Business Toolkit – Page 80 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

Consultative Selling: Solve My Problem – Not Yours

March 4, 2008/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Customer Service /by Mike Figliuolo

Everyone has goals these days. The one that causes more disconnects than any other is a sales goal. It’s a number to hit (either units or dollars or both – the better ones are actually measured in profit dollars rather than revenue dollars). They’re problematic because by their very nature they get a salesperson to focus on their needs (hitting their goal) versus the needs of the customer (finding a solution to a problem). The best salespeople truly use a consultative selling approach. The others? Well, they’re just annoying. They throw around phrases in their sales rooms like “Okay guys! It’s time to get your checkup from the neck up! It’s go time! Everyone start smilin’ and dialin’!” Excuse me. I just barfed in my mouth a little…

I’ve had offers posed by both types of salespeople and I too have sold (sometimes like a huckster in my misguided youth but more consultatively as I’ve learned better). Allow me to offer some scenarios.

I was in the market for a software solution. Nothing major – just some basic functionality that would help me grow my business. I needed cheap (not a lot of budget dollars available), fast (I was trying to grow quickly), and easy (our technology department did not have a bevy of available resources to throw at this). I spoke with a few providers. One of them had a very cool solution. It had bells. It had whistles. If you pushed the right combination of buttons it would make you a frappuccino. It was expensive. Very expensive but somewhat justifiably so given all the features. I explained our challenges to the salesman.

It’s Funny How Death Provides Perspective

March 1, 2008/1 Comment/in Balanced Lifestyle, Business Toolkit, Career /by Mike Figliuolo

I’m back on my kick about perspective. Wow. It’s incredibly easy to get sucked in by work and worry about insignificant things. Many times you’ll find this happening only to have life provide you a clarifying moment. And in that moment, you’re given an opportunity to refocus on things that actually matter. The death of your best friend can have that effect on you. Let me rewind…

Things have been hectic for me lately. Ramping up my own business is a daunting task. I find myself playing owner, trainer, accountant, lawyer, salesman, administrative assistant, travel booker, etc. I wear every hat on the rack. And don’t get me wrong – it’s fun. I thrive on living in the swirl of the chaotic world of business. The problem is, being involved in so many things occasionally leads me to focus on the wrong things. They’re not “wrong” in and of themselves. It’s more that they’re not as important as other things in life.

It’s been busy for me over the past few weeks. New clients. New services. Exciting stuff. Sure there have been a few annoyances too but they happen (sort of like a printer manufacturer whose service department will be the subject of an upcoming post on broken promises to customers). These annoyances have absorbed an increasing and disproportionate amount of my time and energy lately. Then I got a phone call on Wednesday as I was driving home from a client.

It was my best friend’s brother. This friend was a roommate of mine at West Point. Twice. Ty and I became brothers. We lived together. Laughed together. Complained together. The forge of the Academy’s grey granite walls molded a bond between us that became unbreakable through the years. We talked every week. And now, tragically, I got this phone call.

Serving Customers is Easy – Just LISTEN

February 11, 2008/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Customer Service, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

You’ve already been exposed to a few of my customer service diatribes and bad customer service experiences in Customer Disservice. You’ve also seen how little things make a huge difference in my post on Customer Service Without Boundaries. What’s the difference? Two little awkwardly shaped pieces of cartilage covered with skin (and in my case a few errant black hairs that I occasionally have to pluck so I don’t look like Ernest Borgnine). Figure it out? EARS!

Listening makes all the difference. Whether or not your front-line employee (or even you for that matter) takes that moment to genuinely not just hear, but absorb and appreciate the concern of your customer is the determinant of which way the interaction will go. Use your ears and everything will be okay. Fail to do so and you could potentially create a blogger who has no problem whatsoever berating your or your company in front of millions (I’m a nice guy though – I don’t name names…).

“Thanks Mike. Helpful advice. ‘Listen.’ Gee whiz… you’re like the Yoda of customer service. You’ve given me nothing helpful or practical in this post. You must have been a consultant at some point in your career…” You must be a new reader (welcome to the blog by the way!). Regular readers of these posts know the drill. I tee up an issue, highlight why it’s important, tell a story or two, occasionally soliloquize, then give you one or two real-world tools to try out in your business. Strap in. Here we go.

Strategic Thinking: Don’t Bring Problems – Bring Solutions

February 4, 2008/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Ah to be young again. To be able to make mistakes repeatedly and egregiously. To have paternal and maternal figures in our careers who forgive the errors of our youth and kindly guide us to better answers… I miss those days. One of the best “thinking” mentors I had was very understanding of the errant ways of youth and my penchant to find issues all around. I’m blessed to have run across him because he taught me a new way to look at the world.

It started innocently enough. I was new to consulting at the time and was bold, brash and driven (nine years in the Army and spending a few of those years on tanks will do that to you). I was serving a particularly ornery client on a tremendously thorny set of issues. Long hours and frequent travel were wearing on my patience.

Friday finally rolled around. As consultants, we’d all return to the mother ship on Fridays and spend our day in the home office sharing best practices and developing new strategic frameworks (which is code for we’d complain about the hours we were logging and how difficult either our clients or our partners managing our projects were being).

On this particular Friday, I was good and spun up. It had been a train wreck of a week at the client. The progress review went poorly. They were pushing back hard on our recommendations. They put us in a cold, drafty, smelly conference room (I think it used to be a janitor’s closet). Subway was closed for renovations and I had to eat at JoJo’s Subs (don’t ask…). As I was bemoaning my plight to a colleague, our office director came around the corner (he was also the senior partner on my client engagement). He asked what I was so upset about.

Managerial Miscues: The But(t) Sandwich

January 31, 2008/3 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

A really cool thing happened today – I had a referral come to this blog from a prestigious newspaper’s website forum on career and management styles. At first I was like “Wow! I’ve been noticed by a leading periodical.” Then I read the content of one of the posts on the site and lost my mind. No – the post wasn’t something bad about me or my blog. It was offering advice that made me cringe as a professional manager.

The advice was about how to give critical feedback to your team members. It suggested:

“Use the ‘sandwich technique.’ When delivering a critique, it’s important to censure the behavior, not the individual. One of the easiest ways to encourage receptivity is to preface your criticism with a positive statement about the person’s job performance or character. Once you’ve fortified his ego, deliver the bad news. Ensure that he received the message, and knows how to correct the situation. Then close the conversation with an affirmation.”

Pardon me. I just had an embolism.

Sorry. I don’t subscribe to this particular way of doing business. Where I come from, we call the above “The But(t) Sandwich.” You’re offering kind words at the beginning and end (the bread) and the criticism in the middle (the meat). The word “but” typically separates the bread from the meat and the meat from the bread. Unfortunately, while it looks appetizing on the menu, it goes down like a butt (deliberately spelled with two t’s) sandwich. Allow me to elaborate:

Getting to “Yes” – Does It Change The Answer?

January 28, 2008/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Communications /by Mike Figliuolo

At some level, all of us are looking to get a favorable decision on ideas we put forth. Whether it’s being able to hire someone new, launch a new project, make a sale, or get approval for an acquisition. Too often, though, we overlook an important and time-saving point – does what we’re proposing “change the answer?” If it doesn’t, we’re wasting time and energy because nothing will ever come of all our hard work.

Let me explain with a couple of examples. I was lobbying for an acquisition. I built the financial models and my recommendation was to do the deal. Another individual in the approval chain was reviewing the economic model and started pushing on some of the costs in the pro forma future P&L. He believed they were too low (and therefore we were overstating the benefits of doing the deal).

He and I went back and forth for about an hour on whether a particular ratio was 10.2% (my estimate) or 10.5% (his estimate). On another item in the model we argued over whether it should be $37,500 or $42,000 (my and his estimates respectively). We spent a lot of time in the conversation (we were talking by phone). Eventually, I got tired of the argument. I put him on speakerphone, muted my end and let him babble for a while (he wasn’t listening to me anyway). After a while I got bored listening to the diatribe and started messing with the model. I looked at the cells we were arguing about and simply popped 50% and $80,000 into the model just to humor myself. That’s when the light bulb went off – even with those numbers in the model, the deal still made good economic sense. I took my end off mute and quickly said “okay, I’ll use your numbers.” He was surprised with how easily and suddenly I rolled over.

“Great but why the sudden change?”

Strategic Planning: “Budget +10%” Isn’t a Strategy

January 16, 2008/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Leadership, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Everyone wants to do “strategy.” Everyone wants their stuff to be “strategic.”

Strategic Plan
Strategic Facilities Expansion
Strategic HR Sourcing
Strategic Restroom Cleaning Schedule

The word “strategy” is being abused so badly it needs counseling.

Wikipedia says “A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often ‘winning.'” Everyone wants to win. And sometimes winning means increasing financial performance by 10%. The problem is many organizations use the end metric to define their strategy. To be clear – financial or numerical results FOLLOW from strategy (they don’t drive it). Strategy and the defined tactics and initiatives for executing it result in financial performance (hence the more oft used term “financial RESULTS”).

Why am I harping on this point? Simple. Define your strategy as “budget +10%” (or some other such ROMA-based number) and your team will have no idea what they’re supposed to do to achieve it. Instead, provide them a goal and vision then clearly lay out the competitive environment, how you’ll compete, what initiatives you’ll pursue, then execute. Doing this means your odds of hitting your magical budget +10% goal go up dramatically.

Hands-On Customer Service Training

January 6, 2008/2 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Customer Service, Training /by Mike Figliuolo

It’s all well and good to pontificate about “the customer comes first” or “deliver outstanding service” but oftentimes it’s hard for your team to wrap their heads around what that really means. You can say these things until your jaw muscles are sore and post all the “customer service rules” you want on their cubicle walls but only a small percentage of the teachings will stick.

I come from the school of learning by doing. When you see something first-hand or participate in the activity, retention of such information is exponentially higher. Training your people this way provides them a situational context to refer back to. They can articulate and remember the concepts and precepts you’re teaching much better than if you talked their ears off in a classroom. If you want them to retain the information, let them live the lessons. It’s sort of like telling a kid the stove is hot. They kind of understand the concept “hot” but don’t have context around that. Let them touch it and they’ll never forget the definition of “hot” let alone the event.

I was helping an organization move from mediocre service levels to trying to provide outstanding, individualized service to over 400,000 customers. We’d bring our managers in for training and talk AT them all day. Some of the information stuck. A lot bounced off and fell on the floor.

I wanted them to truly understand what “customer-focused” means. I had a choice – I could either talk AT them first thing in the morning in a classroom or I could show them and have them live it. I obviously chose the latter. Read more

Leadership Principles – The Overview

December 31, 2007/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

I’ve led and been led in many situations. The military as a tank platoon leader (one of the funnest jobs you can have as a 22 year old man – four tanks, fifteen soldiers and a job description that reads “blow stuff up and run stuff over.”); as a director of a large call center organization; as a consultant team leader; as an executive in premier organizations. I’ve also been fortunate enough to learn from and work with many leaders and followers in all those organizations (both good ones and bad ones).

Sure there are plenty of leadership books out there (available at fine book stores everywhere!). The thing is, I haven’t come across any that are down to earth and practical in the advice they give. To that end, I see a problem and therefore I own it (one of the principles on the list). I’d like to offer the following basic principles as a perspective on some of the things it takes to be a genuine leader.

Knowing and leading yourself:

Knowing and leading your people:

Yes. Many of the above points are cryptic. Some are self evident. I’ll expound upon each of these principles in separate posts.

– Learn more about how to create your own set of leadership principles in my book One Piece of Paper. Buy your copy here.

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Authentic Leadership: The Thank You Note

December 28, 2007/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

(This is Part 11 of Leadership Principles)

It’s a stupid cocktail napkin when you look at it. It means a lot to me. A whole lot. I have it tacked to the cork board above my desk.

“Q4 losses 7% better than forecast. Nice work. Well done.” It’s scrawled in blue pen and in a couple of spots, it tears through the thin napkin material. Evan wrote it and slipped it to me during a boring lunch meeting.

Evan had only been with the company for a couple of months at that point. He was my boss’ boss. He and I had collectively spent 3 hours together over those few months (enough for him to know who I was and generally that my team and I focused on reducing credit card losses).

The napkin means a lot to me because a guy who I saw as exponentially busier and more concerned with “big” issues took a moment to share confidential information with me (the 7%) as soon as he got it (it came over his Blackberry). Sort of like what I preach in They know what I know. Other managers wouldn’t have shared this – they would have waited until results were officially published. I felt like I was “in the fold.” More importantly, his note acknowledged that I had some role in creating that result and he appreciated the work I had done to achieve it. I was valued by the organization.

A thank you note. That’s all it takes. Read more

Communication: Defining the “so what?”

December 6, 2007/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications /by Mike Figliuolo

So what?

We’ve all been there – sitting through that dreadfully long presentation full of facts, figures, and complex analyses only to leave an hour later wondering “so what?” So what do we do now? What was the point of that? What was the conclusion?

We’ve all heard about “tricks and tips” to engage the audience: use props, tell stories, and use flashy PowerPoint. The list goes on. The problem is, if the audience doesn’t “get” your recommendation or personally care about it, no number of tricks can help.

Unfortunately as presenters, we often fail to define that key “so what” before we create our presentation. This ultimately leaves our audience wondering what our point was.

Fortunately, this problem is easy to avoid. Doing so requires you to identify your “core idea” well in advance of doing any analysis or creating charts. This core idea is the one thought you want your audience to remember. It is the “what should we do and why should we do it?” recommendation that captures their attention and gives them a compelling reason to act. Read more