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.

What, exactly, is a decision? In Dirty Little Secrets, I define a decision as: “…a series of conscious and unconscious choices that result in change that maintains the integrity of the whole. In other words, decisions must be congruent with the rules and agreement of the underlying environment, and certain not to create chaos for the system.’ (pg 239)

INFORMATION DOESN’T TEACH SOMEONE TO DECIDE

Decisions must maintain the congruence of the system they are being decided in. So if you’re going to decide to lose weight, your proposed changes must maintain the underlying beliefs around your current food choices, or you won’t change your habits. If you are starting a new initiative, you must make sure the folks know how to align their beliefs, ego issues, job identity, and social identity, with the proposed change, before they’ll make a creative effort to support you.

In fact, all decisions must be based on the underlying criteria (of the system) or they will either not be carried out or they will be sabatoged in some way. In other words, without buy-in, change can’t happen. And buy-in demands a new decision.

Unfortunately, leaders often assume if they focus on the correct result, offer the best information in the best way (rational, well-said, well-presented, nice) that folks will agree and follow. Or should. But we all know that’s not true. When we work hard at presenting rational, good data as the means to align behaviors, and then get push-back, we often blame the ‘follower’ rather than realizing that possibly we haven’t managed our leadership skills effectively. Not to mention that we’ve never been offered the skills to actually teach people how to make their own best decisions, separate from our biases.

HOW TO INFLUENCE WITH INTEGRITY

Imagine if you believed that folks only made new decisions when their beliefs were engaged, and not on the relevancy of your request or information. What, then, do you do to ensure buy-in? Let me ask that another way: How can you make sure that you get creative buy-in for any change initiative that gives your folks not only a leadership role, but the opportunity to truly leave an imprint on the change?

Here are a few Facilitative Questions for you to consider:

What would you need to believe differently in order to see your role as a neutral navigator – a GPS system if you will - and lead change from ’structure’ not the ‘content.’  What would you need to believe to be willing to give up your personal view of what the change should look like and be willing to allow the change to take shape from within by aligning all of the ideas and creativity of the followers?

How would you know that you could get the most creativity and leadership from folks without reverting to compensation, stories, rules, demands, or presentations?

What would success look like if one of your goals were to help your ‘followers’ discern how to add value to the change in a way that served themselves AND the initiative AND the corporate entity?

In the Argentine Tango, the leader is the vehicle for the follower to shine. If you notice the leader, the leader is not doing his job. In fact, the expression goes like this: the leader opens the door, the follower goes through (using her own personality and presence), and then the leader follows. The entire dance is based on ensuring the follower looks her best, and grows in the process.

Join me tomorrow at my webinar. Let’s continue our conversation in an open format, where all of us can figure out how to move forward.

sd

Leadership Involves Helping Others Decide is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

My jacket designer (Michael Warrell of Design Solutions) assured me (before he called his lawyer and stopped talking to me) that it was all circumstantial, but when anyone looks at the two books together, it seems they are almost identical: same color, same lettering, same typeface and size of type face, same basic layout, same envelope theme. If it was circumstantial, it was an act of God.

Indeed, it looked as if Michael had done a search, liked the design of Seaman’s jacket, and slightly adapted it. And, given that our titles are so similar, the books look so similar they could be mistaken for being part of a series.

I was in a panic. I had just spent 5 months of 17-hour days writing my new book, and 2 months of doing 1-1 marketing, writing blogs and guest blogs, doing interviews and being interviewed, to create a pretty professional launch week. I had cajoling discussions with Amazon to delay fulfillment of their pre-sale orders until THE LAUNCH DATE. I had books here, ready for fulfillment for non-U.S. orders. Indeed: I was ready for success. Ready for the next day. Was there going to be a Next Day?

SCRAP THE LAUNCH?

Did I have to scrap my marketing? Start again with a new jacket design? It felt like it was going to be a train wreck, and I felt I couldn’t stop the train a day before the big launch date. It was an ethical dilemma: I wasn’t responsible for the jacket design, having trusted my professional designer to give me a fresh design and not even considering the possibility that the jacket might have been ‘borrowed.’

And yet, and yet, I was responsible. Was I supposed to have researched other jacket designs? In my haze of writing around the clock and choosing a jacket design in the middle of writing, I guess it never occurred to me to not trust my designer and do some research on my own. At the end of the day, the buck stopped with me. It seemed I had trusted the wrong person.

I wrote Dave Seaman a note immediately, and he had his publishing house contact me. Needless to say, there was a mess that ensued for days. Should I pull the book? Didn’t seem to be an option. Sue the jacket designer? I got a legal note from his lawyer denying any culpability but offering me a settlement to not sue (and they didn’t even pay me the settlement fee!). I couldn’t reach Seaman to discuss, and I was leaving for Australia.

Two friends/colleagues showed up to help: Eric Wolf of Gravity Free Radio, and Stone Payton of The High Velocity Radio Show, both sent Seaman a note suggesting some interesting ideas: get me and Seaman on the radio to do a program on Dirty Little Secrets in Marketing and Sales. They figured we might as well make lemonade, and help each other sell books.

In the end, it all seemed to work out: Seaman and I are supporting each other and have decided not to make it a legal hassle. But it could have turned ugly for sure.

When publishing houses do a jacket design, they have internal folks who do it. But as a self-publishing author (for this book, anyway), here is my question: how does a client know to trust a vendor? How would I have averted this problem? How would I have thought to NOT trust my book jacket designer (given the odds that just maybe he was influenced by Seaman’s jacket design while doing research for ideas for me)?

Given that in this day and age, everyone seems to be borrowing everyone else’s material (someone recently sent out electronic copies of my ebook to her team after purchasing one copy, then contacted me to help her discuss the book during a conference call. In our discussion – and she was quite lovely and excited about the book - she said she wanted to stay in integrity and thought that maybe she was in the ‘gray zone’ from sending out copies she hadn’t paid for, finally recognizing the integrity in actually purchasing copies for each person). For some reason, people seem to think that because a book is an ebook that it’s legally possible to send copies without paying for them. Would they make copies of a physical book? Of course not.  And the difference is….. what?

Here is a rule: don’t copy anyone else’s material, either as a design or a book. It took us a while to realize that musicians should get paid for their music. I hereby request 1. jacket designers come up with fresh designs, and 2. that people pay for each copy of an ebook you buy and do not share it unless it’s paid for. We authors would like to get paid for our IP also.

sd

Integrity in Book Publishing is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Imagine if sellers had the tools to be true spiritual guides and not only sell product, but sell more than ever and become part of the buyer’s team with all of the commensurate integrity and values.

What would be the difference – in skill sets? In outcomes? In beliefs?

To consider sales as a Spiritual Practice, let’s start with my definition of ‘spiritual’. To me it means:

• always having a win-win (there is no such thing as win-lose);
• understanding that the whole is greater than the parts;
• understanding that we are all here to serve each other;
• recognizing that there is no right answer;
• believing that no one has an answer for someone else.

Different from sales, which sometimes has a ‘win-lose’, which sometimes believes that the parts might be greater than the whole, in which the seller serves the buyer, has the ‘right’ answer in their solution, and indeed might have the buyer’s ‘answer’, let’s change the equation from sales to facilitating the buying environment.

Let’s also define sellers as Guides (guides that lead buyers to their best decisions based on their own criteria) and discuss what our jobs would look like with this new set of beliefs.

ALWAYS HAVE A WIN-WIN

To have a win-win, both sides would have to get what they needed in equal measure. I realize that sellers tell themselves that by placing product, there is an automatic win-win.

But the dialogue must be much, much bigger than product placement. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. How did the Identified Problem show up that way? How is it kept in place daily? Why hasn’t it been resolved until now? What are the issues that would have to be managed in order to bring in a new/different solution and not create havoc?

Until or unless all of the internal systems issues are addressed that not only created but maintain the status quo, the buyer can’t decide, and product/service- focused dialogues are misplaced, mistimed, and misguided.

Imagine having a product-needs discussion about moving an iceberg when the entire discussion revolved around just the iceberg’s tip. That’s what the conventional sales model does, and ignores the entire range of systems issues that created and maintain the IP.

Changing the model means the seller will have to take some responsibility to help the buyer manage their off-line, behind-the-scenes decisions.

Is it the current vendor relationship that must be shifted somehow? Does one department have to relinquish a job? What about changes in policy? Or people’s egos? What about historic rules that have kept the Identified Problem in place? Or how have departments and job descriptions evolved so that the status quo is relatively functional?

Having a win-win means that all of these issues get resolved so the buyer is freed up to make a good policy decision. It’s not about your product or their problem.

When sellers see a PROBLEM it becomes the focus of all needs analysis, data gathering, data presenting. Sales is actually defined as a way to place a solution, and everything that supports the selling model is based on placing a solution in the right way to the right demographic. And yet sellers still close under 10% of their prospects (and waste 90% of their time).

Imagine if the sales job were to help the buyer make a buying decision based on the system issues that need to be resolved prior to making any changes. Imagine if buyers knew just what and when and how to buy once they achieved buy-in for change. Imagine not having to sell anymore, and closing twice as many sales. Imagine.

sd

Sales As A Spiritual Practice is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

One of my dreams is that I can lay in my Nicaraguan (huge!) hammock, and swing near my pond, while reading the, oh… 300 books that are sitting and calling out to me that I bought because I love reading and words and ideas and I haven’t yet gotten to because I’m so busy writing the darn things. These book are enticing me: books about how brains work, and how words and ideas create change. Maybe a novel by John Banville (Read the Man Booker Prize-winning The Sea if you want to read one of literature’s great wordsmith’s.The way he uses words will change your life.). Maybe a book by Len Shlain – The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, so I can understand the root of our language. I dream of the time I’m retired so I can take 100 books up to Alaska, and read by day and watch the northern lights. Hmmmmmm.

So Reg has my job – and my life. He lives in beautiful Vancouver, he’s working in marketing (OK. That’s the life I have now…), he’s a contrarian, and is a ballroom dancer (How many of you know I’m a dancer?).

But the real reason I am jealous of Reg is because he gets to read every day. Using the excuse that he’s doing book reviews (Great excuse, Reg), he gets superb books sent to him so he can review them. And what a good job he does: he knows how to get to the meat of the book in simple language, and makes me want to read them – even if i didn’t think I’d have interest.

And he’s not afraid to be nasty – pointing the finger at folks who are harming the earth and people, saying what he believes needs to be said. He’s got a wide range of topics although he specializes in marketing/sales books. When I asked if he’d review my new book The Dirty Little Secret: why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what to do about it that is coming out in September, he wanted to make sure he had enough time to really read it, saying (I’m going to brag a bit here…): “I am a speed reader – but your books need savoring, too much good content to speed through them.”

Oh. Forgot: he runs a sales/marketing consulting company in his spare time. And he truly, deeply, cares about people, and the earth, and integrity. And he’s smart.

Check out his stuff. Reg is one of the good guys. And if you have a book you want him to review – if it’s good and worthy of his heart and brain – ask him if he’ll review it. It will give him an excuse to take another afternoon off, reading a good book. And hopefully, soon, I can do the same.

www.regnordman.com

Reg Nordman Has My Job is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com

Begun about two years ago by Clayton Shold and Dave Maynard to be an encyclopedia/wikipedia for sales, Shold and Maynard have grown the site to be THE place for all-things-sales, with provocative articles and great podcasts. And they keep the site looking fresh, slightly edgy, and crisp. They are obviously doing everything they can to, as Dave says, “Get your attention so you can find those hidden gems.” 

They do a regular blog post, mention/showcase books, and overall, carry a message of integrity: they offer a site that is people-friendly, and obviously recognize that sales is about serving people. Given that my Decision Facilitation models are about serving our buyers by helping them maneuver through their subjective dynamics on their way to buy-in, Salesopedia matches my own criteria around integrity.

As an aside: Clayton writes thoughtful blogs. He steps outside the field of  ’sales’ to mention other ideas, books, etc. to help sales folks think. His blog posts are actually stimulating.

Enjoy the site. It will give you the people you like, the articles that will help, and the ideas that will get you to think. The field is lucky to have such thoughtful professionals serving us.

www.salesopedia.com

Salesopedia: The Sales Place is a post from: SharonDrewMorgen.com