Why Love (Not Money) Makes Great Leaders: Insight from Dr. Herb Greenberg

According to Dr. Herb Greenberg, founder of Caliper Corporation, great leaders are not motivated by money.

This is just one of the conclusions Dr. Greenberg drew from his extensive research on the qualities and characteristics that make great leaders, which he published in his book, Succeed on Your Own Terms (which eventually became a New York Times bestseller).

Among the hundreds of leaders interviewed for the book, Dr. Greenberg says that each had his or her own unique definition of success. “Each person knew exactly what he or she needed to do in order to feel like a success, short term and long term,” says Dr. Greenberg. “None of these leaders used money as a definition of success.”

Dr. Greenberg (who lost his sight at age 10) launched his own long and successful career with a single great idea — he was convinced there was a market for assessment tools that could help companies assess qualified candidates for job openings, including sales. In 1961, he left his job as a college professor and founded Caliper. He and his business partner began knocking on doors to spread the word about the value of a comprehensive personality test to assess job candidates in management, sales, and customer service. At the end of four months, they had nothing to show for their efforts but a string of rejections. “Many times, I woke up thinking to myself what have I done?” Greenberg told Inc.com in this video interview. In a blog post, he summed up his recollection of that time by saying, “The number of rejections, including being laughed at, cannot be counted — I can only say that we needed face masks to protect us from the doors slammed in our faces.”

Finally, Gail Smith, VP of Merchandising for General Motors, decided to take a chance on them. Just three years later, Caliper was performing assessments for 900 job candidates a month for dozens of clients. Dr. Greenberg told Inc.com that persistence was key to their success. “Fight through the failures, take the rejections … and we say this to anybody who’s looking for a job or a client. People are going to tell you ‘No.’ If you’re ahead of the curve, you’re going to hear ‘No, no, no.’ You need the ego strength to take that beating … and push forward.”

Today, Caliper employs more than 250 professionals in 12 offices around the world and is a recognized leader in using personality tests and assessments to predict success in management, sales, customer service, and even sports. In this video interview, Dr. Greenberg shares a story with Selling Power founder and CEO Gerhard Gschwandtner about a successful basketball player they interviewed.

“Everyone said he had all this talent in the world … but would never be Shaquille O’Neal or a Tim Duncan, or any of the great ones,” Greenberg says. “I said, “What’s holding you back? Why aren’t you as good as you could be?’ He said, ‘I hate this game.’ I said, ‘So why are you playing it?’ He said, ‘They pay me $6 million a year!’ But that’s what stopped him from being a great leader. Not loving his work.”

Watch the interview below between Dr. Herb Greenberg and Gerhard Gschwandtner and discover the top qualities that all great leaders share.

Stop Hiring the Wrong Sales Reps

According to Peak Sales Recruiting, the cost of adding the wrong salesperson to your team can total nearly seven times the annual salary for the position. Yikes!

How can sales leaders mitigate the danger of making an unwise hiring investment? One of the best ways to find out what’s really behind a stellar resume and great interview skills is to talk with people the rep has actually worked for or with.

That’s why some companies are now using confidential electronic surveys to gather feedback on candidates from multiple sources (such as managers, peers, and direct reports).

Many sales leaders might have felt burned in the past by glowing recommendations that turned out to be pie-in-the-sky endorsements, but the confidential nature of such surveys inspires candid feedback, say the folks at SkillSurvey. They have long believed that traditional phone reference checks are outmoded and insufficient to give sales managers a truly objective look at a candidate’s past performance.

Their automated survey is designed to provide a “360-degree” assessment of a candidate’s behaviors, skills and developmental needs — and the confidential request for feedback works: more than 85 percent of references respond to a reference request when the request guarantees anonymity.

When soliciting feedback from references, SkillSurvey asks about a candidate’s:

  • Ability to consistently meet or exceed sales goals.
  • Persistence when faced with objections or other setbacks.
  • Competencies in managing post-sale relationships.
  • Determination in locating qualified sales opportunities.
  • Ability to leverage technology (like CRM) for productivity.

To learn more about how how to efficiently and accurately assess potential sales hires for your team, join us on Wednesday, October 25 (2-3 PM Eastern) for a live Webinar, “How to Avoid the High Cost of a Bad Sales Hire.” Selling Power founder Gerhard Gschwandtner will be hosting, and panelist Jack Kramer, Vice President of Field Operations at SkillSurvey, will be sharing insight and expert tips.

 

How Sales Leaders Can Avoid the Quarter-End Crunch

Quarter end crunch in sales
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net/DigitalArt.

The end-of-quarter crunch.

For most sales teams, I’d venture to say it’s 10% adrenaline-fueled excitement, and 90% utter torture.

A quarter-end wish list for any head of sales would likely include these items:

  • a healthy deal cushion to serve as a fail-safe;
  • complete visibility into sales team activities on prospective accounts; and
  • predictability.

The end-of-quarter timeline will vary depending on your goods or services, but the anxiety level maps to the same pattern:

Code Yellow: Pricing
You and your prospect should have agreed on pricing terms X number of weeks before the end of the quarter. You know what X is for your organization (for us in the software world, we’d be looking at approximately four weeks from quarter close).

Code Orange: Contract Review
You have a contract ready for the counterparty’s review by this number of weeks from the quarter end (for my team, it’s three weeks). If terms are still being haggled, it is unlikely you’ll close the deal in time.

Code Red (an appropriate color): Redlines
You should have a redlined copy of the contract from your prospect by this point (for us, two weeks from quarter-close).

Point of No Return
You’re in the office at 6:00 a.m. every day that last week, trying for last-minute heroics, but the reality is you were counting on a deal that didn’t adhere to your timeline.

In an ideal sales world, we could structure predictable outcomes from vendor-selection stage to the moment the customer signs on the dotted line. The limited amount of time we have to close deals at quarter-end forces us to take a good, hard stare at how we can improve efficiency closer to the beginning of the negotiation process.

One simple way to avoid the quarter-end crunch is to inject deal predictability and efficiency into the sales cycle. How? Start with the foundation of your deal: the contract. Here are some techniques that you can start implementing right away:

1) Get a term sheet from your prospect as early as possible. Knowing up front what your prospect intends to include in the contract will ensure that you have a clearer picture of the deal timeline. The sooner you can see the terms and conditions that are crucial to your prospect, the faster you can respond (and the better prepared you’ll be for negotiations). At this point, you’ll already have improved your deal predictability by understanding if the feasibility of your prospect’s essential terms implies weeks, months – or even more than a year for deal closure.

2) Create a “contract playbook.” Perhaps one of the most important things you can do in the early phases of a deal is create a contract playbook – the series of items to which you’re willing to agree so the deal doesn’t get bogged down in legal quicksand. One of the common reasons a negotiation gets delayed is unreasonable terms and conditions on both sides of the fence. Creating your contract playbook ensures that you have a plan about which cards you want to show.

3) Prepare the way for quick signoff.  If you’ve cleared the more difficult hurdle of coming to terms, you don’t want to miss closing the deal because you can’t get the contract to the right people at the right time. Make sure you fully understand the sign-off process for your deal before crunch-time hits. If you have many different types of contracts and a complex approval cycle, consider deploying contract-management software that can automate many of the steps, reduce errors, and speed the approval cycle.

End-of-quarter stress is a fact of life for sales teams. Rather than hope for last-minute heroics to get your deal done, invest in some smart steps ahead of time so make the process more predictable. You’ll be ahead of the game and ready to speed to close when the customer says, “Yes.”

Doug Bell
Doug Bell is Chief Commercial Officer at Selectica.

5 Important Blog Posts for Sales Leaders

Busy week with your sales team? We thought so. Here are links to five great blog posts you might have missed in the past week, related to topics especially important to sales leaders (including compensation, motivation, social selling, Sales 2.0, and the new B2B buyer cycle). Happy reading!

Blog Post #1: The smart way to motivate, reward, and compensate sales reps (via Sales 2.0 Conference blog)

Have transparent payout information. Salespeople shouldn’t worry if last week’s deal will be in their paycheck or not. If they can see the deal is credited toward their payouts, they can focus on the next one. According to Zuora, it’s a “dispute killer.”

Blog Post #2: Know your B2B buyer cycle (via Sales 2.0 Conference blog)

Here are three basic questions that sales leaders should be able to easily answer about today’s buy cycle:

  1. How well can your sales team build relationships with customers via a variety of channels?
  2. How well does your sales process map to the buy cycle?
  3. How empowered are your reps to have compelling and relevant conversations with qualified prospects online?

Blog Post #3: Saying goodbye to the good old days of selling (via Selling Power blog)

I have always believed that selling is an art. Today, however, no sales leader can afford to ignore science. Sales 2.0 and technology solutions are making the art of selling measurable in actual numbers. And that is going to have a huge effect on the way we lead sales teams in the years to come.

Blog Post #4: Communicating value to prospects (via Heinz Marketing blog)

Many companies include examples of the problem in their sales presentations, and wonder why prospects don’t immediately light up.

Your prospect isn’t going to buy unless the cost of changing is lower than the cost of doing the same. Isolated, anecdotal evidence doesn’t change that value equation. But communicating the scope of the problem very well may.

Blog Post #5: The effect of social on enterprise selling/thoughts on Marc Benioff’s keynote at Dreamforce (via Sales 2.0 Advocate blog)

As your customers, employees and partners become increasingly connected online, this raises some interesting questions, opportunities and risks in regards to trust:

  • Will we have some kind of open and universal access to ratings and reviews for B2B sales and service professionals as we now see on consumer Internet sites for professionals like doctors? Will enterprise products – and the companies that produce them – be subject to a proliferation of eBay or Yelp-like reviews?