Barry W Thornton Blog

Just about every Sunday I race my sailboat in a fleet out on the lake I live by. We try to go for just over 2 hours, depending on the wind and that means a course of 5 to 15 miles. I have a big boat and race other folks with big boats, we all depend on our crews to make the boat work right, to squeeze the best possible speed at all times on all tacks. We have a strategist, a tactician, guys who make the motor perform (in this case the motor is the sails), and some who drives the boat. We have a management team. For those of you who care, the driver is not in charge (more about that in a later blog).

After 2 and half hours and miles of water on a nice sunny day you can win or lose by an inch, which in that sense is no different that a foot, a yard, a furlong, or a league; you lose and that’s it. It means that every second of the race is critical and any mistakes can be fatal in terms of getting to the finish line first. Because we all make mistakes the general rule is that the guy who makes the fewest mistakes that day wins. Sure you can be second, or third, and still get iron (a trophy at the end of the event), but, well, you understand. Oh yea, there’s nothing for fourth place.

I depend on a team, skill and communication are critical, mistakes happen and they suck, there is no time off, once you cross the start line you are in the on mode for every second until you cross the finish. Let your attention drift on for a minute and you pay the bill.

Martin Luther King used to talk about keeping your eye on the prize, don’t get distracted or diverted, always focus on why you are there.

Does that sound anything like business?

Welcome to shared realities.

Welcome to Hard Times, not a town in a Henry Fonda Western but your front door. Everyone wants a discount, times are tough, they are special, everyone knows that you make too much anyway.

Your salesman are weakening, they don’t have a clue about selling the value of the product or service even though they read all the books, watch the CDs and you bring in ‘Experts” to prop them up.

I always felt that in general there are three weak spots in sales people that no one wants to deal with:

First, your salesmen are nice people. To be blunt you don’t necessarily want nice people, you want people who can be nice. You want people who have an almost vicious determination to get the sale at the terms they want; nice is one of the many tools they use to do. A good high-value closer is, just below the surface, well, not a nice person. That is cool, most of us deep inside know we may not be the nicest folks in that what we will do to someone else’s head to achieve our goal has limited bounds.

Was that a distasteful thought we just went through, feel that I am being insensitive and maybe even hurtful in what I advocate. If so you really don’t want to go any further with me in the realities I will be exploring in this series, go find a more sunshiny blog to read, one about kittens and puppies perhaps.

Second, your salesmen don’t have the faith. They don’t have the faith that they can close the deal the way you want them to. The suffer from the ‘Stockholm Syndrome”, they sympathize with the customer and surrendered their own will. Lacking willpower means no Force-Of-Will. It is Force-Of-Will that keeps the good salesman working on the customers head until the customer believes the value proposition that justifies the cost of the product. The good salesman instills faith about him, the company, and the products in the customer’s mind. Only then is the value of the product or service well enough established that the discount is not the winning issue, faith drives the discount aside. It’s called a Value Proposition for a darn good reason.

Third, is Cohunes – Brass Balls. Some look at this as a lack of pride, the willingness to interact with people to n-th degree with a sole purpose. Don’t confuse this with Force-Of-Will, there is a fine and important difference. Force-Of-Will is about drive, Cohunes is about welding that Willpower without being bothered what people think of you. It is about using that drive, which is beyond having it.

Point of it all is that good sales people are animals inside, mental animals with few external signs of what is really going on inside themselves. True stealth creatures, how cool!

Let’s talk about salesmen for a bit.

First thought. It is said with confidence that 45% of salesmen don’t close. Personally I think this number is low, but I will run with the convention for this Blog.

That doesn’t mean that they don’t bring home the order, it simply means that in most cases they take the order, not develop it, THEY DON’T CLOSE! They function as clerks, not sales people, but of course they claim all the credit. In fact they will claim more credit for the sale because they know their weakness and will lie to cover it.

Because we managers are only interested in results we generally don’t seek to understand the difference. The problem is that this means we are out of control, our salesman’s performance is capricious, based on luck and Marketing in many ways. Is this bad? After all, we got the sale.

It is terrible for several reasons:

1 – We don’t know which of our efforts (marketing or sales) made the event happen, so where do we pour our limited resources, more marketing or more commissions?

2 – We loose predictability, the data about our sales pipeline is false or weak at best. If the salesman is really clerking then he in fact is doing three things.

A – Operating in the blind, most likely deceiving himself in the process.

B – Deceiving us, in essence selling us, most likely lying to us.

C – Not developing the customer meaning that customer retention is going to be harder and we are not getting maximum yield for that customer.

This lack of clear vision means that the actual effectiveness of our Marketing is not really understood, without this feedback Marketing cannot better tune itself, understand the success of that they are doing, get better at it.

Most important, we have a B or C player working for us in a time when A-players are on the market. If we understood the truth we could replace him with an A-player thus future-proof our company by increasing our overall quality of the process, moral, and power of our selling force.

I hope you like your clerks.

This morning I had a meeting about my recent start-up, I need to build out my team to cover areas I am deficient or weak in (if you only knew). Throughout the course of our conversation I found myself thinking again and again of Bijoy Goswami and David Wolpert’s book “The Human Fabric” (Amazon, you should get it), and its accuracy in codifying the needs of the entrepreneur and the business startup.

They postulate, very accurately I believe, that there are three types of core personalities needed in a startup to get make is successful. These are the Mavens (who are driven by knowledge), the Relaters (who are driven by relationships), and Evangelists (who are driven by action). For those who doubt this it will only take a moment to note that most of the time while you only hear about or see just one of these characters in a business, closer examination reveals, lurking in the background, the others. Further introspection suggests that it is a bit of a folly to try to be all three at the same time. Sometimes you can be two, but all three, that’s a long reach.

This reflection is based on my understanding that I am truly not the world’s best Relater (I have a bad habit of saying what I think – bluntly - I call these verbal aberrations ‘truth-aches’, my mouth gets me in a lot of trouble). But if you want strategy, insight, invention and action, get out of the way, I’m your man!

This means that I must be comfortable with sharing and thus collaborating to accomplish my goals.

If you are an Entrepreneur in development (I have done this 5 times and still consider myself a learner) then you must become honest enough to position yourself accurately in the driving team that gets a business going. If you can do it all yourself, great!  But that strength can also be your Achilles Heel, watch out.

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008, all rights reserved.

Let’s spend some time looking at the world of the Entrepreneur, something people tell me that I am one, though I just thought that “I” was just me and that’s it.  This is prompted by an email passed on to me from a friend who got an email from someone who found considerable time to complain that most of the people he meets in our local Entrepreneurial Group talk about the act of being an entrepreneur but in fact never have been one.  The point was how could they comment without having succeeded as being one (having skins on the wall was his analogy).  Let me offer a couple of thoughts about this –

One form of human endeavor is entrepreneurship, (entrepreneur: (Merriam-Webster) one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise).  Most folks equate this definition with owning you own business or being your own boss.  This is not always the case as will see later when I blog on the entrepreneur inside the enterprise.

There are 10s of thousands of people with an opinion on the entrepreneurial process.  In fact case-studies and the like can make you pretty darn good at the organize and management nature of the definition above. There can be merit in listening to their observations and codifications to build out this aspect of the definition.

But the magic word here is ‘Risk”.  With this word we transition from the world of logic to the world of emotion.  So there are two aspects to entrepreneurial experience, the doing and the risking.  Here is my response to him:

“Dear Sir.

Your observation about not hearing from people who have skins on the wall is in error.  I, and the gentleman who sent me this mail of yours, live in skins lined huts out here on the Plain of Life, and so by your definitions are competent to talk to you.  So Grasshopper, take a moment and read.

Clearly this entrepreneurial thing is a two-stage operation.  My recommendation is that you have Stage One down pretty solid for when you get to Stage Two you will need to have the reactive skills of Stage One.  All these talkers you complain about are working Stage One, which is good.  Not clear?  I like stores so let me offer one.

This weekend the Austin Yacht Club had a sailing race up to Turn Back Canyon on Lake Travis.  My Son and I raced our boat up.  As we pass Pace Bend Park there are some cliffs over the water.  At the top of the cliffs are about 50 people; every so often one guy jumps off and all the rest make a lot of noise.  Most people are there because they secretly would like to be the jumper, but only 3 or 4 actually step out into free space and take the risk, and thus achieve the reward (crowd approval, personal satisfaction, experience, and the Thwap (my Son’s definition, the sound your testicles hitting the top of the inside of your skull as they violently contract in abject terror only to spring back by the sudden elation of knowing you did it and are still alive and well)).  Eventually, someone who has wanted to but has never jumped is driven enough to take the risk and so steps off the cliff.  They are a different person when they climb out of the water and never quite fit back into the crowd at the top of the cliff.

All those folks at the top of the cliff are like those people you are complaining about in the Austin Entrepreneurial Community.  They have done everything but stepped off the cliff, they have done everything but taken the risk and started a business.  They want to, they are learning the drill, and they are gaining on it, but they cannot yet jump.  Those people at the top of the cliff, those Entrepreneurial want-a-be’s, are probably better at organizing and managing than I am.  I respect them for those difficult to obtain and implement skills, I need them for my projects.  All of those folks are working hard on getting up the nerve and conditions to jump, to go out and get a skin.  At some point passion will overcome caution and they will risk it all to win.  And what they win is the transition in their souls.  I will then call them true Homo Sapiens because I believe that when you take that decision you mind changes and you start down a new path to wisdom.  I respect everyone on that path and feel personal sorrow for those that fall besides the trail.

Your problem is that you are looking for someone to show you the magic way.  They already have, but your mind is numb with fear, you just don’t have the ‘huevos’ to step off the cliff yet, so instead of looking inside for the answer you are spending energy and time blaming them.  Yet you still come again and again to meetings and complain, and look for a messiah to show you the way.

All entrepreneurs’ communities are like that.  It is a special filter and there are gradients of humanity, each at a different stage, each trying to become ‘whole man’.  So stop bitching, learn all you can, and then make your mind up to jump.  It is about you, not them.  From someone who has jumped a lot I can tell you that you stink of fear and fear makes your mind numb.  You can’t jump with a numb mind, you can only fall off and thus fail.

Now go do something, start a business, get off your royal rear-end and join our club, but please stop bitching about those who have not jumped, it’s their journey, not yours.

I lift a glass to your future, Barry”

Copyright Barry W Thornton 2008, all rights reserved.