Lisa McLeod: I spent about 10,000 hours in the field studying salespeople, and the data is absolutely clear.
Other people have documented this. Jim Cullen has documented, companies with a sense of purpose outperform the market by 15:1. My former colleague from Procter & Gamble, Jim Stengel, documented this. Companies that want to make a difference outperform their competitors and outperform the market by over 400%.
The challenge is, inside most organizations, what do we talk about? If I'm the sales manager and you're my sales rep, what do you think I ask you about?
Brendan Byrnes: Money.
Lisa: "When are you going to close it, and how much is going to be?"
Brendan: Right. "Where's my profit? Where's my bottom line?"
Lisa: Yeah. "I need the numbers. I need the numbers." This is a very, very real pressure that people face inside companies, particularly publicly held companies.
But here's the flip of that. If I tell you, "When you go on this deal, I want you to close it. We need that money. Think about your bonus," what's going on inside your head when you're with the customer?
Brendan: Right. It's just that. It's monetary.
Lisa: It's "Me, me, me, me, me." The way that you do it, there are several techniques that I use with my clients, but one of the biggest ones is going after the sales leadership and changing the dynamic.
Yes, we have quotas. Yes, we have revenue targets, but when we talk about our customers, we don't just talk about them as prospects. We talk about individual customers, and how are we going to make a difference to them?
