Adapting Your Sales Approach to the Buyer’s Journey

Today, by the time a B2B sales professional meets with a buyer, that buyer has already reviewed a vast amount of information about potential solutions to address their problem or need – through online searches, inbound emails, social media, etc. In fact, according to SiriusDecisions, 67% of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally.  What this means for sales professionals is that understanding your buyer – knowing what they know, understanding their needs, and learning how they buy -  has never been more important.

In her recent blog, Three New Facts You Need to Know about Your Buyer’s Journey, Alison Murdock, VP of Marketing at 6sense, highlighted three distinct buying scenarios, differentiated mainly by decision process, length of sales cycle, and purchase price. To succeed in selling into any one of these scenarios, sales professionals need to ask the right questions to determine their target’s buying scenario, and then map their approach and sales activities accordingly.

With control of the sales cycle now shifting to the buyer (Murdock: “The buyer is now in the driver’s seat”) it’s a good time for sales managers and teams to assess strengths and development areas in light of the new paradigm. What are the effective sales qualities and sales behaviors that will help sales professionals meet the client where they are in their buyer’s journey, rather than just checking boxes on the sales cycle worksheet?

Lumina Learning provides a research-based sales assessment, a state-of-the-art development tool based on the latest market research, called Lumina Sales.  Lumina Sales provides sales professionals with a highly customized report based their own personal strengths and weaknesses. Lumina Sales looks at 24 qualities of effective sales people, such as “competitor savvy”, “proactive networking”, “methodical prospecting”, and “reflective understanding” and assesses for the individual which of those qualities come naturally and which need development. The 24 qualities are mapped to a six-stage sales cycle, which is then mapped to the corresponding stages in a buyer’s cycle.  With this information, the sales professional, and their leader, can identify and address gaps that may be impacting sales success. For example, reflective understanding is a quality tied to “understand needs” in the sales cycle, and “buyer defines requirements & criteria” in the buyer’s cycle.  If the sales professional is weak in fully understanding the client’s goals and needs, they may struggle in adequately qualifying the client, or propose a solution that doesn’t directly meet their needs. 

Something that sets Lumina apart from other assessments is its identification of “overextended” behaviors. Overextended behaviors are those behaviors which, when under pressure or in stressful situations, become “too much of a good thing.” For example, when “competitor savvy” becomes “I-know-best research”; or when “stimulating ideas” become “creative overload”; or when “decisive close” becomes “forcing the close.” Understanding the triggers for these overextended behaviors, and which of the stages in the sales and buyer’s cycles are impacted by those behaviors, are key to creating an effective development plan and achieving sales success.

If you’d like to learn more about how Lumina Sales can improve your ability to adapt to your buyer’s journey and achieve sales success, please contact me at info-us@luminalearning.com or 888.827.8855.

Stay Fit and Focused in 2015

May is National Employee Health and Fitness Month! It is time to shift our focus from adapting to new healthcare regulation to evaluating the actual health and well being of our companies and their workforces.  Healthy people will not thrive in an organization that doesn’t have a wellness mindset. Responsibility for a company’s health and wellness is equally up to the employer and employee. In 2015, the key to employee engagement is corporate health and wellness. In preparation for National Employee Health and Fitness Month, individuals and companies need to create a plan to look inward at their own health and the health of their organizations.

The environment you enter into when you go to work is essential to your motivation and work output. Creating a culture where people can flourish is key to their feeling nurtured, valued and respected.  This is the foundation needed in order for them to prosper and fully engage in their work.

There are three key areas to survey when looking at employee engagement: retention, absenteeism and presenteeism. The biggest threat to employers in the short-term is turnover, presenteeism and attitude. You want those who are showing up to be fully attentive and present while they are in the office, not playing on their phone, escaping mindlessly into social media or becoming negative or ambivalent in their attitude towards their work. Companies that have to recruit, rehire, retrain and refit will see costs rise six times on average.  However, this is proven to be less harmful than the damage that is done with disengaged employees.

Some examples of healthy companies I like are The Container Store, Google, Liquid Paper and Kaiser Permanente.  The Container Store is a perennial ‘Best Companies to Work For' recipient. They provide financial incentives for their employees who are investing in their own health and wellness. Google incorporates activities to make a longer workday possible and enhances their employees’ experience by providing onsite workout centers and cafés as well as creativity lounges. Dallas entrepreneur and philanthropist Bette Nesmith Graham, who invented Liquid Paper in the 50s, was a trailblazer. She started a private elementary school with daycare until six in the evening for single and working parents. She also built a prayer and meditation room in her factory where workers would have 20 minutes per day to take a break and read or worship or just enjoy the quiet beauty of the sculpture and circular cushioned bench seating in the room.  Kaiser Permanente incorporates 10-minute physical fitness breaks during the workday.

I recently worked with a mid-size banking institute and they appropriated part of a room at the back part of their kitchen where employees could relax and study in a modern setting. You can create a healthy environment on any budget.

What can we do? Try the following:

For Individuals

• Meditate: Engage in a good solid 20 minutes twice a day
• Practice mindfulness: Concentrate on specific things – laser focus – there are practitioners available in most communities who can teach this skill.
• Exercise: Go for a walk or jog during lunch or before or after work. Research what public spaces are near your office.
• Concentrate on being present for things in your life: Deep-breathing exercises at your desk can help with this.
• Invest in a business or health coach:  This person can help the individual identify their trap doors and show them what stress does to them and where it’s showing up in their career and job. 

For Employers

• Incorporate an on-site fitness center or provide employees gym memberships coupons, design the workday with breaks and workout time.
• Focus on organic nutrients: There are e-commerce companies who bring fruit to workplaces. For example, the company Fruit Share brings fresh fruit biweekly to offices and offers an employee wellness program. Create a café with healthy snacks at the office.
• Do some culture work: Shift the environment so it appreciates the talent it has which may entail tweaking some activities during the day. It really is about if you are living what you say.  Go over, establish or reinforce the company’s Core Values or create new ones that can drive your organizational goals.  You want to have the leaders actually act and react to support those values in place.  For your senior management ask, “Is our leadership in line with our values and what we want our culture to reflect?” “Are their actions, reactions and behaviors in congruence with these values?” “Does our organizational culture support the accomplishment of our yearly strategic goals so that our leaders and our organization can be successful?”
• Take an online quiz as individuals and as an organization: Lumina Life is an organizational health and wellness assessment from Lumina Learning. Each employee completes the assessment, which addresses their personal, mental, emotional and physical factors including how they handle stress and pressure.  In the second half of the assessment, the employee addresses similar factors regarding their organization.  Certified Lumina Learning Practitioners work externally with organizations to deliver and analyze the results, so all responses are kept confidential.  The executive team is then presented with an executive overview of the analysis providing them with valuable information on how their employees view the culture and wellness of the overall organization.

Women Helping Women Achieve Equality

March is Women’s History Month and recently International Women’s Day garnered lots of buzz on social media. Social injustice is rearing its ugly head across the globe daily. Here in America we are sadly reminded that racism is still a very real issue and sexism was never truly dealt with.

We see remarkable leaders like accomplished actor and humanitarian Emma Watson spearheading the movement for gender equality as the UN Women Goodwill Ambassador. She has inspired countless people, young and old, male and female to take a stand with her #HeForShe campaign.

At the 2015 Academy Awards, Best Supporting Actress Winner Patricia Arquette used a few moments of her acceptance speech to shed light on the subject.  Arquette won her Oscar for the portrayal of a young, single mother in the movie Boyhood. Here is a follow up statement she made after her comments generated mixed reactions.

“I wasn’t talking about my own position. I know I’ve been really blessed in my life. What I was talking about is the other 52 percent, and how it doesn’t make sense why they’re being discriminated [against] because of their gender. They’re taking the same student loans but taking years to pay it back, making half a million to a million dollars less over a lifetime. That’s money they’re not putting into Social Security, or using to pay for college or childcare. I won an Academy Award because I played a single mom, moving and moving again and trying to provide for her kids. I thought long and hard about how her life would have been better with wage equality, and if she made those extra cents on the dollar; and how if she was Latina, she’d need to make those fifty cents more, or how if she was African-American, she’d need to make those 40 cents more.” Patricia Arquette, Time Magazine Interview

According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research women make $0.78 for every dollar a man makes and at the rate we are going the disparity won't equalize until 2058. Female CEOs make 20% less of their male counterparts and female lawyers make 43% less than males.

I think how we can help other women is the key question.  Women are now entering a stage of helping each other succeed rather than seeing each other as competition. Now is the right time to bond together and gain traction.

“The rung of the ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a foot long enough to enable them to put other foot somewhat higher”

Thomas H. Huxley

Communicating with Authenticity and Integrity: What We Can Learn from Brian Williams

NBC suspended news anchor Brian Williams this week after accusations arose of him falsely reporting multiple, significant, first-hand encounters in Iraq, Israel and New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. It appears NBC hopes that implementing this six-month suspension will allow the controversy to blow over.  What remains to be seen is whether or not Williams will be able to recover his reputation as further details surface on his mistaken accounts of these major news events.

These days, network newscasters are considered celebrities and experts.  We allow them into our homes every night and assume that what they tell us is fact.  We expect them to check their sources and report with the utmost accuracy.  Trust is a difficult thing to garner and once it is lost, recovering it can be difficult.

“It is hard to imagine why Williams would falsely report events from his perch in one of broadcast journalism’s most coveted jobs in exchange for slightly louder applause,” said Washington Post opinion writer Kathleen Parker.

Brian Williams made a mistake.  He apologized and will likely have to do more of that in the future but, right now, he is holding his breath in hopes that he will be granted the opportunity to leave this debacle behind him and return to NBC Nightly News. So what do we learn from Williams and where do we go from here?

Key opinion influencers, role models and respected leaders in the media and business world must maintain a code of ethics and possess a level of integrity and authenticity of the highest level. When they stray from this practice, there are repercussions, for leadership, for the organization and even for the fans they have let down. How do they regain respect and how do their viewers, colleagues and organizations rebound?

Have you or anyone in your company communicated key information inaccurately? What was the outcome and how was the situation addressed? Many people offer leaders their trust assuming they are worthy of the honor based on their role or title. Trust and credibility should be treated like fine crystal. Once broken, it is very difficult to rebuild. 

Authenticity is necessary for a leader to be able to have influence over others. It doesn’t take long for people to catch on when leaders are not authentic or do not follow through with their promises. People have a desire for their leaders to be real and relatable.  Simply put, a leader is not leading if no one is following.   

One of the most difficult roads for organizations to maneuver is the period after an M&A.  Far too often the employees who remain feel the organization lied to them or at the very least that the company was not being honest and candid. The new organization is now tasked with rebuilding trust where it was lost while their people are wondering who will go and who will stay when the dust settles. So the seed of doubt is now rooted in a bed of distrust. Savvy leadership would focus on rebuilding the morale of the organization during this time, while establishing new corporate values and rules of engagement in an effort to make a smooth transition. It’s often not a quick and easy process but the sooner the employees have vision and experience of the new world the sooner trust can be established and the more effective the outcome.

Will Brian Williams receive a second chance? That has yet to be determined. Six months from now there will be a new controversy to occupy our blog posts and social media rants. Throughout history great leaders have made mistakes, yes leaders are human. Unfortunately in life most of us do not get a second chance in situations like this.  Leaders must be authentic or prepare themselves for what could be an indefinite suspension from influence. When you compromise integrity and trust, recovery can be a very hard, long road.

Dallas Morning News

6 Ways to Become an Authentic Leader

Think back for a minute about the best leader you ever had. What was it that made them memorable? How did they differ from leaders you had before, or from those you’ve had since? If someone immediately comes to mind, chances are it’s because they were an authentic leader.

“Authenticity is the alignment of head, mouth, heart and feet – thinking, saying, feeling and doing the same thing – consistently. This builds trust, and followers love leaders they can trust.” – Dr. Lance Secretan

Too often people are thrust into a leadership role by virtue of their tenure or performance and are not given the benefit of learning how they, as a leader, can be most effective. In the absence of learning how they can apply their true selves to the role, they become the leader they’ve observed in others (effective or not) or that they think they should be.

So how do you become an authentic leader? Here are 6 tips.

Know yourself. Develop a deep understanding of your strengths and weaknesses, how you lead, and how you respond to situations and people around you. Know your communication style so you can adapt it as needed to better connect with others. Where are you most comfortable in the four dimensions of leadership – leading with vision, leading to deliver, leading with drive or leading through people?

Know your people. Take the time to learn their strengths and development areas. Listen empathically to their ideas, concerns, feedback. How do they like to be rewarded? What are their personal and career goals? Find out their communication style preferences.

Be honest. Always. Tell the truth, even when you’d rather not. Allow yourself to be vulnerable – share mistakes and what you learned from them. Give honest, productive feedback on a regular basis. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.

Develop a shared vision. Employees are more likely to help with the journey if they were involved in selecting the destination. Seek out their input.

Walk the talk. Do what you say you’re going to do. Be available and approachable and encourage open discussion to deal with differences and share ideas. Be fair. Listen.

“Check in” daily. What are the 3 - 5 words that best describe the qualities you use as a leader and as the leader you want to be? Several times a day, every day, stop and ask yourself if your behaviors, actions and decisions are congruent with those words.

The more authentic you are as a leader, the more influence and trust you will have with your people, and the greater impact you will have in your organization.

Lead on,

Rebecca