From Stress to Serendipity: How to create ‘flow’ and keep it

Stress is present everywhere in our lives today. Stress in the workplace is the most dangerous and debilitating because it is often unquestioned or accepted as being “just part of the job.” But stress directly impacts our effectiveness and productivity and therefore our ability to do our job. Excessive stress or negative stress impacts our ability function normally. When we have high levels of negative stress we lose the ability to remain positive, optimistic and we lose the ability to see solutions to our problems. Our creativity shuts down. The first victims of negative stress are: creativity, innovation and a positive, optimistic outlook. And the second victims of negative stress are effectiveness, performance and productivity.

How can you transform negative stress into positive stress?

Well one simple idea is re-framing how we think and how we encourage those around us to think. Here is a simple and powerful series of questions that will create positive stress for you at work and for your team, colleagues and peers. The quality of answers you get depends on the quality of questions you ask and nothing redirects people’s thinking better than a well-phrased question.

5 Killer questions that create positive stress or ‘flow’ in the workplace.

1. What is already working? This question primes the creativity pump, builds energy and gets people involved. It shifts our focus to ‘possibility thinking’ by tapping into enthusiasm, creativity, energy, drive and collaboration leading to an increase our job satisfaction, performance and productivity. Read More

Selling to Different Behavioural Styles

Have you ever been really excited about something and ready to buy and then the urge suddenly faded away? Or have you ever presented a highly compelling new offering to a client who got really interested by the different options and choices you presented, only to find that in the end nothing happened – no sale.

Why? Often it is because we think that all people are like we are. We think that everyone sees the world through the same blue goggles that we do. If we get excited by lots of different and compelling options we think that they will to. Here is the problem: a lot of people (as many of 40% of all people) have a preference for procedures rather than for options. Most people have a dominant preference for one or the other and some have a preference for both. What are the implications for influencing others and for sales? Read More

The Buyer’s Journey

The Sales Cycle is dead. It has out lived its usefulness. Why? Because the sales cycle is all about us and our interests and not about the customer or his/her interests. The sales cycle is something that we do to the customer and not for the customer. We have all seen sales cycles that were driven by internal factors such as making the end of the quarter number or additional discounts designed to stimulate demand to offset a short fall in sales. This is about us and not them.

Consider the various steps of the sales cycle: Prospecting, Qualifying, Needs Identification, Proposing, Negotiating and Close. This language describes where we are in a series of actions that result in ‘closing’ the prospect.

The world has changed, things have moved on. Today, success in sales is all about understanding how people make buying decisions. The Sales Cycles has been replaced by the Buyer Decision Process. The good news is that there are 5 simple steps in the Buyer Decision Process and they always occur in exactly the same sequence. So then success in sales today comes from understanding where your prospects and customers are in the Buyer Decision Process and helping them move to the next decision step. Success in sales today means helping people to buy. ie. Put yourself on the same side of the table as them. This means replacing our traditional selling-centric paradigm with a buying-centric paradigm. Read More

Unlocking Audience Participation

Have you ever sat through a really bad presentation, meeting or workshop? I guess we all have and more often than we wish to remember. What was it that made it bad? Now think about a really great meeting, workshop or presentation that you have attended recently. What made it great? What were those things that made it successful? Somewhere on your list will be involvement and audience participation. The signs of a highly successful meeting are the quality of discussion, the exchange of ideas and points of view, and the sharing of knowledge and experience, in short audience participation.

How do you unlock audience participation? Read More

Adapt your Selling Style to Today’s Buyer Thinking

Buyer thinking has changed, forever. Pre-economic crisis buyer thinking rewarded relationship based selling. When the economy was strong, growing and things were relatively predictable, buyers rewarded continuity and business relationships.

Today Decision Makers are reassessing every spending and investment decision they make. They are looking for ways to reduce, delay or cancel purchases and investment decisions and they are seeking certainty that desired results will be achieved as planned. Maintaining a predominantly relationship focused sales approach will not cut much sway or add relevant value to buyers with a ‘spend less, delay or cancel’ mindset. To succeed in helping today’s buying decision makers you must move your style to a results focused approach.

3 Steps to Mastering Results-Focused Selling: Read More

From Chaos to Clarity

Success in sales comes from creating clarity in the mind of your customer. Clarity in understanding the problem to be solved, clarity in evaluating the possible solutions available and clarity in determining the real value to the business that each solution provides today and in the future.

Clarity helps the customer to move forward with commitment and confidence. How do you create clarity? The first step is to listen. Warning: Do not be deceived by the apparent simplicity or obviousness of this critical first step. Listening is the foundation of success in sales. Listen intently while the customer describes his or her current situation, and then describes their future desired state so that you can help the customer to quantify the size of the gap between the two and move your collective thinking to how to close the gap. The key to success here depends on your ability to listen intently and this means being able to temporarily suspend your self-interest and avoid doing all the talking. Listening is an underdeveloped skill in many sales professionals today and listening is vital to being able to create clarity for your customer. 3 simple steps to follow to create clarity: Read More

Creating Moments of Insight – The Key To Getting Results Through Others

“An insight is a restructuring of information. It’s seeing the same old thing in a completely new way. Once that restructuring occurs, you never go back.” – Earl K. Miller, Ph D. Neuroscientist at M.I.T.

One of the greatest moments in problem solving is the emergence of a break through idea, or the sudden flash of new understanding that we call an insight. Also known as “Aha” or “Eureka” moments, an insight is a sudden burst of activity in the right hemisphere of the brain that lasts for about 300 milliseconds. In comparison to normal analytical thinking an insight is instantaneous: the answer arrives like a revelation. This is usually followed by a feeling of certainty that accompanies the new idea.

“Your brain knows much more than you do. An insight is a fleeting glimpse of the brain’s huge store of unknown knowledge.” – Mark Jung Beeman, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience Program, Northwest University

What leads to moments of insight? How can you create or enable them? How can you create moments of insight in others? Imagine how effective we could become if we had several insights every day, or if we could bring about insights in others as and when we wanted. The job of a leader is to get results through others. Whatever your natural leadership style: Coercive, Authoritative, Affiliative, Democratic, Pacesetting or Coaching, creating insights in the people around you will enable you to capture their hearts and minds, align their thinking and secure their total commitment to your cause. Creating insights in others is the simplest and most effective way to get results through others. There are 3 phases to creating insights: Read More

Selling Your Ideas. The Art of Storytelling

“We have found that the most effective persuaders use language in a particular way. They supplement numerical data with examples, stories, metaphors, and analogies to make their positions come alive. That use of language paints a vivid word picture and, in doing so, lends a compelling and tangible quality to the persuader’s point of view.” – Jay Conger, “The Necessary Art of Persuasion,” Harvard Business Review

From the beginning of time, man has used cave drawings, pictograms and hieroglyphics to tell stories to transfer information, knowledge and experience, to communicate complex ideas and to pass on values and beliefs from one generation to the next. In today’s business world narrative stories remain the most effective way to reach out and “touch” people and influence their thinking by communicating ideas that stimulate understanding, reinforce or challenge established positions and help the listener to imagine alternative courses of action and envision a new and better future.

Why tell Stories? Telling stories creates a lasting impact and conveys new levels of understand and meaning. Telling stories allows us to accelerate the creation of common understanding and purpose in others in a non-directive and therefore more sustainable and pervasive way. The best form of story has an ironic end, in which that audience realises without the need for explanation how the happy ending could have come about. In this way learning is internalised and the audience will always remember the message or moral of the story.

What makes a great Storyteller? Great Storytellers follow 4 simple rules:

1. Structure: All great stories have a plot and characters. The plot should be designed to move the audience to the desired point of view, decision or action. Examples of characters include: a novice character who serves as a stand in for the listener or a hero who serves as an aspirational role model.
2. Authenticity: The story’s message will resonate with the audience when it is aligned with the personality of the storyteller.
3. Congruency: Good storytellers know their own deepest interests and values, and reveals them in their story with honesty and candor.
4. Emotion: Being true to yourself involves showing and sharing your emotions. “I want you to feel what I feel/felt.” A good story is designed to make this happen by sharing information that is bound in personal experience and thus made unforgettable. Sharing emotion demands generosity on the part of the Storyteller. Why? Because it requires being vulnerable. Be willing to expose your fears, anxieties and shortcomings. This allows the audience to identify with you and thereby brings listeners to a place of understanding and a clarity of understanding that will ultimately move them to action.

What are the best stories to tell? The best stories to tell are your own stories because you can tell them with credibility and ease because they are based on your own experience.

Business Storytelling: You must enter the hearts of your audience because this is where their emotions live. Information seeks only to “rent space” in their minds and our minds are relatively open. However, we guard our hearts with zeal, knowing its power to move us. The audience’s mind is part of our target, their heart is our bulls-eye. To be effective the Storyteller must first display his own open heart.

Customer Success Stories: Knowledge of how existing customers were able to address their business problems using your product or service enables you to engage, present and sell to others customers who have similar situations. Look to capture 4 success stories from each customer sale that you make. 1) Vision of a solution: This is what the customer has in mind as he moves through the typical buying process. 2) Solution as initially implemented: The first inprovements and intial results from using your product or service and the time taken to reach this point. 3) Solution fully deployed: What are the full benfits and improvements generated by your solution after it has been fully deployed? 4) Extended solution: Here we are looking for examples of how the customer has been able to achieve other additional benefits to their business that you have not envisioned. These customer success stories often represent new market opportunities.

Stories create a common understanding, disrupt existing or engrained thinking, facilitate learning by enhancing facts and data with context and meaning, and can helpe us to recongnise problems, admit short comings or failure without attribution or blame. Increase your sales today by telling stories that enable understanding, reveal meaning and create insights into how your products and services can help your customers to achieve their vision, their business objectives and most importantly their personal goals. Remember: Don’t Sell, Tell (great stories)!

Selling Your Ideas: The Art of Persausion

“You can have brilliant ideas; but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iacocca, former Chairman of Chrysler Corp.”
How do you develop a systematic approach to selling your ideas that results in effective persuasion? Answer: Learn how to “woo” people to your way of thinking. “Woo” stands for Winning Others Over. It is the ability to move people to your way of thinking without coercion or force, using relationship-based, emotionally intelligent persuasion. To “woo” someone has many different meanings, but they all come down one thing – focusing on the other person, the person you want to persuade. You “woo” people to get their support and approval. It is also the ability to easily establish rapport with many different people. However “woo” may also be defined as effectively selling ideas – using persuasion rather than force – is one of the most important skills that everyone from CEOs and entrepreneurs to team leaders and mid-level managers need to learn if they want to be effective in their organizations. The 4 Step process to selling your ideas: based on “the art of WOO. Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas”, by G. Richard Shell & Mario Moussa, Portfolio, 2007

Step 1) Survey Your Situation: The Idea:
- Exactly what problem does your idea solve?
- What are the causes of this problem?
- What makes my idea better than the available alternatives?
Selling Strategy Stepping Stones:
- Who is the decision Maker?
- Where does the person I am approaching fit into my stepping-stone strategy?
- What are my specific goals for this encounter (gain input, access, positive attitude, authorisation, endorsement, decision, resources, implementation)?
- What medium (face-to-face, phone, e-mail, etc.) should I use?

Step 2) Confronting the 5 Barriers. Be prepare to overcome the 5 most common obstacles that can sink ideas before they get started. The 5 barriers are:
1. Unreceptive beliefs. What beliefs and values does this person hold that could block or support my case?
2. Conflicting interests. What are the other party’s interests and how can I address them?
3. Negative relationships. What characterises my relationship to the person I am trying to influence? Can I improve that relationship?
4. Lack of credibility. What is the basis for my credibility with this person? Can I emphasise this?
5. Communication. What channels should I use (Authority, Rationality, Vision, Relationship, Interests, Politics)? Do I need to adjust my style? Great persuaders throughout history have shared a natural “instinct” for overcoming this last barrier.

Step 3) Making Your Pitch. Frame your idea in a compelling way by answering the following questions:
- What evidence will best resonate with the other person?
- How can I personalize the pitch and make it memorable?
- Link the pitch to key organizational goals and objectives
- Address any potentially conflicting interests.

Step 4) Secure Your Commitments. Seek to secure both individual and organizational commitments.
- What public actions can I request to obtain an individual commitment?
- What political objections may arise related to turf, resources, credit, or careers?
- How can I create momentum to generate a snowball effect?
- What alliances and coalitions should I develop to secure implementation?

Avoid the mistake of thinking that your job is done when you get a “yes” to your proposal. Research shows that in most organizations as many as 8 sign-offs are required even for simple ideas. So, after you move the individual you need to move the organization and that can require a lot of effort to keep the pressure on to drive through new ideas and change within the organization.

Pitching to Win. The 3 things you absolutely must do

How many times have you had to sit through a really bad presentation or pitch? What was it about the pitch that made you bored, disinterested, frustrated or even angry? We all know a bad pitch when we experience one, but what does it take to make a really great pitch?
The key to making winning pitches lies in being able to answer these two questions:
- What are the 2 things that they want to hear?
- What are the 3 things that you absolutely, positively must do if you want them to buy you and your ideas? Let me answer this question first.

The 3 Platinum Rules of making winning pitches:
1. The message is all about them and not about you.
Do a quick check of your next pitch presentation. Are you starting out with an overview of your company: its history and position in your industry and why you are so good at what you do? Here is the bad news. The group you are pitching to doesn’t care about you or your company until they know that you understand and care them and their business, their goals for the future and the challenges they face getting there. When we talk about us and not them we fail to capture their attention and we fail to engage the group. But there is an other more serious consequence which is that we waste the best part of the groups attention span which decreases rapidly when we talk about “us”, and when we do finally talk about “them” they are at the low end of the attention curve (see diagram “Audience Buy-in”). In other words we actively minimise our chances to connect, engage and persuade our audience.
2. Establish relevance up front:
“Why” before “what”, “how”, “who” and “when. Focus on WIIFT (What is it for them) and avoid WIIFM (What is in it for me) thinking. Try this simple test. Take a yellow highlighter pen to your presentation pitch and mark every reference to your company, your brand, your product or service, your position in the market, your track record, your financials, etc. Then present what is left unmarked as your pitch. You may be alarmed to find that you don’t have much to say! Then do a quick check of your benefits statements. Remember the Golden Rule: Its not a benefit unless it has the word “you” in it. Example. At the end of the new campaign you will have revenues up by 15% in the current quarter and you will get complaints down by 25-30% over the following 2 quarters.
3. Focus on their better future not your brilliant past.
This means that you don’t talk about your reference customers, case studies, client testimonials, etc. until you have described how you will positively impact their business over time. This takes hard work. To have solid data on their better future you have to know where they are today, where they want to be tomorrow and know by how much you can help them get there and in what time frame. Once you have established this you can confidently talk about the After Effects: outcomes and results. By doing this you will be aligned with their No. #1 interest – how to achieve their mission, goals and objectives which will determine their success as individuals and as a group.

What are the 2 things that your audience wants to hear?
1) the After Effects. i.e. What do they get and when do they get it, and
2) they want certainty. Anticipate this need by answering the unasked question: How can I be sure and certain that you can and will deliver what you are pitching? This is where your case studies, customer references and client testimonials can be leveraged. As George Bernard Shaw said: “What men want is not knowledge, but certainty.” Make sure that your pitch delivers that certainty.”