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Decision-Making Warning Flag 3 – Intellectually Empty Assertions

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StrategyDriven Decision Making Warning Flag | Intellectually Empty AssertionIntellectually empty assertions represent logical laziness or deceit on the part of the individual(s) drawing these conclusions. Those making intellectually empty assertions do so without supporting facts, in contradiction of factual evidence, by incongruently combining two or more facts, through misapplication of real-world experiences or events, and/or commission of a logic error. (See StrategyDriven Decision-Making warning flag article, Logic Fallacies Introduction.) Such assertions are not presented as opinion, but are instead forcefully put forth as representing either unchallengeable facts or as the only logical conclusion one could draw from the complete set of facts. There is nothing logical about intellectually empty assertions. Rather, these assertions tend to be made by individuals based on their personal biases, goals, or opinions and may drive disastrous outcomes if acted upon.

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About the Author

Nathan Ives, StrategyDriven Principal is a StrategyDriven Principal and Host of the StrategyDriven Podcast. For over twenty years, he has served as trusted advisor to executives and managers at dozens of Fortune 500 and smaller companies in the areas of management effectiveness, organizational development, and process improvement. To read Nathan’s complete biography, click here.

Tough sales issues, and not so tough (but not so easy) answers.

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The 3.5 biggest issues facing salespeople today are:
1. Price integrity.
2. Customer loyalty.
3. Fighting hungry competition.
3.5 Quality, attitude, and belief of the salesperson.

These issues manifest themselves in BOTH lost sales that you could have won and lost profits that you could have earned.

Tough questions:

  • What are you doing to fight price pressures?
  • What is your sales team doing this year to dominate the market and the competition?
  • What is the perceived difference between you and the competition?
  • What are you doing to create real value for customers and prospects in your sales presentation?
  • What are you doing to build more value-driven, loyal relationships?

And the age-old question:

  • Where’s the beef? (AKA: Where’s the proof YOU are the best buy?)

The key success answers lie in:
1. Value offered by the salesperson vs. value perceived by the customer. Ask yourself: What am I doing to TRANSFER my value message so the customer receives it AND believes it to be valuable?
2. Reputation of the product, the company, AND the salesperson. Ask yourself: What is my TOTAL reputation and how do I continue to build it?
3. Proof of product, service, value, quality, and outcome – social and video testimonials. Ask yourself: How am I using “voice of customer” as both social proof and video proof to win customer confidence and sales?
4. Depth of customer relationships, both with the salesperson and the company. Do they just ‘like me’ and still ask me to bid or quote, or do they just call and order? Ask yourself: Am I still bidding on business, and waiting to be told I won?
5. On-going, on-demand weekly training and reinforcement to both help and support salespeople in the field or on the phone. Real-world, web-based training available on all mobile platforms. Go to www.gitomerVT for an amazing example. Ask yourself: What type of training am I offering that actually HELPS my team improve and make more sales?
6. Sales tool support. Easy answer: www.aceofsales.com – this program is a differentiator and a difference maker. Besides amazing emails and email magazines, Ace of Sales offers hundreds of graphics and optional scripted emails and subject lines for every salesperson. Ask yourself: Do my emails look exactly the same as my competition? Why have I not tried Ace of Sales?
7. Leadership support. Encourage and GO WITH your salespeople on sales calls. Coach them; don’t manage them. Don’t just lead by example; set the standard. Ask yourself: What would it take to become known as the BEST place to work in the city – and become known as the BEST boss to work for? Create real attraction!
7.5 Google in and Google out. You (and everyone on your team) should Google the customer and their company to do research before the meeting. HINT: The customer is Googling you as well. Ask yourself: How is my online presence and reputation affecting sales?

MAJOR CLUE: It’s not just one or a few of these answers, it’s ALL of them.
MAJOR CLUE: These answers don’t just happen. You make a plan to make them happen, and then execute the plan.
MAJOR CLUE: The quality of salespeople and willingness of management to help and support are more than half of the answers.

To gain a better understanding of what CAN be done, here are the sales psychologies behind the strategies and answers:

  • The first sale that’s made is the salesperson. If you don’t sell yourself, your product or service has NO chance.
  • The attitude and belief of the salesperson directly affect the customer’s decision to buy.
  • People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy. Stop selling. Start finding motives to buy.
  • All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. All things being not quite so equal, people still want to do business with their friends.
  • People buy for their reasons, not yours. Find out their reasons first, and get them to buy based on that.
  • The old way of selling doesn’t work any more.

Got issues? Or got answers?
The difference is your sales success and your profit.

Reprinted with permission from Jeffrey H. Gitomer and Buy Gitomer.

About the Author

Jeffrey GitomerJeffrey Gitomer is the author of The Sales Bible, Customer Satisfaction is Worthless Customer Loyalty is Priceless, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Red Book of Sales Answers, The Little Black Book of Connections, The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, The Little Green Book of Getting Your Way, The Little Platinum Book of Cha-Ching, The Little Teal Book of Trust, The Little Book of Leadership, and Social BOOM! His website, www.gitomer.com, will lead you to more information about training and seminars, or email him personally at [email protected].

There is No Tradeoff With BYOD

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The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) movement has been portrayed as an impasse for organizations that must make tradeoffs between maintaining security and invading employee privacy.
This is an illusion — there is no tradeoff when you take the right approach to BYOD.

As a relatively young field spurred on by the mass adoption of smartphones and tablets, the BYOD space is in the process of reaching a common paradigm. In the meantime, organizations struggle to navigate a forest of mobile device management (MDM), enterprise mobility management (EMM) and other BYOD approaches that claim comparable benefits but don’t achieve them the same way.
Given the buzz and crowdedness of this field, some organizations simply don’t implement a BYOD solution, believing the medicine might be worse than the disease. This thinking is flawed and actually elevates the risk of data leaks, cybercrime and intellectual property theft.

A multi-persona approach to BYOD achieves the ideal balance of security and privacy, cost and flexibility, and choice for employees while overcoming the drawbacks of other BYOD approaches. With a multi-persona approach, there is no tradeoff.

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About the Author

Omer EifermanOmer Eiferman is Cellrox’s CEO. He is a graduate of Bar-Ilan University with a degree in Computer Science and Statistics, and was a pilot in the Israeli Air Force. Omer has served in a variety of marketing, development and product management roles in technology companies. To read Omer’s complete biography, click here.

How to be an Effective Manager

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Effectively managing people, processes, or both is in many ways a balancing act. Some would even describe it as an art form. There are many variables in play simultaneously which determine if somebody will ultimately be successful in a leadership role.

Before a manager begins to understand all of these nuances they must learn one of the major underlying principles if they are going to recognize their full potential as leaders. They must learn to walk the tightrope between being personal and professional at the same time. It is important to be personal and on good terms with your team members because this is the only way to ensure teamwork and peak performance, but you must also be professional to be respected and trusted. Be too friendly and you may be taken advantage of or not taken seriously, be too buttoned up and ‘professional’ and you risk coming across as uncaring and stubborn.

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About the Author

Gabriel Bristol, president and CEO of Intelicare Direct, is one of today’s most versatile CEOs, having led remarkable turnarounds for several large corporations as well as helping establish rapidly growing start-ups. Gabriel’s success has been well documented, with features in Forbes and other publications throughout the country. To read Gabriel’s complete biography, click here.

How Sales, Marketing and Social Can Facilitate the Decision Path

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Sales, marketing, and social marketing attempt to place solutions and create relationships by supplying great content, discovering likely prospects, and creating trust. Unfortunately sellers end up closing a small fraction – less than 5 percent – of those they reach, and marketers and social end up wasting a lot of time and don’t often meet their goals. What’s causing our failure? And is there one solution that can enhance all?

Problems with Our Current Thinking

Here’s a bit of flawed thinking that exacerbates the problems:

  • Sellers believe prospects are folks who SHOULD buy rather than those who WILL buy. It’s possible to know very early if the prospect CAN buy;
  • Marketers believe that content is king, that offering the right content at the right time enables a buying decision. But we don’t know the role the reader plays on the Buying Decision Team, how or when the content is being used, and if it’s making a difference in the buying decision (i.e. it might be just a resource);
  • Social believes that by engaging in relationships over time and developing trust, followers will come back when they are ready. But because we can’t know their decision path, or associates who need to buy-in to any change, or internal political issues, we can’t know if we are spending time wisely.

We can facilitate the buying decision and create more success with followers by employing different thinking to save us from:

  1. Merely guessing at, or manipulating, our results without knowing our true outcomes;
  2. Wasting time assuming if we play nice or offer good content people will buy or take action;
  3. Neglecting actions we can take to facilitate the decision steps buyers and followers take before they are ready to make a choice.

Let’s look at some new thinking to add to what we’re successfully doing.

What I Learned in the Trenches

We overlook the myriad of things that buyers and followers must contend with outside of the purview of the solution, need, or relationship:

  • People have complicated issues to handle before they can buy or change;
  • Figuring out the full complement of people to include in any purchase or change decision is complex. Each participant brings their unique criteria into the mix;
  • Given politics, internal relationship issues, history and future, it’s challenging to get buy-in from everyone involved with the final solution, yet the buy-in is necessary to ensure the status quo doesn’t implode with a new purchase or change.
      • I learned this as both a sales person and an entrepreneur. When Merrill Lynch hired me a stockbroker in the 1970s, I became a million-dollar producer my first year. But I couldn’t figure out why everyone with a need (especially those I had a great relationship with) didn’t buy. Where did they go?

      When I started up my tech company in London in the 80s I realized the problem: as a buyer, my direct needs were often superseded by the social, political, organizational, and relational considerations I had to manage. When sellers came to pitch they understood my need and gave fine pitches but had no way to handle the fights I was having with the Board, or the issues the distributor was having with my solutions. Nor did anyone even try.

      The sales model, I realized, was not designed facilitate the behind-the-scenes non-need-related issues I had to manage before I could consider buying anything. I then developed Buying Facilitation® to add to the front end of the sales model. My own sales team used it as a front-end to our sales process by first navigating buyers through their change management issues – buyers must do that anyway so we facilitated the stages and steps instead of sitting and waiting for the time it took them to figure it out on their own. That way we got onto the Buying Decision Team early and became great relationship managers. Our sales tripled and the time to close was reduced by two thirds.

      The takeaway here for marketers and social is the recognition that we are largely ignoring the hidden, systemic issues going on that are not available to outsiders yet fundamental for any change to happen. That is our Achilles Heel.

      What’s the Role of Change Management?

      Buyers and followers don’t know their journey to change when they begin and hence take longer than necessary. But we can help them, and make our value proposition our ability to be their GPS.
      There are two elements of the Buying Facilitation® model that can be added to create a ‘pull’ that’s change- and decision-focused.

      1. Listen for systems: instead of coding, noticing, tracking details that will help us guess at who’s reading, who’s a decision maker, where they might be in their sales cycle, etc. let’s begin listening for, and designing, tools to facilitate the movement along the decision path that change decisions goes through; let’s ensure the right people are all involved (some not so obvious) and address consensus-building. We now listen for what we want to hear rather than listening for issues with decision making, change or choice.
      2. Use Facilitative Questions: instead of waiting until they do this on their own, Facilitative Questions guide people through their buy-in and change management issues (necessary for both small purchases and large solutions) and facilitate the trajectory through their steps. Facilitative Questions are a type of criteria-recognition and choice format I developed.

      It’s possible to develop assessments, questionnaires, intelligent contact sheets, CRM tools that provide the capability to lead buyers and followers through the steps they must take, send out just the appropriate data at the right point in the cycle, and facilitate the consensus and buy-in as they ready themselves for change. We can add these to the sales, marketing, and social models to truly serve our buyers and followers and close more. It will be an addition, and the results will stronger relationships and more conversions.

      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.

      Need help developing content, tools, training or questions that will enable a buyer’s buying decision process? A speaker at your next conference? Contact Sharon Drew at [email protected] or visit her website: www.buyingfacilitation.com.