RSSLeadership Involves Helping Others Decide
Feb 8, 2010 Sales Related
Tomorrow I do a webinar with the Business Management Institute called Executive Decision Making: Influencing with Integrity. How does my focus on a buyer’s decision making parallel with decision making in general? For me, it’s all the same: I believe that every choice, every new concept, every new action demands a decision to allow in something new and and supplement what’s already there.
So whether a buyer seeks a new solution and must get buy-in from the relevant people, or a user needs to use the new software, or an initiative needs agreement from the relevant team members to move forward, or a person may want to donate to one charity rather than another, new decisions are necessary or change won’t happen.
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Tags: beliefs, Business Management Institute, choice, criteria, decision making, influencing, integrity, leadership
Buying Facilitation® for Fundraising: it’s much easier than sales
Jan 18, 2010 Sales Related
I know of a few local groups raising money for the Haitian earthquake victims. While I’m pleased they are doing this much-needed service, I wish I could help them influence folks to give more, differentiate themselves from other equally worthy fund raisers, and figure out how to help people who don’t often donate funds decide to give at all. Indeed, I have a special offer at the end of this post for just such groups. But I digress.
As I’ve said so many times, the sales model will not help this happen: the selling/fund raising model used by organizations dependent on raising funds will only find those folks who are already prone to donating and in the same approximate amounts as they have done historically.
What about those untapped people who rationalize why they don’t need to donate? Those hapless folks who think that because they pay taxes, or because they donate to the Salvation Army during Christmas they are spiritually ’covered.’ How do we help these folks decide to donate? Or help those folks who traditionally donate, say, $1000, that it’s necessary (and certainly possible), to donate more?
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Tags: Buying Facilitation®, charity, decision making, donating, fundraising, Haiti
Dancing Together
Jan 12, 2010 Sales Related
As many of you know, I’m a dancer. I began dancing when I was 8, standing on my father’s toes as we (my mother was relegated to dancing with the instructor) learned Latin dancing. When I was 10 took ballroom dancing classes, and at age 11 I was a ‘regular’ on Connecticut Bandstand (I even got fan letters!).
At different times in my life I taught Cha Cha (!) and became the dance partner of a pro during the Disco/Hustle era. I studied Argentine Tango for 5 years and even spent some weeks studying with a professional in Buenos Aires. I can follow just about any lead in any dance category, and I also like to dance in the middle of the room when my favorite Keb Mo is playing. Dancing fills and soothes my soul. There: you now have all of my secrets.
Since dancing is such an integral part of my life, I dance even as I travel so such places as Perth (THE place in the world for ballroom dancing) or Oslo (where I once did an inadvertent exhibition dance in a very darkly lit nightclub with an apparently famous investigative journalist) or Lubbock (this upcoming Wednesday at Last Chance). But my very very favorite dancing experience is with my local ‘Dancing Together’ group that meets several times a week.
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Tags: body choir, dancing, decision making, five rhythms, flow, gabrielle roth, leadership, webinar
Business Management Daily makes leadership easy
Jan 8, 2010 Favorite URLs
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On January 19th, I’m fortunate to be doing a webinar called Executive Decision Making: influencing with integrity with the folks at Business Management Daily. Not only is this group a highly professional group dedicated to making necessary skills available to business people to ensure they are successful, but they maintain a high level roster of bloggers, articles, and resources so business folks (for both corporate folks and small business owners) have what they need at their finger tips. Their Executive Leadership newsletter, as well as their e-letter The Next Level and books on business negotiating, office politics, etc. are highly professional and cogent. They deal with HR challenges, leadership/decision making skills, people management and office communication.
Tags: business, decision making, speaking, webinar
Leadership and Decision Making
Dec 15, 2009 Sales Related
What, exactly, is a leader?
The definition used in Tango is my favorite: If you notice the leader, he’s not doing a very good job. The job of the leader is to get the best out of his follower and get out of the way: He opens the door, the follower goes through exhibiting her best, and then the leader follows. I believe that it’s a leader’s job to help followers - colleagues, staff, partners, teammates - make the decisions they need to make to achieve excellence.
Of course we all know many leaders who believe it’s their job to make the decisions and get their followers to do their bidding. They call that Influencing, and there are many methods and models that teach this. But doing it this way often comes back to haunt: when people are not part of the decision making process and haven’t bought in to the proposed change, they may go through their own brand of sabatoge, acting out, forgetfulness, or misinterpretation en route to following orders. Their knowledge of the environment, of the day-to-day working conditions, and their creative ideas, are ignored. We see this frequently with tech implementations. Indeed, requests made by senior people for ‘underlings’ to do their bidding are often met with failure.
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Tags: Buy-In, decision making, leadership
Purchasing a solution is the last thing a buyer does
Dec 4, 2009 Sales Related
Someone who has read one of my early books told me she thought that Buying Facilitation® was a type of consultative sales model. It’s far from it. Here is why.
Traditional Sales, spearheaded by Dale Carnegie in his book How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1937, is about the product sale. How to position it, how to make its features, functions, and benefits relevant, and how to discuss it so buyers will recognize a need.
Consultative Sales, spearheaded by Linda Richardson in the 80s, added the customer to the mix. What are their needs? What sort of a solution will be relevant? How can we gather the right data so we can ensure that our product/solution can fit with the needs and be positioned in a way to ensure the prospect understands the fit?
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Tags: behind-the-scenes, Buying Facilitation®, closing, consultative sales, Dale Carnegie, decision making, Dirty Little Secrets, Linda Richardson, prospect, sales models, traditional sales
