Many thanks to the dozens of you who have sent me kind messages over the last two weeks asking where The DEW View! had gone.
Nowhere.
I just didn’t have anything shockingly inspiring to share.
I really do want to change the world not waste your time.
ALSO… this blog is getting a massive upgrade. I am working on some new content at danielwaldschmidt.com for you along with my friends at Channel V Media that I am SO excited to share with you. That should be coming to you at the beginning of the year. It’s really going to be VERY cool. I will finally have a platform to offer you so much more content…
Everything that I am working on falls in the general category of high performance. It’s a curious thought. How can you consistently perform at amazingly high levels?
……….How can I do that?
………………..How can you do that?
…………………………How can you hold you employees to that standard?
These questions are on my mind these days. Frankly, I think it’s on a lot of your minds too — if your emails and calls are an indication of what you are thinking about these days.
Being amazing, awesome, stellar — whatever you call it — really comes down to three attributes that any of us can have. It’s not a hard formula to understand. Is is however a painfully hard act to live…
Here is what defines “stellar”:
Desire — You have to want to be better. This is where it all starts. Without desire, you will quickly fall off the mark of consistent high performance. It happens all time — well intentioned, passionate people giving up way too soon. Their will is broken. Their passion is quelled. WHY? They give up because they forget how bad they really want to be successful. You need desire now more than ever. With the gloom of global economic negativity in our face every day, desiring more for yourself is a must.
Dedication — You have to focus your time on being a high performer. You can’t just simply want to be amazing and it magically happen. You’re life isn’t a David Blaine performance, it’s a battle — for your time and attention. Daily activity toward your goal is the only way to be a consistent high performer. Small things add up to big things over time. They do. With the dedication toward accomplishing small goals, you will find yourself doing huge things over time.
Discipline — You have to train yourself to endure the bad stuff that happens along the way. Despite the best plans and the most altruistic of ambitions, people and circumstances will rain all over your parade. They will discourage you. Many times they will deliberately try to hurt you. You have to be ready to take a punch, get knocked out, and then stand back up and keep fighting — time after time after time. No matter what happens, you have to have the discipline to reach deep within your soul and fight on.
Success is not usually an intellectual challenge. It’s a mental challenge. Desire, dedication, and discipline are not taught in the classroom. They are a harsh reality of life. You can be stellar. You can find excellence. You can be amazing…
How are you searching for stellar?
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By the way, if you missed the “Edgy Conversations” webinar I presented for Top Sales Expert International last week, click here to check out what 740 other people clicked on to see. The video is about 60 minutes long and got some tremendous reviews from those who saw it live. As a side note, there were a handful of the hundreds who saw this that thought I was a complete moron — so you know it has to be “spicy”…
You get beaten up in your personal life and it starts to affect your chances at closing deals.
You have opportunities that demand finesse, skill, and talent — and you feel defeated and ready to quit.
Winning is more than about a notch on the belt. It pays the bills. Not succeeding is something you don’t want to consider….
So, what do you do? How do you put your life back together while not missing a career beat?
Recognize that life dealt you a black eye. There is no use denying the obvious.
Try to solve solvable life problems as soon as possible. Let go of your ego.
Spend time “grinding” through the sales steps you know you need to get done. Send emails. Return calls.
Set aside a few special minutes a day to focus on your sales goals. Focus on your dreams.
Write down your scattered sales strategy thoughts throughout the days. Your mind has a lot going on so take the time to store your half-finished ideas on paper.
Write your daily goals on a calendar and don’t let time commitments slide. Don’t let things that used to take 5 minutes take 30 minutes.
Talk to someone that you trust and get the bad stuff out of your head. Telling yourself that you suck is not a super way to build confidence.
Challenge yourself in a favorite hobby or through physical exercise. Take time for mastery.
Take the first step toward your sales goal that day. Then another. Then another. Build momentum.
Learn from the experience — about yourself, about how your customer might be feeling. Build empathy.
There’s probably more to this list than the points I have included. In fact, I am sure there is more to consider. The point is that life happens — and it hurts. You want the world to stop so you can heal and it won’t. It just runs you over again. Use these basic steps to stay “in the game” while your world works itself out.
Winning is not about removing problems that you can not control but about continuing in spite of them…
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And a special event for The DEW View! community. Join me November 19th for a Masterclass about “Edgy Conversations: An Explosion of Opportunities“
Ever wonder how some sales executives land big deals with big players and you feel stuck chatting up the small guys about opportunities that will probably never happen. Do you want to get the attention of the right people? Do you want to see the number of opportunities you are working on explode? Learn how to have “Edgy Conversations”. Learn how to have conversations that matter….
Think through the mind of your customer… and ask yourself if you are “illogically” wooing your customer. Are you doing what no one else will do to make them successful? Are you working to guarantee that your customer hits a home run by working with you?
It’s not logical. In fact, it doesn’t really make sense from a “nuts-and-bolts” perspective.
But like anything, when you swing the opposite direction, you get a better perspective. Instead of being illogically helpful, let’s look at being illogically awful. Let’s look at the bad emails we send and see how we can make them better.
The endless onslaught of crappy emails has accelerated. It has gotten serious. For some reason, crazy sales people who need to have a strong Q4 all decided that they need to mass email the world in the hopes that we will magically take an interest in their nonsensery.
There is no interest in a relationship or learning what might be important to you or me. It’s all about their email and how they have access to an amazing service that we “can’t miss out on”. I want to drag them into my office, throw them on the floor and let them know this simple fact that they are overlooking:
We have thoroughly enjoyed not “enjoying” your service; and if your current care of us is any indication of your future care, then we are best served to not be your customer….. ever — for the sake of our health.
It is such a horrible experience to get these emails. It’s like a sudden nausea that has me tasting a little stomach acid in my mouth. I feel sick but my head’s not warm. I just don’t feel well after reading this chicanery.
I had one such illogically awful encounter earlier this month when I received the following email in my inbox…
Of course, I was more than a little surprised and then annoyed at the premise of the email. (In this case, “annoyed” is a code word for “enraged”).
There is no mention of my name in this entire email (I am not totally sure if she sent this to the right person…)
There is value statement (I can’t figure out what really sets Melissa apart as being worth my time…)
There is no call to action (I am kind of confused as to what logical action Melissa expects from me…)
There is way too much content (I immediately start skimming because it “appears long and boring…)
There is different color font in the email (I start wondering “why” and if there’s a special reason…)
So I emailed Melissa back. And yes, I was in a funk. My time had been wasted. My intelligence had been insulted. I was upset with myself that I had even given Melissa time in my busy day. I was irate and so I shared my thoughts:
I just asked Melissa why being “illogically awful” was a reason why I should care. And not to be outdone or undeterred she let me know. She wasn’t trying to woo me as a customer. She was throwing data at me and hoping that I might be interested.
AWFUL!
A truly “illogically awful” experience. Melissa clearly did not want me as a customer.
A lot of sales books tell you that you qualify and don’t take chances with customers — that you do exactly what Melissa did:
That you refine your questions to only work with prospects who have money and time…. you get then give…
That you only build a relationship once you see that your prospect has something “in it” for you… you prioritize based on immediate perceived value…
That you trade enough negotiable points and win a deal without taking any risks…. you never appear vulnerable or genuine…
That you explain all your moves logically in a “I always win” matrix… you need to appear important and in control…
But let’s not belabor the illustration. We can learn how to be “illogically helpful” by doing everything that Melissa failed to do.
Be personal — Start the email by calling me my name – my first name and leave off the “mister”….
Be brief — Keep it to 5 sentences max. If you need to tell me more, don’t…
Be thorough — Tell me something you know I don’t know… and convince me you’re bad-ass…
Be creative — Leave me wanting to hear the rest of your idea…
Be different — Remove any buzzwords and industry “gibberish” that make me tune you out…
Be inspiring — Combine what you want from me with what I care about. I might actually get involved…
Be important — Leave me good contact details so I can return your call or email and add you to my address book…
Be neat — Proof read your email to make sure it is grammatically “mostly correct”. Bad punctuation is distracting…
Be safe — Don’t go nuclear on a random idea until we have a relationship. (i.e. politics, religion, etc…)…
Be vulnerable — Admit it if you want help. If you claim to have it figured out and don’t I lose respect…
Be About Me — Rewrite your email if there are more I’s and me’s than you’s. You are writing to me so make it about me…
And here is the kicker: If you follow all the traditional sales rules (like Melissa did) you might never really ever lose a big deal. You’ll never be in a position to question whether you made the right decision. You’ll never have to take risks….
But you’ll never have the illogic to support yourself landing big deals.
There’s a secret language that many of us don’t understand. It’s deliberate but very real. It’s hidden but in plain sight. It’s how we work but rarely what we think about.
It’s called “humanity” and it’s the key to making the impossible very real. It’s the difference between the unbelievable happening and almost “getting there.”
When you understand people you understand the possibilities. You get to be a part of this language of “humanity“.
But it means your mission – your calling in life – is not about YOU:
It’s you feeling deep loss and quiet tears even when you’re told “I’m fine”…
It’s you reading the lines of worry on a tired face …
It’s you hearing the silent call for help when there is no sound…
It’s going on around you. It was you yesterday and maybe today.
What happened to the art of caring about the success of your customers?
What happened to caring in general — about your own success, about what wakes you up in the morning, about a higher calling than your 9-to-5? Is it costing you millions of dollars and you don’t even know about it yet?
“Sir, that’s the fee we added recently to anyone returning their vehicle at the end of their lease. It’s helps to offset our recent losses.”
That was the response I got from a customer support rep in India answering my frustration over a $800 bill from GMC after returning my vehicle at the end of a 36 month lease. Do I even need to tell you my response? I was livid (and so are many of you just reading this).
Not only did I pay several thousands dollars up-front to buy my way into the lease, but Bank of America did a super job of auto-paying the bill each month — from my piggy bank to the coffers of GMC’s “bean counters”. And now that my lease is done, some one decides to change the rules and charge me because they horribly mismanaged their own affairs. (That puts me in a bad mood.)
There’s more to this story actually. It gets better…
About 10 hours ago, I got a call from a Senior Customer Service Rep named Debra in Midland, Texas who “humored” me with a call back to help me with my concerns. When I asked why I was getting charged $800 for a “Disposition Fee”, I was told”
“That’s a fee all of our customers pay… It’s only if you decide not to buy the vehicle at the end of the lease. It’s kind of an incentive thing… “
I kindly asked her where this was mentioned in my original agreement.
“I don’t know if that’s in your agreement, sir. I don’t know if it’s mentioned there…”
So then I just got personal and I asked her the logic of demanding I pay a fee that was added three years after I signed paperwork. I just asked why none of this made any sense. What if this was happening to her? Would she think this was the right way to be treated?
“Sir, I am sorry; we can not waive that fee, regardless…”
And then I got the real answer. The fee right now was more important than I was.
……………………..She didn’t want it to make sense.
…………………………………………………She didn’t need it to make sense.
At the end of our discussion — at the end of getting no answers, no clarity, no reasons for these fees — Debra summed it up by simply noting that regardless of the fairness of the situation or her inability to explain the logic of the bill, she simply did not CARE….
That’s what it came down to. She represented a company that did not care about me.
Two things I know:
I will not ever pay this $800 fee until someone can clearly show me my rightful obligation (which at this point seems a long way off)….. AND
I will never (in my lifetime) ever buy another GMC…. (ever, ever….)
What does that mean?
It means that GMC loses horribly over a lack of caring.
Think about this with me.
If I buy a new vehicle every 5 years for the next 40 years (until I am 70) and pay roughly $45,000 per vehicle (like I did with this Envoy), GMC lost out on $360,000. And with a 2-car family, that’s about $750,000. Now what if I buy the boys a car or two (like a generally insane parent)? Are we close to a million dollars?
Are we beyond a million dollars? Probably.
So what happened?
GMC forgot that CARING is the ultimate CAPITAL…..
You can spend millions on marketing and billions on branding, but if you don’t care, you can’t replace your customers fast enough to stay in business. In face, it’s worse than bad. You just don’t upset your community; you create an army of vigilantes who go out-of-their-way to make sure you fail. They actually invest in your demise….
Now before you get too indignant over GMC, think about your customers and the amount of money you lose because you don’t take the time to care. Think about how much money you could lose by not caring to invest in your relationship with them.
And the amazing thing about caring is that when you really do care — you really empathize — you can screw up pretty bad and your customer will forgive you.
Because caring is really what matters most in a relationship.
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“Caring is the different between the struggle for survival or the the passionate pursuit of excellence. With one, you succeed at living and with the other you live to succeed… (DEWism)”
(If you see the guy who switched the playbook let me know so I can slip him over the border into North Korea.)
I want a lifetime ban on boring HTML newsletters. They just suck.
At least pretend to know my name. I feel like the other side of a bad date. Like I am being used for just another number in your “see my 10 gabillion readers” quest for encyclopedic nonsensery.
And here is the ironic part about the craziness of your bad content:
I really want to be inspired by what you have to say to me. I want to get a rush of adrenaline and nod my head at the end of each paragraph as you rock it out. That’s what I want from our conversation.
Instead, you think that your fancy picture (which I have now officially deemed “Lame 2009 Clipart” or L2C for short) does a better job of telling me what you really want me to know.
Here’s another paradox: We all hate the loud dude in the office who just won’t shut up (which is usually me). But then we turn around become the sales people of the world who fight fearlessly for our loud and impersonal emails that just do the same thing.
We need to stop thinking about emails as sales tools and more as conversation tools. If you wouldn’t kick down your customer’s door and start spitting sales facts in his face in person, then don’t do it with your emails.
I got a call about 6 weeks ago from a close friend of mine who used to be a top adviser when I was CEO at ACCESS. Federico was a great compliment to what I did, and so we worked closely on managing large clients. After the purchase he moved on to a billion dollar company in Manhattan that is doing an impressive job of building a legal technologies specialty. He called about an RFP that he was trying to win…
And so we put our heads together on what WILL BE a winning solution. I obviously can’t tell you what Federico and I put together. But I can put you in touch with the sensei who helped me put some structure to my wild thoughts about the RFP process.
Tom was the co-author of the wildly successful book, Whale Hunting, and a week ago I got his latest masterpiece, RFP’s Suck. It’s the best I’ve read yet on this subject of handling RFP’s. Frankly, it’s just about the best book ever on how to land HUGE deals like a sales ninja-sniper (that’s a new life form I just created).
And I don’t do book reviews on The DEW View, so I will just let you know that if you have at least $29 in your wallet, you need to hop on Amazon.com and grab a copy. You’ll see what I am talking about. You literally won’t be able to sleep for a week with the tools that Tom lays out for you to CRUSH down big deals.
And “NO” before you get cynical with me, Tom is not paying me to get all “teary eyed” about his book. I am passionate about all things “No BS That Help Me Land Big Deals” (that’s the only category in my current play book). You should be too if you want to see your business grow in a big way in a short time.
(DISCLAIMER: I will admit that after I saw what Tom was up to, I hired the same gurus at Channel V Media who published his book to help me with my book coming out sometime. I will tell you more about that process as I start putting together more plans.)
But back to Tom’s book…. Here are some highlights that I will share with you to get you salivating. Feel free to add your own “Best of Searcy” highlights in the comments below:
page 6 - most RFPs have little to do with the opportunity offered in the official document….. (learn how to “read between the BS lines)
page 15 - all RFPs are flawed, written by people way too busy to be writing them… (if you answer just what is “written” you are missing out on what is most important)
page 31 – an RFP open meeting can be a trap… (discover hidden secrets with a teamed approach to intelligence gathering)
page 44 - buyers don’t share everything they are looking for in a new vendor… (find out how buyers chose who lands the deal)
page 60 – implementing “fear fighters” to win over reluctant buyers… (build a matrix of possibilities that give you the advantage over any “angle” that threatens your success)
page 70 – saying what you mean in language the buyers understands… (transform industry buzzwords into key words that your buyer really understands)
page 81 – be the “bad boy” of RFPs and disrupt the process… (tactics for “real time” changing the rules of the RFP process)
page 100 – building an Executive Summary for executives to read “executively”… (differentiating your opening shots with valuable information that close the deal from the start)
page 112 - the DOs and DON’Ts of the entire RFP process… (#13 — Do remember that your RFP is an argument, not a writing assignment!)
page 120 – Eight “real live” RFPs examples presented and reviewed by Tom and his team… (“read-it-to-believe-it” type stuff)
At just under 150 pages, you will literally read this book in a short 45 minute lunch break.
The point isn’t really Tom and how he K.O.s the RFP process. The point is YOU! Giving you the tools to be wildly successful regardless of your current size…
Think about this with me for a minute. Allow yourself to “dream big” for a minute…… What could you do (personally, professionally, emotionally….) if you landed a deal 200 times bigger than your average deal? What would you attempt to conquer next? How would you “give back” to your industry, your community, and your family?
You can dream big and live even bigger by taking the time to learn how to master HUGE deals that involve RFPs. I wish I would have had this book a few years ago…
It all started on Friday with a call from my friend, Jill Stelfox…
Between a mix of tears and laughing she told me how she had been working to secure a vendor to tape video footage of one of her clients. Her client is a financial planner who is on MSNBC as a leading source of “money talk” and so she wanted to get a copy of all his appearances to add to his website. (Sounds like a good plan to me…) So she reached out to several different vendors who quoted her prices between $125 to $150 per tape clip. One vendor though struck a different tone. He offered to provide the service at $85 per clip – provided she bought 25 up-front – and even suggested he send her a sample of her client on video.
Pleased, Jill provided more information, and a short bit later the vendor sent over the video. After looking at the tape Jill called the vendor with a serious problem — the audio and video were synced horribly like a bad Chinese Kung Fu movie. Jill’s client was talking and his lips were moving “out of timing” with the audio. The video quality itself was “super spotty”. Still — this was a FREE sample. Maybe there was a good explanation (or not).
The vendor listened as Jill spoke and then professionally admitted that there was a problem. He then went on to note that he “knew there was a problem and that was why he was asking for 25 up-front purchases – so he could upgrade his equipment”… (all true, I promise). He then went on tell Jill that “he was broke and needed the money to do more work for other prospects.”
It took little time for Jill to hang up the phone in disbelief and end a shockingly bizarre buying experience.
Saturday evening Sara and I were “first person” to our own outrageous buying experience. It went a little something like this:
There is an children’s arcade/amusement center called Frankie’s Fun Park about 10 minutes from our house in Greenville that my two boys (Bryce and Dustin) love for me to take them. I just went there a few weeks ago when Sara was out-of-town and found the scene morbidly un-engaging. Employees were frowning and yawning – like we customers were a chore that they were forced to take care of. Needless to say, I took the boys home without spending any more money. I also took the 15.4 seconds necessary to “tweet” to the world about my poor experience. And then told the boys that we would never be heading back there again…
But, alas, the allure of winning tickets and climbing through indoor jungle gyms was too much for the boys to accept. They wanted to return and I wanted to make that happen for them. Besides, Bryce had won almost 2,000 tickets that he had not cashed in for prizes yet. And so we made our way back into the den of sweaty over-caffeinated kid-dom.
The boys headed straight for the “jungle gym”. Shoes off and stowed in cubby. Borrowed socks on. Fun everywhere with mom and dad cheering on the mayhem (I wish they made one of those for adults…). It was when the boys got out that the problem began. Dustin (my 2 year old) had his bright yellow crocs stolen out of his cubby — cubby that his mom and I were standing 5 feet away from the entire night. Sure — someone might have accidentally picked up the bright yellow crocs by accident (hardly….) — but it was the way the employees handled it that made this a story.
Of course I mentioned this to the 17- year old staff member in that kids area who took a few seconds away from texting to look at me with one eye raised. ”Steal your kids shoe?” she repeated back to me incredulously — like I was making the entire story up for. Further outraged, I moved on to the front of the establishment to look for management. Maybe someone old enough to have a car payment would care about my son’s bright yellow crocs. Sadly I was mistaken.
When I reached the front desk the manager came hustling out to meet me, chattering in half-tones into an ear piece about some food cleanup. Without any eye contact, he briefly stopped to tell me that he had “everyone looking for my shoe and that he was sure no one had stolen my sons’s bright yellow crocs.” To which I kindly refrained from sucker punching him in his face and left with Sara and the boys. I came to spend money and was left shoeless and insulted. Another horrible customer experience at an establishment that should be completely focused on user satisfaction.
What’s the point? It’s simply this.
It’s all about the EXPERIENCE your customers are having! You can’t explosively grow your revenue when you are pissing off the people who have the revenue to help you grow. You invest in them FIRST so that they will invest in you FOREVER.
And remember – It’s not about their trial period
…………………………or your proof-of-concept expectations
………………………………….or the support ROI you are factoring
…………………………………………..or “who is right” when a prospect complains.
It’s about how a prospect FEELS while interacting with you. Michael Ports(what a great author…) made the observation that: “Long after people forget what you said or did, [customers] will remember how you made them feel.”
It’s feelings that we need to change. Not facts!
By the way, that means that logic or facts have nothing to do with this discussion. At the heart of this is the concept of “relationships” — which happen to be completely illogical. You can’t build a spreadsheet around a customer experience strategy or “doing the right thing” (which is why so many companies just hire more schmucky sales dudes to find more prospects rather than get religious about creating an outrageous experience for their “community”).
You can’t even explain how you are going to make more money doing this. But it works. It’s the stuff of legends.
It’s the pricing and staffing economics that make Southwest Airlines the only profitable airline in the US and the most enjoyable (non-luxury) traveling experience….
It’s what takes the idea of outrageous customer fulfillment and ten years of consistent performance to build a billion dollar online site like Zappos…
It’s the detailed online client “do-it-yourself” tools that catapult a small franchise like Washington Mutual into a leading insurance powerhouse…
It’s the efficiency of client purchases and delivery that propel Amazon.com to be the leader in online purchases…
It’s the foundation of an ACE Hardware franchise that continues to “delight” even while getting smashed by larger Home Depot and Lowe’s franchises…
It’s easy to call this “too intangible for action” and just add more dollars to the CRM budget next year. This takes guts. And faith. And obsessing about the details of everything you do and every word you train your people to say. It is a religion.
Your ability to achieve explosive revenue growth is directly proportional to your obsession with providing an outrageous customer experience. Suck at one and you’re guaranteed to suck at the other… (DEWism)
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Possibly coincidence, but my CEO friend, Kriss Wilson, tweeted me over the weekend to tell me about his horrible 8-hour experience with Dell support. You have to check it out!!
Sneak up behind someone and poke them with a safety pin and they jump. Do it 100 times to a 100 different people and you will get the SAME result.
It’s human nature. It’s a reaction that all people have. Going a little deeper — it’s a subconscious reaction to feedback from our nervous system. Millions of impulses every second tell you that you are in pain — to move your body away from the source of pain.
It’s not even something you think about.
Which brings me back to the topic of my recent angst — sales strategies based on stats…
Sales research is cool (our teams do a ton of it), but building your sales strategy around market perceptions research is absolutely senseless. I am not sure where we business people went so wrong, but the practice of “wind sniffing” is eroding the foundations of our businesses. We happily produce neutered sales teams while happily sharing the stats around why we are making stupidly uninspired decisions.
We attempt nothing grand, challenging, or edgy. Instead we “grow a set of stats” and use them as a billy club to keep the sales guys in line and unoriginal.
Here is how it works:
“Business A” wants to generate more money in their marketplace…
Executives research what people are buying and doing in the “Business A” marketplace…
Sales team tasked to deliver on getting more people in the “Business A” marketplace to buy more…
Seems harmless. In fact, you might be thinking: “this sounds like a great idea to me; why so much frustration, Daniel?”
But here are the problems:
You can’t improve something by executing a “more of the same” sales strategy… (i.e. Bad people doing bad things produce bad things in bad ways. Copying that is bad too.)
Multiple snapshots of buyer activity produce vastly inconsistent data… (i.e. Like 5 blind dudes with a elephant you get a difference perspective every time you roll out of bed and check your numbers.)
People don’t want what they say they want… (i.e. People don’t want to pay a “fair price”. They want to pay “their fair price.)
Stats bear “builder bias” not facts… (i.e. You can’t escape that you will already have most of the answer before you start working on looking at your “viral stats”.)
Everybody else is equally as motivated to improve mediocrity (i.e. Improving your hustle over your competitor just means that you look like an idiot more times to more prospects.)
Building on mediocrity still has the failure of mediocrity at the foundation — which really negates the “building” part of the scenario… (DEWism)
Watching what people are doing or how they are acting is a good operational practice but quite limited when it comes to sales. It breaks down to Maslow and understanding people.
People do what people do because they are people and that’s what people do…
Instead of researching what already exists – what people are already doing — spend time on what you WANT people to be doing. That should be your ONLY concern. What people are doing is already the past. Your vision for them promises a new and better future.
Here is a stat for you: 99.99% of people want to live and love… Lose your sales stats and sell that with passion…
[...and a Happy Birthday to my mother who taught me to live with courage, to strive for excellence, and to never back down from my obsession with changing the world...]
Do you find that that most of your “targeted emails” never get answered?
Are you tired of having your emails ignored?
Here is my advice: try writing something that is worth reading…
Seriously! (and, NO, I am not mad about this — I just sound that way)
I got the following email in my Gnoso inbox and after about 52.5 seconds of having my life wasted went into a tirade with the team at Gnoso. Stunningly ridiculous content from a marketing company…
Take a look:
What?
You want to meet because you read an article in the newspaper…. That’s your value proposition. Nothing better? No ways that I benefit other than supporting your business with my money (and feeling good about it)? Nothing?
(By the way, no one here is named “Steve”…)
Here is the scientific formula for that crock of menagerie:
Bad homework + boring content = boiling readers…
Next time you stop to write your “target customer” an email, stop and think about what you are doing. Take the opportunity to communicate seriously. And think of the benefits — people won’t hate you and you might make some sales.
Here are 7 DEWlicious conversation observations:
Stop trying to impress me with your name drops of big companies (that I don’t really know or care about)…
Don’t make a lame reason for why I should keep reading or schedule you on my calendar. When I do meet you, I already think you’re lame…
Thanks and appreciation should be for what you have done for me not for how you “feel” about me…
ummmmm….. please, please, please do some research on me, my name, and what I care about…. (I own www.danielwaldschmidt.com so it shouldn’t be too hard
No intrigue = no interest (I don’t want to know the “why” and the “how” – just the “what”)….
More than 5-6 sentences and I start getting bored…
I don’t care about you. I care about me. Care about me too…
Great email content is a skill that we all need to work on. This is a start!
And here — in case you missed it the first time:
I don’t care about you. I care about me. Care about me too…
Last year as I trained for a UFC fight I spent time in the gym pretty much every day running on the treadmill, pushing some weights, and hitting the heavy bags (The speed bag is still a challenge…). After I got out of the ICU from the staff infection that I caught, all the time in the gym was wasted. I had lost about 15 pounds in 4 days and for several months after I left the hospital I was weak and exhausted (from what I still don’t know).
This year I have been back to my roots — running. I will think about getting back into fighting shape later. Right now I am working on the cardio aspects of my training.
To keep myself h0nest, I have been using RunKeeper on my iPhone 3GS (which uses the internal GPS) to manage my entire running process. It then posts it to the web where I can measure calories burned and times and even track the direct link between a specific climb and the speed of attack. It does not however add in the temperature….
Unfortunately, Greenville is a hilly place. A really hilly place.
So is SELLING…
Most of sales is attacking a hill — a challenge, a target, a opportunity, a commission quota… There is no level playing ground and if you should be worried if it feels like you can do your job while coasting (that means a “cheaper” someone else can probably do the same thing).
Getting in fighting sales shape is about training on the hills. You practice on a slope and challenge yourself to run the course faster and more efficiently each time.
You become a master of winning where other people get “winded”…
It you have been in sales long then you can appreciate when I make the observation that SALES is a fight. It require discipline, dedication, and dogged training. To be the best (or even get better) you have to “put in the time” in the sales gym. You can’t get better by being a “January Gym Going”…
It doesn’t work. You will never be the dude giving the knockout punch. You’ll find yourself gasping for breath, knocked around, and feeling like you just got sucker punched. And the reality is just that. You got taken (and lost the deal)…
Like a good fight, the winner knows what he is going to do before the chime of the bell. He has a plan and he executes with a zeal of a man who is about to get his head split open if he doesn’t win. It’s that intense.
So what do you do?
You “put in the time”! (like a lot of life, there is no shortcut….)
You study your craft, study the big players, study some great sources (like Seth and Sandler and Shamus and SalesClub)… and you decide that whatever happens (no matter how badly you get hurt) you will show up for training the next day… Because that’s what winners do.
And this is your fight. And you have come to play……
Part of achieving outrageously enviable performance is understanding who you are. What you want and why you want it.
Now stop! Get that last idea out of your head. Here is what what you just thought: “I already know what I want. In fact, I just told that guy over there what I was trying to do….”
There are ab0ut 63 different combinations of this type of answer and they are ALL wrong.
I want the real answer. The answer that you haven’t told any one about.
This reason is a little more moving. It’s personal. It’s foundational to who are you.
AND it’s the difference between the life and death of your dreams.
You need to believe that. Listen with me:
“You are wonderful” may sound corny, wimpy, fem, or altogether nutty, but until you believe that YOU (yourself) are ALL you need, you probably won’t find yourself accomplishing outrageously enviable success…
NOTE: This is a DEW View rant, you can stop reading this right about now…
I had a thought while running today — about lazy bizdev schmoes. It really pisses me off that in 2009 (with a horrible economy) bad sales people still keep getting thrown the “benefit of the doubt”… As if another decade of their excuse-making is the answer to poor performance. Enough already! Put in the effort or find a new job!
Let’s put this into perspective.
Just a few questions for you. Rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10:
How do you rate your confidence that you could land big customers? (1 is “low confidence”)
When dealing with prospects in the past, how often were your skills not “tough” enough to land the deal? (1 is “very often”)
How long were you able to maintain your sales success momentum after you penetrated your first account? (1 is only a few months…. not long enough)
During the sales process, how hard was it to maintain your skills and close the deal? (1 is “pretty darn hard”)
When you attempt sales success, how satisfactory is your ongoing performance to you? (1 is “I have a lot to work on)
How did you score?
Did you rate yourself a 25(middle of the road), a 10(needs some work), or a 47(pretty much the guru of “All Things Salable”)?
Until Viagra came along, your only hope for having better sex was random herbs and crazy acupuncture. Now you just take a little blue pill and life is bliss….
BUT it is not quite the same when you suck at sales. Your floppy sale pitch and unimaginative “pick ups” can’t be solved that fast. And let’s just say that when you get caught with your pants down, you look really pathetic.
The reality is that you can change this. It requires the one thing you control — EFFORT…
So put in the effort to be better and stop telling me the 74,000 reasons why you “are at 102% of a half-ass quota”!
High-performers in the world of “deal making” share the universal quality of self-assessment. It’s an internal process of strategically measuring the inputs and outputs of a process or idea (or just “what went down…”) and deciding if it could be done better. And that’s all good. It’s more than good — it’s necessary.
You work better when you work with gut instinct. At this stage in your deal process, you generally know what NOT to do (which is 2/3 of the learning process) and WHERE you need to head. But to be the best, you have to be extraordinary — and that requires a different, new, or abstractly innovative idea. Everything that your boss won’t probably agree with…. because it’s not safe.
But there’s actually science to prove that you do make better decisions from gut instinct rather than thinking too much.
“Whether evaluating abstract objects (Chinese ideograms) or actual consumer items (paintings, apartments, and jellybeans), people who deliberated on their preferences were less consistent than those who made non-deliberative judgments,” write authors Loran F. Nordgren (Northwestern University) and Ap Dijksterhuis (Radboud University, The Netherlands).”
And check this out. The science gets even more compelling. After 5 different independent studies, the authors found that “the more complex the decision, the less useful deliberation became.”
That means that less “thought-manship” and more gut instinct is the key to outrageous deal success.
P.S. Ever wonder why outrageous success is so hard to predict (i.e. there’s no formula)? It’s because you’re thinking too hard about it. As you move with gut instinct you see enough of the distance to move around obstacles to get to the finish line. And, like running at the North Pole, you don’t really need to look over your shoulder because your competition is slim…. (and that’s where I like to play)
Under the right incentive almost any one of us can run the same distance in the same amount of time.
It might only be 20 feet… or 2… but until we scale the challenge with hills and distance and time requirements, we are all pretty much the same.
There’s a certain quiet inspiration to that observation. That what separates us from each other is our will to win.
Success is not about the 20 feet where we are all the same. It’s how we perform on the hills and over a long distance that determine our destiny.
And it’s on those hills where we have the greatest opportunity to separate ourselves from the pretenders.
You’re fighting for air. For the finish-line. You just want this part of the race to be over. And yet you find yourself half-way up a hill with the goal somewhere over the top of the ridge with nothing left but the guts to put one foot in front of the other.
And so that’s what you do.
You run…
Because you believe in your heart (and hope in your soul) that the goal is up ahead.
And even if it’s not, you’ve left the pack behind…
There are not many “walking on fire” acts of bravery that compare to stepping into the shoes of “chief sales maker”….Whether you are the CEO of a 1-man start-up venture or the lead sales architect at a Fortune 10 global enterprise, gambling your reputation, your paycheck , and your lifestyle on your ability to generate a lot of SOMETHING from a wide-open disadvantageous position of NOTHING is a complete adrenaline adventure…
It’s not something you start without fighting to be the last one standing.
And so I am confused why sales dudes of all shapes, colors, creeds, and skills give up so easily (and usually with the best of excuses). Did I miss something, somewhere where it became fashionable to replace effort with hope? And why does everyone have a “side-project” going on instead of a “life project”?
It’s really much more simple than that. Success is about putting in the effort, the time, the passion to show up for your destiny. And if you think about it:
If you quit today you never get to see the success of tomorrow.
Warren Buffett famously coined the term “skin in the game” in his business insight that you can “guarantee” the success of a company by requiring C-level executives to use their own money to buy stock in the particular company they are running. Since the company’s interests and the senior leadership’s interests are the same thing, you have maximum inertia in the right direction…
That’s great for running a business, but let’s go another direction.
If you’ve played on an outdoor basketball court at all, then you know what it’s like to leave “skin in the game”. It can be brutal. Every dive and fall leaves a scrape, a gash, or a bruise.
The harder you play, the tougher you need to be.
So it is on the court of “changing the world”…
You should assume that you will leave skin in the game if you really believe in something:
If you don’t have skeptics… then your idea isn’t big enough…
If you don’t have critics… then you are doing everything wrong…
If you don’t have a nemesis… then you are not changing the status quo…
If you have skin in the game, you can expect to be regularly maligned, misunderstood, hated… and most possibly SUCCESSFUL!
Understanding “why” is a frustrating part of life and more specifically your sales negotiations. You can work your ass off, do a lot of things right, and still not get a deal done.
It’s a punch in the gut!
I have had deal-makers get transferred, get sick, get laid off, get fired, get demoted, get married, get retired, get bored and a million other bad and “unplanned” things that kill a deal.
It’s always tough to handle — especially since it almost always unforeseen.
The danger is that you lose motivation trying to dissect something that is too random to really be valuable. There is nothing there. Life sucks! Move on!
Don’t stop to assess, plan, re-strategize, over-think or anything else labeled “the logical” next step. The truth is that you are punch-drunk — like Rocky in the 11th round. You can’t trust your logic or your emotions. What you do next has to be something that is practiced and un-emotional:
Keep your head up — You can’t “suck wind” and get energized with your chin tucked in…
Keep your hands up — You still need to “protect your chin” with your other prospects…
Keep your legs up — You need to push farther and faster now that that you are “behind”…
Keep your eyes up — You need to believe in your vision now more than ever…
You can take a gut punch and hit the mat or keep moving…
Did you notice at about 45 seconds into the video where she says that the reason she is doing this is to “test the theory about her not being talented”?
She said in a sentence why high-performers act the way they do.
WHY?
To test the boundaries of possibility. To push high-performance even higher. To set a personal record. To master an impossible vision. To change the world in a way that others can only criticize.
Kari got two standing ovations for her performance and she probably deserved a third. You may not get a standing ovation for what you do…. ever. You may never get recognized for testing your theory. But you will know…
And knowing that within YOU is the ability to change the world is the first step in making a difference.
Many thanks to the dozens of you who have sent me kind messages over the last two weeks asking where The DEW View! had gone. 
Sometimes life throws you a curve ball.
Think through the mind of your customer… and ask yourself if you are “illogically” wooing your customer. Are you doing what no one else will do to make them successful? Are you working to guarantee that your customer hits a home run by working with you?
“Sir, that’s the fee we added recently to anyone returning their vehicle at the end of their lease. It’s helps to offset our recent losses.”
Since when did we as business people decide that having conversations was too much work?
I got a call about 6 weeks ago from a close friend of mine who used to be a top adviser when I was CEO at ACCESS. 
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Do you write a lot of emails?
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Under the right incentive almost any one of us can run the same distance in the same amount of time.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=44e1d16b-0fe4-486a-a42c-209e19c9fec5)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=5dbae9c2-2486-4975-af6c-6fd2fc275d34)
Warren Buffett famously coined the term “skin in the game” in his business insight that you can “guarantee” the success of a company by requiring C-level executives to use their own money to buy stock in the particular company they are running. Since the company’s interests and the senior leadership’s interests are the same thing, you have maximum inertia in the right direction…![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=236969c4-5d60-4eab-bb65-1d43ed143adf)
Understanding “why” is a frustrating part of life and more specifically your sales negotiations. You can work your ass off, do a lot of things right, and still not get a deal done.![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=351c64f9-1c90-4366-ba6b-9bacb34a482d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=805d48f3-ffd0-4022-8b67-b44127468560)
