If you expect little, you’re rarely disappointed

A visiting speaker at a breakfast networking meeting set me thinking about some key communication principles in business. Dave Bryon, Divisional Director of Burton and District Chamber of Commerce drew upon his past experience as an MD of a budget airline to set about proving to the assembled throng that Ryanair has the best customer relations record of all airlines; Difficult to comprehend at first pass perhaps but then examine the facts: Among the airlines they get the lowest number of complaints letters whereas premium carrier BA apparently gets the most…….even more difficult to believe? No, not really because it’s all about setting customer expectations: Set them high and you set yourself a challenge that if you fail to meet them by any margin your customers will let you know about it. They’ve chosen you based on your promise so why should they let you get away with any transgressions if you let them down? Promise little however and the potential to exceed the expectation you set is much greater. Let’s face it when you fly Ryanair and expect to pay to use the toilet, you’re likely to be delighted when you can actually spend a penny for free! Don’t expect letters telling you this from the majority of your customers, however you’re unlikely to get complaints from them either.

Deliver what you promise

All this makes sense if you’re operating in a low cost no frills environment however whatever your market segment there are a couple of simple communication rules to take note of in selling your service to your customer group if you want them to be delighted by what you actually provide:

• Firstly, be honest with yourself about your market position and the sector you want to operate in. Tailor your offering accordingly.  
•  Secondly, communicate realistic expectations for your chosen segment based on your offering.
• Finally, and most importantly, deliver what you promise!

 Anyone who’s waited in line at a Disney theme park knows that it’s best to under-promise and over-deliver and let’s face it, what customers want most is that your product or service ‘Does what it says on the tin’.    

So back to this morning’s challenge……most of the audience had flown Ryanair at least once and all would do so again……..because they got what they expected!

Thanks to Dave Bryon for his inspiration and Ryanair for the business model.

In business today it is widely considered that blogging is an important way to connect with your customers, to demonstrate your expertise in your subject and to maintain currency in your market-place.it can also increase the dynamism of your web-site. That said, I meet many people who despite their good intentions never quite get around to writing their blog although they believe that it could be a valuable asset to their business. In Brian Tracey’s ‘Eat that Frog’ terms blogging then becomes one of those increasingly ugly ‘Frogs’ that needs to be eaten and Tracey’s advice is eat the biggest and ugliest frogs first. So, as procrastination makes your blog Frog bigger and uglier you finally create the time to work on it and then what? You get stuck….you can’t think of what to write, and let’s face it if you could your blog might never have become a Frog anyway!

This is a situation with which I’m personally familiar and it was only when I recently read Shelle Rose Charvet’s ‘Words that Change Minds’ that I began to understand why; It appears that I have an “Away from” motivation which in a blog writing situation manifests itself as “Writer’s block”. 

The answer is apparently simple; Write anything, because with this motivational trait you’ll just love correcting and altering what you’ve written rather than focussing on the goal of what you want to say.

So, if you want to write a blog so that your web-site doesn’t get stale; because you don’t want people to think you’ve got nothing to say or because you’ve got something to say and you don’t want people to miss out on it you’re almost certainly ‘Away-from’ motivated.

And if writing your blog is becoming a bigger, uglier frog for you, here are three tips for knuckling down and writing regular blog items: 

• Write down and save anything at any time that might be bloggable.
• Make time to write your blog when you feel that it’s becoming a job you must do.
• When you sit down to do it, set about editing and adding to the copy you’ve already written.

Simple…..unless of course, you’ve really got nothing to say!

If you found this interesting and useful you might like to read:

Eat That Frog!: Get More of the Important Things Done, Today! by Brian Tracy

Words that Change Minds by Shelle Rose Charvet

As the England Footballers return home what possible positive lessons can we draw from their disappointing World Cup performances? The half-time and post-match studio analyses frequently had commentators drawing comparisons with the performances of the players in these World Cup games to their performances week in and week out in the premier league.

So why does this difference exist? If we assume that as professional footballers they all want to win and that they all have the capability to play like “World Class” players then their lacklustre performance must surely be attributable to one of two things:

1.    They don’t believe that they can do it ie Their values and beliefs are not aligned with each other and with their management so they are not performing as winning team with a common sense of purpose, mutual respect, interdependency and high standards both on and off the field.

2.    Their environment is having a negative effect their behaviour in a way that isn’t true at club level and this in turn may affect their belief in what they can achieve in this different setting.

 In any team situation the first responsibility of a team leader (Coach, manager etc) is to ensure that he or she has the people with the capabilities to succeed at whatever level they are “Playing”. Technical skill is the entry level qualification but “World class” requires the “Winning edge”; the tenacity, consistency, resilience and self belief that separate the great from the good. Even then, pulling great “players” together into a group and calling them a team doesn’t actually cause them to behave like a “Team”. And in English football this is further complicated by selecting the team to perform actually on the day of the performance; a factor which surely compromises the concept of a winning team having clearly defined roles and responsibilities.

So the additional responsibilities of the leader take him or her far beyond the technical skill of selection and into the complex realms of standard setting and of creating and maintaining an environment in which the great individuals function as a mutually dependent, mutually respecting, self motivating team capable of exceeding the goals of its individuals and even of the team itself. An environment in which individual flair is expected, respected and fostered for the benefit of the team and where winning becomes the raison d’etre. 

Only synergy can produce the type of achievement that these teams desire and synergy is what was missing in England’s world cup.

Image Courtesy of BBC sport

As we edge ever closer to the England Team’s forthcoming encounter with Slovenia I can’t help but notice that if we believe what we see, read and hear, we may have been witnessing a classic example of “Employee disengagement” in the wake of the team’s frustrations with the match against Algeria. There is no question that alignment of purpose is a key to excellent performance and there can be no question that Fabio Capello and the England team are aligned in as much as they would all dearly love to come home with the World cup in their hands. But effective leadership and management must rest on more than a simplistic alignment with the ultimate goal. Has anyone asked the England management team and players why they are in South Africa? Other than being sufficiently talented to be picked for the squad that by default is tasked with winning the World Cup, what’s in it for them individually and collectively? What are their motivations and aspirations and which of them do they have in common? What does it mean to be a part of the team? All these things are important in creating a journey that enriches the lives of each of the team and facilitates them achieving the ultimate goal for the organisation that is the team. When Fabio Capello talks about his team needing to “Have respect for each other” one hopes that they understand each other well enough to do this and thereby respect the integrity of the team as a whole. As we’ve seen, one very disenfranchised member can create the need for a lot of fire-fighting for those in positions of responsibility and the resulting undercurrents will undoubtedly affect the motivation of others. When any team, in business or in sport, is truly aligned it’s members will stick together when times are tough and work collectively to achieve the goals they’ve all bought in to. Goals that are aligned to their own dreams and aspirations. Has anyone heard any of the Argentinian team say anything negative about Maradonna?

The volume and speed of change are greater now than at any time in the history of man and for some this creates endless opportunities whereas for others it creates perpetual stress. Why is it that even when facing prolonged morbidity and even death from heart disease, some people will continue to smoke? Why is it that in the face of unprecedented economic pressure we sometimes resist changes that may preserve rather than destroy our working environment; indeed what are the dynamics of change that seem to be creating so many problems at BA as I write this.

The answer may lie within the pages  of Alan Deutschman’s “Change or Die” (HarperCollins 2007), in which he  examines the dynamics of change citing examples of successfully changing beliefs in individuals and groups where you would barely imagine it to be possible. BA and Unite, read on!

 There are, according to Deutschman, three keys:

1.       Relate - Formation of a new emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires or sustains hope

2.       Repeat - The new relationship helps you learn, practice, and master the new habits and skills that you’ll need.

3.       Reframe – The new relationship helps you learn new ways of thinking about your situation and your life

 It is fundamental that 2 & 3 refer back to the relationship in 1; “Winning hearts and minds” of course is not a new principle and Deutschman’s model puts this at the forefront of change. In order to create the environment for change there must be empathy, trust, and understanding of the emotional impact on all parties. In the natural world continual spontaneous environmental change demands continual adaption of species in order to survive, literally Change or Die. In business however, change is often engineered to alter the environment in order to gain competitive advantage, or designed to adapt to an environment that has already changed. Change for the human race is a social and economic phenomenon rather than a purely biological one. Active social change requires the buy-in of the changing society or it may be fiercely resisted….and there are numerous examples to support this globally.

Of course, people often focus on what they will lose from change and remain blind to the opportunities it may create so agents of change would do well to acknowledge the negatives and sell the positives in their process of building the all-important relationship. Sellng is in itself about facilitating change and effective selling is about creating the right relationship for the prospect to become a buyer through a change in behaviour.

If you are involved in change (and who isn’t) reading “Change or die” will give you good examples of how the 3 keys can work. Conversely, look to BA and Unite for a live case study of what appears to happen if reframing is attempted without the relationship. Perhaps Willie Walsh and Derek Simpson would do well to buy a copy and read it before the dinosaurs become extinct!

Selling is changing, but is the change occurring quickly enough as customers become more informed and products and services become more readily accessible form a variety of sources?

As long ago as 1999 in her book ‘Selling with Integrity’ Sharon Drew-Morgen proposed Buying Facilitation’ as a new way of selling which continues to increase in popularity and which, up until the customer asks “so what is it you’ve actually got?”, is more akin to coaching in its process and skill requirements than it is to any previous selling method.  

Her ‘Relationship first, task second’ approach has the potential to  strike fear into the heart of many a sales traditionalist however I would challenge any sales manager or director that hasn’t done so yet to seek the truth of what makes their best people the best….not their call activity or product mentions; or their behaviours when accompanied by their manager , but the real truth…the truth they talk about with their colleagues at sales meetings or in the coffee bars and hotel lobbies where they meet other salespeople. They all know that people buy from people and the best of them are the ones that “Get on” with the greatest number of customers and have the best working relationships.

What they do better than the rest lies in their desire to serve their customers in getting the best out of their products and services; and that means that the service comes before the product in their minds and therefore their behaviours. In doing this they ask questions to help their customers to explore the furthest reaches of their minds in search of solutions to their own problems so that the solutions, and potentially the decision to buy, remain the ‘Intellectual property’ of the buyer. At no point in the process is there any coercion or a solution that is pushed onto them.  

This process of facilitating discovery is entirely consistent with the model of coaching that has the role of the coach as facilitating discovery by the coachee and avoiding giving advice. There is congruence too in this approach with the NLP “Beliefs of excellence” (Sue Knight, NLP at Work, 2007) that “There is a solution to every problem” and that “Everyone has within themselves all the resources they will ever need”. You see it’s only when a prospective buyer exhausts all of their internal solutions that they will start to consider external ones, and that’s when they may choose, as a part of their internal resource toolkit, to engage the help of the salesperson and his or her product in solving their problem. Up to that point in a selling discussion any attempt to offer a product as a solution may be met at best with a “No thanks”, a “Yes but” or a “Yes” which is really a “Yes but”. The “but” becomes the objection you’re going to have to handle and once you’re handling objections your weight is moving slowly to your back foot! 

Furthermore the customer relationship may be compromised by a perceived attempt at a pushy sale and the hitherto contrived nature of the discussion that preceded it. So it is worth your salespeople spending time exploring and understanding their customers’ problems, solutions and potential barriers to making change rather than telling them how to solve problems they don’t think they have and wasting their time defending a product proposition that the customer doesn’t think they need!

This will be music to the ears of trained coaches who are accustomed to facilitating discovery but how many sales organisations currently train their sales people in the fundamentals of coaching that could be so useful to them in their selling and the development of questions  that facilitate discovery rather than seek to manipulate? 

Just like coaching, “Buying Facilitation” is about helping the client to achieve their goals more quickly by helping them remove blocks to progress and find solutions to problems.

How might your salespeople react to a selling programme that didn’t allow them to give solutions, only to explore problems and help their customer to find their solutions? In our experience they find it refreshingly different to “Normal” sales training; empowering and motivating……and who doesn’t want a motivated and empowered salesforce? Application of this new selling philosophy seeks to improve selling outcomes by creating bonds between buyers and sellers based on a genuine desire to serve on the part of the seller. It removes tension from the seller-buyer relationship and can create a true win-win.

So in a world of extremely well informed buyers, many of whom still hold cynical stereotypical views of “Pushy reps”, now might be the time to improve productivity by making changes to the objectives and outcomes of your sales training by including “customer coaching” or “Discovery questioning”.  After all “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got!”