I started noticing that as a coach in business and with sales people, almost all of the greatest gains come from a breakdown.  As a matter of fact, when I think about it, it almost seems to be a law of nature that translates into our business and our life.

When you breakdown a muscle through working out the muscle responds by getting stronger. When you have a hard time in a relationship the makeup usually strengthens the relationship. When you decide to change a business to capitalize on a new model, product or target market until you find success, the result is usually a break through. When you are failing to communicate with someone in a business relationship a lot of times just sharing in the failure can push the relationship to another level.

We fear failure or we fear admitting failure sometimes so much that we don’t allow ourselves to push past the event.  We seem to think it will become part of our identity like a brand or a cross we will bear.  Well, thankfully someone handled that for us. 

My point is that conflict to the point of failure is not the problem. The breakdown is not a failure.  It is only an event that we can assign meaning to. The meaning we assign is completely up to us. Whether or not it is positive or negative is based on our focus.

In selling, your close rate can be your breakdown. Your ability to dissect your process, profile, approach, client feedback, your messaging, your value proposition, your rapport building, contracts and commitments can be the breakthroughs needed to turn 1 out of 10 into 3 out of 10. 

In relationships your breakdown could be your communication skill. Your ability to listen, to connect, to be present, to spend time, to be empathetic, to show affection and to be clear could be the breakthroughs need to keep together or go apart. 

The decision to let failure be the defining event rather than the beginning of the solution is the real failure. You have been led to this point of frustration to be open to learn what you really need to learn…to be ready to breakthrough. Now go get it!

Cast a Bigger Net has been growing rapidly and solely by word of mouth.

Here are some of the best practices we learned from Chris Reed:

• Networking takes time to pay off. Keep showing up to see the results

• 20% of those you meet networking are a strategic fit, while 80% could be. Focus on those that you can easily help (20%) and look for opportunities to serve the others (80%) and stay in touch with them

• A Power Circle is a smart leveraging opportunity, getting people who can best help each other together regularly!

• Leverage social media as a next step following a face to face meeting

• Tee yourself up for a great 1-1 meeting by researching the contact before the meeting. Use the meeting as an opportunity to ask clarifying questions and serve the person you are meeting with

• Focus your energy on giving. It will come back to you

• Leadership in networking is a bigger opportunity to serve and people know to come to you for help

• 1-1 meetings should be focused on getting results for each other and a best practice is making the connection in the meeting 

• Rainmakers is a great way to increase your universe of contacts regularly and a great way to touch your connections routinely

• Follow up is greatly important. It is about discipline

Find something within this information and make a commitment to implement it into your word of mouth marketing strategy.

Cheers,

Nikki

There are three simple things you can do to build your Sales Esteem.

Change your Identity:

You change your perception of sales people. Sales people get a negative wrap. People think of slick, faster talkers or used car salesmen. I always challenge people on their basic identities of sales people. I try to interject pioneer, frontier’s men, relationship catalyst, solution expert, match maker, life saver, bridge builder, disease stopper, expert, subject matter expert, facilitator, connector, economic driver, etc. All of the above things are true. What we choose to take on as an identify can effect our Sales Esteem.

Change your Scoreboard:

Instead of measuring your life in popularity or feedback, move it into controllable actions like calls, testimonials, connections, dispositions, RFP’s responded to or presentations delivered. Too many times we as sales people live on the highs and lows of the way we feel after a meeting rather than the real numbers that drive our business.

Change your Value:

Every service and product usually finds a competitor but people can always be an individual. You can always decide to be different from your competition even if your product or service isn’t. You can always be the one person that remembers birthdays, writes personal cards, sends great anniversary gifts, is an exceptional public speaker, builds networks for your clients, is genuinely interested in their family, is always positive, is always candid, is always great with follow-up, etc. In short, you can always add value to “YOU” as a person. You always be a player that separates yourself from your competition in the sales world.

Build your Sales Esteem and you will work your way through the sales funnel faster and with greater results. Best thing of all is it’s controlled by you!

Here is a great example. Michelle Wilmouth with Alliance Environmental came into the Rainmakers office for a strategy session last week and shared her business with us. She does testing for mold, lead and asbestos. She needs to be aggressively “touching” people each day that could be referral sources for her testing services. Once we identified her goal, we then identified the best people for her to be meeting, which are: Plumbers, General Contractors, Private Insurance Adjusters, Insurance Agents and HVAC companies.

Michelle’s goal in Rainmakers is to get ten new connections (to her referral sources) each week. Michelle will do this through three new introductions at each event and by logging in to the Rainmakers Networking Toolkit and setting 1-1 meetings with: Plumbers, General Contractors, Private Insurance Adjusters, Insurance Agents and HVAC companies.

Goals will keep us focused and growing.

Cheers,
Nikki

Then I ask a series of questions that leaves them jaw dropped.  How are you enrolling clients in your company?  Your vision?  As a referring partner?  The silence is usually deafening as they get immediate clarity in what I am talking about.  They spend a lot of time and money to acquire a relationship and they don’t make it a big deal.

Here are some ways you can really enroll your clients in your company.  Do this and watch you referring business double!

1.  5 Things That Make Us Different:

Create a list of important differences in you and your competition.  Make them understand how they should take advantage of those differences and why it is important to them.  It helps them de-commoditize you from your competition.  They will know why to spend their money with you rather than your competitors.

2.  Paint the Vision: 

Give them a clear vision of what the next three months will look like as your client.  Walk them through how you will learn to serve them better and their role in that process.  Let them know what you will need from them in order to do your job as well as you can.  Talk about your ultimate goals for the relationship,  i.e. “earn the right to clean all their buildings”, “grow their pipeline by 30%”, “help them open three new stores in the next three months”, etc.  Get to a common shared goal that you can use to rally their and your efforts behind.

3.  New Products, Other Services and Innovations: 

It is so important to take the time to make sure your clients understand all the services you provide, the products you have rolled out in the last couple of years and the new services and innovations that keep you on the cutting edge.  Most companies I work with that do this see a double digit increase in their dollar per client.  I can’t tell you how many times I have talked to customers who said, “I didn’t know you guys did that”.

4.  Philosophy and Commitments: 

Philosophies are what bring businesses together.  It is so important to write yours down and share them with your customers.  Get it down to your standard and commitments you have and the ones you expect from your clients.  My commitment has always been to be a 5 to 1 return on investment as a consultant.  I have always been in a place where I could create that for my clients because my plan and goals reflect it.  You could have the commitment to be transparent in pricing as a goal to create a partnership feel vs. a vendor.  Whatever you feel is important in your client relationships should go down on paper.

5.   Guarantee: 

If you have one you should make sure you go through it with your client.  Get them to fully understand it so they will become a mouth piece for you on this level.  Get them to understand it, market it and promote it as one of your differentiators.

6.  Philanthropic and Community Activities: 

This is a huge part of your business and what you are about beyond making money.  Sharing how your company is a viable productive part of society as a whole can be a great differentiator.  Businesses are just organizations of people with common goals.  They want to be a part of things that are bigger than themselves.  Showing how you are engaged in your community is a great way to illustrate that voting with their dollars for you is a very good move for the community at large.

7.   Founders and your People: 

Market your people like they are running for office.  People want to believe they are buying the best.  Show them with employee bios, backgrounds and resumes how great your people are.  Tell the story of your people and your business.  They will be enthralled in it and love to share it for free.

8.   How  you Grow: 

Tell them how you grow.  Walk them through the ways you acquired your best clients.  Tell them the stories of the referrals and the introductions that led to best and biggest deals in the company’s history.  Tell them that you regularly ask your clients for referrals and your official policy is By Referral Only.  They will love that you need them that much more and that they can help you grow and see how much you value them as a client.

The best way to become “top of mind” is to help others achieve success. Start by being someones accountability partner.

Accountability is a key ingredient to success in networking, especially in the Rainmakers model. It is one of our five core values.  

Now, combine accountability with strategic relationships, another one of our five core values, and you have a winning strategy to achieve success.

If you joined our Leadership Development Program (LDP) Call on Monday, you heard Nikki talk about this very subject.

Did you miss the call? No problem, the calls are recorded each Monday and are available until the next LDP Call is recorded (the following Monday).

Listen to the recorded call: 

Dial (605) 477-2199

Access Code: 591123#

Reference Number: # key 

Join us every Monday at 1:00 EST for the LDP Call…new topics each week!

When we design a program for a client, it has to have three components of belief (in order of importance below) to really make the impact we are looking for: 

1. Self
2. Company
3. Product

Self: You must always start with the individual going out to take the arrows for the company. They must believe in themselves, and if they don’t, you better believe in them enough for them to borrow some confidence or they WILL NOT be successful.  This game of waiting to see if they perform after you have hired them will keep you both in the dance of just barely hanging on to their job. Get rid of them or get behind them!

Company: People want to belong to something greater than themselves.  Sales people are people too and nothing embodies that “belong to” more than an organization or people coming together for one mission.  A company is nothing more than a team of people serving others in some manner and collectively creating more value than their customers could do themselves. The difference in the value they create and the value they consume is profit.  The number one job of the leader of the sales team is to sell the company back to his or her sales people every day. It is a daily occurrence that involves inspiration and motivation and companies that get bored or tired of this become weak and stop growing.  Your people have got to believe in your mission, your organization and the leadership that drives it.

Product:  Sales people need an “unfair” advantage, at least in their mind. I always try to find the unfair advantage we have in the market place with our product or service and really get our sales people excited about that.  It could be speed, strength, durability or a special feature no one else has, but product and service design without talking to your sales team is like sending soldiers to battle without consulting them on weapons they would like to carry. I can believe all day in the war against Hitler but it is really going to be tough to get me to jump out of an airplane with a bow and arrow. When we don’t listen to our sales people about the product, we tend to undermine the two other beliefs they need in order to sell.   

All of these beliefs are related, but if you can organize your motivation, education and inspiration accordingly to make sure they are all there, your sales team will be a powerful force to be reckoned with!

Sometimes we spend all this energy and most of all time on these meaningless or even petty stands.  I find myself asking my dad (who we lost last year) what he would think of all these things people do. (or more to the I do) My Dad a had a kind of been there done that type of energy.  He had made many mistakes in his life and many with his family.  He lived the life of someone who knew the waste of time and energy that we all go through fighting fights we think important at the time.

I think he would get that wry smile he had where he knew he could be totally useful with his wisdom and really make you feel he understood and he “lived” it.  Oh, sure as his son it really got old but other people just fell into his accepting and forgiving energy.  I think Dad knew his time was getting short and wanted to make an impact in peoples lives, mainly his family.  He wanted them to not go through some of the pain he had seen. 

I think it is easy to forget why we love our family, or any of the people that are important to us.  The heat of the moment, the paint of a hurt, the wronged or disrespect we feel makes it easy to overlook why we love who we love. 

I think we love because it makes us closer to our maker, to see greatness in others.  To forgive them of their humanness and see them for their greatness.  We love to accept the faults in ourselves and to celebrate the chance that greatness can live in us as well as the people we love.

We love to give of ourselves and believe there is greatness in others as well as ourselves.  Love is not easy but, maybe it is not supposed to be.  .  .  Maybe we when we forget why we love we should understand that loving someone else can change the world and always has. 

Whether it is Martin Luther King, Ghandi or my Dad.  Great people were great because so many loved them.  Kind of funny huh? 

Here is my point.  Today is the day to decide to play bigger.  To make the conscious decision you are here for greatness and to move accordingly.  You could continue with the cloud you have looming over you head or you could see that cloud for what it really is.  The shadow of the purpose you have not truly embraced, the purpose for your life that you could create for yourself if you just allowed yourself to speak it.

Speak your greatness into life, find your purpose and live accordingly.  I know you face challenges but you also have resources that only you can tap.  Talents given you by God, now what you do with them is your gift back to him.

You see, you were aware of so much more than what you are now (no offense), you knew how everyday was a gift. You lived for the now!

This Christmas, my daughter and I got stuck in Austin TX (on Christmas day) without the ability to get out. We proceeded to have an adventure, no restaurants open, nothing to do, and a bland hotel that Southwest decided “made up” for the inconvenience (yes, a blog about my disappointment with Southwest Airlines is coming).

I have one sentence to say, “It was awesome!”  Now, I have to tell you my little girl is pretty awesome anyway, but her attitude and demeanor and sheer joy for the “right now” was contagious. Everyone we came into contact with became part of the “Christmas Experience.”

I was tired, frustrated, road-weary and having one of the best times of my life . . . Now, don’t get me wrong, I missed my little girl and I couldn’t wait to see her but it was a great Christmas for so many reasons. Here is my point: my daughter is not afraid, she hasn’t lived a life where she let someone down, especially someone she cares about, being vindictive is not in her vocabulary. She is about fun, joy, and the pursuit there of. It comes with some challenges, but what kid doesn’t?

Here is what I know: I learned a few things that Christmas Day.

Here is the most important: Christ was a Hero for so many of us because of how he showed up and showed us how we could be. We all have sins where we hurt someone we love, do something we are not proud, or just plain forget how to dream. . .

We get mired in the crap of what we did instead of what the next moment could bring or whose life we could touch. Our fear stops us from acting freely like the heroes we once knew . . . isn’t that ironic?

We learn how to hurt and how to be hurt, and over time, it causes us to stop living our lives.

Here is what I am trying to tell you: my daughter is oblivious to the word, “Hero.” She just wanted people to be happy. She hasn’t been around enough to question herself, and therefore she just acts out by reaching her hand out to connect w/ another hoping to find some joy for her and the other.

I, like many of us, have made mistakes and have experienced the hurt that comes with life and started to second-guess my ability to be a hero.

We all can be that hero.

We all can make that difference.

In this New Year, you have the chance to let go and recognize your place here.

Be someone’s hero.

Live abundantly and share it.

Letting go of your track record could be just as easy as saying, “I’m a hero, and I recognize my place to create joy for others.”