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edward craft's blog
THOUGHTS ON SELLING, STRATEGY, TACTICS, & ORGANIZATIONAL POLITICS
Would Sun Tzu have approved of the current presidential campaign? A key principle in The Art of War (no, this is not another plug for my book), is that there is nothing skillful or admirable about competing without regard to cost.
Some people preach against negative selling. I don't. To a certain degree, we all engage in negative selling from time to time. It is unavoidable. Selling is a process of establishing a clear and decisive contrast between ourselves and competitors. Sometimes, all we must do is accentuate our positives. But most of the time we also have to accentuate the competition’s negatives. It’s just the way things work.
But, either way, there is a line. Cross it, and you are no longer honestly and ethically doing service to prospects. You are no longer legitimately informing their decision-making. You are trying to deceive them. In so doing, you are climbing on the back of a tiger. You may win, you may lose. Either way, you are bound to end up inside.
What happens when a presidential candidate crosses that line? What happens when he goes so negative that the venom defines his campaign? Can he ever unscramble that egg? If he wins, can he ever call people to come together for the greater good? Can he even ask them with a straight face? If he loses, can he ever restore his honor?
By now, with two weeks to go, both presidential campaigns know how this is going to end. It doesn’t always work that way, but usually it does, and it certainly does this year. The polling data in their possession is vastly more definitive than anything we see reported in the media. You and I may not be certain who is going to win, but the campaigns are. Trust me. So, at this point, a new question becomes relevant for a candidate: how do I want my campaign to be remembered?
Two weeks before election day in 1984 it was abundantly clear that Walter Mondale had zero chance of defeating Ronald Reagan’s bid for re-election. Mondale asked an adviser what the campaign should do in the time that remained. The reply was to finish the campaign the way he would want his grandchildren to remember it. That would be wise advice this year. And any other. It is wise advice for presidential candidates, and it is wise advice for us, too.
In the 1980s, Labor Secretary Ray Donovan was indicted on charges of corruption. He declared his innocence, but resigned nonetheless, knowing that he would not be able to carry out his duties under such a cloud. But in departing, he lodged a memorable protest. He asked: when I am exonerated, where do I go to get back my good name?
Eventually, Donovan was exonerated. Do you think he ever got back his good name?
Some things in life just happen to us. Fair or not, ours is to learn to live with them. Other things are consequences of our decisions. It is entirely fair that we own them, too. So when you can decide, choose wisely. Run your campaign – I’m back to sales campaigns now – the way you would want your grandchildren to remember you. Run your campaign in such a way that, if you win, your victory is untarnished. Run your campaign in such a way that, if you lose, your dignity and viability are intact, and you live to fight another day.
Word to the wise.
A reader writes: “So, mister strategy, mister politics, mister Sun Tzu, who’s going to win the presidential election?”
I actually know the answer.
It’s not that I’m a pundit. I don’t have access to the inside scoop any more than you do. But I do have one acid test that has proved reliable for over twenty years.
If you have been through a Premise program, you know what strategy is: the fundamental approach to achieving an objective. And you know the critical test of strategy: that it must clearly communicate why someone will select you. A compelling strategy, coupled with well-executed tactics, results in victory. But all the tactical proficiency in the world usually cannot overcome a weak (or missing) strategy.
In each presidential election year since 1988, when I conduct 20/20 Selling programs I ask two simple questions: what is candidate X’s strategy? What is candidate Y’s? Usually, everybody can immediately state one. And, usually, they struggle to come up with the other. That candidate loses. It never fails.
This year, when I ask the question about Obama, everyone immediately says “change.” People who like Obama may say it with a smile, and those who don’t may say it with a sneer, but almost everyone gets it. When I ask the question about McCain, all I hear are mumbles.
It’s going to be Obama. Big. I won’t opine here whether that pleases or displeases me. That is not the point. I’m just telling you what will happen, because a lot of you asked. I think the margin in the electoral college will be two to one Obama. There are 538 electors. So, if I am right, Obama will get around 350 electoral votes.
You heard it here first.
SEPTEMBER 24, 2008
So there I was, in mid-thought or mid-rant, only to vanish from the blogosphere. Sorry. I was really, really busy. And the dog ate my blogwork. But now I’m back. Well, almost.
When I was a kid, there was a show on television called The Time Tunnel. Somewhere in an undisclosed location in the desert, a bunch of scientists had built an enormous tube that could send people back to the past or ahead to the future. But guess what happened? In the very first test, the machine broke, and two members of the team were sent to an unintended place in time. Who woulda thunk it?
Why is it that in every time travel show, they build a gorgeous machine with flashing lights and shiny knobs, but just at the worst possible moment, the contraption goes all random? Call me crazy, but if I'm building a time machine – especially if I'm to be the one to test it – I debug that thing to death. I don't set foot in it while it's in beta.
But I digress.
Each week on The Time Tunnel, the two travelers found themselves thrust into a dire predicament. Back at base, their colleagues could only look on with worry. You see, the Time Tunnel was also a giant widescreen television. The rest of the team at headquarters – including the lovely Lee Meriwether, a former Miss America, who would later play Catwoman – could see everything that happened, but were powerless to help.
This raises a question. If you have a machine that can televise the past or future, why do you need to get in it and travel? It seems like an unnecessary risk. After all, everyone knows that if you go back in time and change something, you could destroy the universe. One false move, two lovers never meet, a child is never born, and Hitler wins World War II.
Again, I stray.
I also object to the fact that these guys always ended up at some major historical event. Come on. The odds of that happening are microscopic. The vast majority of the time, things are pretty quiet. But Tony and Doug – I can't believe I remember their names – were never sent backward or forward only two or three years, and certainly not to a pleasant city park where the only thing going on was a leisurely game of checkers. They were always at Plymouth Rock or Ford's Theater or Omaha Beach or someplace similarly dramatic.
They were also astonishingly lucky. Each week, just as they were about to get scalped at Little Big Horn or something along those lines, one of the techs back at base spun a dial and – poof! – Doug and Tony dematerialized and were transported to some other date and locale. You got a hint about next week's episode by how they were greeted in their new situation. "Thanks for coming, gentlemen. I am Colonel Travis. Welcome to the Alamo."
Now I have really run off the rails.
Last week, when I finished a seminar at a hotel, I walked past another meeting room, and heard a familiar voice. The door was open, so I stopped and discreetly snuck a peek. I lingered far longer than I had intended.
I felt like I had stepped into the Time Tunnel. The voice belonged to a guy I used to work with a long time ago. He was conducting a sales training class, an amateurish clone of a program we both had taught a couple of decades ago. The first thing that struck me was that he was using the same examples, telling the same jokes, and relating the same stories he had used in the 1980s. Back in the day, as they say. Back in the Reagan administration, for crying out loud. I found it depressing.
Then I realized the worst part. What he was teaching hadn't changed either. This I found rather infuriating. I felt sorry for his participants, some of whom were barely out of the womb during this guy's entire frame of reference.
Some of the old, legacy sales training programs have withstood the test of time. But not many. Most should be put on a back shelf in the attic next to grandma's old cracked dishes. They should share the fate of Cabbage Patch dolls, leisure suits, big hair and boom boxes. Of course, their sponsors will claim the programs have been improved, but this really isn't so. All they have done is rename a few things, update the print design of their materials, and transform a mass of unwieldy forms (anyone remember blue sheets?) into equally unwieldy software. They haven't innovated, mainly because they have stopped trying to learn. Their methods are relics whose chief attraction is sentimentality. Today, they are irrelevant, because today the key to everything is speed and simplicity. Word to the wise.
thought followership
There is a game I call Lingo Bingo. I use that title because this is a family-friendly blog. It usually goes by a name where lingo is replaced by a barnyard epithet, the one typically abbreviated BS. You play the game at seminars and conferences while you are in a natural state for such events, that is, bored to death. You play it on a bingo card, but instead of letters and numbers, there are buzzwords. So, for example, what in regular bingo would be O-21 might be optimize. N-13 could be synergies. B-5 is scalable (unless you are in the database business, in which case, no problem). You catch my drift. Every time a speaker uses the cliche, you mark it on your card.
I nominate for inclusion into the Lingo List the now oh-so-tired thought leadership.
Recently, a client invited me to attend a series of presentations by management consulting firms. Forgetting that I am opposed to torture, especially when the the body tied to the rack is mine, I accepted. Without fail, each speaker, at some point in his pitch, used the term thought leadership. The problem was that every one of them said pretty much the same thing. All their slides looked more or less alike. Some even used the same stock photos. Even their client lists contained many of the same names. After just a few, all the presentations blurred together, and people started to snicker every time they heard those words.
Not one of these speakers – and probably not one of these firms – is a thought leader. They were practicing me-tooism in its pure, unadorned state. So, back to the drawing board, self-professed thought leaders. You need a new cliche. (A new cliche? I think I just invented an oxymoron. Does that make me a thought leader?)
hello, i must be going
APRIL 16, 2008
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of chairing a sales force effectiveness conference in Spain. I was joined by a client who is a general sales manager with whom I have much in common, not the least of which is the country of birth of our children.
At the conference, he and I were slated to deliver a joint presentation. Our central theme was how the selling environment has changed and that so-called sales processes have failed to keep pace. Well before the conference, we exchanged thoughts by telephone and email to plan our talk. During one conversation we were discussing specific changes in the sales environment when my friend made a startling observation:
"Relationship selling is dead."
As he went on to explain, I realized that he had put words to a problem that many salespeople are experiencing but have not come to such clarity about. For most, it is still a general, unspecified uneasiness that something has fundamentally changed and that a hard job has now become even harder.
The problem, as diagnosed by my friend, is that decision-makers in accounts are cycling through their jobs much faster than in the past. By the time you build a relationship with them – that is, by the time the relationship reaches the point where it creates advantage for you – they move on.
This is cataclysmic. If it is happening in your world, it illustrates a key point we make in 20/20 Selling: that the work of getting to the heart of what constitutes personal value for key people starts the minute you meet them, not at some imaginary date far off in the future, not at some never-to-arrive time when you think that going about it will be more comfortable. Word to the wise.
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