the folly of the relationship builder of old. We earn friends by driving new insight. We want to be stewards of transformation rather than the status quo. We gain meetings by being respectfully disruptive and we close sales because there is truly a belief that doing something in a new and innovative way can revolutionize a system, making it hyper-efficient, building a flywheel toward revenue generation. 

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - Buckminster Fuller

Help your clients to see this and do this. Fight with all your intention to help them see the world differently and you will prevail with a much greater trusted advisor relationship than you could ever bargain for. Challenge yourself to see around corners and bring insights that you synthesize from research you yourself do. As you fall in love with helping them, they will fall in love with your personal brand and thus your organization will flourish as a subtext to your deeds, integrity, delivery and ongoing results. 

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: Ralf P

Tony Robbins' Ultimate Success Formula Applied To Strategic Sales

1. Know precisely the desired outcome.

2. Take massive action to achieve the outcome.

3. Notice quickly whether the action is working.

4. Change the approach as required to attain the outcome.

I would imagine this post will find many a Tony Robbins fan. The above is excerpted from Unlimited Power and Awaken the Giant Within. Applied to strategic sales, it's fairly remarkable how rapidly it can produce results. Let's take a quick look at the ramifications of each step on complex B2B selling.

1. Is the goal of what we are doing to close the deal, earn commission or toproduce transformational results in the client prospect's business? What's really your desired outcome? Visualize this clearly in your mind and ensure you have a close plan in place that includes the start gate, how you'll collaborate with internal stakeholders on your side and you understand the procurement process of the buying organization. At a macro level, take yourself mentally to the end result and play the event sequence back in your mind recalling it to ensure you've thoroughly accounted for every step.

2. Massive action is a theme we've seen with Google 10X moonshots, Grant Cardone's 10X rule and even Nike 'just do it.' Everywhere in natural systems, we see abundance manifested in massive actions, seeds on the wind, explosive schools of fish around the great barrier reef, infinite expanses of space energy and stars. You have to balance this with the risk of busy fool syndrome and boiling that ocean of greenfield opportunity. So how can you take, laser-focused, effective action? The answer is to think strategically and execute the strategy that will be most effective informed by wisdom of experience, common sense, and a willingness to do an uncommon level of research. To do this, it requires being in the now: full there... aware. 

3. This is where we start to get feedback in real time from the strategy that we are implementing. In a strategic sale, it's often high risk and there can be land mines in the deal, frenemies in the account, smiling forces that are secretly aligned with competition. You may take the wrong massive action and trip the wires. Over time, you'll start to be able to discern with pattern recognition and read these signals better. Keep focused on the goal, take massive action and then start to get feedback on what's working in a single deal or as you look back over your last year of selling.

4. Adjusting the approach can take various forms: Perhaps you just keep going after the CMO and they've been totally unresponsive so you leverage a referral to the CEO, or a friend of yours in-network is on their board. Perhaps you leverage an InMail or a strategically placed cold call, maybe even a neighborhood technique to call the meeting on their home turf. Perhaps you're going to build a consensus to get sponsored up into the account. Maybe it's generating that one piece of provocative insight based on a trigger event like a new advocate in the account or something a CXO alluded to in the trades. Sellers that win pivot, they adjust, like Tony Robbins and Jack Canfield say they 'ready, fire and aim.' It's important to note you are never 100% in control. Man makes plans, God laughs. You can exert an effective process to provide prediction and give guidance but the obsidian rock of the status quo will break a diamond drill bit. You're going to have to sufficiently reduce friction via brilliant communication of risk mitigation and cement home clear articulation of a value creation scenario that inspires trust and fosters long term business results. 

So let's run one of these complex B2B scenarios through the basic formula: 

1. Goal: Close a $1,000,000 sale this year. 

2. Take massive action: Work collaboratively to build out a transformative solution across multiple business units and collaborate with teams on both sides to locate the suite of solutions that will have the greatest impact on the clients business (revenue generation, operational efficiency, outcomes and risk). Work to get the right people in the room in the right sequence, adding value each time, ensuring clients are talking 75% of the time. Massive action could mean getting training on this or training up your people. It could mean reading the top 5 books on strategic selling and applying them. It could mean simplifying your effete umpteen-stage sales process into a meta-framework like my RSVPselling: •Relationships •Strategy •Value Creation •Process 

3. Has the account gone cold? Did you land the meeting? Are you tapping into the right insight? Are you getting the signals back that you have a shot at breaking through in this account at the highest level? Are you getting delegated down or is the CXO assembling her generals to meet seriously on the matter? Are you blocked, talked into oblivion or is this a Challenger mobilizer, cynical but continuing to grill you (indicating interest and latent buying intent)? Work with your team to understand the signal flares of desire to be able to properly qualify where this account is really sitting and turn off addictive, collective happy ears and cognitive bias. 

4. You're not going to throw all the paint at the wall and see what sticks with Jackson Pollock Selling. By this time you have a scalable, repeatable sales process, understand the sales cycle, have a thorough SPIN based qualification methodology and have worked to win the technical and business sale. You've built out a value hypothesis and proved it out with your client both quantitatively and qualitatively (perhaps by utilizing an ROI calculator that factors in conservative estimates for lift or cost reduction). You've set traps for competitors and budget has been opened up to do this. Always focus here on reorienting clients and prospects to the state of full implementation and success. Ultimately, they'll endure quite a bit of a roller coaster to get through all the red tape and growing pains to have a fully customized CRM system, ERP configuration or new piece of cutting edge software starting to solve problems and create efficiency.

There are probably a million iterations of this four step formula. I will say, if the phone isn't ringing, there's no way you're calling enough clients. If the deals aren't closing, you aren't qualifying properly. If you're not building 5X pipeline, you're underestimating the level of action required in highly competitive markets where buyer's perceive all solutions at relative parity. Are you the best of the best? Welcome to commodotization where the only difference is you and HOW you sell it.

If your deal size isn't approaching six and seven figures you must work with product marketing on product-market fit but if it can be sold and others on your team are selling gobs of it, your own personal sales process is most likely broken or overcomplicated. Are you listening enough? Are you patiently peeling the onion with Implication and Need Pay-Off questions, what some call Tier 2 and 3 lines of questioning. There are many things that can go wrong but with massive action that is applied strategically and the above considerations, most results you seek in business and in life are possible.

Tony has proved anything is possible. Will power may be a myth; one has to establish new habits and routines to ritualize success. Mike Weinberg puts it eloquently as, "nobody ever defaulted to prospecting mode." The daily path of least resistance or high levels of 'easy' action is just more of the 'busy fool syndrome.' Taking a few challenging, hard actions before lunch that take quite a bit of effort and strategic thinking spiked with focus in execution is where the rubber truly meets the road. Crave the challenge and when it gets hard push through with massive focus. Massive action can even be ONE action with total force of effort and intent.

Why not go and see Tony Robbins live at his next event!

Now it's your turn: What has your experience been with the above Ultimate Success Formula? Has Tony Robbins played a role in your selling and motivation? What other systems do you use to break through?

If you valued this article, please hit the ‘like' and ‘share’ buttons below. This article was originally published in LinkedIn here where you can comment. Also follow the award winning LinkedIn blog here or visit Tony’s leadership blog at his keynote speaker website: www.TonyHughes.com.au.

Main image photo by Flickr: Randy Stewart