Mature from the desperate pleas of “tell me what to do!” to the confident leadership of “don’t tell me what to do.”
Mature from the desperate pleas of “tell me what to do!” to the confident leadership of “don’t tell me what to do.”
As the subject matter experts, rock-stars that we are, we’re often burdened with taking the customer’s challenges and needs and developing our position, messaging, and solutions for the rest of the team.
We all know it is easier to edit than create, and therein lies the challenge. After blood, sweat, and tears are invested in solution creation, the meddling fools who delegated the creation authority to us in the first place feel the need to take our effort and begin the process again from the beginning, turning over each stone.
And turning them over again. And again.
The horse is dead.
Stop beating it.
Stop thinking on our time; We’ve invested our creative effort offline, previously, and have communicated it to you with good reason. Be a professional, stay up to date, and be prepared.
The review is not the starting point; it’s the affirming close.
We’ve all experienced the mind that won’t let go of a problem.
It might be stress, a problem to solve, tomorrow’s presentation, or making the system show the way we want; we perseverate on these ideas well beyond their merit, and these concerns will surface at any moment.
But there’s a time and a place for everything. Perhaps it’s time to make dinner. To join in your life. To go grocery shopping.
Develop the habit of putting these ideas out of your mind.
When they start opening the door, slam it on their fingers, lock it and latch it and move on with your life. The problems, challenges, and presentations will still be there when you get back to them. They have to be- their fingers are stuck in the door.
That’s gotta hurt.
Fear of failure may drive you to work harder. And in so doing, you may succeed. But with success will come greater responsibilities, greater potential failure, greater drive to avoid failing. You may go far, but when fear is the foundation of your motivation, the inevitable failure in your future will tumble the whole tower of blocks.
If, on the other hand, you risk failure by measuring it and its companion, reward, there is joy and art in your motivation. You will work harder to push the envelope. When failure arrives you’ll recognize it, welcome it with a hardy “I knew I’d find you eventually,” then shrug and carry on.
What’s your motivation?*
If you find yourself in the fear-of-failure camp, here’s a helpful exercise. In Pre-Sales, as in Sales as in baseball as in life, great batting averages are barely above .300. Face it, you’ve failed. You’ve failed often. So go back to a few deals you’ve lost and spend fifteen minutes looking at your presentation, your differentiators, your themes, and the way in which you demonstrated your solution. If it’s had time to settle, to breathe, then the reasons for the failure will jump right out at you.
“How could I have been saying this when the customer obviously needed that?”
Learn from your failures.
*Failure can be risked and feared in darker, more dangerous ways. Risk without caution, without preparation, is foolhardy and invites catastrophic failure. Worse yet, fear of failure can drive you to avoidance, procrastination, safe decisions. Then there are no rewards; success becomes a failure.
Experience has taught me to listen to my experience.
When faced with different situations, my inner monologue* kicks in and starts feeding me nuggets of advice:
Listen to the advice your inner monologue feeds you. You’ve spent years developing it.
*It’s not a dialogue- I don’t converse with it, I listen to it.
In a recent engagement, I’ve been paired with a pecuniary peer in pursuit of building a business case.
We worked together with the customer in a workshop and emerged with very different interpretations. On its own, this is not surprising- ask different individuals what happened in a meeting and you’ll get different answers- but we had core and complimentary purposes for the workshop. I found obstacles and points of change. The logical implications and resolutions flowed from that seed. He found an accounting indicator that was far out of range (and not in a good way) for the customer’s industry.
I focus from the qualitative perpective, taking processes, systems, information, strategies and data and craft the logical argument; he approaches from the quantitative perspective, taking processes, systems, information, strategies and data and crafts the fiancial justification.
Together we earned executive buy in. We made a formidable team.
This post was originally titled “Logic vs. Data,” but that’s wrong. It’s not Yin vs. Yang; it’s Yin and Yang.
We’ve all been to a meeting or an event where a bit of corporate culture was born. Meeting catch-phrases and events take on a humorous life of their own and become a relationship link among the participants, becoming the stuff of legends. Konica Minolta’s commercials and The Office series are chock full of examples of this.
Though we try to boil down our messaging into catchy themes and analogies, there’s no guarantee they’ll resonate. So work with the audience to find what does stick. Corporate-culture themes can emerge in the midst of a presentation if you’re listening for them.
If an audience member volunteers it, maybe as a wisecrack, a comment on bullet point, or a strong opinion, positive or negative, of what you’re saying or showing, all the better. You’ve got something you can work with. Hold on to it. Play it up. Repeat it in a different context and in a humorous, self-deprecating way. If another audience member joins in the fun, you’re set, you’re immortal, you have been crowned a legend.
Two years down the road, when you bump into someone who was there, they won’t remember your name, they won’t even remember what you were showing, but when they say the secret catch-phrase, you’ll have a good laugh and an even better bond.
Early in my career, I read George Will’s excellent “Men at Work,” which not only made a baseball fan out of me, but helped me understand professionalism. Hard work, practice, and development of skills apply to talent-related activities, not just white collar careers.
Is a creative person talented or professional? Neither. Both. The creative person has a different end in mind. For example:
If they give you a box of Legos and you build the little space-ship or car pictured on the cover, you’re solving problems; if you take that same box of Legos and make a trebuchet out of it, you’re being creative.
You have the same ingredients, the same effort, but completely different goals.
If your customer says something you disagree with, and you have valid arguments, then challenge them.
Not their authority, not their past decisions, not their role in the decision, no. But their preconceptions, their misunderstandings, and their prejudices are fair game.
Give them a mental challenge. Spar with them.
You’re an expert in your domain, and they’re an expert in theirs. You’re at par. But you probably know more about their domain than they do about yours. Advantage you.
You’re asking them to make a huge investment and business decision. Let them know what you’re made of. Take a punch and punch back. They’ll respect you for it.
We all travel. Now and again we’re challenged to save costs. I did some brainstorming and here are some ideas I’ve come up with: