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HBR – Replacing the Sales Funnel with the Sales Flywheel

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HBR – Replacing the Sales Funnel with the Sales Flywheel

HBR article by Brian Halligan, November 20, 2018

Using a flywheel to describe our business allows me to focus on how we capture, store and release our own energy, as measured in  traffic and leads, free sign-ups, new customers, and the enthusiasm of existing customers. It’s got a sense of leverage and momentum. The metaphor also accounts for loss of energy, where lost users and customers work against our momentum and slow our growth.

Employee skills. In the “better product” era, when you grew, you added humans, and you placed them in specialized roles. In addition to a sales rep, you created a business development role for pre-sales, you hired a variety of hunters and farmers, you assigned an account rep to manage ongoing business. You hired and trained “I-shaped” employees who could dive deep into a specific domain. Specialists are great at handling specific customer issues. But, when you have multiple specialist roles, it means your customer is getting handed off from one specialist to another. And, if your customer is getting handed off, they are experiencing friction.

sales heroes; Joost d’Hooghe , Kristina Sutton,  Luca Morrone, …….

ARTICLES, RizeClub®

HBR – Distill Your Message to Just 15 Words

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HBR – Distill Your Message to Just 15 Words

Know how to pitch.  Start with the idea and why you are the right person to take the stage and deliver this big idea. While it must be a big idea, you need to be able to communicate it in 15 words or less.

Share what the audience will take away, as well as the global impact of the talk. Don’t save the most important part of your pitch for the end; people may stop reading before they ever get to it.

Know your audience. When you do research on your audience ahead of time, it gives you the opportunity to craft your talk with the language that your audience speaks.

Know your objective.  It’s about being authentic. Even though the audience is probably not going to audibly respond to you when you’re speaking on a stage, you are in a scene with them, and when you have a clear objective in terms of what you want, and how to get it, you will be more believable and captivating from the stage, therefore building your confidence as a speaker. Think about the objective you have going into your speech. Maybe your goal is to get the audience to donate to a worthy cause, or spread the word about your ideas. If you want your audience to accept your ideas, or change their opinion about something, how are you going to get them to do it? You can inspire, motivate, or even scare them into changing their minds. But you can’t do any of those things until you know what you want the ultimate outcome to be.

Know the difference between a good talk and a bad talk. A good talk has content that is fresh and well-edited, with a clear arc that takes us on a journey. A good talk is one that is so well rehearsed that you are able to let go of the script and freely share the content in the moment. A good talk is one where your audience wants to adopt your idea at the end of the talk.

click here for the full HBR article, image by UNSPLASH

 

ARTICLES, HUMAN RESOURCES, INSPIRATION

growth mindset & the t-shape

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growth mindset & the t-shape
HBR article Paul A. O’KeefeCarol DweckGreg Walton SEPTEMBER 10, 2018

Some people lean more toward the view that interests are inherent in a person, simply waiting to be awakened or found — this is what we call a fixed mindset of interest. Others lean more toward the view that interests can be developed and that, with commitment and investment, they can grow over time — we call this a growth mindset of interest.

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Some companies have seen the value of cross-disciplinary problem-solving and have implicitly adopted a growth mindset of interest. For example, Tim Brown, CEO and president of the design consulting firm IDEO, has emphasized the value of the “T-shaped person.” The vertical line of the T represents one’s depth of expertise in a field, whereas the horizontal line represents one’s diverse interests, and ability to work and collaborate across areas. Like those with a stronger growth mindset, T-shaped people are experts but do not necessarily have a singular focus, and look for inspiration from multiple areas.

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Innovation requires both reaching across fields and, often, acquiring more than a surface-level understanding of those fields. This means that when people reach across fields they must maintain that interest even when the material becomes complex and challenging. A growth mindset of interest may help promote this kind of resilience.

CLICK HERE for the full article.

FUNCTIONS, INSPIRATION, PODCASTS

HBR podcast – Use Learning to Engage Your Team

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HBR podcast – Use Learning to Engage Your Team

We can see the power of using deliberate learning requirement as a way to stimulate engagement. Indeed if someone is highly experienced and fully capable from day 1 that sounds effective, but also very boring for that person.

Whitney Johnson, an executive coach, argues that on-the-job learning is the key to keeping people motivated. When managers understand that, and understand where the people they manage are on their individual learning curve — the low end, the sweet spot, or the high end — employees are engaged, productive, and innovative. CLICK HERE to LISTEN to this HBR Podcast.

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