Competitive Separation is what makes you or your offer unique, unmatchable. The more unmatchable your offer is, the great the level of competitive separation. Step 1. Determine your current level of Competitive Separation. Step 2. Determine your Aspirational level of Competitive Separation and Step 3. Create a plan to get there.

1. What makes you different?

What makes you different? What are your “Crown Jewels”? Why should your customers care about this difference? How can you leverage this difference to capture new customers and enter new markets? And finally, are you going to develop or acquire your “Crown Jewels”?

“Crown Jewels” are your unique assets that are proprietary to you, hard for competitors to replicate and highly valued by customers. They can be technology patents, size of installed base, disruptive business model, domain expertise, skills and capabilities that are unique to your company. That if developed and positioned properly create sustainable advantages that enable real and measurable competitive separation. We all have them. Sometimes we don’t know what they look like or where they are hiding in our organisation.

2. Who is in your Competitive Set?

Most of us live within the confines of our competitive set. A competitive set consists of you and every other company/capability/offer/product or service that customers perceive as comparable or equivalent. ie. Your customers view you as potential substitutes. Do you have a well-worn list of usual suspects that you compete with? Who is in your Competitive Set today? Should they be? Who will be in your competitive set in 3 years from now? Who would you like to include in your competitive set?

3. Who is your Reference Competitor?

The choice of your Reference Competitor is critical as it determines your position and reveals your competitive aspirations.

Example: Using an aspirational Reference Competitor to create competitive separation.
Are you familiar with Slideshare?” I ask people. “I post my presentations there so program participants can view them and download them, as well as anyone else out there who may be interested.” When I explain what Slideshare is to some people I see their eyes start to glaze over. They just don’t get it. So I ask if they have heard of YouTube? “Yes, of course. Everyone knows YouTube” they answer. “Slideshare is YouTube for Powerpoint.” “OK, now I get it! Now I know what you are talking about. (thank you)” Here competitive separation was achieved without reference to Slideshare’s direct competitors (Brainshark, Sliderocket, Authorstream and others) who are part of Slideshare’s competitive set today.

What is your Competitive Separation strategy?

Start by answering these questions:

• Who is in your competitive set?
• Who is your reference competitor (today)?
• Who is your aspirational reference competitor (tomorrow)?
• What are your “Crown Jewels”?
• What are the key buying criteria of the customers that you serve?
• How will you provide unmatchable value for each of those buying criteria?

Make it happen: lead first, manage second.

*based on ideas from the book: Escape Velocity, by Geoffrey A. Moore, HaperCollins 2011

Welcome to 2012 a year of challenge and change. A year of challenge, why challenge? Because our challenge is to bring about change and this is a major challenge for us all.

“I’m Starting With The Man In The Mirror
I’m Asking Him To Change His Ways” – Michael Jackson

“If change were easy, I would have done it long ago.” - Unknown

The challenge of change is breaking through the status quo and that means your enemy in 2012 will be “status quo thinking”. Your job is overcome the Tyranny of Change, not to manage the inevitable. What worked in the past is less and less likely to work in the future. What made you successful in the past will not make you successful in the future. In short: what got you here, won’t get you there. You must turn off the life support system for “business as usual” and embrace the new realities of 2012.

How can you move beyond the status quo and free yourself from the gravitation pull of the past?

12 Strategies for Growth in 2012:

1. Competitive Separation
2. ROI = Return on Innovation (not Return on Investment)
3. Capitalise on Markets in Transition. Move everything to the web.
4. The Buyer’s Journey: Aligning with your customer’s decision making processes
5. Discovering your “Inner Advantage”. What sets you apart from the rest?
6. Accelerating time to adoption: Delivering the desired End-to-End Customer Experience
7. Tipping the Funnel: Make your customers your unpaid sales force.
8. Building 3 Horizons of Time (Portfolio thinking)
9. AND Thinking (The end of OR Thinking)
10. Differentiate or Die: How to avoid commoditisation
11. Value Innovation: Understanding Price/Benefit sensitivity
12. Identifying Next Generation growth

Over the next few months we will explore each of the 12 Growth Strategies listed above in a separate posts. So stay tuned….

Make it happen: Lead first, manage second

How many people do you know would describe themselves as being creative? A lot I find. “I love new ideas, creating new concepts, building new models, etc.” they will tell you. And many of them are highly creative when working with a clean sheet of paper, in “green field” situations or without any limiting constraints. This could be considered as pure creativity. But I think that the really creative people are those that can come up with new ideas, a reconfigured concept or innovative new models in response to constraints in order to solve a problem. This is what I call practical creativity. In other words it is the constraints that trigger the creativity required to overcome them. Cause and effect. Now, ask those same people how good they are at problem solving. I think you might get a very different answer? Creativity seems to evaporate rapidly when confronted with real problems to be solved.

So here is my point: No constraints, no creativity. The good news is that you can activate your creativity on demand by recognising problems, existing constraints or future constraints. Practical creativity is simply an advanced form of problem solving.

The key thing to remember is that creativity loves constraints. It is often times difficult to tap into our full creativity, but it is seldom difficult to find a constraint or three in our daily lives.

May the problems you face become the drivers of your practical creativity.

Everyone loves a good story. That’s why stories are so effective for engaging an audience, and inspiring action. Great leaders are great storytellers. Great leaders know how to capture people’s hearts and minds using stories that we well chosen, well constructed and well told. Great stories are engaging, inspiring and energising because they embody relevant, timely and are highly memorable messages. Great stories inspire, motivate and move people to action.

“Those who tell the stories rule the world.” - Plato, Greek Philosopher

What is a great story? A great story captures you, your identity, your journey, your values and beliefs, and where you came from.” according to Dr. John Sadowsky, Distinguished Professor of Leadership at the Grenoble Graduate School of Business in France. Great stories are:

Authentic. You live the story in visible ways.
Engaging. Your energy and passion engages your listeners.
Personal. You reveal yourself through your stories.
Simple. Include the minimum to create the maximum impact.

Stories are so important and powerful because they are viral by definition. That is, people simply love to hear them and share them. This has been true since the beginning of time, and it remains true in today’s high-tech world. Storytelling is the way we express our passion. Stories capture emotions and those emotions are transferred to others through the stories we tell.

“Reasons lead to conclusions; emotions lead to actions.” - Saatchi & Saatchi

Where do you find great stories? They are all around us, every everywhere, just waiting to be recognised and captured. They are crying out “take me, take me, I am a great story!” However, if you are not looking for great stories it is unlikely that you will find any. So, ask yourself the question: “how could I use this as a story? How can I turn this into a great story? What is the meaning, message, analogy, anecdote, irony or humour that I can liberate and how can I inspire people to take action as a result of this story?  If you can’t find your own use other people’s stories.

“I … SHAMELESSLY STEAL … stories of others’ effective actions.” - Tom Peters

Your life is a story. You just have to write it yourself.

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.

2. What makes it work? This is the learning step. If we can understand why something succeeded then we can replicate it. It moves us beyond the “find the problem and fix it” thinking to a success-focused forward thinking mind-set by consistently repeating our successes.

3. What are we trying to accomplish? Here we seek to clarify and align our goals and objectives by re-framing, re-validating and re-stating what we want to achieve.

4. What would be the benefit of achieving that? Here we want to answer the question: why? Why bother doing this? Why is this important? What is the value to you personally? Provide a reason or a sense of meaning and you will get buy-in and commitment from your team, stakeholders, partners and your customers.

5. What can we do more or better? This question re-directs our thinking back to step 1 and re-engages the creativity pump to inspire and engage our thinking around the problem being solved. Creative thinkers get there more quickly because they continually seek solutions.

You are responsible for creating positive stress in your life by creating flow; energy and enthusiasm that will enable you to perform at high levels of productivity. Whether you are a single contributor or leader of a team, you are responsible for creating, building and maintaining the energy, enthusiasm of those you interact with in business.

based on ideas from the book Leadership Made Simple by Ed Oakley and Doug Krug, Enlightened Leadership Publications, 2006

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?

1) Options Preference: People who have an Options preference are motivated by opportunities and possibilities to do something in a different way. They are thrilled by unlimited possibilities and ideas.

When selling to an Options person the goal is to get them to think in terms of possibilities. Give them lots of alternatives. They want to examine all the reasons why they should buy. An Options person is motivated by choice, unlimited choice.

Don’t make the fatal mistake of using this approach on someone with a Procedures Preference. Want to know how you can avoid doing this?

2) Procedures Preference: People with a Procedures preference like to follow set ways. They are interested in how to do things, not in why things are the way they are.

When selling to a Procedures person the goal is to get them started on a procedure because they are compelled to complete it. They want to see a clear step-by-step procedure to follow. They don’t want to be shown several ways of doing something. They want one way, the right way. Show them how to buy.

Identifying Behavioral types:

Options people: Are excited by choice and possibility. Have trouble following set procedures

Procedures people: Prefer to follow tried-and-true set ways. Get stumped when they have no procedure to follow.

Influencing Language:

Options: Opportunities; variety; unlimited possibilities; lots of choice; options; break the rules

Procedures: The right way; how to; tried and true; speak in procedures: first ….then …. lastly

Mobile Phone Retail Sales example:

“The first step is, I’ll show you the latest mobile phones that we have available today that match your usage criteria. Then you can take a good look at them, I will show you how they work and you can try them out. You can then decide which one you like best. After that, I’ll explain how the payment plan works and set up your new phone in our system for you. Then all you need to do is sign your new Service Agreement. Lastly, you can take your brand new mobile phone home with you today, all set up, fully operational and ready to go. You can start using it immediately without any hassle or delay. Are you ready to get started?”

Based on ideas from the book “Words That Change Minds. Mastering the language of influence.” by Shelle Rose Charvet

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.

The 5 steps of the Buyer Decision Process*:

1. Person: You must always start here to create trust and personal credibility. The buyer won’t go the next decision step until you have successfully completed this step.

2. Company: ‘Sell’ your company before you start to ‘sell’ your product or service. Over look this step at your own peril.

3. Product: Many of us start here and spend most of our time on this decision step. Why? Comfort factor, probably. We understand our products and services, and we want to show our people how knowledgeable we are. In reality, most buyers today have done extensive research online. They know exactly what they are looking for and often they know as much or more about a specific product or service than we do.

4. Price (Value): Most buyers have done their homework and know exactly or have a very good idea what prices are and which products and services fit their budget and which one don’t. Help buyers navigate this step by validating their product choice and advising them on different options, packages, service bundles that will deliver superior value to the bottom line in their usage scenario.

5. Why Now? This is where you can be of real service to your prospects and customers. How often have you seen a prospect fly through steps 1 through 4 of the buyer decision process only to arrive at this step and suddenly get stuck in ‘inability to make a decision’ or ‘indecision to take action’. Your role here is simple. Create a sense of urgency by pointing out all the reasons why the buyer needs to take immediate action and more importantly help the buyer to calculate the cost of indecision or delay.

Remember. Everyone goes through exactly this decision process when making a buying decision. All you have to do is determine where they are in the process and provide the required information by asking insightful diagnostic questions that will help move their thinking to the next decision step in the process. Do this and you will add value by helping your prospects and customers make logical, rational buying and investment decisions. Use the Buyer Decision Process and your prospects and customers will reward you with more and higher value buying decisions.

*based on ideas from the book: Action Selling by Duane Sparks, The Sales Board, Inc.

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?

Start with the End in Mind. What are your desired outcomes for the presentation, meeting or workshop? List the Top 3 objectives you have as outcomes of the meeting. Think carefully about this when choosing a name for your presentation, workshop or meeting. “Quarterly Business Review” sounds like exactly that. A meeting who’s title is “Identifying and finding ways to remove costs that won’t negatively impact revenue growth” creates a totally different perception and expectation about the desired outcomes of the meeting. Set expectations upfront and challenge your audience to find at least 3 personal “Take Aways”: actionable ideas that they can put to work immediately.

Engage them immediately. Skip the personal introductions and normal meeting protocol. Go straight to your desired outcome and your expectations. Connect with your audience immediately by soliciting their ideas, input, agreement/disagreement, opinions and feelings. Encourage interaction and exchange of ideas. How? by asking questions. By asking for their opinions, asking for examples and stories that illustrate a point, or simply asking for their validation of the item being discussed. Get them involved and keep them involved through frequent and continuous inclusion.

Think like a Facilitator. Use “the answer is in the room” thinking. How? Don’t answer the question, put it to the room. What is the difference between a Presenter and a Meeting Facilitator? When running a meeting or a workshop you are not a subject matter expert, you are a process expert. Your role is to liberate the tacit knowledge, opinions and collective experience of all participants. Leverage the power of simplicity. Speak less and say more. Remember, briefness equates to effectiveness.

Maintain Momentum. Use stories, storytelling, anecdotes and humor to keep things moving. Energy and engagement tend to drop off after a while. You can avoid this by telling stories and encouraging participants to tell stories. Relevant stories embody key ideas and are memorable. People love stories, they engage us and they energise us. Start building a library of personal stories that you can use in your next workshop, meeting or presentation.

Finish Strong. Review key actions, learning points and agree next steps. Summarise their ideas; recognise the value of their ideas. Point out the positives, build on them, test and challenge them. Invite comments and inclusive group discussion. Do this and you will make your presentations, meetings and workshops productive, constructive, energising and highly memorable.

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:

1. ‘Euroize/Dollarize’ the problem. Help your client to quantify the cost of his/her problem or lost opportunity by determining an approximate cost or financial benefit. This will allow the customer to prioritize their buying or investment decision and create a sense of urgency to take action. The rule is: the bigger the problem (€), the bigger the solution (€).

2. Use Creative Thinking (Divergent Thinking) Create a list. Work with your customer to draw up a list of as many possible ideas and actions that could minimize or resolve the problem and deliver the required outcomes. The goal is to capture the maximum number of possibilities without judging or eliminating any ideas. Target: Create a list of 20 possible solutions.

3. Use Critical Thinking (Convergent Thinking) Make a choice. In this phase of the process help the Decision Maker choose the best solution that meets his requirements: cost or investment, and delivers the desired results. Demonstrate how you can assure that the desired results will be realized? Provide value assurance by helping your customers achieve their desired results in a measured and predictable manner.

Relationship Based Selling is no longer a meaningful differentiator to buying decision makers in the post-crisis world. Buyers are looking for results and you must demonstrate that you are results-focused by helping them: 1) identify, 2) quantify and 3) deliver desired results. To succeed in tomorrow’s post-crisis business world you must become a Results-Focused Trusted Advisor.

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:

Listen to Learn
Mind-set Tip #1: Listening to learn is vital to your success in creating clarity for your customers. It is all about wanting to learn which transcends the desire to simply understand your customer. When we are in learning mode we are open and receptive to new and different ideas and able to explore and play with them freely. Listening intently in this frame of mind will significantly help your customers to clarify their thinking and their decision making.

Listen with Your Eyes
Mind-set Tip #2: Listen with your eyes by focusing your attention on observing your customer. Observe the customer’s body language as she describes her challenges and the ideal solution she would like your help to deliver. Listen with your eyes in an objective and nonjudgmental way. Observe her thinking. Look beyond the words she uses. Look for the hidden drivers of her behavior. Focus your observation on looking for insights into how she responds to your questions, how she makes decisions and what motivates her to commit to take action.

Listen with Your Mind
Mind-set Tip #3: Listen with your mind by listening for the unconscious forces at work in the head of your customer. Think about how they process information. Do they want facts and figures and benchmark data, or do they prefer anecdotal customer stories and case studies, or do they show a preference for testimonials and references? This will help you to understanding how they: 1) think, 2) decide and 3) behave. Knowing this will allow you to navigate your way successfully through the complexity of their decision making process.

Success in sales today is about helping your customer move from chaos to clarity. Do this by listening to learn about how they think, process information and make decisions. When you create clarity your customers will commit to moving forward with you and be confident in achieving their desired outcome.