Sales – Page 3 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

3 Ways to Serve Your Clients With Empathy

February 22, 2021/1 Comment/in Books, Business Toolkit, Communications, Guest Blogger, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

Customers don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Learn how to improve your sales pitch by taking the time to understand your customers.

Today’s post is by Joe Paranteau, author of Billion Dollar Sales Secrets (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

Even if you are the best sales person with an airtight pitch, you might fumble your sale if you don’t make space to listen to what your customer has to say to you. Steamrolling ahead without listening to your customer will cause you to miss key cues about what’s important to them, their hesitations, and their goals. Without this information, you’ll never achieve value alignment.

Listening well is your single biggest asset when it comes to selling. People fundamentally want to be understood, but many salespeople get so caught up pitching their latest whiz-bang widget that they don’t stop to investigate whether their customers even want or need it in the first place.

This is why, as a seller, one of the most important skills you need to develop is empathetic listening. I learned early in my career that people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. To be an empathic listener is to understand someone intellectually and also emotionally. Read more

Crises Need Leaders, Not Superheroes

November 30, 2020/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Sales, Strategy /by Ryan Shaw

Navigating crisis is not for the faint of heart, but what it takes to see your team through crisis is true, authentic leadership.

Today’s post is by Joseph Michelli, author of Stronger Through Adversity (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

Crises are humbling. They unmask imposters and reveal dormant strengths.

During COVID-19, many leaders navigated unrelenting and unchartered territory from their bedrooms, not their boardrooms. Some found themselves uttering previously unspoken words like “I don’t know,” “unprecedented,” “new normal,” or “pivot.”

I was fortunate to have a front-row seat on leadership behavior during the pandemic while serving on crisis task forces for my clients (C-suite leadership teams at globally recognized brands). Aided by videoconferencing technology, I observed vastly different leadership responses to the pandemic. As I worked with diverse teams, I asked senior leaders to share insights on strategies, successes, mistakes, and lessons learned during the pandemic.

In the months that followed, I spoke with more than 140 remarkable leaders (clients and their colleagues) who navigated chaos, lockdowns, re-openings, and more. These leaders stewarded for-profit, nonprofit, and public safety organizations. They included CEOs and Presidents of companies like Target, Verizon, Kohl’s, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz, Marriott, Farmers Insurance, Dairy Queen, Zappos, United Way, and the Salvation Army.

The 4 Need to Know Approaches to Growth

November 16, 2020/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Entrepreneur, Sales, Strategy /by Mike Figliuolo

Knowing your growth strategy and understanding four key growth approaches – organic, acquisition, new products, and geographic expansion – will help you be more successful in achieving the growth you desire.

You have to ask yourself – how does your business grow? Is it geographic expansion? Are you selling new products? Are you selling the same products to new customers? Are you growing by acquisition and buying other businesses?

What’s your overall growth strategy? You need to be able to answer this question. Look at your historical growth and where it came from. That’s usually a pretty good indicator of how your organization is going to continue to grow from here. Pull out your strategic plan and look at your marketing plan to see where the future growth is expected. Assess whether or not that sales and marketing plan is aligned with where the future growth is supposed to come from.

Different Approaches to Growth

There are some very common methods for growing and they all have very different economic profiles.

Acquisition

One way you can grow is acquisition. The economics of conducting an acquisition are you spend a lot of money up front to buy another company or portion of another company. You’re buying a large piece of the market when you do so. The way you make acquisition economics work out is you reduce the costs of the combined entities by looking at synergies.

So, you bought another company. Congratulations! You have two HR departments now. You have two marketing departments. You have two Legal departments and two IT departments. You have two of everything! How do you consolidate those and reduce costs? That’s the first source of economic value in an acquisition.

The second source of acquisition value is all about growth. Now you have a new market you can enter if the acquired entity was in a different geography or targeted a different market segment. You can sell your existing products into that new market. You can sell the products you acquired into the existing markets you were in pre-acquisition. That’s how an acquisition is going to drive top-line growth.

Organic Growth

Boosting Sales Is About Simplicity

September 30, 2020/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Leadership, Sales /by Ryan Shaw

Sales are the lifeblood of any company. No sales, no company. The good news is there’s an incredibly simple technique that you can do right now to help boost your numbers.

Today’s post is by Mike Figliuolo, Managing Director of thoughtLEADERS.

Strap yourself in. You’re about to have your mind blown.

Ever since grade school when I sold anything that wasn’t nailed down, I’ve been drawn to sales. It started with pencils I painted with custom designs and people’s names on them. I then graduated to selling comic books. Then I sold table space at comic book conventions I put on myself (at age 14). Over the years I’ve migrated to other sales roles and, in the day to day running of thoughtLEADERS, I’m the head of sales.

I won’t lie – sales can be a grind especially when facing competitive situations or making big ticket complex sales. Long lead times, budget constraints, and prospects who are tough to get a hold of make selling efforts difficult.

But I’ve found a secret. I’ve found a way to get in touch with clients and prospects and engage them in a sales conversation 100% of the time. Not only that, they’re excited to talk to me about it and they’re usually ready to buy by the time we finish talking. I’ve been astonished with how effective this technique is and it’s beyond simple. I’m going to share it with you now and it will change your life.

Using Stretch and Commit Goals to Drive Performance

September 21, 2020/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Career, Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

Goal setting is tricky business. You’ll get much better performance if you set two goals for your team. Once you’ve done so, paying for performance is more of a math equation than it is black magic.

Incentives can, and have been, a topic of great discussion but one thing that is hard to argue is this: you want to complete a goal, incentives work.

Sometimes incentives are money. Incentives can be salary increases or bonuses. You may offer stock or options. Other incentives can be awards, time off, or promotions. Incentives need to be something that’s meaningful and exciting to your team, collectively.

When you set the incentives, make a direct linkage between the goal and the reward. I’ve always liked setting “commit” and “stretch” goals. The commit goal is something where folks are signing up to deliver it no matter what. There’s zero bonus associated with hitting a commit. It’s the “you did your job” level of goal. A “stretch” is the furthest point that folks think is in the realm of possibility. They have an idea for how they’ll achieve 70% of it but no clue where the last 30% will come from. And to be clear – that first 70% will take a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to hit. With a stretch goal, people can max out their bonus.

If you have a commit goal and a stretch goal, put the bonus on a sliding scale between those two instead of creating an all-or-none scheme. A “commit” goal is the minimum that someone will deliver to the organization. At the “commit” the bonus is zero. A stretch goal is a high level of impact that will take a tremendous amount of effort to achieve. If someone hits their stretch, the bonus should be 100% of what’s available as an incentive.

Teams can get extremely frustrated when they hit 85% of their stretch goal and they get nothing for it. They should get 85% of the possible bonus. I’ve been in both of these situations. I was in one organization where we had a commit of $50 million of profit and a stretch of $75 million of profit. At $50 million dollars, our bonus was going to be zero. If we hit the commit, there was no bonus. At $75 million of profit, the bonus was going to be 10% of our salary.

How Great Stories Create Great Performance from You and Your Team

August 24, 2020/0 Comments/in Books, Communications, Leadership, Sales, Upcoming Events /by Ryan Shaw

Here are six great ideas to move performance from good to great. From the stories you tell to your own bold moves others will be telling stories about for years to come, you can build perseverance, passion, and engagement.

Today’s post is by Paul Smith, thoughtLEADERS instructor and author of Sell With a Story.

Here’s an easy way to learn some new leadership skills – in easy-to-digest 10-minute podcasts you can listen to at your convenience.

These podcasts are based on interviews with 100 executives and leaders at dozens of companies around the world. Each episode brings you an important leadership lesson through a single compelling story.

These next 6 episodes will help you learn to do remarkable things other people will talk about, lead your team to love what they do or find the perseverance to press on even in the face of defeat or ridicule, move their performance from good to great, and learn 5 steps to giving more effective feedback.

Staff meetings your employees won’t try to crawl out of

One of the perhaps less-than-obvious ways to help the people who work for you to find passion for their work, is to remove the things they’re decidedly dispassionate about – starting with your staff meetings.

Perseverance: The Pringles Story

Perseverance in the face of defeat is a required character trait in sports and politics. You have to lose a few games and races on the road to the Super Bowl or to Washington. Here’s what it looks like when you demonstrate perseverance in business.

The Jittery Compass: Moving your performance from good to great

Change Starts At The Top

August 3, 2020/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Sales, Strategy /by Ryan Shaw

Leadership cannot be do as I say, leadership must also be do as I do, show your team how you want to operate.

Today’s post is by Pat McManamon, author of The Intentional Sales Manager (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

As a sales leader, you have to admit it’s been an interesting year.

You’ve been faced with business challenges you never even imagined you would encounter. Guess what? Your sales people are in the same situation! Your decisions, like theirs, are going to be crucial. What criteria will you use to make them?

Business is still being conducted; prospects are reaching out; your competition is on the phones and on the streets; customers are buying. Many companies I’ve spoken to had a record month in March despite the disruption of a nationwide shutdown. All signs point to a strong recovery in the near future for those who are prepared. But we must be prepared to make constructive changes, and we must accept that the most important change starts with us!

Smart People Make Dumb Decisions When It Comes Time to Sell Their Business

February 18, 2019/0 Comments/in Books, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Sales /by Ryan Shaw

When it comes to making decisions about their own business, some of the smartest leaders and best business people make the dumbest decisions, especially when it comes to selling.

Today’s post is by Terry Monroe, author of Selling With Certainty (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

I am shocked by how many successful entrepreneurs—smart folks who’ve devoted years to building their businesses—can be so casual and sometimes downright dumb when it comes time to sell their businesses. Regardless how successful someone may be, and I am talking about business owners who are making $5MM, $10MM, $15MM a year in net income, they are undermining and underselling when putting their businesses on the market.

I believe part of the reason people behave in this manner is they think because they have sold things in the past such as vehicles, buildings, houses, or maybe even one time a business, they can sell what may be the largest financial asset they own, which is their business, by themselves. And armed with this uneducated self-confidence they proceed in attempting to sell what is basically their retirement account, themselves, and wonder why things didn’t work out. Either they are not finding the right buyer or are getting so frustrated they end up abandoning the sales process and continue to run the business.

My goal is to help educate as many business owners as I can on how to determine if you are ready to sell your business and, if so, what steps need to be taken and how the process works.

How often do you try to meet new people when you travel?

November 1, 2018/0 Comments/in Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Poll, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: How often do you try to meet new people when you travel?

Very: planes, lounges and hotels are great places to meet new people: 18.0%
Sometimes: I’ll occasionally make an effort to meet new people: 40.1%
Not very: I’d rather keep to myself most of the time: 32.3%
Not at all: leave me alone: 9.6%

Networking opportunities abound. Look around you when you travel for work. You’ll notice many people who look like you. They’re business travelers too. Meeting them could create great new opportunities for you in the form of customers, partners, employees or future employers. But you have to make the effort to meet them. There are many examples of great connections to be made while traveling. All it takes to get started is a polite “hello” or a simple offer of assistance. The vast majority of you report that you don’t take these steps to expand your network. You could be missing out on your next big opportunity. Next time you travel, offer a kind greeting and introduce yourself to someone new. At the very worst, it will make the world a friendlier place.

Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

How well do you handle an unexpected personal crisis at work?

September 13, 2018/0 Comments/in Communications, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Poll, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: How well do you handle an unexpected personal crisis at work?

Very well. I deal with the issue productively and can resume work effectively: 33.3%
Well. I deal with the issue but it has some negative work effects: 51.9%
Not well. Personal crises tend to throw my work off substantially: 12.3%
Poorly. A personal crisis totally derails me at work: 2.5%

Moving through the crisis. It’s inevitable that a personal crisis will interfere with work at some point. Illnesses, car accidents, thefts and other challenging issues are bound to crop up and always at the worst time. Some keys to dealing with crisis involve keeping things in perspective, getting your priorities straight and getting assistance. Don’t be afraid to ask colleagues for help. We’ve all been there, and, by and large, people are understanding and supportive. There’s no need for you to shoulder the entire burden yourself. And when you see a colleague in crisis, don’t wait for them to ask for help. They may be too overwhelmed or feel like they’re imposing on others. Offer your help proactively instead.

Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

Have you ever considered running your own consulting firm?

August 16, 2018/0 Comments/in Entrepreneur, Leadership, Poll, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

Our reader poll today asks: Have you ever considered running your own consulting firm?

Yes, but I haven’t done it yet. 46.5%
No, I’ve never considered it. 30.2%
Yes, and I’m currently doing so. 13.6%
Yes, I once ran a consulting firm but don’t anymore. 9.8%

Get the revenue model right. Many of you have considered hanging out your own shingle and running your own consulting firm. One of the most important questions you have to answer is: what’s your revenue model going to be? If you don’t get the revenue model right, you’ll be spending too much time working and not getting paid enough for it. You might also miss out on lucrative alternate sources of revenue if you’re not thoughtful about what assets you have to sell. You must understand the different types of consulting revenue models and choose yours deliberately. It can be the difference between working like a dog and retiring early.

Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

A Simple Sales Tip for Maintaining Great Relationships

August 15, 2018/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Customer Service, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

How effective are you at maintaining client relationships? Do you stay in touch with them or do you lose the relationship over time? Do your clients and prospects respond to your messages or do your emails end up in a black hole? Here’s a simple tip for maintaining contact with your clients and prospects.

Client relationships are the lifeblood of any business. Be deliberate about maintaining them. Regular contact will keep you top of mind.

Find meaningful “excuses” to reach out to them. Some of my favorites include “Hey I read an article and I thought of you” or “I heard about a cool new technology and I thought you might be interested in it.” Send these notes and leave it at that. Don’t try and sell during those interactions. They know you eventually want to sell them something. Beware of excessive contact, they’re going to ignore you or block you if you’re in their inbox too much. Focus on being helpful and good things are going to come.

I have one client who I’ve had a great relationship with over the years. Every once in awhile I’ll see something that I think would be interesting to him and I drop him a note and I said “I read this and I thought of you.” He always writes back and says “Thanks for the information. Interesting. I appreciate it… not that you’re trying to sell me something.” This has become a running joke with us that at the end of every interaction one of us says “not that you’re trying to sell me something.” He understands the nature of the relationship because he is a great salesman too. He and I both know the deal but he doesn’t mind my outreach. He actually welcomes it because he knows I’m trying to be helpful. These interactions help me stay top of mind, so anytime he has a need that my firm can fill, he’s going to call me first.

Some reasons you might wanna reach out to connect with your clients and prospects include things like: