USING THE POWER OF PASSION TO EXPLOIT TOUGH TIMES AND WIN NEW CUSTOMERS
USING THE POWER OF PASSION TO EXPLOIT TOUGH TIMES AND WIN NEW CUSTOMERS
The understandable norm in meltdown times is to hunker down. This works only as long as customers are willing to cooperate and competitors are ready to follow suit. But it entirely misses the opportunity presented by the crisis – while also having an unfortunate effect on our team’s morale, passion, and commitment.
But as proactive leaders, we can go beyond trying to survive these meltdown times. We can even go beyond trying to thrive during the down economy. We can plan to win big, to go from victim to victor, to climb higher while our competitors slide.
The challenges of leadership include managing ever-present business paradoxes. Of the 20 paradoxes we’ve studied, there are 7 manageable paradoxes that organizations can practice to win in tough times. The untrained mind, especially under duress, works to reject these competing ideas and pick easy extremes. Meltdown leaders instead embrace these apparent contradictions to unleash passion:
Spread optimism and spread the ugly truth. Meltdown needs a positive framework. Your people will conquer mountains – if they believe they can and that there’s a point to the battle. But with the hope, they need the unadulterated truth. Cheerleading won’t get the job done if it’s based on wishful thinking rather than hard-core reality. Be a pragmatic idealist in the face of stiff winds. Lead with faith, but mix – in equal amounts – optimism about capturing and keeping customers with ugly truth about the challenges.
Broaden the vision and narrow the focus. Meltdown is no time to have too much of your future tied to too much of your past vision. Broaden it. What else are we passionate about? How about our customers? Where can we make a unique contribution, given the new rules of the game? What are our non-customers up to right now? At the same time, resources are perhaps scarcer than ever, so we had better spend them on the best opportunities that we have. If we’ve wandered in good times into areas where we’re strangers in a strange land, let’s exit. Fast.
Nurture customers and fire customers. Of course, it’s always the time to love your customers, but now’s the time to really love the ones with cash and orders, those who currently have more options. Assign interim customer champions to make sure that nothing is taken for granted. Find ways to help your customers through their own meltdowns – they’ll be sure to remember you. Become even more indispensable. But purge the bad customers – the ones who bring you high levels of demand and complaint and low levels of profit and partnership. You have no time for these marginal or negative contributors. Clean out the address book. Use that extra time to win new good customers who are abandoning your hunkered-down competitors.
Increase freedom and clarify boundaries. The shackles need to go. You’ll be tempted to “batten down the hatches,” but you won’t exploit meltdown with policies, procedures, rules, or regulations. You desperately need good judgment. Give great latitude to anyone who displays it for even a minute. But times are challenging and there’s no time or resources for people to duplicate or overlap efforts. Give more freedom to do what no one else is doing to serve customers, but tell people where the fences are.
Expand creativity and eliminate ideas. Leaders always claim to value innovation, but few really encourage it or measure it. Right now you need 100 percent of your staff thinking like CEOs. Create forums for ideas and the liberty to implement them fast. But you’ll need to eliminate a high percentage of these ideas very quickly. Find your most passionate people at all levels and create Incubator Teams™ – gatekeepers who can kill thoughts without killing thinking.
Take more risks and eliminate risk. You’ve got everyone out on the edge. Push people to do things that are a bit scary. Ask your people every day what risky new action to serve customers or improve operations they have on their agendas. But also clearly delineate what no one can do without clearance until meltdown is over. We may have less cash for fewer tries, so we’d better try fewer – but more radical – things. Poor managers do across-the-board cuts. Meltdown managers reduce costs a lot in some areas, so they can increase spending in places where new customers are waiting.
Execute better and make more mistakes. When customers are already skittish and focusing on price, there’s no room for sloppy execution, mindless bureaucracy, or dumb mistakes. Weed out all waste, no matter how small. But do it to free up resources to make smart mistakes, what we call Intelligent Mistakes™. Try original ideas that could never survive scrutiny in boom times. Meltdown is the time for fresh initiatives out on the cutting edge, where some of them just won’t work. Encourage lots of well-executed mistakes and celebrate every one – while squeezing them for learnings.
We need our team to go far beyond being “happy,” “satisfied,” or “engaged.” We need passion and commitment and Positive Discontent™. Great leaders know that passion to serve and win is built by fresh, positive action, not by fearful retrenching. Organizations that act on these 7 paradoxes can recapture the power of passion with their teams, use that passion to capitalize on the tough times and win new customers, and dramatically differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Above all, keep a nice rhythm between pressure and stress. Great leaders in down economies learn how to convert stress into positive energy, confusion into an opportunity to learn, and insecurity into a challenge to grow. People can perform well in meltdown times, as long as they know they can still be successful. Remember that meltdown is a time for both war rooms and party rooms.
Here’s your opportunity to use some innovative approaches to capture the power of passion with your team. You can turn potential disaster into real growth and wealth. Meltdown is frightening – but if handled well, it may be the opportunity of a lifetime.
USING THE POWER OF PASSION TO EXPLOIT TOUGH TIMES AND WIN NEW CUSTOMERS - To learn more about this author, visit James R. Lucas's Website.
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There is one large business truth in traumatic times: Either you’re exploiting change, or change is exploiting you.
The understandable norm in meltdown times is to hunker down. This works only as long as customers are willing to cooperate and competitors are ready to follow suit. But it entirely misses the opportunity presented by the crisis – while also having an unfortunate effect on our team’s morale, passion, and commitment.
But as proactive leaders, we can go beyond trying to survive these meltdown times. We can even go beyond trying to thrive during the down economy. We can plan to win big, to go from victim to victor, to climb higher while our competitors slide.
The challenges of leadership include managing ever-present business paradoxes. Of the 20 paradoxes we’ve studied, there are 7 manageable paradoxes that organizations can practice to win in tough times. The untrained mind, especially under duress, works to reject these competing ideas and pick easy extremes. Meltdown leaders instead embrace these apparent contradictions to unleash passion:
Spread optimism and spread the ugly truth. Meltdown needs a positive framework. Your people will conquer mountains – if they believe they can and that there’s a point to the battle. But with the hope, they need the unadulterated truth. Cheerleading won’t get the job done if it’s based on wishful thinking rather than hard-core reality. Be a pragmatic idealist in the face of stiff winds. Lead with faith, but mix – in equal amounts – optimism about capturing and keeping customers with ugly truth about the challenges.
Broaden the vision and narrow the focus. Meltdown is no time to have too much of your future tied to too much of your past vision. Broaden it. What else are we passionate about? How about our customers? Where can we make a unique contribution, given the new rules of the game? What are our non-customers up to right now? At the same time, resources are perhaps scarcer than ever, so we had better spend them on the best opportunities that we have. If we’ve wandered in good times into areas where we’re strangers in a strange land, let’s exit. Fast.
Nurture customers and fire customers. Of course, it’s always the time to love your customers, but now’s the time to really love the ones with cash and orders, those who currently have more options. Assign interim customer champions to make sure that nothing is taken for granted. Find ways to help your customers through their own meltdowns – they’ll be sure to remember you. Become even more indispensable. But purge the bad customers – the ones who bring you high levels of demand and complaint and low levels of profit and partnership. You have no time for these marginal or negative contributors. Clean out the address book. Use that extra time to win new good customers who are abandoning your hunkered-down competitors.
Increase freedom and clarify boundaries. The shackles need to go. You’ll be tempted to “batten down the hatches,” but you won’t exploit meltdown with policies, procedures, rules, or regulations. You desperately need good judgment. Give great latitude to anyone who displays it for even a minute. But times are challenging and there’s no time or resources for people to duplicate or overlap efforts. Give more freedom to do what no one else is doing to serve customers, but tell people where the fences are.
Expand creativity and eliminate ideas. Leaders always claim to value innovation, but few really encourage it or measure it. Right now you need 100 percent of your staff thinking like CEOs. Create forums for ideas and the liberty to implement them fast. But you’ll need to eliminate a high percentage of these ideas very quickly. Find your most passionate people at all levels and create Incubator Teams™ – gatekeepers who can kill thoughts without killing thinking.
Take more risks and eliminate risk. You’ve got everyone out on the edge. Push people to do things that are a bit scary. Ask your people every day what risky new action to serve customers or improve operations they have on their agendas. But also clearly delineate what no one can do without clearance until meltdown is over. We may have less cash for fewer tries, so we’d better try fewer – but more radical – things. Poor managers do across-the-board cuts. Meltdown managers reduce costs a lot in some areas, so they can increase spending in places where new customers are waiting.
Execute better and make more mistakes. When customers are already skittish and focusing on price, there’s no room for sloppy execution, mindless bureaucracy, or dumb mistakes. Weed out all waste, no matter how small. But do it to free up resources to make smart mistakes, what we call Intelligent Mistakes™. Try original ideas that could never survive scrutiny in boom times. Meltdown is the time for fresh initiatives out on the cutting edge, where some of them just won’t work. Encourage lots of well-executed mistakes and celebrate every one – while squeezing them for learnings.
We need our team to go far beyond being “happy,” “satisfied,” or “engaged.” We need passion and commitment and Positive Discontent™. Great leaders know that passion to serve and win is built by fresh, positive action, not by fearful retrenching. Organizations that act on these 7 paradoxes can recapture the power of passion with their teams, use that passion to capitalize on the tough times and win new customers, and dramatically differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Above all, keep a nice rhythm between pressure and stress. Great leaders in down economies learn how to convert stress into positive energy, confusion into an opportunity to learn, and insecurity into a challenge to grow. People can perform well in meltdown times, as long as they know they can still be successful. Remember that meltdown is a time for both war rooms and party rooms.
Here’s your opportunity to use some innovative approaches to capture the power of passion with your team. You can turn potential disaster into real growth and wealth. Meltdown is frightening – but if handled well, it may be the opportunity of a lifetime.
USING THE POWER OF PASSION TO EXPLOIT TOUGH TIMES AND WIN NEW CUSTOMERS - To learn more about this author, visit James R. Lucas's Website.
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John PowerJohn Power, founder of Biltmore Franchise Consulting, has extensive experience developing and marketing franchises and business opportunities. He has been in and around franchising for over twenty years. From 1980 through 1990 he conceptualized, organized, and developed the American Video Association. He grew AVA to 2,000 national members, before selling the company it 1990. It was later merged into another home video marketing company. From 2000 to 2005 he worked as a contract marketing and human resources consultant to several local and national companies. In 2005 Mr. Power began working as a franchise development consultant on a full-time basis. Since that time he has helped more than three dozen companies initiate and develop their franchising program. He notes that there are many companies interested in developing a franchise program, and who need his specialized assistance. Mr. Power is a “hands-on” franchise consultant. He said, “I am the ‘nuts and bolts’ person who tends to the details for my clients.” Mr. Power holds a B.S. degree with a major in Marketing. See: www.biltmorefranchise.com You may contact Mr. Power at: jpower@biltmorefranchise.co - Visit John Power's Website |
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Kim CastleWith nearly two decades in the advertising and design business, with clients like Domino's Pizza, General Motors, Direct TV, Pedigree, Wolfgang Puck, Higher Octave Music, Hollywood Celebrity Products, Disney, and Paramount, as well as thousands of entrepreneurs around the world define, structure, communicate, and position their business for greater profits, BrandU(R) co-creators Kim Castle and W. Vito Montone discovered that entrepreneurs could experience the same power that big brands command for a fraction of the cost with the world's only process-based results-drive Integral approach to business creation. BrandU(R) is helping entrepreneurs grow with the power of extreme clarity from idea...to brand...to market(TM) and helping one million entrepreneurs become successful and whole so that they can make a difference in the world. Are you one of them? If you want to experience clarity all the way to the bank(TM), get started now at http://www.brandu.com. - Visit Kim Castle's Website |
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Dave KurlanDave Kurlan is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development. Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles Sales & Marketing Summit. He has been featured on radio and TV, including World Business Review with General Norman Schwarzkopf, in Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine and Incentive Magazine. He is the author of Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. He created and wrote STAR, a proprietary recruiting process for hiring great salespeople, and he writes Understanding the Sales Force, a popular business Blog and is a contributing author to The Death of 20th Century Selling and 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 2. - Visit Dave Kurlan's Website |
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George LudwigGeorge Ludwig is a recognized authority on sales strategy and peak performance psychology. An international speaker, trainer, and corporate consultant, he helps clients like Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, Northwestern Mutual, CIGNA, and numerous others improve sales force effectiveness and performance. Though it's George's strategies and processes that help corporations increase productivity and performance, it's his tremendous energy and dynamism that spark the transformation. Again and again, clients remark on his amazing ability to unleash human capacity and inspire men and women to break out of their comfort zones. The result is a whole new type of salesperson. His customized presentations teach achievers to make stunning advances in their lives. From helping salespeople realize cherished dreams to helping corporations exponentially accelerate revenue streams, George Ludwig leaves audiences and individuals empowered, emboldened, and clamoring for more. George is the best-selling author of Power Selling: Seven Strategies for Cracking the Sales Code and Wise Moves: 60 Quick Tips to Improve Your Position in Life & Business. - Visit George Ludwig's Website |
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Linda RichardsonLinda Richardson is the Founder and Executive Chairwoman of Richardson, a global sales training and performance improvement company. As a recognized leader in the industry, she has won the coveted Stevie Award for Lifetime Achievement in Sales Excellence and she was identified by Training Industry, Inc. as one of the “Top 20 Most Influential Training Professionals.” Ms. Richardson is credited with the movement to Consultative Selling and is the author of ten books on selling and sales management, including Sales Coaching — Making the Great Leap from Sales Manager to Sales Coach, and Stop Telling, Start Selling. She teaches sales and management at the Wharton Graduate School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Executive Development Center. Linda is a frequent speaker at industry and client conferences, has been published extensively in industry and training journals, and has been featured in numerous publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Nation’s Business, Selling Power, Success, and The Conference Board Magazine. Learn more about Richardson's sales training and performance improvement solutions at http://www.richardson.com web - Visit Linda Richardson's Website |
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Jay Kubassek(Jay's Full Bio: EvanCarmichael.com/jaykubassek) In five years, Canadian-born entrepreneur Jay Kubassek went from selling mufflers at a Midas franchise to revolutionizing Internet marketing with the 2004 launch of CarbonCopyPRO, a online marketing education company, now worth over $20 million with customers in over 160 countries.
As an independent film producer, his upstart film fund Aliquot Films is currently producing a films with Spike Lee and Abel Fererra (starring Ethan Hawke and Dennis Hopper.)
Jay's entrepreneurial spirit is irrepressible. He’s the owner of five companies, a professional speaker and trainer, international real estate developer/investor, extreme sport enthusiast and emerging philanthropist. Jay resides in NYC with his wife Jamie, son Milo and dog Cooper. Visit Jay's official website: www.JayKubassek.com - Visit Jay Kubassek's Website |
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