OneAccord Articles

Nearly every sales effectiveness course I know of encourages salespeople to call at the "C" or executive level. I think it's time for a fresh concept!

Sales seems to be one of those functional areas that is most resistant to change. Concepts taught 30, even 40 or 50 years ago, are still advanced by sales trainers as a "best practices." And of all areas in the firm, sales is often the most resistant to embracing technology. Odd isn't it?…although there may be some good reasons.

First, every training class they go to still teaches the same old theories. Second, sales, perhaps more than any other functional area, demands skilled "coaching" for effectiveness, and few compensation plans I see reward their management for coaching. It's hardly ever mentioned, let alone measured and expected. We reward activities and measurable success metrics. We rarely reward sales management directly for personnel coaching and development.

I was reflecting on this while I was recently in South Africa on a safari watching a lion eat his kill. Think it's odd that I was thinking about sales while watching the water buffalo get devoured, don't you? I've decided the link must have been accomplishing the mission!

Anyway, the lion didn't go for the head of the herd, his equivalent of the "C" level. Rather, he went for the easiest kill!

It seems to me we should re-think how we encourage our sales people plan their approach to the prospect. Trying to go by key influencers and straight to the "decision makers" will likely work against them more often then it will work for them. There's no question the final authority/decision maker is critical to the process, but it is a process, and trying to jump over the earlier supportive levels can be fatal. Relationships can be built, trust can be established, features and benefits can be vetted and confirmed, and opportunities can be discovered and developed, all at levels below the key "C" level executive.

It's my experience that winning the support staff carries far more weight in advancing the sale than does the reverse, which is having the "C" level executive impose a salesperson on his subordinates. When that happens, they are, as often as not, working to prove him wrong, and by extension the salesperson and his product as well.

Clearly, we should be working to understand the buying process, the issues that face the buying organization, the solution we can offer and winning the hearts and minds of the implementation team, and then advancing to the executive level with the support, confidence and trust of his staff. That's a sale that will happen, happen more often, and happen far more quickly.

And they are usually far easier to get to meet with. They have less gatekeepers trying to keep sales people at bay. My advice is..get in!! And get in at any level. If a sales person is successful at penetrating the "C": level, then he should work to get introduced to those who will support the decision, rather then try to influence a buying decision in their absence. Relationships, confidence, engagement and trust are as important today as most non-enterprise product offerings. Successful rock star sales people know it and practice it, in spite of what they are told during their sales training classes!

Today, every organization is attempting to do more with less. Maximizing asset values have become the axiom of business in the short-term as no longer can executives go into the credit markets to find cash. Hence, what are the future prospects for business in 2010? Several fundamentals are emerging:

Many economists along with the latest economic indicators are showing more of the same with some forecasts not projecting any rebound until 2011. At the core of the issue is consumer demand. Consumers will remain hesitant given the jobs report and current foreclosure reports. This issue is further exacerbated by banks who continue to keep borrowing rates high to offset their debt losses.

With consumer optimism down can your business operate profitably at the current demand? Do you have sales plan to support your core customers? Does your operating model need to be changed? Do you need to divest yourself of customers with little or no short-term return?

For the remainder of 2010 those that have a price advantage can leverage this advantage to gain key markets and customers. Any reduction in supply-chain expenses while maintaining quality will enable an organization to have a major competitive advantage this year.

Today's tough economic times require a company to respond to emerging issues with a strategic approach that places corporate citizenship at the heart of business. Corporate citizenship is simply how the world views your organization in our new global economy. Good or bad. Those that have made corporate citizenship as a strategic initiative are clear winners especially with those who can control world opinions. Governments will continue to require greater adherence to expanded public policy from the private sector. Criteria for what is a good corporate citizen is promoted and maintained by: Corporate Responsibility Officer Magazine (www.thecro.com) in addition they also rank each year the top 100 corporations, www.thecro.com/files/CRO100BestCorporateCitizensList2009.pdf

This is a sore subject and there has been an extensive analysis on the cause of the massive losses in the debt market. Now that you have this partnership, can you support the debt through operations? If yes, then what is the investor's exit strategy? If no, then can you both find an investment alternative.

Are you managing to a strategic plan? If yes, then how fast can you change tactics to achieve the milestones? Have you optimized all of your available assets? Do you have the team to accomplish your goal? Is the organization optimized? If you have a large war chest then a strategic acquisition strategy would be timely.

These are just some of major trends emerging for 2010 and organizations that are managing to these fundamental shifts will gain momentum as the economy improves later this year.

Peter Klinge, Jr. is a marketing and management executive, and Regional Managing Principal with OneAccord Partners, LLC based in Salt Lake City. A strategic marketing and communications executive, Mr. Klinge has more than 20 years experience with many of the top advertising/marketing services agencies, driving business success for major global brands and early stage companies, in technology and consumer categories. BIO

Contact: peter.klinge@oneaccordpartners.com

Are you contemplating the sale of your family business? The United States Census bureau along with Capital IQ says you are not alone. A recent Deloitte study cites that nearly half of the millions of family owned businesses in the United States will change ownership in the next 5 years. Market signs are pointing to an improved environment. And there is no greater harbinger of improvement in the economy than to see the uptick in M&A activity, particularly in Private Equity. It is critical to take the right steps to take advantage of opportunities as they come. Private equity acquisition or investment could be the right option for your company.

PE firms (with their vast amount of due diligence, specialization in a specific market segment and available investment capital) scour the market looking to get in front of the next wave of market demand. PE firms look to act on opportunities first and at present, have begun to make strategic acquisitions to support these overall objectives. Over the past decade PE firms have done a good job in providing value to their limited partners. Value creation is accomplished in an organization by creating a culture of urgency focusing on driving revenue growth and operating efficiency coupled with the effective use of capital and the assets. Investment capital firms that have an active board and aligned management team, have proven to be excellent catalysts for transforming organizations in all business sectors.

Have you considered a private equity group as a possible acquirer? PE firms are looking for good, sustainable companies that are well managed with a solid track record. Those firms may more accommodating today than in previous cycles to make a deal with owners looking to make a transition.

- Get a business valuation - Just like when you're preparing to sell your house you receive an appraisal of your home in comparison to others in the neighborhood, a business valuation is needed to determine the market value of your business. Valuations can be achieved from several sources including accounting firms, large business brokers and investment bankers. On the buy-side, PE firms do a complete due diligence analysis to determine perceived value so knowing what your business is worth upfront providing a basis of understanding moving forward.

– Stay focused on your company's operations- Far too often business performance suffers as a result of the ownership's focus on the company sale, thus losing a great amount of market value at closing. Consequently, hire a competent advisor or task a board member to source an advisor who is experienced in M&A and your industry to manage your side of this process and, if possible, demand multiple offers to create competition. On the buy-side, PE firms want to see a business plan with hard, comparable results using current and projected financial modeling as a basis to understand your value to the market. They will require a review of all current and projected revenue sources, new product or market expansion plans including projected cash-flows and use of proceeds on a three basis. Rich, is a "three-basis" common terminology?

- Get your house in order – Benchmark the organization to your major competitors and then optimize all business value drivers. If unsure, bring in an outside advisor/executive coach to improve the value of your organization. It's money well spent. Make sure all legal documents and patents are in place for your company and your local bank including any loan agreements, banking covenants. On the buy-side, PE firms will verify and validate this information in the due diligence process including obtaining a third-party "fairness opinion" on your intellectual property (IP).

- Succession planning – What is your succession plan when the business is sold? If your business is family-owned, have you come to grips with how and who will take over after the sale? Don't be afraid to acknowledge any major gaps in functional leadership as this will show a maturity in leadership, but also have a plan in place on how you will fill this position. On the buy-side, a PE firm does not want to manage your company but partner with you to make it grow. However, sourcing an interim executive is a common practice to quickly assist management to drive growth and execute the strategic plan post sale.

- First impressions are everything – Again, just like with a home sale, make every effort to provide a good impression of order and responsiveness and avoic confusion in all your contact with the potential buyer.

– Finally be patient and keep your eye on the prize – A business sale on average may take over one year experiencing many twists and turns. But as when you started your business, it's time to roll up your sleeves and get to work. No one said it would be easy!

Note: OneAccord can provide the strategic guidance to prepare your company for acquisition and valuation. Contact us to learn how we successfully help organizations through this major business transition. You can also review this Overview Document (PDF) to learn more.

To many of us, it takes millions of media dollars and dramatic Super Bowl commercials to create an effective Brand. We think of Chevrolet and Cadillac, Budweiser and Coors, or Staples and Office Depot, but seldom consider the brand message created by our experience with the corner hardware store, the local dry cleaner, or our neighborhood restaurant. By definition, your company has a Brand. The real question is whether you are managing it and building
on it.

There is a simple and venerable definition of a brand, and it's a definition which we can all use whether we have the media clout to reach our consumers by pounding the airwaves or are a small manufacturing company dealing with business customers, face to face. It recognizes all purchases and customer relationships – B2B and B2C – are based on product or service attributes and the emotional connection shared by buyer and seller, product and consumer. Jim Collins' record-selling business book, Good to Great, recognizes the foundation of a brand as a company's reputation and the emotional connection customers have to it.

A true brand reaches us with its logic + emotion. Even the most basic of business contract requires not only an agreement on the attributes or deliverables to be offered but also an often unspoken emotional element of confidence, credibility, trust, security, dependability, reliability, fairness, or other similar non-tangibles. Even though Nordstroms, for example, has great buyers, merchandisers, and real estate planners, the connection we always talk about is its level of service, the great sales people who engage us and with whom we memorably connect.

Understanding that a true brand is based on logic + emotion is important because it means that any company, no matter how small – even an individual — can create a brand which is something they own, something which is competitive and distinctive (Tom Peters, author of In Search of Excellence, offers a program developing a personal or individual's brand). A properly developed and positioned brand delivers that final hook to win the sales transaction whether the product is sitting on the shelf, being delivered by a restaurant's server, or offered up by a committed sales team.

How does a small, even a B2B company, create, live with, and build and execute its Brand?

To begin with, the Brand is the key element which ties the consumer or customer to the purchase in a memorable way, and you probably already have the building blocks in place. The first step to create your company's Brand is to understand what makes your company distinctly competitive or even superior. What aspects of this competitive edge are product focused and which are more emotional or personality driven? The second step is to work this competitive advantage into your overall strategy or what the company expects to accomplish by creating direct and simple vision and mission statements which all employees can understand and relate to. And the third step, which many of us do unconsciously, is to develop or recognize the personality of the company. Is it energetic? Thoughtful? Caring? Solid? Analytical? Engineering like? Steady? Reliable?

When these elements are combined, understood, and embraced by the management team, they can be consistently communicated as the vision/mission/personality values to the company, whether it's made up of five or 2,000 employees. The Brand values exist at this point, but decisions have to be made on what the brand's "voice" will sound and look like. This voice will impact everything from the logo and the font and layout chosen for the company's business cards all the way to how we want to "talk" and relate to our own staff and our customers. A real brand is tightly woven into everything the management team communicates to its employees and the company communicates to its consumers or customers. It represents what a company makes, the services it provides, and its culture and values. A brand is much bigger than a short term advertising slogan.

Because we are accustomed to brands being discussed in terms of Coke and Pepsi, McDonald's and Pizza Hut, Honda and Toyota, or Boeing and Airbus, we tend to presume brands are not important to our small to medium sized companies.

Case in Point One: But my own experience of working with multi-million dollar communications as well as more minimal budgets has taught me differently. One example is an experience with a medium sized restaurant chain which had been suffering through a malaise created by a lack of clear leadership and a steady 2% to 3% sales decline. Its external media budget was close to zero. However, the management team repositioned the company and brand based on three core values of sales, hospitality, and nutrition. Everything from training to bonus programs to business cards to customer communications were redesigned to communicate a clear message of the company's new value system. Every operations meeting and every CEO speech or presentation focused on the three core elements in a way which was consistent with the new "personality." The result turned a negative sales trend to 50% growth over five years as the chain became known for its great service and tasty, nutritious food.

Case in Point Two: A $10 million B2B service company created a new division and needed to find a different voice from its parent which had been struggling over the three previous years and had made headlines with some legal issues. To start out with its new bundle of products and name, we spent time understanding where we were (Departure Point) and where we wanted to get to (Arrival Point) a few years down the road. The only "media" we had at our disposal was a new web site driven by some good search engine optimization and marketing work (SEO, SEM), booths with brochures distributed at association and other related conferences, email lists, and our sales approach to potential clients. Although it is too early to note demonstrable results, all communications and products were developed with one clear voice, and the early returns are making the rest of the company take notice.

The foundations for a true brand, long lasting Brand come from within the company and therefore can be expressed by any company of any size, whether it is B2B or B2C – even an individual. These true brand elements can then be expressed to the customers as well as the internal organization in a consistent, sustainable, and business building fashion to give your company competitive leverage for the short and long term.

Many CEO's and executives would concur with the truism that "leadership" is ultimately more important than "management." But when it comes to real performance, superficial assent is not enough. The critical issue is what do you actually believe about leadership. Research has proven that what you believe will ultimately drive what you do and the results. So if you are looking for superior results, you need to first go upstream and assess your beliefs about leadership which will drive behaviors and ultimate outcomes. Evaluating and believing the truth about effective leadership will make you a better leader and help you take yourself and your organization to the next level. In this article, we hope to shed some light on "championship" leadership and tools we utilize to help executives get there.

The place to begin, however, is a little bit of healthy self-examination. This simple self-assessment will help you in a journey to greater effectiveness.

Leadership and Management are intertwined but they are different and distinct. Management is the strategy and tactics that businesses employ to generate return on investment. Obviously, solid Management is critical and can easily usurp 100% of one's time. But solid Management is only 50% of the equation – Leadership is the other 50% needed to drive superior Team and Business performance.

To estimate real effectiveness use this multiplication equation:

• Rate yourself on each component (Management – then Leadership) from 1 to 10 with one being minimum and ten maximum.
  • Before you settle on a "Rating" review your calendar and "to do" list – are they jammed full of urgent Management activities. Does your calendar indicate that important Leadership activities are planned for and routinely addressed – or is Leadership squeezed out.
  • Reflectively inquire – try to be accurate on how you affect performance through active and positive Leadership. Active and positive Leadership is analogous to "quality" time in personal relationships – just being there or having the title is not good enough. Active and Positive requires planning plus execution.

Once you rank your Management effectiveness and Leadership effectiveness from 1 to 10 each, then multiply those two numbers to estimate real effectiveness. The maximum effectiveness would of course be 10 * 10 = 100

a Leader so focused and caught up in urgent Management that they rarely invest time in important Leadership.

Their equation is a Management score of 9 times a Leadership score of 2 resulting in 18.

a Leader who attends to urgent Management priorities and supports with that focus with important active and positive Leadership expressions.

That equation is a Management score of 8 times a Leadership score of 7 equaling 56 or three fold larger.

true Leadership is the multiplier affect that exponentially grows your performance and ultimately increases a Team's and a Business' return on investment.

Start with your Management and Leadership "beliefs." Sequentially, "beliefs" drive "actions" which accumulate into "behaviors" which ultimately create "results." So if you want different "results" you must start upstream. If your "Belief" is "Leadership is control – full control where others accept without question and fully execute your delegation," this discussion on Active and Positive Leadership will feel off base.

I submit rather than "Control," today's Leadership power is influence, influence to create the environment where individuals become engaged champions of their specific roles and responsibilities. Having "champions" –in customer service, "champions" in production and "champions" in the field–creates Championship results for the Team as a whole.

Quoting National Champion Coach Nick Saban (2009 winner of The Pacific Institute's Leadership Innovation Award) "You have to have a team full of champions before you'll ever win a championship." A key to Leadership is using positive influence to inspire employees to engage and become individual champions. Delegation is significantly short of attaining the championship level. Inspiring individual champions to fulfill their roles and responsibilities so they continually innovate and collaborate to meet the business dynamics is the championship level. Leadership influence facilitates alignment with goals. When Teams are aligned and engaged, great results become the norm.

This seems like common sense, but study after study report a severe lack of engagement in organizations. In fact, many of the studies indicate 70% of employee's are not engaged. The key to reversing that in any organization first starts at the top and the quest for the application of effective leadership.

In the next few months we'll discuss other practical ways to turn "behaviors" into superior "results." But for now let's focus on "beliefs". To help Leaders clearly see and understand their "beliefs" and "behaviors" we use The Circumplex®, a scientific survey tool. The Circumplex® organizes a Leaders Impact® into 12 distinct Behaviors. Maximizing the Constructive Style Behaviors (Achievement, Self-Actualizing, Humanistic-Encouraging, and Affiliative) are those that contribute to the Active and Positive Leadership Influence needed to build champions. So as a Leader what do you "believe" about Active and Positive Leadership. It's hard to know clearly what you "believe" and translate those into "behaviors" that create "results." It's really difficult to look at oneself but it's truly the starting point.

The Temple of Delphi in ancient Greece stated "Know Thyself" as a requirement to find success. So think through what you "believe" about your Leadership and separate urgent Management activities from important Leadership priorities. Be candid about "quality" time vs. just being there. Once you firmly establish what you "believe" then initial plans and ultimately execution follow naturally.

If you are interested in scientifically completing a personal Circumplex® to see your "beliefs" using the 12 Behaviors please email: dale.hintz@oneaccordpartners.com or call 972-824-6923. Dale will coordinate taking the on-line self-survey (20 minutes) and debrief your personal results…"Know Thyself".

The Next Leadership Topic in this Series will take us all the way to improved "Results":

-Positive Leadership Influence is the key. – Daily create individual "champions"

1 Research and Development by: Robert A. Cooke, Ph.D., J. Clayton Lafferty, Ph.D., Copyright © 2003, 1989, 1

987 by Human Synergistics, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Dale Hintz, Excellent Cultures Practice Manager for OneAccord. Dale is a highly organized, strategic and creative executive with expertise in product research/development, price optimization, market segmentation and mapping brand strategies. Currently, Mr. Hintz works out of the Dallas Region for OneAccord and has a leading role with Excellent Cultures practice. He is a strategic and creative leader with expertise in Culture Measurement, Organizational Development and Leadership Coaching. BIO

Contact: dale.hintz@oneaccordpartners.com