How the Sales Leader gets unstuck
I’m still thinking about North Dakota, TTT Ranch and stuck tractors…and earned – and unearned – optimism.
When your tractor gets stuck, you can curse your luck and lower your expectations. For example, a construction company president I once spoke with threw up his hands and said, “Yup, 2008 is bad. And 2009 is going to be even worse. We’ll need to lay off 50% of our workforce by this time next year. We just need to hunker down and make it through.”
If this statement left me less than hopeful and inspired, imagine how this guy’s employees felt? Now everyone in the organization has let the muddy economy gum up their mental gears. And if they’re not careful, that mud is going to dry, forming a tough crust that will keep them from ever coming up with the creative solutions they need to plant, tend, and harvest their crops, season after season, whatever the weather. Because they’ve focused solely on the mud, this organization’s tractors are not only hopelessly stuck, they’re not even tractors anymore – they’re monuments to defeat.
On the other hand, you can adopt a wait-and-hope-and-see approach. Surely, the mud will be drier tomorrow, so why break a sweat today? Why not just put on the rose-colored glasses and hope the weather lady on Channel 13 has a long, dry stretch in store?
It’s not that I’m against optimism – actually, I’m a huge fan. It’s like diesel fuel, a motive force. Without it, tractors – and businesses – just sit there, mud or no mud. The problem is that this kind of hope is “unearned optimism.” It makes you feel good, but you haven’t done the legwork to justify it. It’s having an opinion without shoring it up with facts.
Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, once interviewed Admiral James Stockdale, the highest-ranked naval “guest” of the “Hanoi Hilton” POW camp. Stockdale endured torture that makes waterboarding seem benign. He spent seven years in Hoa Lo Prison, four of that in solitary, complete darkness. And yet he never gave in, never stopped inspiring his fellow soldiers to remain strong in the face of overwhelming adversity. Asked how he survived, Stockdale replied that he refused to lose faith in a good end to his story. Collins then asked Stockdale who didn’t survive the ordeal. His reply? The optimists who were sure that they’d be out by Christmas. Or Easter. Or Thanksgiving. Or Christmas, again. Ultimately, these optimists died, brokenhearted.
In Stockdale’s case, the optimism he felt, “the good end” he never stopped believing in, took into account the grave facts of his long captivity. But it was also based on the fact of his determination and his deep knowledge and respect for his own internal resources, which couldn’t be diminished by the enemy. His brand of optimism was what I call “hopeful realism” – a levelheaded response to adversity which acknowledges all the facts, negative and positive.
It is this same hopeful realism which gets stuck tractors and stuck businesses unstuck. It is a reasonable expectation of a good end – neither a false hope nor a false despair. And it can become the dominant attitude throughout your organization.
So, how are you as the president, CEO, owner or sales leader handling your “stuckness”? What are the obstacles that are making it difficult for you to get unstuck? What mindset might you change to help you and your team get unstuck?
I look forward to hearing from you!
P.S. Have you seen the summer eBook from Top Sales Experts? Very good!
No Excuse Sales Leadership
Feedback on the June Minnesota Business Journal Power Player article (No Excuses, p. 40) suggests that my rural roots are showing – and that sales leaders connect with the down-to-earth business insights they generate. If you haven’t guessed yet, the article focuses on my vision of what accountability means for business today.
So, I’ve been reflecting on the relationship between ranch life and the life of the business leaders I work with every day.
I’ve seen my fair share of tractors. When I was a kid growing up on the TTT Ranch in North Dakota, especially in springtime, our landscape was dotted with these red or green mechanical horses. But unlike horses, tractors had a habit of getting stuck in the mud. And staying stuck until resourceful human beings unstuck them.
Assessing the situation accurately, rolling up your sleeves, and unsticking your tractor was one option. A second was to let the fact of the mud overwhelm you, cause you to curse and throw things, and make you wonder why you kept doing this year after year. A third option was to sit and stare calmly at the tractor, willing it to unstick itself, and when that didn’t work, give up for the day and hope the tractor would be easier to unstick tomorrow, when the mud might be drier.
Options two and three had emotional benefits, sure, but the result was a tractor just as mired in mud as before.
Today’s businesspeople are farmers & ranchers as surely as those I grew up with. Their harvests are a bit different on the surface, but it’s all the same in the end.
Their mud is the sludgy, sticky economy.
Their tractors are their people, their processes, their visions.
Top Sales Experts & “The Power of Sales Process”
Sales leaders, you’ll find this upcoming roundtable on “The Power of the Sales Process,” sponsored by Top Sales Experts, to be packed with practical, how-to ideas on structuring your sales process. A strong process will give you a competitive advantage, even during this recession. I’m on the expert panel with well-respected sales process gurus Craig Klein, Steve Matinez, Jonathon London and Jonathon Farrington. You can get more details here.
I’ll be sharing principles used to create the Hardball sales process for Flint Group, formerly xSYS Print Solutions. They were the largest international supplier of narrow-web tag and label-printing inks struggling to reverse a three-year trend of declining revenues. We help the VP of Sales develop a system of sales management processes that changed a culture of excuse making into one of personal accountability to generates predictable, sustainable results. Listen to Hank tell the story of how we accomplish the following:
- Market share grows despite an industry recession
- Predictable revenue with more accurate business planning and sales forecasting, more efficient operation and higher margins
- Faster, organized sales process generates revenue more quickly
- New hires reach higher sales performance levels 30% faster
I recently conducted a webinar with EcSELL Institute on the same subject. Bill Eckstrom, Founder of EcSELL Institute says that it was one of the most practical webinars they had–strong take-aways that sales leaders can implement immediately.
Hope to see you there!
Sales Management Negotiations
This is a short post. Thought you’d enjoy this video since it talks about the everyday insanity that sales people deal with: http://tinyurl.com/leemo3
 |
 |
 |
