Everyone needs a miracle from time to time.

Jeremiah 29:11 “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

We all face times of desperate need. All of us at one time or another in our lives “need” a miracle. It might be saving our job/business depends on closing a business deal. It might be that we have a loved one with a medical emergency. But at some point we recognize that we can’t do it alone and “need” intervention. Most of us look for a “parting-the-Red Sea” type of miracle. We’re looking for that big, immediate, in-your-face solution to our problem. I know some of us can point to big “parting-the-Red Sea” miracles and I believe they exist, but for the most part I think if we critically looked at even those they would follow this process. It is just that we obeyed so naturally that we don’t see our involvement. What is the real pragmatic expectation to answered prayer? There are six points I’d like to make:

1. God knew the need before we asked for help 
2. God could have solved the problem immediately without the help of other
3. God expects us to do what we can, he expects obedience 
4. God uses resource that we have 
5.  God does what we can’t
6.  Here is the hard part, the final solution always takes longer then we want, requires obedience even when we don’t understand the required task and is more painful than we would like.

I have listed five Biblical miracles at the end to use as examples. They are just five of many, but they demonstrate the principles well. They all share the six points above. 

God knew the need before we asked for help

We are not going to surprise God with our need. Psalms 139:4 “Even before the words are on my tongue, you know it all together.” We are not bringing Him a perplexing problem that He needs to contemplate. Our problems are unique and immediate to us. Because we do not see the future, our need is for a quick solution. When we don’t get it we believe either God doesn’t know, doesn’t care or can’t help. The timing is a well thought out decision by God based on his plans for us.

God could have solved the problem immediately without the help of others

In Genesis 1 we learned that God created the heavens and the earth. There is nothing He cannot do without our intervention. Genesis 22:18 says "And through your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed—all because you have obeyed me." He wants to bless us by getting us involved. The first part of the blessing is that He wants us to work together. He wants a relationship with us. He wants us to trust and obey. He could have simply made the five thousand full. Or made the bridal party happy with what they had, or wiped out the debt of the widow. He wants us to experience the joy of working with him.

God expects us to do what we can, he expects obedience

You can’t steer a stationary ship, it requires movement. Obedience is movement. Many times we pray for a solution and wait for the answer. God will send us “nudges” as a call to action. He will not always show us an immediate result when we obey. The size of the blessing can be determined by our actions. In both the Water to Wine miracle and the Widow’s Olive Jar miracle, the size of the blessing was determined by the number of vessels the people gathered. Peter could have never walked on water if he hadn’t first gotten out of the boat. The cripple went to great effort to have his friends carry him to Jesus, lift him to the roof and dig a hole into which they could lower him. The first step is obedience. Obedience requires movement.

God uses resource that we have

This is the first miracle, we have everything we need. Generally we expect that the solution of the problem centers on the fact that we can’t get what we need, which presupposes that we don’t already have it. The cripple had friends that were willing to help. The widow had olive oil, the wedding guests had water jugs, and the 5,000 had five fish. It seldom seems like we have enough, so we overlook what we have. Whether it is money, friends, intelligence, energy, or experience, we have resources that God will use. We need to take the time to understand the resources available to us and we need to be willing to apply them even when they seem lacking.

God does what we can’t

He is where the magic happens. As the servants ladled out the water it turned to wine. As the widow poured out olive oil from her jar it kept filling jars until she was out of jars. As the five thousand took pieces of fish and bread, there kept being more fish and bread. The cripple picked up his mat and walked. You don’t really think Peter could walk on water without God’s help. This is the part of the miracle we see and expect. The blessing is a result of our obedience; we kind of forget that part. 

The Hard Part

The final solution always takes longer then we want, requires obedience even when we don’t understand the required task and is more painful than we would like. Sorry I wish I could say more, but this is it. We have expectations that if we do what God wants, he will do what we want. Sorry, it’s not a trade. He knows so much more than we do. He knows what we want and need. He can see the future implications to all actions. We have a vision of our future based on limited knowledge. He has perfect knowledge. 

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Test this theory by reading about these five miracles in the bible:

1. Walking on Water (Mathew 14: 22 – 33)
2. Water to Wine (John 2: 1 – 11)
3. Widow trying to save her children from indenture (2 Kings 4:1 – 7) 
4.   Feeding the five thousand (Matthew 14: 13 – 21)
5. Cripple who is passed through the roof (Luke 5: 17 – 21) “get your hands dirty digging through the roof kind of faith”

Business Development verses Sales

I was following a car to work today that has the prestige license “VPRES”. I wondered if this person was a teller in a bank. Kidding aside, titles can really be confusing. I’m in the business of creating long-term incremental new revenue. One might think that means adding new accounts or growing embedded accounts. To me the answer is “yes” and “no”, but mostly “no”. I have traditionally approached sales as the means by which a company achieves its annual revenue plan. This includes both growing existing accounts and adding new ones. I like to think that a good rule of thumb is to have 30% of revenue from new accounts. This helps deals with the revenue attrition experienced with older existing accounts.

So in my definition, what is business development? Clearly you have to be able to sell to develop incremental new revenue. But the selling is more strategic than tactical. A good business development person is opening an all new market. The selling is typically to the early adopters who will blaze the trail for the mainstream sales force to take over. I think in terms of a three year cycle. At the end of three years it becomes more of a sales activity than a business development activity. What are the traits of a very good Business Development person?

Sales: Number one on the list. It’s about revenue. There is no reason to have a business development process if the end game doesn’t produce significant revenue growth. Solution selling skills are the minimum requirement. Advanced skills and experience are what you are looking for. Do they have a wide variety of successes or are they a specialist? I believe a variety of experiences is always best.

Marketing: It’s not about spinning an existing product to fit a new market. It’s about finding and validating an all new revenue source. There is a lot of advanced marketing going on here. Market research is paramount to long term success. Remember, in no more than three years you want to turn it over to the rank and file sales teams to exploit. The marketing is not so much copywriting and collaterals as it is messaging. What is the Unique Selling Proposition and what’s the value add that makes the solution appealing?

Product Development: Again, this is not classical product development. But it is the ability to create a new product from existing parts, with an extra dash of new. It is understanding the effort required and the resources available to meet time-to-market. It’s the ability to assure that it is within the product roadmap for the company.

Business Skills: Are they going to treat the company’s money like their money? It cost money to develop a new market. Can they run it like a profit center or are they content to run it as a cost center. Do they understand the investment they are asking for and the return they are willing to deliver? Have they built Pro Forma statements to use as milestones?

In the end, if you hire a sales person for a business development position, you may grow revenue in the short term, but will it dramatically affect the revenue potential of the company in the long term? And the other point is…. If you are looking for a pure hunter to open new accounts, don’t call it business development. If you want a hunter, ask for a hunter and hire someone who is proud to be called a hunter. If they don’t like being called a hunter then they probably aren’t one…..

Unique Sales Proposition

This is one of the least understood and most over used concepts in sales and marketing. Everyone thinks they have one, few companies do. Here’s why….

A Unique Sales Proposition (USP) must have these characteristics:

1. First and foremost it must be unique
2. Second, it has to be easily validated
3. Third, it must have real intrinsic value to the buyer.

USP’s are situational. What has unique value in one environment may not have any value in another. So one of two things must happen, either the USP changes based on the environment or the seller must target only the environment in which the USP is truly unique and valuable. The second alternative limits the viability of the market. The first alternative widens the target market but required that the seller understand both the unique value of their products or services and the specific value the prospect is looking to achieve. So the USP starts to look like a BBQ Menu; pick one entre, and two side items. Listing the attributes of your products and services is the easy part, getting past the second characteristic is where most fail the test.

Validating your USP is going to be difficult in traditional terms. Companies like to think their UPS is best-in-class service, leading edge technology, the most this, the fastest that, the only whatever…. The problem is can you prove it? More importantly can you prove it prior to the sale in such a way that your competition is left in the cold. This innately means that the USP must be measurable. If I want to state that my product is installed in more companies than any other like product; do I have the third party validated market share data to back up the claim? Is there another study out there that might invalidate my claim? If I claim to have best-in-class service; can I validate it with third party customer care data? Many benefits are just that benefits, they are not USP’s. I may be able to demonstrate that my clients rate my customer service 97 out of 100, but that does not make it a USP. It makes it very good and is an asset, but unless I can validate that my competition cannot meet that, it’s not a USP.

The last point is the logic test. Who cares? I have a good friend whose company has incredible IP based video server technology. It is truly great stuff. It is incredibly fast and has great features. The problem is; who cares. They compete against analog video servers that are half the price in small configurations and most of the video is never viewed. They lead with their gee-wiz technology just to get hammered on price. They try to tout their reliability, but the prospect counters with “I can afford spares”. The real challenge is to find a market that requires very high camera counts and the video is reviewed on a regular basis. Think casinos…. Think major airports….

The point is that every buyer has a unique set of pain that requires a unique solution. The product or service does not have to be unique, just the sales proposition. When your company can document that your product or service can uniquely address their particular problem, you have a leg up on getting the business. This will shorten the sales cycle and could lead to larger margins.

Your USP is not a tag line on your advertising. It is a tangible benefit supplied to a specific prospect in a specific environment. Don’t look for the magic bullet. Look for an arsenal, a smorgasbord of objective tangible benefits that can be used as the situation dictates.

Defensively speaking, look at your competitors USP’s and be prepared to demonstrate how your product can provide the same benefit. It won’t make your product more attractive, but it will reduce the FUD factor.

Selling in the 21st Century

Selling has changed considerably in the last 10 years. Start-ups have embraced this change because they have to. Older companies are just starting to understand it. This change in driving business, has been brought about to a large extent by the movement away from the concept of “Web 1.0” to “Web 2.0”. The major difference in these two concepts is the Web 1.0 was a more traditional push-pull approach. The idea was to attract eyes to your website and then provide value. This is an electronic form of print advertising, except that there is a lot more real estate to use and a wider geographic distribution. Web 1.0 didn’t fundamentally change sales methodologies. Prospects were attracted to the website, were then pre-qualified by filling out a form and passed to sales as a lead.

Web 2.0 changes that dynamic. Web 2.0 is interactive. The website visitor can change the content by commenting on it. They can add their own spin. Two prospects can debate benefits and add insight for each other. Many Web 2.0 demonstration sites allow the viewer to interact with the demo by inputting their own data. They can have a dialogue with the presenter if there is one. Fundamentally, a prospect can experience the first 2 or 3 steps of the sales cycle without engaging a live person. When the lead gets to sales, the prospect is much more informed and qualified.

Using blogs, twitters and wikis as part of the marketing and sales strategy has become more commonplace. Letting the marketplace create marketing content through interaction provides deeper insight. Sales has to adjust to this new medium. As the prospects and client collaborate on new ideas and approaches, Sales has to keep up. No longer can they rely on marketing material printed annually for their source of information. Smart sales people have their own blogs and twitters. They are engaging their market to build relationships and find opportunities. Social networks can provide new knowledge on personalities, backgrounds, priorities. Reference selling through social networks is a growing tool.

Hiring salespeople with a defined rolodex and an aptitude for cold calling is old school and ineffective. There are just too many screening processes available to the prospect. The average buyer in inundated with spam and junk e-mail, not to mention telemarketing calls. They have e-mail filters and incoming call identification to help them manage unwanted interruptions.

Times have changed and companies must change with them. Take the time to reevaluate the interaction between clients, marketing and sales. Look for sales people who have embraced the new technologies and know how to use them to drive performance. Have they defined their social networks and do they know if and how these networks affect their performance.

How to Manage Sales Performance Change

In my business I deal with this almost daily. Either a sales person or an entire organization is not performing up to requirements and change has to take place. When I was a new sales manager, and I consider this to be the first five or so years, I tended to approach these problems with more or less brute force. There is a sales methodology in place and I needed to enforce it. I had several years of sales and sales management experience and that experience taught me to go back to the basics and build upward. In time I finally noticed that the irregular results I was achieving while managing change was stressful to me and unacceptable to the organization. Typically a new sales manager brings their bag of tricks and when they run out they move on to the next job. So, I started to look for a better way. I needed to understand how to implement sustainable change.

There are several high brow concepts that need to be understood to effectively manage sustainable change in any organization and this is especially true with sales. The first concept is Gleicher’s Formula for Change. All of these are found in psychology textbooks, but still have relevant practical use. Basically Gleicher states that the discomfort level that exists, times the vision of how things could be better, times a finite plan to make it happen, has to be greater that the resistance to change for change to effectively take place.

D * V * F > R

The second is the concept of Psychosclerosis and Homeostasis both developed by Abraham Maslow. Genetically we do not embrace change at the subconscious level. We dig in our heels and prefer to stay the way we are. Johannes Schultz developed the theory of Autogenic Conditioning around this concept. The last concept revolves around the Reticular Activating System (RAS). That is the part of the brain that is constantly filtering information for the subconscious.

This is a lot of book learning just to attack a simple problem of getting someone to perform at a higher level. But to sustain change over time these concepts have to be understood and applied. Now this is enough material for a book, so a blog will not give it justice. The one sentence answer is this:

The person or system that must be changed must be able to visualize the benefit of change at a subconscious level, and they must understand a clear plan to implement lasting change to embrace that change will happen. Then there must be a repeatable reinforcement methodology in place to overcome the natural desire to stay the way we are.

There are as many ways to accomplish this as there are personalities. Experience managers know how to connect the dots in a lasting and meaningful way. Less experienced managers will go through their bag of tricks until they are no longer effective and then they move on. Never really understanding why change is not permanent.

Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives. William James (1842 - 1910)

Enduring Greatness

Jim Collins is still one of my favorite authors. He has this die hard, never say quit, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead, attitude about success. In his latest article for Fortune Magazine “The Secret of Enduring Greatness”, he again states his case for greatness. ….The best corporate leaders never point out the window to blame external conditions; they look in the mirror and say, "We are responsible for our results!"….

We ARE responsible for our results. Whether those results are for individual behavior or corporate performance, we are responsible. One common denominator of those who never achieve their potential it is lack of personal responsibility, the belief that others have more control over our personal performance than we ourselves do. I could point to countless examples of this in society. In almost every case there is a price to be paid. In the end the price is far greater than the original cost of just taking responsibility and making something happen.

In the face of uncertainty, punt. Uncertainty creates stress. Stress hurts. So we hide from the source of that stress by assuring ourselves that there is nothing more we could have done. It’s just not our fault. If only this had happened or that had happened it would have all turned out differently. If only the government had adopted this policy or that policy it would have turned out differently. If our employees had performed better, if our customers weren’t so demanding, if the competition had been honest, it would have turned out differently. There is a never ending supply of excuses.

It was once said it is not how many times you are knocked down, it is how many times you get back up. Life was never meant to be a smooth road. We get stronger through adversity. Without adversity we would never know triumph. How would we ever relate to those in need if we ourselves had never experienced it? Here is a simple way to overcome adversity and accelerate your success:

1. Define the problem in front of you in the greatest detail possible
2. Write down every potential outcome from the situation as you see it today
3. Decide what one outcome is the worst possible scenario.
4. Develop a plan to mitigate the impact of this scenario.

Once you define the problem in detail you will find that it isn’t as bad as you imagine. Our imaginations always paint things worse than they are. This alone will reduce the stress level by eliminating some uncertainty. By choosing the worst possible scenario you face the worst possible outcome. I think you will find that it isn’t as bad as you thought. Finally attacking this scenario with a plan to minimize its impact on your life will put you in a position to win. Remember this is the worst possible scenario. Everything else is peanuts compared to this.

Having a plan and working your plan is the only way to take responsibility for what happens to you. The environment changes, plans change, results vary. The goal is to have the final result better than the results you would have gotten doing nothing.

“A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power.”
Brian Tracy

Hire Slow, Fire Fast

This is an adage we all know. Typically we hire faster than we would like because each employee represents work that is piling up. We fire slowly, partly because it is unpleasant and partly because we just somehow expect it to fix itself. In some cases I would even suggest we fire slowly because we don’t realize there is a problem until we’ve had to deal with it for some time. My background is sales and marketing, but throughout my career I have managed many operational types as well. To me, operational employees are easier to evaluate because they typically are in the middle of the business cycle. They are given work to do and there is an expectation of the quality and quantity of effort. Problem employees produce sloppy, incomplete or no work.

Sales people are a different kettle of fish. When they come on board there is a natural expectation that it will take time for them to come up to speed. In many cases they have to build a pipeline. If the sales cycle is six months, it should take on average six months to close their first deal. Most sales people don’t start completely from scratch, but there is a very good possibility that their territory have been vacant for some period of time and is therefore more or less dormant. So how long do you give a new sales person before you start the “are you the right person” discussion?

My suggestion is day one. Each business should have a documented and repeatable sales methodology. That methodology has certain milestones. There are leads and suspects and prospect and qualified prospects and proposals and contracts. There should be prospecting scripts and data gathering outlines and proposal templates. There are a myriad of tools available to start evaluating the progress of a new sales person the very first day. Each new sales person should have a 90 – 120 day plan that outlines expectation. The expectations should be targeted toward results, not activity.

Here’s the hard part, you’ve got to pay attention. You can’t have your best sales person training the newbie. That creates two problems. If you follow a program for the first 90 – 120 days you will quickly find out if the new sales person can perform certain critical aspects of the sales methodology. You can compare their performance against a standard at each phase of development. This developmental approach is better for the company and the employee. If your sales methodology works for the sales team in general it will work for the newbie. They perform better within the sales culture of the company, thus making more money and so do you.

If they cannot master a critical component of the sales methodology and you’ve tried every mentoring approach you have, then it’s time to have the “are you the right person” discussion. I personally believe that if you are having the “are you the right person” discussion you, as the hiring manage, screwed up somewhere. Sometimes we don’t like to admit that, so we keep pushing a square peg into a round hole. We all make mistakes. Good managers recognize them before they affect results and correct them. Other managers make excuses or cover them up.

Here is the really good news for you…. If you have a program and you’re following it, then the new sales person knows where they stand at all times. The “are you the right person” discussion might be brought up by them. They see the goals, they see they’re not making them, they understand they have a problem. The discussion is not a shock. My guess is that if you have a decent hiring process and a decent development process, then this discussion will very seldom ever take place.

That’s the goal anyway….

Obligatory New Year Resolution

The beginning of every year, we as business people are obliged to set new goals for the upcoming year. I have gone through this process over 30 times in my career. During this time I have noticed one striking trend. Those who believe succeed; those who don’t, don’t. Brian Tracy in his Psychology of Achievement spends a great deal of time helping people reset their subconscious so that they can achieve the success they have always wanted. His story is that you have to concretely believe you can succeed before you can actually do it. There is a lot of data to support that this is fundamental to individual success. What about corporations?

Thirty years of business planning has taught me that it’s very true of corporations as well. If the annual plan is a hope and a prayer, it will not succeed. Many companies have a top down planning approach. Those in the know determine the cash requirements of the corporation to survive and meet expectations for the coming year. They then extrapolate the revenue number taking into account cost of goods and cost of sales. The revenue number is then passed down to the individuals responsible. Sometime, like when I work for British Telecom, the number is inflated as it is passed down to assure each management group is successful. The final number given to each sales person is a result of this process and doesn’t reflect the reality of their market. The people at the top “believe” in their number because it makes sense. The people at the bottom find the number arbitrary at best and will strive to do their best.

A deviation to this strategy is a top-down, bottom-up approach. While the executive management is forecasting from above, the sales force is forecasting from below. They meet in the middle and develop a compromise. Sound better doesn’t it? Heisenberg taught us that this isn’t necessarily so. My experience collaborates this. The people at the top assume the people at the bottom are going to sandbag (low ball) their numbers and the people at the bottom assume that the top is going to inflate the numbers. Everyone knows it’s a negotiation, therefore it’s best to build in some level of compromise. In this case neither party”believes”. Both have had to compromise and assume the other is not being fully honest in the process. This by the way is true.

So, how do you get everyone to believe? The answer is to take a more systemic approach. If you haven’t ever done this it won’t happen for 2008, but it can happen in 2008. The object is to align the entire company toward a single goal. Everything is tied to achieving that goal; from product development, to marketing, to sales, to legal, to accounting, to procurement, to support. Everyone knows their responsibility for achieving that goal and believes they can do their part. No one is part of the “sales prevention” team. The sum of the parts becomes greater than the whole. What’s the systemic approach?

This takes some thinking. It is not intuitively obvious. If you are a glass half empty type of person, you may not see how it will work. Every activity must be tied directly to revenue and carry a specific expense associated with that activity. Some will be profit centers and some will be cost centers. But they are all tied to the final objective. Deciding how this will work within your specific corporation may take a lot of thought. Many departments don’t like this thinking because either they don’t truly understand how their department impacts revenue or they do understand and they would just as soon you don’t. A good place to start is to map out the process, cradle to grave. Apply your vision and mission to the process, you do have one right? Make sure everything aligns, and then start doing the math. Always seek input from those responsible for implementation.

Reprogramming the human subconscious to succeed is a consistent, repetitive process. The same is true of corporations.

The corporation that believes…. Succeeds.

Change is inevitable, but it’s the speed of change that determines success.

I am constantly trying to find ways to accelerate performance without burdening the process or people. The first question that comes to mind is “If performance is accelerated how can the process be burdened?” To find that answer, let’s start at the very beginning. At some point a need within the company is recognized. Something is not being done as well as it could be to the benefit of the company. A new process is defined, new job descriptions are developed, compensation equal to the effort is determined, and extensive search for the right employee is undertaken. A business ecosystem is developed that like all biological ecosystems is based not only on the inhabitants of the local system, but also the interaction with the contiguous systems surrounding it.

In James Moore’s book “The Death of Competition” he talks about the difference in the biological ecosystems of Hawaii and Costa Rica. Hawaii is an island that is somewhat sheltered from outside biological influences. Costa Rica is a virtual highway of migrating plants and animals. Costa Rica hardly notices a new entrant into its ecosystem, while Hawaii is devastated by every variant. So it is with business ecosystems. A business process that is virtually independent of other process within the business has less tolerance for change than business processes that are heavily dependent on external processes. The dependent process is constantly being pushed to and fro with changes from the co-dependent processes. Employees are so use to change that they notice lack of change more than change. Someone is always doing something to disrupt their karma.

Highly independent processes are more rigid and inflexible. They change only when the inhabitants want the change to take place. Homeostasis dictates that change is hard to accept, so given an option, it won’t happen. When change is thrust upon this independent process it is very disruptive. People fight back. They intentionally or unintentionally sabotage the desired results. Wayne Anderson wrote an article “People Performance: Can you believe what you see?” In it he discusses Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle which says the very act of observing performance changes the performance while it is being observed.

So, when an opportunity arises to make a change that will theoretically improve performance, a close eye has to be kept on whom it affects. A highly dependent process will adapt much easier than a highly independent process. The performance improvement that is expected from the change may be eroded or eliminated in an independent process by the disruption to the system. While a more dependent process may take it in stride, make the adjustment and reap the benefits more easily.

Change is an inevitable and desired aspect of running a business. To constantly evolve is to continue to grow, but at what cost? Before diving into even obvious change, determine the ability to absorb the change. Change is inevitable, but the speed is dependent. Engage all the stakeholders. If they appear to be a fairly homogeneous group get buy in up front, take the time to paint a clear vision of how things will be better after the change is complete and implement the change in well documented stages. If this sounds familiar it’s because it follows Gleicher’s Formula for Change. Gleicher doesn’t have a time element. But timing is very important.