Operations – The Five Daily Fundamentals

Posted on May 3, 2016 by David Shedd

Turnkey LocksMost companies still provide a tangible product or service. This means that companies need to have operations employing people to produce the product, deliver the product, or provide the service.

These operations are essential to great customer service and building business success. Without a strong operational capability, product will not be delivered, promises will not be kept, and the customer will not be satisfied.

So, what are the fundamentals that we, as leaders, need to keep front of mind, in order to drive operational success? Continue reading →

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Sales Fun Facts

Posted on April 5, 2016 by David Shedd

Picture 1This month, I thought to share some sales “fun facts” to get us all thinking of what we can do better to drive sales growth and success and move our companies forward.

 

Having the right people on your sales team is essential

  • Four out of every five salespeople a customer meets are mediocre, incompetent, or downright ineffective.
  • In a separate study, 69% of corporate buyers rated salespeople calling on them as “fair” to “poor.”
  • As a result, customers are impatient and do not give salespeople any slack
    • On average, a salesperson has only 12 minutes to establish credibility in an initial meeting. 

Continue reading →

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What Does a Buyer Want?

Posted on March 1, 2016 by David Shedd

Know Your Customers CartoonI recently interviewed a professional buyer at a customer company who was looking to move into a sales role for our company. I asked how she would use her current experience as a buyer to be a better salesperson. Her response was a nice reminder of what good salespeople need to do every day.

  1. Be Attentive: This means making my problems your problem. I want to know that your salespeople really care about my problems and my issues more than about just getting the sale.
  2. Be Responsive: Give me what you promised. When you say you will get back to me, then get back to me. Don’t make me wait (respond quickly and respond even if only to say that you heard my request and are working on it).
  3. Be Proactive: If there is a problem, issue, or delay, then tell me about it before I find out and have to ask you.
  4. Focus on my needs: Listen to what I say. Listen in order to truly understand what I need. Then give me what I want and need. Do not give what you want to sell me; and do not give me what you think I may want.
  5. Be Friendly: Be “good people”; be friendly and nice to everyone on my team. Be easy to get along with. I do not want or need to have to defend my decision to buy from you in front of my colleagues who all think that you are a jerk.

Out of the approximately 300 salespeople this buyer deals with, only three salespeople (exactly 1% of the total) satisfy all five of these points.

 

Are our salespeople part of the 1% or are they part of the other 99%?

 

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5 Ways Managers Can Make It Happen

Posted on February 2, 2016 by David Shedd

Sitcom Cartoon.jpgIn order to move our companies forward, we, as managers, need to get the right things done – the most important tasks that lead to success.

This needs to happen in a workplace besieged by interruptions, distractions, and office chatter. It is not easy. But, it is necessary.

Here are five ways that we can make it happen and get the right things done.

1.  Start early and do the most important (and difficult) task first: Get in early and pound out the most important and difficult task – the task that you have been procrastinating about for days. This allows you to accomplish something before the regular phone calls and E-Mails start; this reduces the stress and anxiety from the procrastination; and this sets up the rest of the day to be easy. As Mark Twain said:

Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

Continue reading →

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The 9 Steps to Managing Our Stress

Posted on January 5, 2016 by David Shedd

Stress Cartoon 1As business leaders, our lives are often stressful. Recent research confirms what many of us have observed; stress can harm our careers, endanger our health, and kill.

In my career, I have witnessed:

  • A boss retire early from his dream job as CEO because he could not handle the stress
  • A colleague battle numerous and debilitating medical conditions caused by stress
  • A mentor die unexpectedly from a stress-related heart attack in his late 40’s.

To be successful as we advance in our careers, we must all learn to cope with and adapt to the stress of our jobs.

Continue reading →

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Don’t Upsell…Right Sell

Posted on December 1, 2015 by David Shedd

theupsell“Would you like to supersize your order?”

As I wrote previously (“Do You Want Fries With That?” – An Opportunity for Profitable Growth), upselling can bring additional value to our customers, create additional sales and profits, and cement our relationships with our customers.

Unfortunately, upselling has become abused as companies focus more on creating profits and less on adding value to the customer.

Upselling is a sales technique whereby a seller induces the customer to purchase more expensive items, upgrades or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale.  [Wikipedia] Continue reading →

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Coaching and Developing Great Salespeople

Posted on November 3, 2015 by David Shedd

Question CartoonWanted: Great Salespeople!

All of us are looking for great salespeople to close business, grow revenue, and help drive our companies to success.

What are some of the qualities of great salespeople?

  1. Professional and personable
  2. Responsive and lives up to commitments
  3. Organized and focused on the important… customers, activities, etc.
  4. Knowledgeable about our customers’ business and in our company’s products and services
  5. A team player
  6. Knows how to sell

Continue reading →

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Lead With Questions

Posted on October 6, 2015 by David Shedd

Valued cartoonAs leaders, we often have an employee come to us with an issue or problem. As “make it happen” managers, we then focus on getting the problem solved and getting it done as quickly as possible. Thus, we take charge, tell the employee what to do, and are done with it.

But, to be an effective leader, we must resist this urge.

Continue reading →

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5 Steps to Improving Customer Service

Posted on September 1, 2015 by David Shedd

Customer Service CartoonExcellent customer service is a fundamental for success in our businesses. Unfortunately, it is all too often lacking.

So, how can we improve customer service in our companies?

  1. Hire and Develop Employees that Actually Like People: Customer service starts and stops with each individual employee that touches a customer. To be effective, each of our individual employees has to genuinely like people and be sincerely interested in solving the problems of the customers that they are dealing with. Grumps, grumblers, and grouches rarely like people and thus can never really give good customer service – they just do not care enough.

Continue reading →

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6 Steps to a Successful Team Project

Posted on August 4, 2015 by David Shedd

Project CartoonToday, more than ever, employees need to be able to work in teams as businesses try to solve every more difficult tasks. Alas, many team projects start off with high hopes and ambitious targets only to end up with diminished expectations and delayed timelines.

 

So, how can we realize a successful team project?

 

  1. Have a Leader as the Leader: Many project teams, especially technological ones, have the highest ranking person or the most important expert as the leader of the project. That is a mistake. Projects need to be led by a leader / manager who is able to set clear expectations, follow up, and hold the different members of the team accountable to do what they have committed to.

Continue reading →

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Prepare Questions…Not Presentations

Posted on July 7, 2015 by David Shedd

powerpoint cartoonThe sales meeting begins.

  • The salesperson starts talking through a PowerPoint presentation slide deck (which took him several hours to complete) telling the customer how great the salesperson’s company and products are.
  • 30 minutes later the presentation is complete.
  • And 30 minutes after that, the salesperson walks out of the customer’s office empty-handed.

This exact scenario will take place countless times today, tomorrow, and every day for the foreseeable future.

As salespeople, don’t we ever learn?

Continue reading →

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We Must Impose Limits… On Ourselves

Posted on June 2, 2015 by David Shedd

Limit CartoonAs business leaders, we are constantly being bombarded with distractions, new opportunities, and issues. Everything and everyone screams at us to do more. Yet, to achieve our goals, we must prioritize.

By imposing limits on ourselves, we can better focus on the important and get it done.

Here are five ways we can limit ourselves in order to win.

 

  1. Limit the Number of Objectives

In order for us to realize our objectives, we need to have just a few goals. In fact, we should limit our goals and the goals of our employees to at most five. This allows these objectives to be memorized and internalized and be active in our day to day thinking. Alas, most companies try to do too much and too many things:

I have worked with a company that has 17 different objectives listed on their mission statement. Another company circulates a list of their “critical few” goals only to have this list run to three pages.

  Continue reading →

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How Not to Waste Time In Meetings

Posted on May 5, 2015 by David Shedd

Meeting Cartoon - 2In his book, Meetings Matter: 8 Powerful Strategies for Remarkable Conversations, Paul Axtell gives a strong argument in favor of meetings.

Meetings are at the heart of an effective organization, and each meeting is an opportunity to clarify issues, set new directions, sharpen focus, create alignment, and move objectives forward.

Alas, in most organizations, meetings are not effective; they waste time; bore the participants; and do not resolve anything. As the humorist Dave Barry notes:

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.’

So, how can we make our meetings more effective? Continue reading →

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Get to the Front Lines

Posted on April 7, 2015 by David Shedd

tempUndercover Boss has become a hit TV series by showing big corporate bosses going undercover and discovering the reality of the work lives of their employees.

As leaders, we do not need to go undercover; we just need to get to the front lines of our businesses, listen, and learn so that we can understand our companies better.

We Need To:

  • Meet with customers large and small
  • Ride-along with our salespeople
  • Work with our workers in the plant or drive with our drivers out on the road

Continue reading →

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Calm the Rhetoric…Make Molehills

Posted on March 3, 2015 by David Shedd

tempToday, exaggeration and hyperbole are ever-present. Listen to any sports event… tune into any news program…Speak with many of your friends and/or employees…

What do you hear?

  • Amazing… incredible… unbelievable
  • The meeting was a disaster…this is crazy… what a collapse
  • I got thrown under the bus
  • He is furious… she is ticked off… I’m mad as hell…
  • I just got beat up… he ripped me a new one
  • …

Continue reading →

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Ten Ways to Grow Sales Now

Posted on February 3, 2015 by David Shedd

CartoonDespite the improving unemployment rate and positive economic indicators, many B2B companies are stuck in slow and no growth modes.

How can these companies re-kindle growth and increase sales? Continue reading →

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New Year Resolutions for First-Time Managers

Posted on January 6, 2015 by David Shedd

Happy New Year!

For first time managers struggling to move their business units forward in 2015, now is the time to take a step back and focus unwaveringly on the fundamentals of managing and leading others.

As such, I offer up five New Year’s Resolution for these first – time leaders.

1. Be clear

The first task of any leader is to set clear goals and targets and make sure that they are understood by the team. Clear objectives need to be simple, few in number (3 – 5), and constantly repeated. Then, the manager needs to avoid distractions and trivial matters and remain focused on the goals and targets.

Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate. They don’t have to be charming. They don’t have to be brilliant…They don’t have to be great speakers. What they must be is clear. (Marcus Buckingham, Business consultant and author)

  Continue reading →

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Mistakes Will Be Made

Posted on December 2, 2014 by David Shedd

Four fundamentals to executing and getting things done are:

  1. Keep it simple
  2. Focus on the important
  3. Empower the team to make decisions at the lowest level possible
  4. Speed

In practice, we often ignore these straightforward guidelines due to one over-riding fear:

 

“But, what if I make a mistake?”

  Continue reading →

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Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity

Posted on November 4, 2014 by David Shedd

Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity, written by Alan Siegel and Irene Etzkorn, is an excellent reminder to all of us to rail against complexity and keep things simple. Even though I summarize some of the key points below, I still encourage you to pick up a copy and read this timely book.

The Crisis of Complexity

  • Complexity wreaks havoc on business, government and finance making life more difficult and confusing for everyone
  • Complexity is subtle; as Joseph Tainter suggests: “complexity creeps up on you.”
  • Complexity is counter-intuitive
    • More information, more “background”, or more explanation rarely lead to greater simplicity and clarity

Continue reading →

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Go Where the Growth Is

Posted on October 7, 2014 by David Shedd

In today’s low growth world, B2B companies need to be looking for those market segments and niches that are growing faster than the overall economy.

‘Going where the growth is’ offers our companies the promise of increasing sales to growing customers that are usually less price focused than customers in low or no growth markets.

So, how do we find these market niches so that we can focus our sales and marketing resources on these higher potential customers and markets?
 Continue reading →

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