Strategic Sales Planning: Lessons from iPhone Wars
Lessons from iPhone Wars: Competencies to Turn Sales Visions into Reality
“You have to tame that grass-is-greener-in-the-other-pasture leadership vision with the management skills that tell you how to extract maximum value – no more, no less – from the pasture you’re harvesting right now.” Quote from Leadership Shift (Management in Synergy with Leadership)
Being raised on the TTT cattle ranch, I understand the grass-is-greener-in-the-other-pasture fallacy. It’s critical for CEOs, presidents, owners and VP of Sales to maximize the sales talents and harness the staff resources in their own sphere of influence. 
A great place to study this grass-is-greener-in-the-other-pasture phenomenon is the IPhone wars. It’s actually the battle for the IPad market – the giant smartphone – that I have been following lately. In the early days, numerous companies announced their sales strategies to introduce competitive tablets to take on Apple. Some of them have shelved their IPad plans (HP) while others have launched patent wars (HTC). Apple’s competitors may have become too fixated on the competition while ignoring their own core competencies. HP is really good at Tablet PCs and HTC is a leader in smartphones but thus far neither company has developed a competitor to Apple’s hybrid or come close to matching it’s sales leadership in tablets.
In a market that recognizes the value of competitive advantage, it is easy to become overly focused on your competitors sales performance; instead of concentrating on your own sales process improvement. HP may have been better off focusing on harvesting its own pasture, or building a better Tablet PC. While the Ipad is simply a giant smartphone, HP could win over the market with a slimmer, sleeker Tablet PC with full PC functionality. But, alas, it digressed. Now all are watching to see if Google can turn it’s sales vision into a reality as the online chatter rises on plans for a Google IPad.
The Sales Lesson: Knowing where to go requires knowing where you are and what your own unique corporate talents and gifts are – this should form the basis of your strategic sales plan.
The Sales Question: What can you do today to maximize the value of your current sales team and your sales management processes? Your clients? Your products, services and programs?
Improve Sales Management Performance by Increasing Sales & Leadership Communications by 10X
“Research into the challenging economic cycle before 2002, conducted by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, found that companies which kept employees in the loop saw profits 200 percent higher than those which didn’t. Such is the power of hopeful realism in the hands of many.” Quote from Leadership Shift (Instill Hopeful Realism)
Since its groundbreaking 2003/2004 Communication ROI Study™, Watson Wyatt has been making strong links between communication and organizational performance. Its 2009/10 survey, drawing on corporate experiences since the 2007 downturn, provides further evidence that the quality of communications can positively affect employee engagement and, thus, organizational effectiveness during times of change. Throughout the years, the studies have consistently shown that companies that are effective employee communicators are also top financial performers. Over the last five years, a volatile period, companies that are highly effective communicators realized a 47% higher return to shareholders than ineffective communicators.
The research findings are all the more significant in a market in which two-thirds of CEOs are changing their business models, notably with a renewed focus on innovation, according to IBMs 2010 Chief Executive Officer Study.
Nonetheless, while working recently with a company that’s in the midst of an exciting vision shift, I encountered sales staff who were clearly disengaged: “We have no idea what’s going on! The executives are in the boardroom all day, day after day. They never tell is what’s happening. No memos. No vMails or eMails. Nothing. We’re in the dark. It makes it hard to sell when you don’t know if the company’s going to be around or not.”
In fact, I know firsthand that this company was enjoying record sales yet the inability of management to effectively communicate with staff created an environment of insecurity that demotivated the sales force. Communication as a clearly defined sales management process was required here.
The Sales Lesson: During times of transition, increase your communications by 10x. Communication is a sales management process requiring regular reviews.
The Sales Question: So, what are you doing to keep your employees “in the light?”
How to Improve Sales: Take Stock of Your Sales Situation From Multiple Viewpoints
“One of the biggest reasons that the facts of a business challenge are distorted or unrecognized altogether is that business leaders haven’t yet leveraged all the human creativity, ingenuity, and experience available to them. In a way, it’s like trying to think with 2 percent of your brain or play the piano with one finger.
“You don’t want to miss any of the nuances of the problem or any of the available resources, so don’t cloister management together behind locked doors hoping they solve your problems. Light up your entire organizational “brain,” shedding light on all facets of the problem as well as all the talents and resources available to solve it.” Quote from Leadership Shift (Instill Hopeful Realism)
Hopeful realism is hard to achieve if we shut ourselves off from the real world. Yet rather than thinking
outside of the box, many management teams do most of their thinking inside the box – the boardroom. Increasingly, though, companies are recognizing the intellectual assets of all employees as a key competitive advantage. As a result, companies are drilling further down into the organization when doing strategic sales planning.
When predicting that the Bakken Basin – an oil rich basin spanning two US states and one Canadian province — could produce over 1M barrels per day by the end of the decade, David Hobbs, chief energy strategist with IHS CERA noted that in order to accomplish this, engineers will need to be open to new ideas, new innovation, and new perspectives. Since its discovery in the 1950s, recovering oil from the basin has challenged many geologists. In the end, it may not be new technology but new ways of thinking that tap into this abundant resource.
Search engine giant Google has become a model of resource extraction of a different type – human capital. Google’s 80/20 work design allows employees to spend 20 percent of their time on their own projects. Google credits its innovative job design for the ongoing innovation that not only keeps it on top of the search engine ranks but also has helped it successfully expand into operating systems and other markets.
Interestingly, according to the research findings in IBMs 2010 Chief Executive Officer Study, two-thirds of CEOs are changing their business models, notably with a renewed focus on innovation. Two-thirds! Encouraging innovation, yet balancing it with discipline, has become a very important sales management process.
The Sales Lesson: Access as many viewpoints as possible. Work at continually improving your sales management processes and watch your sales performance improve.
The Sales Question: How many viewpoints are you using to analyze your sales and business challenges?
P.S. Have you seen the video’s at “Brain Rules“? It talks about how to ensure you access even more of your mental creative juices. You’ll hold more walking meetings!
Servant Leadership Lesson: Seed the Next Generation of Sales and Leadership Solutions
“This is a key efficiency that many businesses miss. Once your organization has designed and implemented a solution – whatever the ultimate result – feed it back into the system with the same transparency you developed it with. That way, you’ll build an organizational knowledge base that grows over time, helps to institutionalize the hopefully realistic mindset, and roots out both unearned optimism and unfounded pessimism.” Quote from Leadership Shift
We all want to take our top performing employee, (including our sales people), map their performance DNA and make copies, don’t we? Or, we look for a clone when doing sales recruiting. While this may not be possible, we can institutionalize, and build on, their ideas. Knowledge sharing is becoming more popular in businesses. Presidents, CEOs, owners and VPs of Sales in all sizes of companies recognize the great efficiencies that can be achieved by sharing intellectual capital and not reinventing the wheel. Build this knowledge into a sales management process and use this when doing sales recruiting. With all available knowledge transparent, realistic optimism can be achieved.
Enabling knowledge sharing, however, goes beyond a piece of software. The workplace culture must support the sharing of intellectual capital. If you don’t trust your colleagues or your boss does not give you credit for your ideas, you will be less likely to share the good information. Anything of real value you will keep under your sleeve.
The first step to institutionalizing knowledge sharing is building a culture of trust in which people are given credit for the ideas they generate, this is part of your sales motivation. Remember the former USSR before property rights laws? Innovation was stifled. Once trust is established and more valuable knowledge made transparent, you will be able to operate within a realm of realistic rather than uninformed optimism. One of my favorite books is The Trust Edge by Dave Horsager. Dave shows that trust is a quantifiable competency that brings dramatic results, even in sales organizations.
The Sales Lesson: You can improve knowledge sharing and organizational effectiveness by increasing trust and knowing your organization’s knowledge, capabilities and competencies and how they interconnect – these are good qualities of any sales executive. A tool that I often use to facilitate dialogue is CAMMI Logic.
The Sales Question: What steps are you taking to seed the next generation of sales and business solutions? Has it become a Sales Management Process in your organization?
How does “Tikkum Olam” relate to Transformational Leadership?
I love new words around leadership! A couple of days ago, I wrote about tuka pamoja. Today, it’s 
tikkum olam.
Karen Winner, an expert in marketing communications, is helping Cheetah Development with their marketing plan. As Karen gains insights about Cheetah’s work, she thoughtfully says, “Oh, you’re doing tikkum olam.
Of course, her words sounded Greek to me!
Actually, it’s Hebrew and means, “healing the world.”
Yes, this concept relates to Cheetah Development’s work. However, I also suggest that tikkim olam is the work of all leadership, regardless of whether we’re a CEO, owner, president or VP of Sales.
In the forward of Leadership Shift, I touch on the difference between Transactional Leadership and Transformational Leadership: “Transformational leadership, on the other hand, takes the view that all problems, no matter how small, can worm their way into the very fabric of an organization, eventually becoming an unwelcome part of a business’s culture. Once these problems are embedded, they continually – and almost undetectably – wreak havoc unless they’re promptly addressed in a transformational, long-term way.”
As Transformational Leaders, we create healthy companies, where people are fully engaged. Sales performance improvement results when sales motivation is successful . This is in contrast to recent studies that employee engagement is declining in the U.S. workforce.
The Sales Lesson: As sales leaders, we are involved in “healing the world.”
The Sales Question: Do you see yourself as a Transformational Leader?
P.S. You know about my all-time favorite word, don’t you? SISU. If not, learn more here.
The Sequoia Principle, Swahili and Sales Leadership
What do the great sequoia’s have in common with the Swaili concept, tuka pamoja, and sales leadership? Here’s the connection.
I learn Swaili this week while working with Ray Menard and Karen Winner on the Cheetah Development project: tuka pamoja.
Tuka pamoja means “we are one” or “unity.” To help us understand it’s importance to the Tanzanian people, we need to understand how foreign the concept is to us in America, even within the sales management ranks. There’s an interesting body of work done by Hofstede discussing Riding the Waves of Culture where he identifies five dimensions in which cultures vary. One of these dimensions that relates to tuka pamoja is “Individualism vs. Collectivism.”
Wikipedia describes this Individualism vs. Collectivism dimension as how much members of the culture define themselves apart from their group memberships.
- In individualist cultures, people are expected to develop and display their individual personalities and to choose their own affiliations.
- In collectivist cultures, people are defined and act mostly as a member of a long-term group, such as the family, a religious group, an age cohort, a town, or a profession, among others.
According to the Hofstede’s study The US ranks as one of the highest in the world for Individualism (89), whereas East Africa ranks significantly lower (27).
I submit that American business leaders, CEOs, president, owners and sales managers, can learn wisdom from the Tanzanians. In Leadership Shift: Paradoxical Wisdom for Transformational Leaders, I highlight the importance of “Fostering Collective Independence.” I observe that the “strongest leaders are also the most interdependent” and that it’s the interdependent root system of the Sequoia’s that gives them the strength to withstand tremendous adversity. The Sequoia Principle is one of my favorites in the entire eBook. If you haven’t downloaded yet, I invite you to do so. Then, after you read Leadership Paradox #4: Foster Collective Independence, send me your insights and comments. Let’s dialogue!
Transformational Leadership Lessons from Bakken Basin and Apollo 13
It’s a jam-packed 3 days at WPOC learning how America can retain leadership by becoming more energy independent. We hear from innovative leaders such as Brigham Exploration Company, Whiting Petroleum Corporation, and EOG Resources.
The conference mantra is innovation. David Hobbs, HIS CERA Chief Energy Strategist, predicts that by the end of this decade, the Bakken Basin will produce over 1 million barrels of oil per day, positioning the Bakken as one of the top 20 energy producers in the world. Although that’s an aggressive target, it’s possible to achieve through a commitment to continuing innovation, or, as one engineers states “through techniques and processes yet to be developed.”
When I hear the comment,“through techniques and processes yet to be developed,” I immediately think of Leadership Paradox 3: Cultivate Disciplined Creativity in my new eBook: Leadership Shift, Paradoxical Wisdom for Transformational Leaders. In the “Action Steps for Developing Disciplined Creativity in Your Team,” I recommend that we need to be more like Gene Kranz:
Remember the scene from Apollo 13, when NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz says, “I don’t care about what anything was designed to do; I care about what it can do?” Remember when, confronted with a dangerous CO2 buildup in the LEM, he tells his team to “invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole” and design a new filter from spare parts? What you expect, you tend to get, just as Kranz does as he orchestrates the safe return of a doomed spacecraft. Like Kranz, don’t just ask for innovative change, pursue it, no matter how long it takes employees to get into the groove. Your dogged efforts are necessary to bring your organization’s untapped creativity kicking and screaming from the gutter and into the light of day. Though it may seem a bit heavy-handed, this determination to extract the best ideas from each individual will result in employees who first are surprised by their own resourcefulness and then are empowered.
As a sales leader, how are you encouraging and rewarding innovation? How are you nurturing innovation, or disciplined creativity, in your sales team? Countless times in a given day, week, month and year, your teams, including your sales teams, need to tackle a “ dangerous CO2 buildup in the LEM.” What steps are you taking to their resourcefulness?
The Sales Lesson: Disciplined Creativity has become an essential sales management process, Sales Coaching can help you to establish this in your sales organization.
The Sales Question: I’d love to hear what you’re doing to cultivate disciplined creativity.
You also might find this article of interest: Drill below the Surface to Energize Sales Performance.
Leadership Shift & Coffee
It must be the coffee.
Two years ago, I’m savoring my custom-designed blend of coffee at the Caribou on Bren Road in Hopkins while reflecting on the characteristics that I see in vibrant companies. I compare these observations with what I’m learning in my master’s program on transformational leadership. On a clean Caribou napkin, I thoughtfully sketch the core paradox of Sales Growth 
Specialists:
Discipline-Creativity
I observed this paradox while selling at Xerox, managing and leading at Micro-Tech and consulting with clients at Sales Growth Specialists. It seems that vibrant leaders are able to artfully hold these tensions in balance. I often find highly creative teams, flush with fresh ideas, unable to execute due to lack of discipline. Vice versa, I also find highly disciplined sales organizations that lack creativity, unable to maximize their talents. My conclusion is that resilient companies have strong leaders who balance the paradox, managing these polarities.
Maybe it’s the extra shot of caffeine that day, because it’s then that my brain goes into overdrive. I begin envisioning a host of other paradoxes. I race to write them on the Caribou napkin, filling up both sides with ink.
These five leadership paradoxes, that started out as scribble, now form the foundation of Leadership Shift:
1. Instill Hopeful Realism
2. Manage in Synergy with Leadership
3. Cultivate Disciplined Creativity
4. Foster Collective Independence
5. Inspire Servant Leadership
During the uncertainty of 2010, I observe two other paradoxes that Make-It-Happen leaders balance and manage:
6. Nurture a Focus-Forward Culture
7. Capitalize on the Energy of Adversity
I invite you into dialogue over the next couple of weeks as we wrestle with these leadership ideas. I trust that this dialogue will inspire all of us to sharpen our leadership acumen so that we can continue to lead in uncertain times. I invite you to download and read Leadership Shift at your favorite Caribou.
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