Contributed by CRT Sponsor Darren Cecil, Owner, San Diego Sandler Training Center

Like the iceberg that sank the Titanic, there are at least four major weaknesses lurking beneath the surface of any potential new hire and perhaps even your current sales force. Don’t wait till your ship starts taking on water to uncover and shore up any potential threats.

Ice Issue in the Need for Approval

When salespeople need approval from prospects, they are unable to close effectively. They cling to comments like, “we really appreciate what you did for us”. They are too fearful to get the business. They usually find it difficult to ask tough questions because they’re afraid to upset prospects.

Freezing due to Emotional Involvement

Some salespeople are worriers. They strategize on the fly, are excitable, creative, or analytical. After a sales call you might hear them say, “Oh jeez! I should have said…” They weren’t able to execute during the call because they were caught off guard, became emotional, and over-analyzed. Panicking, they began to think about how they would handle the obstacle. When your salespeople talk to themselves they can’t effectively listen to their prospect.

Icicles in Non-Supportive Buy Cycles

Buy Cycle refers to how your salespeople make purchases for themselves. They will tolerate bad behavior from their prospects when it is similar to their own. A buy cycle that fails to mirror a proper selling process causes many obstacles your salespeople have been unable to handle. Anyone who bargain shops, does extensive research, and clips coupons will be more vulnerable to stalls, put offs, lies, excuses, procrastinators, comparison shoppers, sob stories and other forms of “think it overs.”.

Cold Feet Talking About Money

My parents told me never to ask questions about how much money people made, had, or merely mention the word money. Discussing money is impolite. Right? Wrong.

When salespeople are uncomfortable talking about money, they can’t ask a prospect how much money (s)he has, where it might be coming from, or how to come up with more. Therefore, they fail to accurately learn how much money a prospect will spend with them. This becomes even more difficult when the prospect is equally uncomfortable.

You run a tight ship and don’t shuffle the deck chairs on the Titanic. You systematically assess all your new hires freezing out anyone who can’t or won’t sell at the margins you require. You also have a good plan for supporting your existing team so these icy issues don’t cause their blood to run cold. As a result your sales are hot.

If for any reason you want a screening or a sales force evaluation process more streamlined and fluid, please contact us at the Sandler Training at 619 295-2222 or check out www.sdsales.sandler.com and we will help your ship come in.

Darren works with CEO’s, sales managers, and sales people on taking control of the sales process, shortening sales cycle times, eliminating the frustrations and disappointments of an erratic sales process and  implementing a selling system that produces predictable and consistent results while protecting all parties involved.  Darren Cecil worked with major corporations such as Qualcomm, Toyota, Genoptix and the National Football League.  

 Darren attended Emerson College for his bachelors degree and graduated with his masters degree from The Ohio State University.   He has a scholarship named after him at Emerson College entitled the Darren Cecil Scholarship.

 In addition to his professional work in the San Diego business community, Darren is very active in local civic organizations such as The San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce, the San Diego Rotary Club 33, a Board Member of The Executives Association of San Diego and the Chairmens Round Table.   He is also a national speaker and published author.  He is married and has 3 children.

What a decade! Bookended by 9/11 and the Great Recession, with the emergence of the BRIC nations as global competitors and a near meltdown of the world’s financial system, what are the attributes of a successful leader in the decade to come? What new skills will a leader need to achieve success for his or her organization? Let me share my top seven qualities that I believe a leader will need.

1. An “articulate communicator” of a sound well thought out vision for what lies ahead. A particularly tough challenge when both internal and external circumstances require the regular revisiting and revision of that destination vision for the organization. Think of how the iPhone and the iPad have changed the cell phone and pc business or how Google has changed how we all get information.
2. A “team builder” of non-traditional teams. 1 in 4 of the U S workforce works part-time, as temps or as contract workers. No longer just a manager of employees today’s leader now needs to quickly build rapport, trust and loyalty with employees, partners, customers and, yes, government regulators. A “coach” and a “mentor” rather than a manager.
3. “Salesman-in-chief” selling the values and mutual benefits to everyone the organization touches including the communities in which they operate.
4. A “change agent” who understands that yesterday’s best practices may leave your organization in the dust and can make his or her organization flexible, responsive and invigorated rather than restive and bureaucratic.
5. An “ethical bottom line thinker”. No, that is not an oxymoron. A leader  must balance both a sound return on invested capital and a real respect and integrity in all dealings with customers, employees, governments, partners, suppliers and others. Enron, WorldCom, AIG and other disasters have shaken the faith in the U. S. style of capitalism and each leader must go the extra mile to rebuild that trust. A great leader must set the right tone from the top and help others in the organization to become leaders.
6. An “innovator” who can grasp and effectively deploy technology and partnering. To move the organization ahead, a leader must understand his or her organization’s unique skills and strengths and complement them with the resources of others. Going it alone is increasingly difficult. You cannot expect to do the same thing each time and expect a better result.
7. A “cheerleader” whose energy, focus, commitment and action orientation draws inspired people to want to join in the achievement of a common goal–the ability to create a human connection. A leader must walk the talk. Work hard, play hard.

Terry Bruggeman is the Executive Chairman of a group of industrial biotechnology companies (BioTork, Evolugate and Entovia) which use a common technology to develop third generation biofuels, to provide non-chemical alternatives for insect and pest control, and for the bioremediation of oil spills.  He serves on a number of non-profit boards including the Lincoln Park Zoo, the College of Business at Cal State San Marcos, BIOCOM and the Sanford Burnham Institute for Medical Research.

_______________________________________________________________________________

This is Dave T, Terry, Lou, John, Jeannette, and Dave C, members of the Chairmen’s Roundtable (CRT), coming to you from the blogger table live at the CRT offsite meeting at the Classic Residence by Hyatt, La Jolla Village.  Today was the beginning of our implementation phase for our multi-month strategic planning effort. A few months ago, the CRT made a decision to take our own advice and pause to focus on our business of helping San Diego companies more effectively by conducting our own strategic planning process.  Just like many of our clients, we realized we were so busy providing our pro bono consulting services that we had not taken the time to focus and align ourselves.

What we’ve determined and reviewed so far this morning:

“ Our Mission (Why we exist)
“ Guiding Principles/Our Values (How we behave)
“ Destination (Where we are going in the next 18 to 24 months)
“ Strategies (What we will focus on across the organization)

Today’s meeting is about beginning to operationalize the plan through exploring our breakthrough model – what we will do broken down by timeframes and capabilities required to do it.  After that, each team will determine their accountabilities and assign owners and timeframes.  Finally, we’ll develop a scorecard so we are tracking and measuring our progress.

Here is what the bloggers got to say about our off-site during the event:

Dave:
The offsite has enabled us to bring many different points of view to bear on our most strategic issue – how to make the San Diego business community aware of our service offering.  By using multi disciplinary teams we have been able to better understand our communication challenges and how to solve them.

Terry:
The offsite gave us an opportunity to revitalize our volunteer organization by having us redefine our values and our processes so that we deliver increased value to our clients. Additionally, it gave us an opportunity for all of our members, mentors, and sponsors, to get to know each other better.

Jeannette:
I’ve been with CRT for more than a year now, going to regular meetings, social events, but I had the most fun today at the offsite as I felt the games and exercises really gave all mentors and sponsors a chance to get to know each other and get clear on what is most important for our organization.

Lou:
I am most interested in how we are managing client expectations, full disclosure of the elements of our process, and improving our mentoring skills.  We are getting clearer on these elements continuously and today we made significant progress.

Dave T:
Today’s meeting was an AWESOME experience.  Jeff delivered our new mission and value statements.  Each of our teams discussed significant issues that we’ve been working on including Client Flow, Mentor Engagement, Sponsor Engagement, and Marketing & Branding.  Our branding exercise allowed us to use our skills, abilities, and brain trust to market CRT to our other teams.  Very interesting…….took me back to 1st grade……filled with great ideas, nutritional information, games and ingredients designed to sell the CRT position.  It really brought the brand to life from multiple perspectives and helped us get to know one another in an effective way.
John R
As a member of CRT for nearly a decade, the idea of an off-site meeting to renew our mission gave me the reassurance that the founding ideas of the group had not changed.  The goal of recruiting the best the San Diego business community had to offer to mentor companies looking to realign their strategic plan had been the founding idea and still rang true today.   As I survey the room and I recognize many new and old faces, I feel proud to be a part of such a credentialed group that are willing to volunteer their time to advise companies on how best to navigate these difficult waters.  

Editor’s note:
Blogging is a new experience for many of our mentors and we will continue to explore ways we can capture the many ideas and rich experiences of our membership to share even more with the San Diego business community.  Our strategic planning offsite was the beginning of many new ways of working to provide the most value possible to San Diego companies and their leaders as well as a reaffirming experience that our founding values and reasons for being still ring true.

Most small business don’t think they need a Board because the owner thinks a) their company is too small, b) they are private not public, and c) no one would be interested in serving on it because of a and b. My experience tells me that such an attitude is not only incorrect, but may deprive the business of a tremendous competitive advantage.

Generally, when we think of Boards we think of the board of directors of a public company such as General Motors where the Board not only has substantial fiduciary responsibilities under the law but great authority over the business (they can fire the CEO). Public company Boards today spend much of their time performing compliance checks and various administrative duties such as dealing with Sarbannes-Oxley and microscopic reviews of incentive compensation systems which seemingly present little value to the small business owner. For all of these reasons, formal boards of directors in the public company mold seldom make sense to the smaller private enterprise.

Advisory Boards, however, are a completely different story. Imagine the value a small business owner would derive from being able to pick the brains of industry and technical specialists, academics, legal, accounting, and tax professionals, and a host of experienced active and retired executives a couple of times a year at a relatively low cost. Bounce ideas off them, ask for their experiences in tough situations, use their connections to reach customers, suppliers, financing sources or regulators.

Advisory Boards differ from Boards of Directors in that Advisory Boards do not have any fiduciary duties to the company (aside from contractual ones such as a confidentiality agreement) and therefore face almost no liability exposure. Advisory Boards also have no authority relative to the company – they cannot hire or fire the CEO and the CEO does not need their approval before taking significant actions. The role of the Advisory Board is just that – purely advisory.

Advisory Boards also differ in that a single company can have more than one Advisory Board. It is not unusual, especially in the science based industries, to have both a Scientific Advisory Board comprised of leading scientists and industry experts and a Business Advisory Board that deals with business matters, such as strategic planning and significant operational issues. The two boards have nothing to do with each other and offer the business owner a wealth of knowledge, expertise, and experience that would otherwise be unavailable.

Because an Advisory Board spends the bulk of its time addressing the major issues facing the business, such as strategic planning, product or project development, financing, potential acquisitions (or sales), succession planning, and similar meaty issues, Advisory Board members are much more inclined to feel that they add value to the enterprise. Most Board members do not enjoy spending the bulk of their time discussing regulatory and compliance issues – they are neither fun nor stimulating. Board members like to talk about action items – how can we do this better, faster, cheaper and good Board members have plenty of pertinent experiences to share. For these reasons, many valuable Board members are more inclined to serve as Advisory Board members than as members of a Board of Directors.

Afraid your small company won’t be found worthy of the time of those you ask? You won’t know unless you try. Consider dropping down a notch on the management hierarchy. Instead of recruiting an industry leading CEO to your Advisory Board, target instead the head of marketing, finance, or operations. They may be more likely to accept and will almost certainly have more time available to actually serve and contribute (and may actually have more valuable information to share). And don’t limit your potential Board members to locals – everyone loves to come to San Diego in the winter. For the cost of a plane ticket, hotel room, a small honorarium and perhaps a round of golf, you would be surprised not only at who will be interested, but just how valuable your Advisory Board becomes to you.

There are, of course, a myriad of details involved in building a truly valuable Advisory Board. We hope to delve more deeply into the subject in future articles.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Michael J. Berthelot is CEO of Cito Capital Corporation, a San Diego strategic and financial advisory firm and is the Chairman of San Diego’s Corporate Directors Forum. Mike is the retired CEO of an NYSE listed multinational manufacturing company, currently serves on the board of directors of two publicly traded companies and on several private company advisory boards and has served on more than 30 boards around the world.  Mike teaches corporate governance at the UCSD’s Rady School of Management and writes and speaks on corporate governance on a national basis.