In his book ‘Close to the Wind’, around the world yachtsman Pete Goss, explains the circumstances that made him give up his chance of winning the Vendee Globe in December 1996, when he went 160 miles out of his way to rescue the almost dead French sailor Raphael Dinelli. I met Pete a few years ago and asked him how; with so many others in the race, it fell on him to abandon his chance of winning. His answer was quite simple. “When someone needs your help – you just help them”, he said. “I was the nearest,” He’d just acted on his instinct.

My work involves me in supporting clients in building their confidence and enhancing their leadership skills. Not just identifying what’s working and doing more of it but discarding what isn’t working. By helping them to break old patterns (what’s not working) and establish new ones, new patterns of behaviour once established soon become instinctive. And with a little practice, it takes less time to develop a new behaviour pattern than you might think.

I was recently looking over some course material for a two day workshop on ‘Leadership’. Under the ‘what you will learn’ section they had, amongst other things, listed:

You will learn

• How to evaluate workplace relationships for maximum productivity
• How to lead with integrity and earn the respect of your co-workers while getting the job done
• How to influence the most persuasive person in your organisation
• How to align a team towards a common direction
• How to motivate the unmotivated
• The 5 steps that successful leaders use to develop other people
• How to achieve results through relationships

All very important competences of course. However, the title of the workshop was ‘The Leader within You’ and irrespective of the title, from surveying the rest of the material, it quite plainly focused on the fact that this was new learning.

Open any sales manual and you’ll come across references to the importance of ‘building rapport’ with prospects and clients. Dictionaries refer to this as ‘sympathising or being in tune with the other person’. The manuals often suggest that this involves new learning for the sales person, in much the same way as it did on the leadership workshop. It can also be seen to have a direct correlation to the level of self-confidence that the sales person possesses.

I remember taking a cold call from a salesman last year. “Hello John, how are you today, did you have a good weekend?” His manual had told him to build rapport early on, before proceeding with his presentation. I didn’t know him and quite frankly took exception to a complete stranger being so familiar and patronising. I cut the call short.

What happens when you walk into a room full of strangers? Unless you are intending to spend the rest of the evening alone, sooner or later you’ll gravitate to a particular individual (or group of individuals). To the proverbial ‘fly on the wall’ it may well look as if you’ve known each other for years, since you are getting on so well.

From the neuro linguistic (NLP) point of view you’d be demonstrating rapport with the other person by matching or mirroring their gestures or postures and even matching their rate of breathing. How do you do that? Well, unless you’ve studied and applied some of these techniques intentionally, you will be quite unaware that you are doing it.

As human beings we have a natural ability to build rapport. I appreciate there are tools and techniques for analysing this and building on it so that we can do it more effectively. I use them with my own clients. Never-the less by working with what’s there, by just being yourself and trusting yourself and being genuinely interested in the other person, you’ll build rapport without being patronising.

Do you ever go to meetings and look around, then wonder what you are there for?

I once worked with a client who employed a telesales company to generate appointments for the sales team. The only problem was (against my advice, I might add) they were working in isolation. The client company had no marketing strategy. They had no means of making sure that the prospects were at the right position in the sales pipeline to qualify for a face to face meeting. What sort of response do you think the sale team got from a large number of prospects?

I only agreed to the meeting because your people were so insistent and I wanted to put the phone down.

They wasted so much time with meetings ‘blowing out’.

On a number of occasions when I’ve sat in on monthly sales meetings with clients, I’ve noticed that the main focus of the meeting was an analysis (often in great detail) of the business they didn’t get and why. This often leads to some finger pointing and “you said you would” types of conversation. I remember once asking the sales manager what was the prime purpose of such meetings? “To motivate the team”, he said. “So why have they all left in a worse frame of mind than the one they came in with?”, I replied.

The next month we tried something a little different.

 
Instead of going around the table analysing failings, we went around asking the team to summarise what they had done to create the sales successes they had each been responsible for the previous month. Noticeably, as they took turns to contribute it built up a positive momentum. Such comments as “I’ll try that next month”, were quite common along with “that’s a really good idea – well done”.

Can you imagine the motivational effect this had? It was fantastic.

 
Have you ever tried to make an appointment with someone only to be told, “Sorry, I’m in wall to wall meetings all day”? Maybe they might find more time for you if they started to apply the Pareto Principle to their meetings? Identify the 20% of those meetings that contribute to 80% of their targets. Ask themselves whether they really need to be there.

You can take the application of the Pareto Principle even further.

 
By recognising the best use of your energy, you don’t need to try so hard or work so long. Identify what you are already doing that works really well. Delegate or just stop doing those things outside that 20% where you are most productive. What is likely to happen is that you will become even more productive.

As Confucius is reported to have said, “Man who chases two rabbits catches neither.”

A few weeks ago I was listening to a radio phone-in whilst driving to an appointment. The topic was ‘Running your own Business’ and the guest was one of those ‘overnight business successes’. You know the story – after 20 years in business he became an ‘overnight success’ and celebrity!

One caller rang in to complain about how the UK supermarkets had moved into the domestic electrical market and because of their buying power were forcing the likes of him out of business. What should he do?

You may not be surprised at the answer, but how is it that so many people in similar positions who also know the answer, seem to do nothing about it? The answer of course was to ‘develop a unique selling proposition’, that the competition was unable to match. Offer your customers ‘added value’. Within the space of a minute the speaker was suggesting how he might do just that. Whether or not the caller took the advice we’ll never know.

I took a call last week from a former client of mine who’s in the tool hire business, and phoned to update me on his progress. Since we had last spoken, he’d undertaken a survey of his customers to ask them ‘what they wanted’. As a result of the survey, he’d not only taken their views on board, but acted upon them. Within three months he’d redesigned his website, extended his scope of services (by offering more added value) and seen his turnover increase by 20%. I’m sure that the very fact that he’s contacted his customer base (without trying to sell to them) had a positive effect on the relationship and contributed to the upturn in business in itself.

I know it’s been said so often that business owners and CEOs get so immersed in the business, they have little time to work on it. They can also lose sight of what it’s about. It’s no good having a real passion for producing black widgets if the market has shifted and is now demanding red ones. You are in business to make money, not widgets!

So what other factors contribute to success in business? I referred, tongue in cheek, to an overnight success that took 20 years. Overnight successes rarely happen; you need staying power and determination; but that doesn’t mean going on blindly!

You also need to be able to stand back from time to time, be honest with yourself about your success criteria and change course if you need to. I call it plan-do-review.

Another major factor is the willingness to take advice and act on it. Research shows that those who do take advice, enjoy more success than those who don’t. It also shows that women are more likely to take advice than men. Perhaps we’d better not go there right now!

 
So having collected your data as carefully and objectively as possible, and having established the validity of the measures you have used, it is important to clearly show that you are comparing like with like. This might prove difficult depending on your particular business circumstances, but it is well worth going the extra mile at this stage of the process if you are to ensure you obtain the most effective outcome. Armed with all this it is now time to consider what’s to be done…

 
I’d suggest you go for the ‘low hanging fruit’ first. By that I mean have a good look at what is working and do more of it;

• Who are your best sales performers and what can everyone learn from them? Organise a ‘best practice’ meeting.
• Which products or service elements are your most profitable and who are your major customers – maybe they can be encouraged to buy more!
• What needs to happen for you to be able to generally sell more to existing customers?
• What elements of your commission structure work best for you – change the ones that don’t!

 
Once you’ve done this, you can move on to the more short and medium term actions, for example;

• If you undertake your own distribution, to what extent do your drivers ‘sell’ for you? Perhaps they could use some training.
• How innovative are you? Are you relying too much on out of date products, taste or fashion? If so, address it.
• Does everyone at the customer interface within the business (they needn’t necessarily be in a selling role) appreciate and agree precisely what’s expected of them and by when? (Many companies still fail to identify the expectations they have of their staff and the time it might take to satisfy them)

 
As you can see, one thing I’ve omitted to suggest is to increase the number of sales people or blame the poor performers and dismiss them. Before you even start to think about this, you need to identify the value of your current resources and work to use them more effectively.

 
One question you might ask is ‘are sales falling or is profitability – or both’? Remember the old adage ‘Turnover is Vanity and Profit is sanity’? I appreciate that in some industries and businesses, turnover is a recognised measure of the capability to deliver. Some buying authorities are reluctant to award contracts that would themselves form too high a proportion of current turnover. Aside from that it maybe that you are enjoying increased profitability from a lower sales volume – so does it really matter?

 
Assuming it does – what next? Take a look at your measures. What measures do you have in place and on what basis are they telling you that sales are down? If you analyse your various product or service lines, are they all showing a downward sales trend to a similar extent?

 
What other dynamics are in place? Has there been some extraordinary event that has had a general impact on the market – health and safety issues or the media impact from a food scare for instance (I recently heard that some UK online marketing businesses had been effected by EBay’s decision not to list their products in the US, although I since heard they were looking to reverse their decision).

 
Check back for the next installment of this short series where I’ll address these questions in more detail…