Patience and Aggression at work

If you can balance between the two, Patience and Aggression depending on the situation, then you have a winner in hand. Being patientful all time doesn't help and same is the case with aggressiveness, but if you can moderate these two behaviours of yours appropriately depending on what you are dealing with, you can make a world of difference in your approach, decision making and execution skills. That's my thought.... let me know yours.

Sales not working out?

Here is an incomplete list on where you or your organization may be going wrong on sales


Always me-too strategy

Never a head of curve

No passion for BHC (Beat-the-Hell-out-of-Competition)

No value proposition

Not aggressive (No Speed)

Not working hard

Don’t realize that good is bad in this world (be exceptional)

Internal Collaboration sucks

Poor or No retrospection

Not performance driven

No one to confront problems

No outside-in approach

Collective thinking is missing

Incompetent Sales Team

Focusing on too many things

Trying to make everybody happy internally

No distinct positioning

No Monitoring No Measuring

Don’t know how to beat down-cycle with up-cycle

Trying to sell poor products or services

Not engaging with prospects

Athletes

Athletes become champions not when millions of people are watching them on TV, not when 1000s of people are chanting their names on the field, not when they go and receive the medal but in the early morning silence, when no one is watching them, no one is encouraing them, no one is rewarding them.... yet they go out and practice every single day in anticipation of that winning moment. That is when they become champions.

Did you practice in your area of work today?

Be an athlete.

Low-ball-game

Sales people sometimes offer their products and services at the lowest possible price (even below cost at times) and then hope that they can make up their lost margins on possible additional or recurring sales. Nothing wrong with the strategy if overall you can still cover up your cost and make a healthy profit. But at times vendors go overboard on this, leading to poor after-sales-support (not enough money left for support)
and huge losses  (resulting even in a shutdown).  Hope you have your checks and balances in place to avoid low-ball-failures.

Passenger’s Trust Deficit Syndrome

If you have travelled in suburban trains in India, you know that they stop for about 30 seconds in every station, and getting in and out of them is hassle at times, because there is congestion near the gate (even people who are not getting down are standing near the gate). This congestion is partly due to what I call the Passenger’s trust deficit syndrome, passenger don't trust that every other passenger would step near the gate only a few seconds before their stop, since no one is trusting the other, they all clog the gate making the entry and exit difficult. This is the same syndrome we experience with flights, moment taxiing is done everybody gets up so fast (clogging the entire aisle, even though they know it would take about 4 to 5 minutes for the gates to open) from their seat because partially they are afraid that someone from behind will pass ahead of their row. Some amount of mutual trust and discipline among passengers can help avoid congestion to some extent.

Engaging is hard in sales

Why engaging with a prospect is difficult? Because it needs a lot of hard work which most of the sales guys are not willing to put. If you have to engage then you have to


1. Do proper pre-call analysis about the prospect and their company (background, product, services)

2. Read few stuff related to the contact person, their industry, their business model, their competition etc

3. Listen...Listen...Listen, if you are more worried about putting across your point or your presentation, then you will lose when it comes to engaging with the prospect, because every word coming out of prospect's mouth can give you cues on how you can engage with them.... use it productively

4. If you feel your prospect is good at something.... don't lose the chance to appreciate them (sales guys sometimes are obsessed about completing their presentation and they don’t see how good the prospect is at something.... and fail to pass on a compliment... too bad)

5. Engaging means you have to constantly improve on being more creative, amusing and sharply attentive!! Because these are the 3 attributes which can help you engage with anybody much better.

6. Prospects are pre-occupied with their priorities at times, and you may need to grab their attention if you need to engage. Try this, it may work ”If you can provide me 10 minutes of your full attention, I can show you something which may turn be very important for you and you can then decide to continue or not”, and then don’t try to rush through, that will only lead to completing your ten minutes with no results. Try to engage.... in most cases prospect will end up spending more time with you.

7. Don’t be transactional in your approach, which is desperately trying to seek the answers for the questions you have in your mind...start friendly, engage and then incrementally seek answers to your questions, works better.

Number one

If something (product or service) is number one, it is easier to buy because

- There is a lot of social proof around (testimonials)
- Doesn't need a world of buying analysis (there is no competition for number one)
- Pretty easy to justify your decision to your boss (after all you bought the number one product or service)
- People around you readily accept that you have made the right choice
- And in the event something goes wrong with what you bought you still get the benefit of doubt

This doesn’t just hold good for products or services, it holds good for you as well.
So are you striving to be number one? And helping your employer buy YOU?