Congratulations Florida - NCAA Champs! Being in Atlanta, and a UGA fan, that was really tough to write. If you watched the game, you saw another great sales analogy. Florida simply wanted to win more than UCLA. "Want" translated quickly into hustle, then into execution, and on into a win, which just happened to be for all the marbles. If you leave anything on the court - i.e., conference room table - a competitor who wants the deal more than you is probably going to win.

On the Hunt: In Mack Hanan's sales library staple Consultative Selling, he makes the case that if you are not bringing new issues to your prospect's attention, you are just another vendor. In other words, if the prospect has already identified the problem, they are already working on the solution, and someone else is in the lead on the deal. While we will always be faced with deals that are already in play - AND will win some - the point is important. Helping your customers realize they have a problem, earns you an inside track on the solution. To that end, great sales people are discussing issues that are still only on the horizon. That means they know the trends and associated implications that will create the future challenges their customers will face. In an article in McKinsey Quarterly by Ian Davis and Elizabeth Stephenson, the writers identify 10 trends that will shape the world through 2015. Here is a synopsis of the list - how will your solution help address the issues these trends bring to your customers?

Face to Face: "Meet the new boss... NOT the same as the old boss...or co-worker, or customer, as the case may be. There is an increasing likelihood (do the math) that they will be younger than you and part of Generation Y. The Baby Boomers were success-oriented structuralists, Gen X was fighting for an identity, now Generation Y comes along. Their norms are wildly different. They have been raised on PCs, PDAs, digital cameras, iPods, Starbucks, and high speed wireless access. Everything in their world is instant, digital, and remote. In their view, things change so fast, tradition hardly exists. "Everybody" in Gen Y blogs, IMs, chats, has a web presence, etc. So what does this mean to a sales professional? Basically, you need to be prepared to deal with a group that would rather text you than pick up the phone, would rather come in at noon and work until 10pm, sees no reason why you care what they wear to an internal meeting, and expects you to listen while they question every aspect about the way business is done. Whether they are right or wrong is not the point. The point is that there is an entire generation with a substantially different point of reference than that of the BBs, and successful BBs and Gen Xers will learn how to respond.

The above two articles come down to the notion of addressing change. As sales executives, that is the foundation on which we thrive - helping customers face change. Think back 10 years - ERP and distributed computing were driving the train, Y2K was on the horizon, and the WWW was getting about as much attention as PCs did in the mid 70's. So how has the web shaped business at this point? The effect has been huge! e-Commerce, e-Marketing, interactive web content, content management issues, security meaning more than Ol' Clem standing by the bank door with his six-shooter, identity theft, customer data protection, privacy policies, and on and on. Would you have had an advantage in the marketplace if you had had insight into how your customers and prospects were viewing these types of issues 10 years ago? At this year's LOMA/ACORD show in Vegas, that will be the focus - Reimagine Your Business. The idea is to discuss what insurance companies think they should look like in the future. The sales opportunities that come out of those conversations will be money in the bank for the creative sales executive. Check them out on the web: www.acordlomaforum.org.

Separating Yourself from the Pack: In every search assignmnet we accept, communication skills are one of the traits hiring authorities continue to name as a critical requirement in a sales candidate. The reason is obvious - sales executives need to be persuasive and communication skills impact the ability to be persuasive. A Yale University study identified what they believe are the most persuasive words in the English Language. Here they are in alphabetical order: Announcing, Benefits, Discovery, Easy, Fast, Free, Guarantee, Health, How, Love, Money, New, Now, Proven, Results, Safety, Sale, Save, Secrets, Why, Yes, and You.

"HELPING YOU LEAD THE PACK"
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