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Sales

The One Document Every B2B Sales Professional Should Be Reading Right Now

By Jack Malcolm / 7.13.2020 / No Comment

If you are a B2B sales professional who aspires to be more than simply a product-pusher, you already know that you need to be as informed and up-to-date as possible about your customer’s business, including their financial performance, the state of their business, and their strategies and initiatives to compete and make money.

I’ve long advocated the importance of studying your customer’s annual report as an indispensable source document for a lot of this information, but at this current unprecedented stage of our world economy, there is a source that is even more timely and valuable.

This just-finished second quarter from April through June is one of the most consequential and revolutionary three months that any of your customers or prospects have ever experienced. They’ve all had to revise their expectations, reformulate new strategies to compete and survive, change their plans, and radically reconsider investments and purchases. In selling terms, they have different problems, opportunities, changes and risks.

If you’re selling to those companies, wouldn’t you want to know as much as possible about these changes, so that you can speak more intelligently and find ways to address them? Wouldn’t it be great to have an unfair advantage over competitors who are not as well informed as you are?

Fortunately, over the next few weeks there will be trove of documents published that will contain a lot of this incredibly valuable information. I’m referring, of course, to quarterly earnings reports. The most detailed document is the form 10-Q, which for larger companies must be filed within 40 days of the end of the quarter. It contains a narrative description of events that impacted financial results, as well as updated information on business conditions and risks. But most public companies also conduct an earnings conference call with investors and analysts well in advance of the release of the 10-Q, and these may contain a lot of valuable additional detail.

If you’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get an appointment with your dream customer, turmoil may be your friend, because they may be open to new ideas, especially if you are the first to show you know what they’re going through. If you’re working with established customers, your competitors may be trying to do the same thing to you, so it pays to stay ahead of them. Just like any treasure map, the first to get there wins.

P.S. If you only deal with private companies, you might think this article is not helpful. However, I would strongly recommend that you read at least one quarterly statement from your customers’ competitors who are public. If they’re in the same industry, most of the same information will apply.

Book reviews - Thinking Books

Book Recommendation: The Biggest Bluff

By Jack Malcolm / 7.8.2020 / No Comment

Having already read and thoroughly enjoyed Maria Konnikova’s two previous books,[1] I pre-ordered her newest book as soon as I learned about it. The Biggest Bluff did not disappoint. I believe it’s her best book yet, and I thoroughly recommend it.

First, let me summarize what it’s about. Konnikova is a psychology PhD who studies human cognition and decision making. In 2016, for various professional and personal reasons, she set herself the challenge of learning how to play poker from scratch, with the hugely ambitious goal of finishing in the money at a World Series of Poker event—within one year.

What strengths did she bring to the table? A strong academic grasp of the science of decision-making; an deep capacity to learn; and, most importantly, a humble recognition of her own ignorance. Not least, she chose her teacher wisely: Erik Seidel, a legendary poker champion who also has an incredible gift for teaching.

Reading The Biggest Bluff is like peeling an onion, because there are at least four layers to this deep book.

On the surface, The Biggest Bluff is about poker. I don’t play poker, so I can’t comment on how well it does its job. I did have trouble following some of the descriptions of certain hands she played, but those few instances do not detract from following the often suspenseful action and grasping the meaning of what’s going on.

Second, it’s a book about psychology, and the primary reason I bought the book. It’s one thing to study decision-making using other subjects in a laboratory setting; it’s another challenge entirely to study it under unrelenting time pressure, intimidation, using yourself as the test subject, with real money at stake. Konnikova learns and teaches useful insights about attention, emotional control, working with your own cognitive biases, reading people, and acquiring expertise. If the book had stopped here, I would have still considered it well worth reading. The next two layers are an unexpected bonus.

Third, The Biggest Bluff is a memoir that reads like a novel, a hero’s journey of self-discovery and personal transformation. As a neophyte, she had to adapt and learn quickly in order to survive her quest. As a woman in the heavily male-dominated world of poker, she had to learn to endure appalling insults and attempts at intimidation; Although it took longer than her initial one-year target, she ultimately fulfills her quest, but gains far more than she intended when she began. And something tells me that Konnikova’s journey is not over yet.

The fourth layer, and the one that resonated most strongly with me personally, is as a philosophy book, particularly Stoic philosophy. I’m not sure if she meant it that way. She only mentions the stoics once, near the end of the book, but their philosophy weaves throughout the book. Three key themes of stoicism are also key themes in this book: knowing what you can and can’t control; managing your perception and interpretation of reality; and staying calm and rational whether you’re winning or losing, especially the latter.

I strongly recommend you read this book if you’re interested in any one of the layers. You may even find other layers I’ve missed.

[1] Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes and The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It…Every Time,

Book reviews - Success Books

Book Recommendation: Plato’s Lemonade Stand

By Jack Malcolm / 6.30.2020 / No Comment

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade. It’s one of the oldest clichés in the book. The problem with clichés is that we hear them so often that we tune them out, which is sometimes a pity because there’s usually a reason they became clichés in the first place. They contain a deep and clear truth—if we just take the time to dip below the surface.

2020 has produced a bumper crop of lemons for most of us, so what better time than now to dive into the philosophy of that old adage?

But it helps when you have an experienced guide to show you the way. Tom Morris has a singular ability to start with a simple truth, examine it carefully for 275 pages, and produce something that’s wise, highly readable, and especially useful at this time.

The point in Plato’s Lemonade Stand is to show you explicitly how to deal with change. How do you explain the recipe without resorting to yet more shallow clichés and easy advice? You start a conversation with the great minds in history. Plato doesn’t actually appear too much in the book, but his name is a proxy for a long litany of thinkers throughout history whose wisdom Morris taps for this book including Plato’s teacher Socrates and student Aristotle, continuing with the New Testament, and ending up with Harry Potter. As change books go, Plato’s Lemonade Stand is orders of magnitude more fulfilling than, say, Who Moved My Cheese?

Life is full of change, and it’s not always positive. We want strawberries or peaches, but we get lemons instead. Grit and resilience will help us deal with the sour taste, but we can also add sweetener in the form of perspective, self-control and positive action. These are covered extensively in the first two-thirds of the book. If the book ended here, it would be well worth the price for the help it can give anyone struggling to deal with the current crisis, or any other adverse circumstances they face.

But there’s more to the story than that. There are two forms of change: that which happens to us, and that which happens because of us. The second section of the book is about the latter.

It’s one thing to change when you don’t have much choice in the matter; you have to play defense. But sometimes it may be harder to play offense—to initiate change when things are going well. In one of the more compelling metaphors in the book, Morris teaches that when you finally reach a peak that you’ve aspired to climb for a long time, you will inevitably spot a higher peak in the distance. But here’s the rub: you can’t start climbing the second peak without first going downhill from the first. It definitely won’t be easy, and it can be tempting to just decide that the hill you’re on is good enough.

But if you decide to embark on the effort, you need to accept being a beginner, struggling with the unfamiliar, being scared and tested all over again, which is why G.K. Chesterton said, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”

If I have a quibble with the book, it’s that I would have liked to see more about self-initiated change. To be fair, Morris covers a lot of that ground well in some of his previous books, especially True Success. And maybe he’s saving for a sequel. He hints at that on the next to last page, with one last surprising truth—which I won’t spoil in this review.

If you’ve read anything by Tom Morris before, you will encounter some familiar ideas, particularly his 7 Cs of Success. But that’s not a bug, it’s a feature, because anything worth knowing is worth repeating and refreshing from time to time. If you haven’t read anything by Tom Morris before, do yourself a big favor, starting with Plato’s Lemonade Stand.

Persuasive communication

Are You Being Heard?

By Jack Malcolm / 5.19.2020 / No Comment

Credibility expert Mitchell Levy, who interviewed me recently for his videocast, has a stock question that he asks all the guests on his show: “What’s your CPoP?”

CPoP stands for “Customer Point of Pain”. Mitchell asks that question because he’s less interested in what a person does, than in what a person does for others. A question like that is a scalpel that cuts through layers of marketing and sales-talk fat to get to the real meat inside—especially because Mitchell insists that any answer must comprise ten words or less.

I confess that I knew the question was coming before the interview started, but that doesn’t mean that I found it easy to answer—not without a lot of thought. I’ve been in this business for a long time, and I’ve had thousands of opportunities to describe what I do, but still I had to think carefully to distill it down to its essence.

In the end, I’m rather proud that I was able to boil down my customers’ point of pain to just two words:

Being heard.

Being heard: what does that mean? It means that every person that I work with wants to matter in this world somehow. They want to matter by making a real contribution—and be recognized as making a real contribution—to the people whose work and life they affect, whether they be customers, coworkers, their leadership, or even friends and family.

The scope and value of their contribution begins with the quality of their thinking, but it doesn’t end there. It doesn’t matter how smart you are if others don’t listen to you with the attention and credibility you deserve. I work with a lot of very smart people who don’t show their full brilliance to others because what comes out of their mouths does not always do justice to what goes on in their minds. Perhaps they take too long to get to the point, or they lack confidence (especially in larger groups), or they don’t put their ideas in terms that their listeners understand or care about, so they are not heard to the extent they deserve.

What does it take to be heard? Contribution and credibility. Both are necessary, but ultimately the second rests on the first. As long as you have something to say that contributes value to the other party, you are almost guaranteed an attentive listener. You won’t often go wrong if you go into every conversation or presentation with a clear idea of how the other person will be better off for having listened to you.

Contribution is a necessary first step to getting that initial hearing, but you need credibility to sustain attention long enough for your message to take root and turn into decisive action. How many shiny new mousetraps have gone unsold because the inventor did not put as much thought and care into selling them as they did in creating them? As Aristotle says, “…It is not sufficient to know what to say, it is also necessary to know how to say it.”[1]

There’s bad news and good news: The bad news is that it’s harder to be heard in a world that’s flooded with a nonstop flow of information. The hard fact is that your natural brilliance won’t sell itself. You need to communicate in such a way that others believe you, and that takes skill and practice. The good news is that quality can stand out because people will gravitate to those who provide the most value in return for their attention, and who communicate that value clearly and compellingly.

If your point of pain is “being heard”, ask yourself these two questions:

What am I doing to maximize my contribution when I speak?

What am I doing to maximize my credibility?

[1] Thomas Habinek, Ancient Rhetoric from Aristotle to Philostratus, p. 50.