“What do you think?”

 “Many a man would rather you heard his story than granted his request,” wrote Philip Stanhope, the Fourth Earl of Chesterfield. 

Make those around you feel heard by asking the superb question: What do you think? You will open up a floodgate and become a sponge soaking up information. 

Then listen. Listen aggressively. Listen attentively. Listen to the silence. Listen with your eyes. Listen! You may not like what you hear when you ask the question. That's the risk you take. Just remember the seeds of progress are rooted in the unhappy person. It's the pebble in the shoe that causes you to take notice. When to use the question Whenever you are discussing a dilemma or planning a course of future action. After you have shared your views or presented a proposal. When someone comes to you with a problem.

Alternative versions of the question “I value your opinion. Can I get your reaction to this?” “Would you be willing to share your views?” Follow-up questions “What has influenced your thinking about this the most?” “Are there any other perspectives I ought to be aware of?"

Sobel, Andrew; Panas, Jerold (2012-01-05). Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others (p. 16). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

How an Entrepreneur Looks at the World

 People often ask me who are some of the most fascinating people I've interviewed.
I would put Sam Zell on that list.

Sam is the billionaire Chairman of Equity Group Investments well known for calling the top in real estate when he sold $39 billion worth of office properties to Blackstone in 2007. He is also equally well known for taking over the Chicago Tribune that same year and overseeing its demise into bankruptcy only a short time later.

Needless to say, he's a polarizing figure - and he likes it.

Sitting in his penthouse apartment one spring afternoon in Manhattan, Sam gave me a true glimpse into how he - a serial entrepreneur - sees the world.

"The ultimate definition of an entrepreneur is someone who is always thinking he can do things a different, better way. If he walks down the street and sees a painter on a ladder, he thinks, ‘Gee, if he’d moved the ladder to the middle of the wall, then he could paint both sides without having to go up and down the ladder as many times,'" he said. "I can’t tell you why I think that way, but that’s literally the way I think all the time. It’s always been that way. I look at things and see them differently than other people do."


He recounted all the different business ventures he started from the time he was in grade school, which eventually led to his investments in everything from rail car leasing to bicycles to food additive manufacturing. Last year, Forbes ranked him as the 103rd richest man in America.

"I'm very much like a private equity guy is today except that I've always been a private equity guy - with my own private equity!" he said.

But what really struck me was what Sam observed about big companies. There was one major difference, he said, between the way workers behaved in a major corporation versus an entrepreneurial one. He called it using "information as currency."

"I hired this woman from a major corporation, and she was very, very smart. But I fired her within nine months. I promise you this woman had never been fired in her life; she was a major overachiever. But she brought an element from her past job in the corporate world that didn’t fit with our culture. She used information as currency. The most important thing about an entrepreneurial world is that the enemy is without, not within. I can’t have an employee who holds back information for political reasons or unless they are going to get something in return. We operate in a much too fast-paced environment for that kind of internal trading. In a big corporation, almost everything moves slowly so you have more time and opportunity to catch mistakes. That culture often breeds using information as currency. In an entrepreneurial culture, if somebody has information that they’re not sharing with others in my shop, that means that I’m taking risks that I don’t know about.”

If you're an entrepreneur, you know what he's talking about. If you work for a major corporation, you likely also know what he's talking about. Those behaviors, if they're not rooted out quickly, breed organizations where silos develop, political infighting balloons and inefficiencies overcome productivity.

Sam, of course, looking relaxed in his black shirt and jeans, was beyond many of those problems already. One of the biggest issues for him now, he said, was how to give his money away in the most meaningful way.

One program he funded was helping create entrepreneurs in Israel - people just like him.
"They call themselves the Zell-lots!" he said.
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Betty Liu is Editor-at-Large and host of "In the Loop" on Bloomberg Television. Her latest book, Work Smarts: What CEOs Say You Need to Know to Get Ahead, is available on Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and other major booksellers.Posted by:
 Betty Liu

The Buyer Revolution: 4 Steps To Evolve Or Be Toppled

Knowledge will make you free (Photo credit: tellatic)

The rapid changes in technologies and business models continue at breakneck speeds.  Shifting the landscape of buyer behavior along the way.  Fermenting the once dormant ability of buyers to redefine the seller-buyer relationship .  Creating a buyer revolution marching on unabated.

B2B business, marketing, and sales leaders are faced with rethinking long-held strategies and redefining tactics.  Confronted with a new reality, which bears little resemblance to just a few short years ago.  One thing has become clear in the buyer uprising B2B businesses face today – they must evolve or they will be toppled.

Meeting Demands
The buyer revolution is resulting in new demands.  Buyer demands can be boiled down to two essential elements involved in all revolutions.  Information and knowledge.  Buyers are demanding more access to information and want more knowledge.  Just as the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenburg in 1440 changed the world forever, new digital technologies are changing the seller-buyer relationship forever.  Sellers can no longer hold back information and knowledge – or – there will be no relationship.

Information And Knowledge
To evolve today means staking out a leadership position in meeting the demands of buyers.  Specifically, meeting the demands for information and knowledge.  A mistake companies make in their attempts to evolve is focusing on the former versus the later.  Inundating buyers with so much information, it actually harms more than foster relationships.  Information is dumped without thought to knowledge, which the buyer desires to internalize.

Misguided attempts with information are becoming more evident.  The newest is the fad-crazed use of the word “insight” today.  Recasting information as insight.  Insight has no value unless it can be translated into knowledge.  Let these words from a recent interview illuminate:

“Recently, I did spend time on the phone with a rep from (Vendor A).  Not too long but was interested in hearing more.  He said he would send valuable insight on how my issues and such can be fixed.  Well, basically what I got was product information.  Nothing new so to speak.”   Vice President, Retail Banking Group

As you can see here in this simple statement, what actually happened is expectations were raised for knowledge to be gained, only to fall short significantly.  In the end, this does more harm than good.

Evolve You Must
To evolve today, B2B marketing and sales today must work in tandem to bridge the gap between information and knowledge.  What the buyer revolution is all about is buyers no longer want to feel like they have to pull teeth to get the knowledge they need.  The more sellers resist the freeing up of information and knowledge, the more the ramifications of the buyer revolution will persist.  What can B2B businesses do to evolve in the face of the buyer revolution?  Here are four suggested steps:

Identify Gaps Customers Have In Knowledge

This is a crucial step.  B2B companies today will need to engage in buyer insight research to identify the gaps customers and buyers have in knowledge.  Not easy for buyers often have difficulty in articulating and may not use standardized terminologies.  Yet, it must be done.

Evaluate Information

Once you know the knowledge gaps of your customers, it is important to evaluate your existing information.  If you have done your homework, be prepared to cringe.  This effort goes well beyond the content audit often recommended today.  It goes to the heart of what you are willing to give.

Redesign Information

What we may call content, buyers think of as information.  Not getting this could mean your content will be just plain bad.  You need to know what information means to buyers, design it, and deliver it.  One of the causes of content marketing ineffectiveness is related to this issue.  Too much inside-out thinking on content means no connection to the information buyers are seeking.  Frankly, they do not care how cool your content is if it says nothing.

Build A Bridge To Knowledge

Buyers are seeking knowledge.  We may be getting confused with insight being knowledge.  The true difference maker is helping customers to translate information they are receiving into to newfound knowledge they seek.  The role of insight is to be the bridge itself.

  

Companies who get this right will separate themselves from competitors dramatically.

Turn Insight into Knowledge

History serves us well.  Institutions who embraced Gutenberg’s invention and evolved the knowledge of societies flourished.  Those who resisted perished.  The buyer revolution today means flourishing by providing customers and buyers with knowledge they need to accomplish their goals.  Following these four steps helps you to evolve the capability of bridging information to knowledge.

Time is running out.  The pace of change is only quickening.  Evolve you must.

Article by Tony Zambito

What The Younger Generation Wants At Work - With OgilvyOne CEO Brian Fetherstonhaugh

One of the youngest and with-it industries is advertising and no where more so than the new media side. One of the smartest people I know is Brian Fetherstonhaugh, who is the CEO of OgilvyOne, the new media part of Ogilvy, the great advertising company. So it quite interesting to talk to Brian about the younger generation and how it likes to be worked with, he has got many on his staff. Over to Brian.

Brian, you get to spend a lot of time with the younger generation around the world. Have you noticed if there is any difference between them and the generation just before?

BRIAN FETHERSTONHAUGH – Absolutely. A couple of observations, the average age in our company is in it’s late twenties and in Asia and other parts of the world it is even younger. So, we have a very young population and a couple of things are different certainly from the world I grew up in. One is the convergence between work and play – this separation where you go home and your friends are outside of work, it is [now] a different environment and I think these are quite converged.

In our business, we brought back things that we haven’t had in quite a long time – Thirsty Thursdays and Wet Wednesdays where actually work-based social environments, where people can connect with others and their colleagues and sort of bring back some play into the workplace, have been really successful for us and [we have had a] tremendous response from our young employee population.

I think another massive difference is the need for transparency among the millennial employee population. It is not ok for the big bosses to have little quiet meetings and to keep things from the employee base. There used to be an acknowledged separation that those are big management conversations – that separation is no longer accepted. So the expectation from a millennial employee is almost full transparency, authentic communications, “if the company is going through hard times then tell me about them”, or “if the company is going through good times tell me about them and why that is happening.” So I think the expectation of transparency is much higher. Those are two key ones.

KM – How can you be authentic at work without being either a jerk or giving away too many things? How can you be authentic?

BF – I think that people deserve grown-up conversations on almost any topic. I think that people sometimes to either extreme: they hold back the information because the employees aren’t ready or mature enough to hear it. I think that is a mistake. On the other side I think people share but fail to manage the expectations side so I think the best leaders find a way by giving authentic information but also letting people know some of the reasons why and the consequences.

So when you have a revenue slowdown you are going to have to let people go, in most organizations. You can hide behind that and say, “New revenue’s are coming and that’s all magical,” but I don’t think that is fair to people. Certainly the best leaders I have seen will take on, “Here is what is happening with our business, here are the consequences, we will have to make adjustments in our employee talent base”, and then have individual counseling with people to make sure you get to the people you want to get to and want to be a part of the future new reshaped company – you need to get to them one-on-one right away and let them know they are safe and let them know they are valued.

But you owe them the big message, you have to tell people what is going on and one of the realizations in the social media world is even if you don’t want to talk about it, the company is talking about it. You don’t control all the information, it is out there, whether you decide to show it or not.

That’s Brian’s thoughts. Margaret Snell, a former student who now works at CGI, and I are finishing off a book, Postmodern Management: Leading, Managing , Working With People Under 30 The Way They Want To Be Worked With. Why Leading and Managing are crossed off, and that is deliberate, is because those words are too strong, too hierarchical for many of that generation.

Brian’s points on transparency strikes us as very relevant. One of the cautions I give my MBA students in our CEO Insights class, where they interact with 24 CEOs over the semester, is to realize they are hearing leadership advice from people in their 40s and 50s. How much of that advice is relevant for people in their late 20s is an important question. The world has changed enormously since the CEOs were the same age and learning some of their most lasting lessons about leadership as they took on their first leadership positions. Because they are CEOs still in the saddle much of their advice is very germane but some of the lessons of the older people must be tossed over the side.

Four Star General Martin Dempsey, current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. military, in an interview related to me a famous saying in the military, “Generals Fight the Battle of Their Youth”. This equal applies to CEOs. When we were in our 20s and learning our management chops, you held information close to the chest, information was power. In a world of Google GOOG -0.26%, you simply can’t do that anymore. In fact the pendulum has swing the other way, it is far better to share information very widely, it empowers people to solve problems, look for new markets, etc., and to Brian’s point you need to be more transparent, you don’t have much choice with this generation.


 

Karl Moore, Contributor

Foster A Collaborative Sales Team: 5 Ways

It's impossible to work together in a dog-eat-dog showdown. Encourage collaboration and you'll see huge sales growth for years to come.

shutterstock images

In the old days, seeing a sales team work was like watching sharks smell blood in the water and furiously bite everything around them. Darwinian sales managers throw chum in the water in the way of contests, spiffs, shouting matches, and "top dog" awards. For companies that have short-term goals, huge prospect lists, and turn-and-burn attitudes, the feeding frenzy can work.

But for companies with longer sales cycles, more complex and expensive products, and more of the total deal value captured in post-sale annuity-type revenue streams, sales teams should be collaborative.

Collaboration is simply more effective. No one salesperson can marshal the information, contacts, and insights that a coordinated team can. And you don't really need your salespeople working against each other by jumping territories or stealing leads. One of the most effective ways to disrupt a set of existing industry players is to sell to your audience differently.

Here are five ways to make your sales team more collaborative:
1. Don't split commissions
The first move many managers make towards encouraging collaboration is to divide commissions among the salespeople who worked on the deal. In practice, though, splitting commissions always ends up in a vicious circle of compensation gamesmanship. Without fail, you'll wind up in discussions about who contributed more to a closed deal and who should therefore take more of the commission home.

In a recent conversation I had with Dan Pink, bestselling author of Drive, he aptly said: "No matter what compensation scheme management devised, the sales folks figured out a way to game it. (That's not a criticism. I'd respond the same way.) That led management to ratchet up the compensation scheme's complexity –- which, in turn, led sales people to ratchet up the ingenuity of their response. On and on it went."

Instead, it's much more effective to encourage a team culture of collaboration with manager praise, kudos from the "team captain," and unexpected spot bonuses.

2. Share information
No one knows as much about your company, competition, and prospects than everyone put together. The more information is communicated among a sales team, the more you can help each other. Discuss deals everyone is working on as a group. Talk about losses openly and without blame. Solicit your alpha salesperson to help a junior member with a deal. Ask everyone on the team to weigh in on a particularly tough prospect. You'll be amazed when you find that the quietest person has a cousin in the purchasing department of the company you're struggling to break into.

3. Invest in your sales team
The vast majority of sales technology spending goes to systems for oversight and reporting, rather than to empowering collaboration and sales success. Investing in tools, services, and training that help your team do well--individually and as a group--demonstrates your commitment to employee success, and will sell more products. 
4. Hire collaborators, fire selfish sellers
This is obvious, but must not be overlooked. When you interview, pay attention to the people who say, "We achieved," instead of, "I beat my quota." Hire the applicants who talk more about their previous company's growth than their one big deal.

After a team meeting or before an offsite, think over each member of your team and ask yourself, "Who would leave the rest of us stranded? When something goes wrong, who shares least?" If you want to send a message of collaboration to the rest of the team, let that person go.

5. Create external enemies
So many sales teams are built on "friendly competition" between members. Get rid of your top-seller award, and instead encourage collaboration by setting up an outside goal that the team can reach together. The best sports teams in the world pay more to their stars, but their attitudes always emphasize team achievements. Your star shouldn't be proud of her MVP award if your team didn't win the championship.  

Want to become a better, smarter, more effective team builder and communicator? Join us at Inc.'s upcoming Leadership Forum June 10 to June 12 in San Diego. Visit leadership.inc.com for details.

Matthew Bellows is CEO of Yesware, an email service that helps salespeople track conversations, create sales templates, sync emails with CRM and much more. @mbellows