I’ve recently launched a new front in my personal quest for knowledge. Inspired in part by Dave Brock’s continuing series on applying lean principles to selling, I’ve begun dusting off some books I read years ago about lean production, total quality management, six sigma, etc. In fact, I believe that sales is an area that’s definitely ripe for more work in the field, and I’ve begun gathering additional reading material and notes for some writing and learning of my own on that topic.
However, as I’ve been getting deeper and deeper into the topic, I’ve begun noticing applications in unexpected areas, and I’ve started thinking about how to apply those principles to my own work. Being self-employed, I am supposedly in complete command of what I choose to work on and when, so I should have everything organized and arranged for maximum personal productivity, right? Ha!
The lens of lean methods, when applied to your own work, acts like those chemicals that forensic scientists apply to a surface—all kinds of ugly evidence comes to light for all the world to see. Think about it, how much time do you waste in a given day?
Let’s make sure it works before we put passengers on it
I’ve written often about the importance and benefit of planning, whether it is for a sales call or a presentation. The discipline of planning allows you to refine what you want to say so that you can be more efficient and effective. Most salespeople get this, but even so, getting them to plan can be very difficult. Being fully aware of that, I’m going to crawl even further out on to that limb and propose yet another step. In this article, I’d like to focus on the step between the plan and its execution, the one that is probably most neglected by sales professionals, either because of a surplus of self-confidence or a deficit of time.
I can hear you thinking already: “Why should I rehearse? I’m an experienced professional, and I’ve done this many times before. I don’t want to sound scripted.”
The rehearsal step is most often skipped for three reasons. The reason most often given is the least valid: you don’t have time. That answer is totally unacceptable and unworthy of a true professional. Your time in front of high-level decision makers is the most highly leveraged use of your time that you can have. If you don’t have time to make sure you’re at your best, how do you find time for all the other things you do in your work life? Besides, if you don’t care enough to rehearse, why should they care enough to listen?
There are hundreds of books written on leadership every year, most of which claim to analyze and isolate the traits that make someone a good leader, as if there is a secret formula for leadership that can be bottled and sold. The fact that each book’s secret formula is different does not seem to deter the writers or their readers.
There is no secret formula or combination of traits that will make anyone the best leader, and an excellent illustration of this can be found in Walter Borneman’s new book, The Admirals, which chronicles the careers of the four American admirals who achieved five-star rank while leading our nation to victory in WWII.
The highest ranking (by design, he was the first promoted to the new five-star rank, so that he would have seniority), most influential, and least heralded was William Leahy, who served during the war as FDR’s personal military adviser.
In working on my new book, Strategic Sales Presentations, I’ve shared the manuscript with some colleagues and friends for their perspective. Their feedback has been almost uniformly complimentary, and they’ve further inflated my own opinion of the value of the book, its content, and its writing.
BUT, I just received comments from a more objective reviewer who does not have personal ties to me. His comments back to me initially echoed some of the same praise I’ve grown accustomed to receiving, but then he launched into what he saw as the shortcomings. Let me tell you, it was painful to read—yet it was exactly what I needed to hear.
He made three suggestions which make a tremendous amount of sense and which in retrospect seem obvious. They were not obvious to me, probably because I was too close to it. I suspect they were obvious to previous readers, though, and if I shared the latest reviewer’s comments with them, they would probably say they agree as well. Yet, they never said anything to me. Maybe they were trying to be tactful and spare my feelings, or maybe they did not want to feel uncomfortable themselves.
Sometimes compliments are the easy way out. We don’t want to put ourselves in the uncomfortable position of making someone else uncomfortable, so we choose the path of least resistance, in which case we’re making it as much about ourselves as we are about the other person.
It reminds me of a lesson I learned early in my sales training career. I was facilitating some role plays and one of the participants did a very poor job. Not wanting to hurt his self-confidence, I performed all kinds of verbal gymnastics trying to find something good to say about his performance. Immediately one of the other participants called me out on it; he rightly pointed out that my feedback was worse than useless, and that I was not doing the job I was being paid for.
I was trying too hard to apply a feedback sandwich, in which you sandwich your improvement suggestions between two positives. This is designed to preserve the self-esteem of the one being corrected. Yet, maybe sparing someone’s feelings is exactly the wrong approach. Of course, you don’t want to be brutal or gratuitously harsh, but by trying to soften the emotional impact are you not harming the learning process? Touching a warm stove may or may not teach you a lesson, but touch a hot one stove, and you’ll never forget the lesson.
Second, how often do we strive so hard to be “constructive” that we lose clarity, directness and honesty?
Third, the sandwich approach may also backfire, because our natural confirmation bias disposes us to hear only what we want to hear and disregard the rest.
So, if you really want to be a friend, if you really want to help, give them something useful and be direct. Of course, if you don’t care that much, you can always take the approach that my friend Gary Connor did. He was at a conference and listened to an excruciatingly bad presentation. Immediately afterwards, the speaker asked him what he thought. Gary’s reply: “Of all the presentations I heard today, yours was definitely the most recent.” The speaker beamed and thanked him for the feedback!
I’ve recently launched a new front in my personal quest for knowledge. Inspired in part by Dave Brock’s continuing series on applying lean principles to selling, I’ve begun dusting off some books I read years ago about lean production, total quality management, six sigma, etc. In fact, I believe that sales is an area that’s definitely ripe for more work in the field, and I’ve begun gathering additional reading material and notes for some writing and learning of my own on that topic.
