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The Five Key Qualities of a Decision-Maker

StrategyDriven Decision-Making Article | The Five Key Qualities of a Decision-MakerDecision-making is one of the most important qualities when it comes to successfully running a business. Without being able to make the right decisions a business is likely to completely flounder. That’s why it’s so important to know which qualities separate a proper decision-maker from somebody who is simply coasting. Whether you are the CEO of a company but are unsure of how to proceed or you are looking to rise up the ranks of your company through firm and decisive action, you have come to the right place. Read on now for all you need to know about decision-making.

Research

A good business leader knows that no decision should ever be entered into lightly, as there can be a whole bunch of factors that could come into play once a decision has been gone into. That’s why you should make sure to do as much research as you can within the given time-frame as well as putting in the time to learn key skills and insights about the business. For key learnings about how to get better insights into your business, you should check out the services of a small business consultant today.

Listening

Listening is often an underrated part of the decision-making process, but the best CEOs know that they are not so often operating autocracies, but take all ideas in-hand before finally committing to a final decision. Take the example of the long-serving chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, who is often praised for her ability to listen to everyone before finally taking her own initiative.

Understand Risk

All decisions are about balancing risk in some way. After all, no matter which decision that you make in the end, you might encounter some difficulty along the way. By doing your research and understanding all the different risks involved, you will be able to make the best possible decision possible for your business.

Deliberation

Only the worst decision-makers jump rashly into a new business plan. It is worth fully deliberating and taking your time before you decide to commit to an idea. The worst decision you can make is a quick one, as this can definitely backfire. Remember it’s always better to not do something risky than to commit at all, meaning that you should be aware of all the different outcomes before making that final commitment.

Decisiveness

Intense deliberation should never be confused with indecisiveness. Instead, it is about weighing up options before committing to one. This mean that eventually you want to be able to make a key choice, good or bad, to allow the company to move forward. One of the worst options is to take too long to come to a final conclusion as this can slow down company processes completely and also cause your employees to start making decision themselves without your authority. Instead, once you have an idea of what you want to do, it’s important to take the lead, make that decision and then be responsible for any possible outcome.

How Data Management Can Help You Get More from BI

StrategyDriven Organizational Performance Measures ArticleMaking sound business decisions often relies on extensive analysis from a wide variety of sources, which can be a difficult and laborious process without proper data management solutions. Not taking advantage of modern software services made to manage and govern your information stores in an effective manner can diminish your chances of competing with organisations that do. The business world of today moves at a fast pace, leaving little room for error or experimentation.

To show how business intelligence can be improved via better data management, let’s take a look at how proper data management procedures can drive positive resolutions.

Data Management Suites to Handle Automated Processes

Manually gathering, sorting, and analysing relevant data for your business can be a monumental task that requires a massive amount of manpower. Having the ability to more quickly and efficiently store and retrieve your information in a format that is easy-to-understand and reliable can set you apart from the competition.

Without a proper data management tool such as ZAP Data Hub, you risk missing out on a lot of important data that just can’t be obtained using traditional methods. This reduces your chances of making intelligent business decisions. Data management suites and services are offered by a variety of vendors to meet any industry’s requirements.

Expanding BI Availability Within Your Organisation

If you’re not using information gathering and data-driven decision making across all departments, then you could be missing out on increased productivity and metrics. Lower-level management depends on reports and statistics to be able to do their job effectively; their efforts are hampered by the lack of a fast and simple way to acquire the data they need.

Putting more power into the hands of those who actually use business intelligence to make important decisions can liberate their reliance on other groups and allow for much faster solutions.

Real Time Results Can Make for Quick Decision Making

The slow turnaround time from the request of a data report to its delivery can be a huge roadblock that deters the ability to make speedy resolutions on the fly. The time it takes for a team of people to collect, analyse, and extrapolate real information from a chunk of data is monumental compared to the relative ease in which automated systems can process the same data. Lightning-fast collection and reporting – in real time – allows for far greater flexibility for decision makers and speedy response times.

Automation Allows More Time Spent on Examination

Traditional methods of reporting usually rely on IT or executive branches of your organisation to do the heavy lifting when it comes to data acquisition and publication. In today’s heavily data-driven environment, the need for expedient delivery of records is paramount to success. Following traditional procedures puts your organisation at a disadvantage compared to those who understand the importance of proper data management. It has never been easier to automate these laborious data collection and reporting tasks with modern data management solutions, thereby giving your IT department more time to work on their primary tasks.

Companies live and die by the fortitude of their data management and governance principles. Those that have a tenuous grasp of their data and what it really means are doomed to make poor decisions. Getting the most out of your BI tool requires modern methods and technology-driven protocols.

When You’re Faced With A Frustrating Business Problem, There’s Always A Solution

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No matter how good we are in our business, or how well we can do our jobs, there are sometimes problems that we’re faced with. Some will be easy to remedy, but others will be much harder. Then, when you’re faced with a frustrating business problem, you can feel like it’s impossible to solve, or that you’re never going to get the time to tackle it head on. But, don’t let that put you off. When it comes to overcoming your business obstacles, there are easy solutions to most – you just have to know how to handle them. So, take some of these solutions and see if they work for you.

Not Having Enough Hands

Firstly, you may find that you just don’t have enough hands to get all of your business tasks done. This can definitely be the case when you provide a service to customers, and you spend a lot of your day with customers or clients. But, there is a way that you can gain more hands – or more time. And that would be to start outsourcing tasks to a virtual assistant, so they can get them done for you. Whether it’s admin, emails or processing invoices, you can have a lot of work done for you.

Losing Custom

Then, there is the kind of problems you face when you lose customers. Now, you may not always know why it’s happening, but that’s your first fault. To find a solution, you have to be able to figure out why you are losing them to get them back, or gain new ones. Sometimes you need to be able to improve your customer service or even the quality of your product or service. And then there’s also the option of pushing your marketing efforts too.

Not Being In The Office 24/7

When you can’t be in the office all day every day (because you do have to go home and have a social life too), it can be frustrating. If you’re missing calls, it can drive you crazy. But, instead of spending time playing catch up, you should look into options for answering calls after hours to save the frustrations. You should do the same for an online chat service or answer emails if you get a lot of contact via those two methods too.

Falling Behind

Sometimes, when you’re business, you realize that you’re starting to fall behind. It can be tough because you’re not sure how you’re going to find the time to keep up. But, just like outsourcing your admin tasks, you may need to look into innovative business options that can keep on top of things for you. You may find that automated online process means that you never fall behind the business trends.

Struggling To Find Investors

And finally, it can be super frustrating when you want to grow your business, and your business is ready to expand, but you just need the cash. So, you’re on the look out for investors, but how do you find them? You may find that you can pitch to different investors using online platforms, as well as considering selling stocks in the traditional route, to give you lots of options.

Buying Decisions, Buying Decision Path, Buy Cycles, and Pre-Sales

I’d like to set the record straight. In 1985 I coined terms that I’ve written extensively about in best selling books, magazines, and hundreds of articles. Unfortunately, when finally adopting them, the sales field defined them differently than originally intended, causing important concepts to be lost. This article presents the intended definitions and explains how I came to coin the terms.

In 1979 I became Rookie (stockbroker) of the Year at Merrill Lynch with 210 accounts (the market was 777). I couldn’t understand why prospects who ‘should have’ bought didn’t buy. When I started up a tech company in London in 1983 and became a ‘buyer’ I realized the problem and developed a new skill set to migrate it. Here’s how I figured it out.

HOW SALES IGNORES BEHIND-THE-SCENES BUYER’S REAL ISSUES

As an entrepreneur with needs, I invited sellers in to pitch me. But regardless of their professional skills or my potential need, I couldn’t decide what or if to buy before

  • the people involved shared their thoughts and concerns, and bought-in to any changes a new solution would involve,
  • we discerned any fallout to the company, relationships, people, policies etc. that change would incur and figure out ways to minimize it,
  • we tried workarounds and determined we couldn’t fix the problems with known resources.

Even though we were only a $5,000,000 company, I had a closely knit team and flourishing business to consider before bringing in anything that might rock the boat with my employees, investors, clients, company strategy, bottom line, brand, daily routines and systems. With a focus on placing solutions and ‘understanding’ needs (impossible to answer accurately until we all comprehended the scope of the givens) the sellers pitched solution data I didn’t know how to consider responsibly and potentially lost me as a buyer. That’s when I realized the problem I had had with buyers not closing:

The sales model focuses on placing solutions (seeking folks with a ‘need’ who ‘should’ buy) and ignores the confounding human-, policy-, and system-specific issues buyers must handle before a purchase could even be considered (folks who ‘will’ buy). By entering only during the final element of choice (vendor, solution), sellers squander the ability to influence the major portion of a buyer’s decision process which has little to do with needs or purchase.

Indeed, the sales model promotes the cart before prospects even know if they have a horse or have mapped out a destination, ensuring only those who have their cart ready to go (knew the obstructions, route alternatives, and danger signs) would buy. Promoting solutions, and asking questions in service of a sale, merely captures the low hanging fruit – those ready, willing, and able to buy – and ignores the possibility of influencing, enabling, and serving the early, Pre-Sales components in the decision-making path (whether selling/marketing online or through customer contact) – not to mention loses untold amount of business.

I realized all buyers must do this; and as I seller I had been sitting and waiting while buyers did this on their own, without me. Indeed, the time it took them to complete this was the length of the sales cycle. I figured if I could facilitate the buyer’s decision path, I could accelerate their decisions to ‘buy’ or ‘not buy’, stop wasting time, close more sales (quickly) and really serve. So I coded the entire change/decision arc (13 Steps, 9 of which [70% of the decision process] are outside the scope of how/what we sell), learned how systems make decisions to change, coined some new terms and developed some new models for questioning and listening without bias, and built this into a front end to sales so I could enter, facilitate/serve, and influence, earlier. I named this process Buying Facilitation® to denote the difference in focus between ‘selling’ and ‘buying’ and help buyers do the initial stuff they had to do anyway, but without sellers:

  • assemble all appropriate stakeholders ((Buying Decision Team) to get their input;
  • get consensus for types and levels of change manageable;
  • research options;
  • discover easy, economical workarounds where possible;
  • decide how to identify handle any disruption a new addition would cause;
  • weight risks with stakeholders to discern the efficacy of buying anything (Buy Cycle);
  • choose solutions and vendors.

To be fair, the sales job has never been about facilitating change, using a restrictive ‘solution-placement’ model since its inception without recognizing the low close and enormous time wastage is anything more than a problem finding buyers. This singular focus has been so endemic that sales hasn’t accounted for either the idiosyncratic issues buyers must address prior to buying anything (even for inexpensive items) or the opportunity to influence and serve buyers much earlier than the final point they might reach to buy, believing that if they find creative ways to offer content earlier it will mitigate the problem. But it doesn’t.

The industry close rate of 4% has always been an indication of a problem: the centuries-old bias toward placing solutions (How can we accept a 96% failure rate [from first contact] as standard?) ensures all sales models, including Challenger, create resistance, potentially turn off real buyers who need your solution (80% of prospects buy a similar product within 2 years of your interaction), and ignore the ability to influence 70% of the Buying Decision Path.

Indeed, buyers don’t want to buy anything, they just want to resolve a problem congruently, without major disruption to that which works well. Indeed a purchase happens only when there is no alternate resolution; and we haven’t had a skill set that blends with the sales model to help: except for visionary areas within the global companies I’ve trained over the last 30 years, the sales field found my ideas and newly coined terms pointless. But sellers who added Buying Facilitation® to their sales activities experience upward of a 6x increase in sales as they truly facilitate buying decisions. My dream has always been that Buying Facilitation® be taught as part of sales training for all sales professionals.

Buying Facilitation® Facilitates 70% of Buyer’s Decisions

I taught my sales team how to add Buying Facilitation® to their current sales skills; we quickly experienced a 40% increase in sales (from first call) and I only needed half the sales staff. My tech team used the material to involve all the right people immediately and extract the most vital information quickly, making programming and implementing more efficient, and insuring early project completion and no ‘user errors’. I began teaching the material to clients, coaches, and managers.

Approximately five years ago my terms began entering the sales field. But, as happens when a new idea enters mainstream, the terms were not defined as I defined them, but re-defined to be a part of the very concepts I was fighting against.

Terms Defined

I have no illusions that the mis-definitions will continue and some mainstream sellers will think they ‘do this’ already. Hopefully some folks will seek to learn the material (and training is required as the model employs entirely different thinking and skills). But just for my own piece of mind, I’m offering the definitions of the terms I coined in 1985. They include some form of the word ‘buy’ to denote the disparity between the act of buying and the process of selling. And the underlying belief is that as sellers we should be using our unique positions as corporate representatives and knowledge experts to be servant leaders and truly serve buyers to discover their own path to excellence, hopefully, ultimately, with our solution (But if not, we end quickly and gently. Otherwise, we close in half the time.).

Buying Facilitation®. A generic change management model for coaches, sellers, managers, etc.) that enables efficient, congruent change, that employs a specific type of listening (Listening for Systems), and new form of question (Facilitative Questions – not information gathering), used in a specific, coded sequence, for facilitators to enable excellence through congruent change. It manages all of the unconscious, upfront, endemic change issues that would have to accede for change to happen. Until buyers (or anyone) know how to manage this, they cannot agree to change/buy, hence the length of the current sales cycle.

Helping Buyers Buy. The term comes from the first Buying Facilitation® training I delivered in 1988 to KLM. By ‘helping buyers buy’ we facilitate the full Pre-Sales Buying Decision Path.

Buying Decisions/Process. The outcome of resolving all of the change/decision issues into an action: consensus of all stakeholders who will touch the new solution; the route forward to change without disruption or resistance; deciding to move beyond their workaround; AND THEN the solution/vendor choice issues. The term is being misdefined by sales to merely include vendor/solution choice issues.

Buying Decision Path. 13 steps that traverse the elements of change management: starting with an idea (Step 1) through to a purchase (Step 13). It includes people, systems, implementation, resistance, workarounds, relationships – and comes well before any decision is made to buy anything, and quite separate from any ‘need’. The sales field uses this term erroneously to denote how buyers choose one vendor/solution over another, line up the funds, etc. – a usage dynamically opposite to the original definition.

Buy Cycle. The entire set of givens necessary for buyers to end up with excellence (either internally or with a purchase). Again, it’s not only the solution/vendor choice issues.

Buying Decision Team. The full set of stakeholders – some not obvious, some not ‘decision makers’ – who will touch the final solution and need to add their ideas, concerns, knowledge, and feelings to the discussion. Usually sellers (or change agents) aren’t privy to the internal machinations necessary before a purchase (or any change) can happen. Hence the 4% close rate.

Buying Patterns. The way the buyer has traditionally bought/changed in the past. Do they always use known vendors? Will they never take cold calls or meetings with sellers? Sellers traditionally use their comfortable selling patterns and cannot connect with buyers with divergent buying patterns.

Marketers currently use the term Buyer Persona to denote ‘influencers’ who will enable a sale. This ignores most of the early decisions buyers make and keeps marketing from entering effectively much earlier. Using different types of content it’s quite possible to influence different points along the Buying Decision Path.

Time for Change

Think about it. Are you happy with your low close rate? Your horrific waste of time and resource running around after people who will never buy (and who you could know on the first call weren’t buyers) or responding to RFPs that fail? The time waste seeking prospects who will take an appointment only to have one person on a data gathering mission show up – and then you never hear from them again (not to mention the hours planning for the meeting!)? Have you never wondered where buyers go when YOU think they have a need?

The current sales model closes a fraction of people who need your solution, and costs much more than necessary on wasted resources (large sales forces, presentations, proposals). The problem isn’t finding the buyers; the problem is facilitating those who can buy. As an example, using Buying Facilitation® at Kaiser, sellers went from 110 visits and 18 closed sales in a month, to 27 visits and 25 closed sales, an increase of 600%, not to mention the time saving.

I go back to the original question I posed decades ago: Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy? They are two different activities. And I’ve developed terms that help sellers think through the steps that help buyers buy. Maybe it’s time to begin learning the ‘how’ of helping buyers buy, the ‘what’ of the buying decision path, and the ‘who’ of the buying decision team. Let’s begin using the terms properly and stop ignoring such a large piece of the puzzle.


About the Author

Sharon Drew Morgen is founder of Morgen Facilitations, Inc. (www.newsalesparadigm.com). She is the visionary behind Buying Facilitation®, the decision facilitation model that enables people to change with integrity. A pioneer who has spoken about, written about, and taught the skills to help buyers buy, she is the author of the acclaimed New York Times Business Bestseller Selling with Integrity and Dirty Little Secrets: Why buyers can’t buy and sellers can’t sell and what you can do about it.

To contact Sharon Drew at [email protected] or go to www.didihearyou.com to choose your favorite digital site to download your free book.

4 Beliefs that Lead to Bad Decisions

All great leaders have one thing in common – they know how to make great decisions. But many people find making great decisions difficult because of common yet avoidable pitfalls. These pitfalls are caused by wrongly held beliefs. Here are 4 assumptions that can get in the way of making great decisions.


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About the Author

Don MaruskaDon Maruska founded and was CEO of three Silicon Valley companies and venture investor in startups that became public companies. He’s now a Master Certified Coach and author of How Great Decisions Get Made with Foreword by Margaret Wheatley (American Management Association, 2004) and co-author with Jay Perry of Take Charge of Your Talent: Three Keys to Thriving in Your Career, Organization, and Life with Foreword by Jim Kouzes (Berrett-Koehler 2013) serving high-growth firms and Fortune 500 companies. He earned his BA magna cum laude from Harvard and his MBA and JD from Stanford and previously led projects for McKinsey & Company.

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