Rather than driving action, they leave participants without clear direction or means to move forward.

This is where my insights from Jonathan Courtney come into play, and particularly his framework for running effective and interactive, action-oriented workshops. He is passionate about them and insists they can revolutionize how teams collaborate and achieve meaningful results.

The problem

There are three common problems he noticed when working with some of the world's leading companies:

1. Teams don't always know how to best start new projects. It's difficult for them to achieve consensus regarding what initiatives should be prioritized.
2. There is no unified, or robust system for how to run their projects, resulting in lack of alignment. Trying to decide on how to best run a project ends up taking longer than actually doing the work.
3. Finally, poor communication throughout the project ends up killing creativity because office politics and hierarchies get in the way. The by-product becomes a lot of wasteful talk with little progress and discussions that go nowhere.

This results in disheartenend and frustrated professionals doing lots of "busy work" but with little actually getting done.

What is the goal of a workshop facilitator?

The singular goal of a workshop facilitator should be to help people unlock their superpowers. According to Jonathan, when people don't have to think about what processes to choose, they can focus on doing the work they were meant to do. With an effective workshop framework, a good facilitator should be able to land into any dysfunctional team and turn it into a powerhouse.

Become a good workshop facilitator

According to Courtney, there are four key steps to becoming a good facilitator.

1. Mindset and theory - You have to understand the basic principles and mindset of workshop facilitators or "workshoppers".
2. Facilitation skills - You have to develop your ability to lead a team of any size through a workshop confidently along its entire duration. This requires improvisation skills, ability to manage team dynamics, and a keen eye for participants' energy levels.
3. The toolkit - Having tens of exercises to choose from and knowing how to combine them is a huge advantage. This will let you create even some of the most complex types of workshops with a lot of moving parts.
4. Widely used & proven workshop recipes - There's no need to reinvent the wheel as there are some tried and tested workshop principles already out there such as the Design Sprint. Having a handful of flexible recipes in your pocket means you won't have to create custom workshops from scratch.

In this post we'll mainly focus on the first step.

Facilitation principles

The core principles that guide Courtney when designing a workshop are:

1. Together, alone
2. Everything is anonymous
3. Creativity is a nice to have, but not essential

Above can feel counter-intuitive at first, but when you look deeper, they make a lot of sense.

Together, alone

Even when people sit at the same table, they should work individually. They shouldn't discuss or brainstorm next steps even if they work towards a common goal. They shouldn't speak or negotiate on how to best move forward. This counterintuitive idea is one of the best ways to avoid some of the major issues that pop up as part of team dynamics where extroverted people take all the control, and decision-makers start influencing everybody else in the room. The group's tendency will be to go along with the opinions of such members, or worst of all, end up not having any opinion at all. When you work "together alone", you don't get influenced by colleagues, and in turn, this leaves you time and space to work through a solution.

Everything is anonymous

In the same way as with the principle of: "Together, alone", this one has the added benefit of removing any bias towards a preconceived piece of the solution, helping participants be more adventurous. When drawing sketches, team members ideally shouldn't know who came up with what. When drawings or ideas are submitted anonymously, team members can vote without knowing who came up with them, helping everything stay more objective.

Creativity is nice to have, but not essential

Especially various design-thinking workshops have pushed the idea of requiring creativity. However, this results in putting a lot of people off who don't consider themselves creative. This is why workshops should be designed in a way where participants that don't consider themselves to be artistic or "designery" can still produce interesting, innovative and creative solutions. Workshops should ideally replace the need of being creative by providing a conducive environment and a step-by-step system to experiment with ideas while being guided every step of the way.

Workshop supplies

It is a good idea to keep some office supplies handy for an in-person workshop. This one is taken directly from Courtney's Workshopper playbook:

• Square sticky notes (two different colours)
• Rectangular sticky notes (yellow)
• 1.5 large black markers per participant (bring more than needed)
• Two different colors of sticky dots for voting
• One empty sketching notebook per person
• A block of plain printer paper
• Adhesive whiteboard roll
• Whiteboard markers
• A timer clock

The 4C's framework

There's a clear pattern to most workshops out there, and using Courtney's four C's will fit any variation regardless of the topic, length or outcome:

1. Collect
2. Choose
3. Create
4. Commit

Collect

In the beginning, there's always a stage having to do with infromation collection, be it challenges, ideas, inspiration, data, or anything else. This information must be visualized for all the participants. During the collect phase also the scope of work gets defined. This is especially important when the problems to solve are not all that clearly defined.

Sample exercise:

One exercise that is useful for the collect stage is the sailboat. The outcome of this exercise should be a categorized, non-prioritized list of challenges and issues. The duration is 30 minutes. Materials needed for the exercise can be the following:

1. A whiteboard or a flip-chart.
2. A block of square sticky notes per participant
3. One sharpie per participant

A preparatory step is to draw the sailboat, but as their first actual step, the team is tasked to think and work on what is moving the team forward, and what are the positive things (wind in the sail). Taking around 10 minutes, this serves as a nice preparatory warm-up before jumping into the challenges.

Next, the team moves over to the more negative part having to do with the challenges and problems. This is done in a more anonymous fassion. After 8 minutes of thinking and writing down, the team members are asked to stick their notes to the bottom (next to the anchor) in a rapid and random manner.

As the third step of the Collect-phase, after the facilitator identifies a single sample common group and adds a sticky note to it, the team is tasked to help categorize the rest of the sticky notes into logical groupings during the next 10 minutes. This is not about choosing what to prioritize to be worked on as that is done later, but the outcome is a vertical logical grouping of topics.

Choose

Having collected enough data, it's time to select what to focus on and what to leave out. The team must know what it is working on so it doesn't create solutions to wrong or irrelevant challenges. During the choose stage, the workshop develops a clear direction that acts as the foundation for everything else.

Sample exercise:

One suitable exercise for this stage is the dot voting, where eight sticky dots are given out to each person. The outcome of this exercise is a prioritized list of challenges or ideas. Here, during the 8 minutes each team member thinks independently without having to discuss the topics with each other. Each member can vote also for their own sticky notes, and indeed, they can put as many sticky dots on each identified challenge or idea as they want. But remember, nobody is allowed to talk!

As the follow-up step taking approximately two minutes, everyone sits down and helps the facilitator arrange the ideas with most votes vertically in a descending order.

These issues, ideas or challenges can then be converted into opportunity questions or "How Might We's" (HMWs).

Create

Once everyone is on the same page regarding the scope of work and other relevant information, it's time to create solutions. The solutions themselves shouldn't be final or even very detailed. What's important instead is creating a multitude of potential solutions.

This is where the team begins to truly flex their solution and ideation muscles.

Even as there are many exercises for the create stage out there, it's recommended to use something along the lines of mass idea generation at first, and only then idea prioritization. Among others, one good exercise for this is Coutney's 10-for-10.

Commit

Workshops are useless without actionable takeaways. Unless the workshop is only aimed at inspiring people, the commit phase is about the facilitator helping team members commit to a small number of solutions to be executed.

Because ideas are worth nothing without execution, a system for committing to ideas becomes critical. The goal here is to take our prioritized solutions and create a plan to actually make them happen.

A fitting exercise for this stage is the action board which uses the effort-impact matrix and combines it with a simple system for creating actionable tasks.

Because this is the last exercise in the last phase of your workshop in this case, you should really end it one on a high-note and give everyone a big high-five! You can also reflect on how much progress you've achieved together!

If you liked this post or have any questions, consider subscribing to my occasional hand-made newsletter below. Talk to you soon!

I was so intrigued about scenario analysis and Monte Carlo simulation after publishing my thesis about the topic that after building an easy to use three-scenario FPOM calculator with Python Django, I went all-out and created an easy to use simulator add-on for Google sheets I called Simulate. After some back and forth with Google’s review team it is now finally downloadable from the Workspace Marketplace!

Using Simulate, which is currently available in free public Beta, it is super easy to generate hundreds of scenarios simply by highlighting the variables you are uncertain about in your Google Sheet document and letting the simulator sample the specified ranges so you can better understand risks and uncertainties in your model. I firmly believe it will work with almost any model of yours, and I encourage you to try it out. Scenario thinking, analysis and better decisions for the win!!

I’m so proud to have built something I myself will use, and if it’s helpful and there will be more demand, I’ll keep improving the tool in the future. However, for now, I’ll just let it simmer for a while.

Oh – and I’ve also recently migrated most of my hosting over to Hetzner from Digital Ocean after learning about their great customer feedback, some of the industry’s lowest prices and, most importantly, the fact that they originate from Bavaria 🇩🇪 (not so far from where I lived). And what’s more, one of their main server locations is in Helsinki, Finland 🇫🇮. So it looks like I’m starting to bring some of my apps and infrastructure back closer to home!

The LBS blog will remain on Digital Ocean VPS in Amsterdam for now though, whereas the transition to Hetzner for Simulation DSS was easy thanks to it being a fully dockerized application. I have to say I’ve had some weird small performance issues with Hetzner in the beginning, but currently it seems to be stellar ✨

I’ve recently gotten interested in fishing and I’ll be storming some downstream rivers with my SUP board while sleeping the nights in shelters. I didn’t even know it is possible to fish salmon in North Karelia close to some of these rivers! For now, when I still live close the pristine eastern Finland's wilderness areas, I want to get the best of it while I can! Here are some pictures from last summer as I was just getting into traveling on the thing:

Fun times, but this year I’ll be hitting the rapids 💪🌊🏄‍♂️

Thanks to my professors I’m taking the chance to fly over to one of the world's oldest universities, University of Bologna in Italy 🇮🇹 to attend a Real Options conference where I’ll meet some of this interesting field’s most distinguished scholars and present a paper to the audience. This paper is my first proper academic publication in collaboration with some professors (and probably the last one, but you never know, haha) 🤓🎓.

Additionally, in a couple of days, with one of my best friends I’ll be flying to Istanbul from where we’ll travel east and cross into Georgia to spend some time in the mountains while getting to know this beautiful country. I’m super much looking forward to the trip! 🇹🇷🇬🇪🏔️

New article: Account development 🌪️

😴 After the critical implementation stage, your strategic sales journey transitions into what is commonly labeled "account maintenance", or more aptly, account development. Thinking of this crucial stage merely as "maintenance" is misleading because it implies a passive approach.

Per definition, whereas the word "maintenance" is about keeping things the way they are now, active account development is actionable and dynamic ⚡️

Continue reading here.

Favorite quote  💭

You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life – Steve Jobs.

Random remark  📖

A note to myself on bold writing

Like most of us, I tend to gravitate towards hedging my words and using too many of them. Instead, I need to write boldly and make a point. Words like “probably”, “maybe”, “could be”, etc., feel good in the moment, but during the editing stage all this wariness should be removed in order to make a strong point that comes across loud and clear.

It’s crazy to realize that nobody cares about my unclear carefully considered and thoroughly “hedged” points I put forward along with all the unclear nuance and complicated words. Hell, I might be losing you right now.

What the reader remembers instead are my boldest statements that I can proceed to discuss and analyze face-to-face if a need be. Provocative, bold and brave! It doesn’t mean I’m coming across as dumb, right?

Nobody will read my stuff otherwise – I wouldn’t. It all makes sense. But once again, this is mega difficult thing in practice. I’ll keep learning.

End note

As always, thank you for your time and for being a great subscriber!  🎉

In case you find this stuff interesting or useful, I'd be super thankful if you'd share the LBS with a friend or two.

Talk to you soon.

All the best, Santeri

Per definition, whereas the word "maintenance" is about keeping things the way they are now, active account development is actionable and dynamic.

Sometimes it happens on autopilot and your new customer will provide you follow-up access to other problems existing within the account. This way, if you’re fortunate enough, you'll instantly be able start a new sales cycle and take things on from there.

When your product is already established at your customer's site, you’ll find it easier to work with your internal sponsors resulting in less selling effort needed to close consecutive add-on deals.

However, sometimes things are not all that easy.

The importance of actively developing your accounts

Account development is not a low priority hands-off process, but a strategic necessity. Neglecting existing accounts can lead to your competitors taking away your business.

A robust active account development strategy is your best bet to protect your customers from competitors' advances and leverage your accounts for referrals and new sales opportunities. Particularly in niche markets, your reputation among customers can significantly influence your buyers' decisions and provide synergies helping your clients do the selling for you.

Account development strategies

After closing your initial sale, it’s unlikely there's any immediate business potential as your product tends to satisfy the current need until there are significant changes. Some salespeople will resort to waiting and occasionally calling their clients to ping whether there's anything new regarding the strategy or people while maintaining an overall passive stance.

According to Rackham, such a passive-static approach is one of the least successful and most expensive ways of doing business, rendering the distinction of breaking salespeople down into “farmers” and “hunters" wholly inadequate.

In order to protect your most important accounts from competition, your best defensive strategy may be going on the offensive and working on them actively by identifying additional business opportunities.

He lists five simple ways to ensure your current accounts are harnessed for maximum potential.

1. Don’t maintain, but actively develop your accounts: Without a clear sales goal, shifting over to simply maintaining good personal relationships and going for an occasional visit, lunch or a social chat will not be enough. This will not protect your account from competition.

The most successful salespeople Rackham studied looked actively for new opportunities instead of resorting to static maintenance. By turning every customer-care call into a consultative one attempting to extend their business they stood the greatest chance of protecting the business they had already won.

2. Document the good news: During the most active phases of interacting with your accounts, and especially when problems come up during the implementation phase, you'll tend to put a lot of effort into correcting any issues.

But what happens when things are done right? Most people are too busy to notice any smaller successes which continue going unrecorded, whereas problems incur ample documentation, emails and correspondence. As the good things don't get remembered later down the road, an eventual new decision-maker who'll try to understand what happened can inevitably force you into a weaker position.

A simple good tip here is to ensure there’s a positive trail of good things and successes, not only the problems. It's wise for the salesperson to collect and document the positives throughout the journey from people who are satisfied with the work being done. This way, when the renewal finally comes up in some years' time, you'll be in a stronger position to ensure the smooth continuation of your business.

3. Collect references, leads and recommendations: Again, the issue with a satisfied customer is that the better you've covered their need, the less there tends to be an immediate opportunity for any direct add-on business. But these sorts of customers are extremely valuable in their own right because you can ask them to serve as references for your other prospective clients.

Best yet, you can ask them openly for any potential leads to be contacted. A satisfied customer will often be more than willing to give the right introduction to a potential client in another company.

Remember again, however, that the enthusiasm might be at a temporary low during the implementation stage’s motivation dip, so your best-bet would be to do this either very early or wait until your solution’s installation is complete to gain maximum impact from getting introduced to new business leads.

4. Don’t trust your “happy ears” – ongoingly re-assess your understanding of client’s needs: Once or twice a year the more successful sales professionals tend to conduct a business review with their customers treating them as completely new sales opportunities. By looking deeper into and probing for any of their ever-changing needs they want to understand what is truly going on in their accounts.

However, even many of the experienced salespeople can at times convince themselves they already know all the needs of their present accounts, so they wrongfully consider it as a waste of their time.

Being an experienced coach, it happened to Rackham many times that after asking the skeptical salespeople to actually go into their accounts and try uncovering new needs, up to a half of the presently dormant customers revealed new potential business opportunities.

If it's not you who ongoingly re-assesses your customer’s needs, it will be your competition that'll do it for you. Rest assured – your competitors will continuously try to uncover and develop any needs you are neglecting.

5. Impact and influence your client’s future decision criteria: Even if your customer has no present need or cannot provide new leads, there's still a chance that by visiting you’ll get a new sales opportunity. By having access and molding your clients current decision criteria you can ensure that in the future your offering is perceived as stronger than that of your competitor.

The less effective salespeople tend to move on to talking about non-business topics when they don’t see a new business need, but it’s much more powerful to work on your client's current decision criteria if you can!

One non-obvious strategic error to avoid

When companies launch new products they tend to try and sell it to their key existing accounts first. This is a mistake resulting in wasted business potential. If your product or service is brand new, you are initially better off spending some time to gradually learn the best ways to sell it.

As salespeople in Rackham’s experience are found to sell better when they talk about their customer’s challenges instead of talking about their own products, the large amount of talking about your new shiny product’s features could be a turn-off to your present clients.

Instead, start by introducing your newest products to your less important accounts and approach your key customers only when you’ve learned to make a solid problem-based or needs-oriented sales call.

Concluding note on account development

The quote: “If you’re not improving, you’re falling behind” is apt here as your business relationships are never simply static. Like Rackham says, they’re either getting better or they are decaying. Don’t put yourself at ease by thinking your relationships will continue indefinitely while remaining impervious to competition.

Resting still and turning complacent can be one of the worst mistakes you can do with your current customers. In our market economy, what you may have done to your clients in the past is history, and the only thing which is important is what you can do for them today or tomorrow – and this mentality is the essence of successful account development.

If you liked this post or have any questions, consider subscribing to my occasional hand-made newsletter below. Talk to you soon!

To state a simple example, let's say you and me discuss starting a business. We'd be splitting our shares in the venture 50-50, where both would need to dole out 1000 bucks towards the initial start-up capital totaling $2000.

You're kind of interested, but you are hesitating.

You have lots to bring to the table, but you're slightly worried of losing your $1000. Neither are you sure about the long-term potential of our amazing new business idea.

At this stage in life, you have other options and you're willing to walk away.

Sensing that you're on the edge – what if I tell you that I value your expertise and knowledge so much that in order to sweeten the deal, I'm ready to provide you an added incentive in terms of flexibility, or a clause in our shareholder agreement that would enable you to increase your share in our venture by additional 20% in three years time at certain pre-determined price?

If we become a success, I stand to greatly benefit from this too, right?

But I need you, so here you go, please have that precious additional upside.

Now – you may think, this added upside seems indeed attractive... But what does it mean exactly? Proceeding onwards from here, we intensely ponder what other potential contractual options could we include to appropriately incentivize and better optimize the risks of our business relationship.

Coming back to the initial option where I offer you a 20% stake in three years' time – what is the price at which we should fix your right to acquire the 20% added stake in three years' time? What is the value of this contractual option? What is the value of any number of other similar types of contractual options when negotiating between two or more parties trying to conclude a complex, large-scale business transaction or agreement?

As Warren Buffett said: "Any option has value..."

In fact, with the common simple market-traded financial options' asymmetric characterstics that provide you the possibility but not the obligation to act, you can construct almost any kind of risk-payoff profile to suit your needs as visible in the picture below.

That, of course, comes at a cost.

What cost?

There are many tools out there to value options, but the whole topic is not as simple or clear-cut as you might think.

When we use strict formulaic tools to value flexibility, risk, or uncertainty, we might miss the bigger picture. One of Buffett's other taglines was that "price is what you pay, value is what you get".

Indeed, I may be willing to pay more than you for something that's more valuable to me personally than it is for you. That's common sense.

Highly liquid markets are great for determining the price of things, but what if the thing in question is not actively traded? And more generally though, what is the value of flexibility? Could there be a value-unit for a single factor of uncertainty within a given system or a context?

Many questions...

Be it an engineering system or the flexility to abandon an R&D project at a certain point in the unknowable future – as uncertainty continues to gradually resolve over time, we'll eventually learn whether our project or an engineering design proves to be viable. It's exciting but risky, isn't it?

Such bets are, however, exactly how many companies compete and create value!

Fundamentally, these and other questions are about controlling leverage, the all-powerful force and wonder in our market economy and the financial system. It's almost like physics – but enough of that physics envy already!

Anyhow, these things are exactly what I explored in my recently published Master's thesis late last year, combining real options thinking with simulation-based methods and analytics. Check it out if you find these topics interesting. One of my main goals was to try and best explain these things in simple terms to the average reader!

Ohh, and I visited Boston, New York and Washington D.C. recently – here's a photo of me at MIT, where in an elevator, I happened to run into my favorite professor Andrew Lo who teaches finance at the Sloan school of management. What a great moment it was... I highly recommend his open finance lecture available on YouTube recorded back in 2008 as the financial crisis unfolded. By now it has over a million views and counting, it's epic.

The man, the legend! 😁

New article: After-sale strategies – Navigating the treacherous implementation stage 🧭

😳 Sales professionals tend to relax too soon after concluding an agreement. Let's delve into the crucial but often treacherous stage that follows the closing of a deal – the implementation phase of your product or solution.

If you think it's time to ease down and relax immediately after your deal is closed, think again because you may be wrong!

In strategic sales, it's incredibly common for salespeople to decrease their activity and involvement with their customers when signatures have been exchanged, whereas experienced sales professionals know the real work between your organizations is only about to begin.

Continue reading here.

The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay 📝

📈 This book review has spiked the traffic on the LBS website

And for a good reason too! I think it's one of the best (and most extensive) book summaries I've written on the entire site, so feel free to check it out if you haven't already.

The Art of Action by Stephen Bungay

Santeri's comment

Many think that military principles and learnings should not have any bearing whatsoever on our civil lives, nor the management of contemporary organizations."We are past this way of leading..." they say, and "You cannot manage today's people in this manner..."

In essence, this book is the best effort so far to help correct the misunderstandings of what leadership under uncertainty is truly about and where the competitive pressures of "opposing wills" play-out on a constant basis – in military and at war.

Stephen explains excellently why military principles can be an effective way to think about leading, while simultaneously laying out some core reasons for why you should care about any of this at all in the first place.

Two outtakes from the book

🔮 Predictable versus an unpredictable environment

In a stable and predictable environment, it is possible to make quite good plans by gathering and analyzing information. We can learn enough about the outside world and our position in it to set some objectives.

We know enough about the effects any actions will have to be able to work out what to do to achieve the objectives. We can then use a mixture of supervision, controls, and incentives to coerce, persuade, or cajole people into doing what we want. We can measure the results until the outcomes we want are achieved.

We can make plans, take actions, and achieve outcomes in a linear sequence with some reliability. If we are assiduous enough, pay attention to detail, and exercise rigorous control, the sequence will be seamless.

In an unpredictable environment, this approach quickly falters.

The longer and more rigorously we persist with it, the more quickly and completely things will break down. The environment we are in creates gaps between plans, actions, and outcomes:

• The gap between plans and outcomes concerns knowledge: It is the difference between what we would like to know and what we actually know. It means that we cannot create perfect plans.
• The gap between plans and actions concerns alignment: It is the difference between what we would like people to do and what they actually do.
• The gap between actions and outcomes concerns effects: It is the difference between what we hope our actions will achieve and what they actually achieve.

We can never fully predict how the environment will react to what we do. It means that we cannot know in advance exactly what outcomes the actions of our organization are going to create.

🎖️ Similarities between business and military

The following is a description of the nature of combat from an academic thesis about the nature of military thought:

• Combat is an interaction between human organizations. It is adversarial, highly dynamic, complex, and lethal. It is grounded in individual and collective human behavior and conducted between organizations that are themselves complex. It is not determined, hence uncertain, and evolutionary. Critically, and to an extent in a way which we currently overlook, combat is fundamentally a human activity.

Compare that passage with this one characterized by Bungay (author):

• Business is an interaction between human organizations. It is competitive, highly dynamic, complex, and risky. It is grounded in individual and collective human behavior and conducted between organizations that are themselves complex. It is not determined, hence uncertain, and evolutionary. Critically, and to an extent in a way which we currently overlook, business is fundamentally a human activity.

Continue reading the full summary...

Favorite quote 📖

👨‍💻 One day, as I was writing my master's thesis at the university library, I took a short break to walk around proceeding to pick up a random book which seemed interesting.

What caught my attention was a beautiful quote by Hermann Hesse talking about life, fate and despair – so why not share it with you.

“
Fate was not kind, life was capricious and terrible, and there was no good or reason in nature. But there is good and reason in us, in human beings, with whom fortune plays, and we can be stronger than nature and fate, if only for a few hours.

And we can draw close to one another in times of need, and live to comfort each other. And sometimes when the black depths are silent, we can do even more.

We can then be gods for moments, stretch out a commanding hand and create things which were not there before and which, when they are created, continue to live without us.

Out of sounds, words and other frail and worthless things, we can construct playthings–songs and poems full of meaning, consolation and goodness, more beautiful and enduring than the grim sport of fortune and destiny.

– Hermann Hesse in Gertrude.

Predictive versus prescriptive analytics 🤓

In the world of machine learning and data science, all the rave is currently about predictive analytics and deep learning as driven by breakthroughs in employing the transformer architecture. This way large language models (LLMs) are currently spearheading the proliferation of AI in our lives.

But what about prescriptive analytics and decision support systems (DSS)?

In my Master's thesis I studied how to better control leverage, value strategic options, and make more rational and better-informed strategic investment decisions using simulation and prescriptive analytics approaches.

Simply put, prescriptive analytics is about answering the question "what should we do?", and here I've stumbled upon the efforts of my supervising professor's Mariia Kozlova's work to extend our understanding of the value of simulation and decision support systems (DSS) in decision making.

She calls her method Simulation Decomposition, or "SimDec", which with its colorful output intrigues me as a powerful tool for sensitivity analysis and truly "prescriptive" analytics. I'm confident that more people should familiarize themselves with it and try applying it to their analytical problems.

Here's the direct link to the SimDec website. There you'll find interesting papers and open-source libraries for you to learn more, try it out and apply it to your data.

Let me know if you'd like to learn more about simulation or real options methods in the future, and I can try to do a great compact write-up on these topics in one of my later newsletter issues or YouTube!

End note

As always, thank you for your time and for being a great subscriber!  🎉

In case you find this content interesting or useful, I'd be super thankful if you'd share the LBS with a friend or two.

You can also directly reply to this email if you have any feedback I could incorporate into future issues.

Talk to you soon.

All the best,
Santeri

If you think it's time to ease down and relax immediately after your deal is closed, think again because you may be wrong.

In strategic sales, it's incredibly common for salespeople to lower their activity and involvement with their customers when signatures are exchanged, whereas experienced sales professionals know the real work is only about to begin.

The capricious implementation stage

Just as you think it's safe to reduce your intensity, there’s another critical stage to bite you. Among the never ending hard work that’s needed across the full spectrum of complex sales, you'd think you've deserved some rest – and I understand you. However, not only does your competition never sleep, but your customer is only getting started with your solution, so the "organizationally" intense and hard work only begins.

Why?

What tends to ensue next is something along the lines of a psychological rollercoaster, and it's integral for the salesperson to remain sensitive and alert during this period. Even when modern companies have increasingly embraced customer success teams emphasizing a smooth handover to implementation or customer care functions, there are many reasons for you to stay on your toes.

You have to keep in mind that psychologically the implementation stage is surely one of the most anxious and fear-inducing periods for your customer. What if things go wrong, or if your buyer thinks they've made a bad choice? Here their purchasing decision collides with reality and is about to be tested.

The time spent implementing your solution can be treacherous, but if you execute it well, it'll also become your most surefire way to get in a good word and generate additional revenue both inside and outside your account.

Because there have been promises made throughout the buying journey, now they must be delivered upon.

What can the seller do?

Let’s first try to comprehensively understand the customer’s point of view regarding the psychological rollercoaster of emotions and perceptions.

The psychological stages of the implementation phase

Continuing from Rackham’s great book Managing Major Sales published in 1991, the implementation stage from the perspective of your customer’s psychology can be roughly broken down into the following three parts illustrated below. Let’s discuss each of these stages.

1. The "new toy" stage

Initially, there’s excitement and curiosity. Customers eagerly explore your product, trying out low-effort tricks, seeking out quick wins and achieving some immediate small results. Sometimes, the more sophisticated users in your client's account may already be exploring the more unusual or “techy” aspects of your product before getting down to serious work.

If you think about it more generally, everyone tends to play around with things when they're new. This kind of play serves a good purpose by building-up confidence in your solution and especially because your buyer will start instantly justifying the correctness of their buying decision.

In terms of your sales strategy it’s valuable for you to try and enable such behavior to the extent possible by building-in aspects that will quickly show first results for little initial effort. These kinds of quick wins will help support your client’s overall adoption journey.

Finally, it’s worth highlighting that just as with any high-technology solution, the "new toy" stage can happen with any other mundane, traditional, or a “boring” solution too. It may be just your 24/7 hotline that will be tried out, or some of your training content will be found amusing!

2. The learning stage

This is often the hardest stage of the implementation journey and it's where your client’s confidence-levels can sink to crisis levels. Psychologically speaking, as it often happens, the benefits tend to come in proportion to the effort invested. After the initial “new toy” stage, the excuriating process of actually implementing your solution begins.

For your client this stage is a lot about learning – and learning is hard work.

As depicted in the illustration, the effort needed for this stage tends to be higher than the results your customers are getting, making this part of implementation process extremely vulnerable.

This is just as true for any other type of learning you may have done. If you learned to play a musical instrument, started going to the gym or began riding a bicycle, you may have gotten discouraged when you ran into first difficulties.

When your client is in the process of installing your new advanced production system, during the early stages of implementation, it may still be easier for them to do things manually.

So what are some of the effects the customer perceives when having to invest all this effort?

As a rule of thumb, and especially for your less sophisticated clients, your buyer tends to underestimate the effort required to implement your solution, or the difficulty of getting the product to prove its full business value.

Your more advanced customers will tend to have less trouble during this "learning stage", especially if they’ve already implemented comparable solutions before. They tend to have a more realistic implementation plan helping them navigate and eventually achieve the full potential of your solution. Their past experience helps them cope with the many kinds of problems that arise with your less sophisticated customers.

A tip worth noting here is that for you as the seller, it is important to remain careful with using your client as a reference during this turbulent stage. It’s likely that emotions may still be on a rollercoaster ride leading possibly to some unpredictable reactions. If your customer is having a low moment and you ask your other prospective customers to contact them about their experience at that moment... Well, it may be a bad idea.

3. The effectiveness stage

As your customer gains a better understanding of your solution, the effort that goes into learning it will decrease dramatically. Your product or service will begin to show its real value, and the customer starts realizing the tangible benefits leading to a renewed sense of appreciation and reliance on your solution.

Here you’ve managed to navigate through the treacherous psychological stages of the implementation process and have began reaching the winning side of the overall project.

According to Rackham, if your customer says something along the lines of: “I could never go back to the old way of doing things”, or “How did we ever manage without it” – your implementation can surely be considered a success!

The "motivation dip"

Helping understand the three previous implementation stages, Rackham also introduced the concept of the “motivation dip” illustrated below. It shows your customer’s level of enthusiasm and how it changes across the implementation process.

Let's describe what we're seeing here.

At first, right after concluding the agreement, your client’s motivation is high, but after the “new toy” stage is over, your customer’s high expectations and motivation tend to start melting away.

Enthusiasm continues to drop rapidly as your customer proceeds to the middle parts of the learning stage.

As I briefly mentioned earlier, this not only happens with purchasing decisions, but remains a commonplace aspect in our everyday psychology.

When you start a new sport, despite your initial excitement, the magic tends to wear off quickly, and most people will experience a dip in their motivation. Many if not most will get discouraged.

Working with your customers, this is exactly where the value of your attentiveness and sensitivity grows in importance.

Continuing the sports analogy, the hobbyist may want to resort to old habits as the motivation continues to dissipate.

This is a high-risk phase for implementing any sort of change, whether we’re talking about simple weight loss and dietary discipline, or implementing a billion dollar installation. Here it is absolutely critical to put in extra effort as your customers are working hard but may not yet see the results they expect.

If the seller was painting a rosy picture leading to the customer expecting an easy time, they’ll come unprepared for the collapse in motivation when faced with real-world challenges that are bound to arise.

What is positive, however, is that the motivation dip doesn’t last. If you and your client can bear through it all, the effort will start paying off and the results will come.

With your sports hobby, you may see your technique start improving, or your weight start noticeably going down. Maybe you're now finally able to play an increasingly difficult composition with your instrument along with the song you so much love.

When results become visible, the motivation increases again and it's exactly what happens in the "effectiveness stage". This is when your solution finally proves itself and starts paying off. In order to reach it, however, you’ll need to put in quite some effort to survive the motivation dip!

Strategies for handling the motivation dip

After studying hundreds of customer engagements, Rackham identified three main strategies the more successful salespeople tend to use to ensure their customers get through the motivation dip with less difficulty.

1. Start before signing the contract: During the installation, your anxious client may be particularly sensitive to any signs of things going wrong. Naturally, because of this anxiety, they can overreact when faced with smaller difficulties. If you’ve done good work earlier in the sales cycle, your buyer will be less prone to overreacting when any of the inevitable difficulties arise.

One area important for resolving implementation anxiety comes from the earlier evaluation of options stage in the buying process. If you’ve ensured your customer genuinely perceives the product you offer as matching their decision criteria better than your competition, you’ll be half-way there with removing the most dreadful aspects of your client’s worries.

Likewise, your handling of any possible consequence issues is important before signing the contract.

If any unresolved issues remain lingering under the surface, your buyer will readily expect things to go wrong. This way the customer will focus heavily on any faults and remain blind to any of the positive successes happening across your implementation process.

2. Involve your customer: As I’ve discussed in one of my previous posts regarding the many psychological aspects at play in the process of negotiating, it may be a good idea to involve your customer in the process of planning your implementation and facilitating the needed change.

Generally speaking, bringing about any sort of change is difficult, and it's double-difficult if you’re trying to impose it on someone else. Making a detailed installation plan, and going step-by-step with your client through this process will require their input which serves as a yet another avenue for introducing your product and maximizing the chances of your implementation's success.

No surefire guarantees exist against unexpected problems, but if you’ve involved your customer early, they're likely to be more forgiving when problems spring up.

In short, customer's stake and motivation in the project will help make it a success.

3. Put in effort early: People who’ve proven to be effective in implementing new ideas or paving the way for adopting new organizational processes know that concentrating your most significant effort in the early stages is critical.

Mediocre sales professionals don’t know about these three implementation stages or the motivation dip, so when they see an excited client during the “new toy” stage, they'll think it will remain this way throughout the entire implementation journey. They proceed to give their account less attention failing to pick up on any of the warning signs that can lead to problems within their account. In the learning stage, mediocre sales professionals are taken by surprise and tend to wait too long to take corrective action.

Not acting upon these problems promptly will tend to exaggerate them leading to further frustration and dissatisfaction. As Rackham says, “fire prevention is a better strategy than firefighting”, and the motivation dip is far easier to handle if you put in your effort early on.

Make sure there's less of a chance for fires to break out in the first place – and you are half-way there.

In a future post, I’ll discuss transitioning from the implementation stage into active account development. For updates on this and more, consider subscribing to my very occasional hand-made newsletter below. Talk to you soon!

n the fast-paced world of sales, mastering the sales process is more than a skill—it's an art. As sales teams navigate through the complexities of the sales cycle, understanding and leveraging each phase becomes critical. This article delves into innovative strategies for enhancing the sales process, boosting sales team performance, and accurately forecasting sales outcomes.

The Sales Process: A Roadmap to Success

The sales process serves as the backbone of successful sales activities. It's a structured approach that guides sales teams from initial contact to closing deals. By systematically understanding customer needs, building relationships, and presenting solutions, sales professionals can navigate the sales cycle more effectively, increasing the likelihood of successful outcomes.

Enhancing the Sales Team's Performance

Empowering sales teams begins with training and resources. Comprehensive training programs, combined with ongoing learning opportunities, enable sales teams to refine their skills and adapt to evolving market trends. Effective sales management also involves fostering a collaborative environment where team members can share insights and strategies.

The Art of the Sales Forecast

Accurate sales forecasting is essential for strategic planning and resource allocation. Utilizing data-driven tools and CRM systems, sales managers can analyze past performance, market trends, and customer behaviors to predict future sales. This not only helps in setting realistic targets but also in identifying potential challenges and opportunities.

Learning to Sell: An Evolving Journey

Selling is a skill that evolves with experience and continuous learning. Sales professionals must stay abreast of the latest techniques and market dynamics. Resources like sales workshops, online courses, and industry seminars provide valuable insights and practical tips for improving sales effectiveness.

Strategies to Increase Sales

To increase sales, it's important to focus on both inbound and outbound strategies. While inbound sales focus on attracting customers through content and online presence, outbound sales involve proactive outreach through sales calls, emails, and meetings. A balanced approach, tailored to your market and customer base, is key to driving sales growth.

Optimizing Outbound Sales and Calls

Outbound sales, particularly sales calls, require a strategic approach. Understanding the customer's needs and challenges, personalizing the conversation, and clearly communicating the value proposition are essential components of successful sales calls. Regular training and role-playing exercises can help sales teams hone their outbound sales skills.

Conclusion

In conclusion, mastering the sales process in today’s market requires a combination of strategic planning, team empowerment, continuous learning, and leveraging the right tools and techniques. By adopting these approaches, sales teams can not only meet but exceed their targets, driving growth and success in an increasingly competitive landscape.

In the dynamic world of modern sales, success hinges not just on personal skills but on leveraging an array of sophisticated tools. These tools, often underutilized or misunderstood, can dramatically reshape sales strategies and team dynamics in large corporations.

1. Advanced CRM Solutions: Beyond basic customer management, advanced CRM systems now offer predictive analytics, integrating AI to forecast sales trends and customer behaviors. They're evolving from data repositories to insightful decision-making tools.

2. Integrated Communication Platforms: Tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams have revolutionized team communication. Integrated with CRMs, these platforms facilitate real-time discussions, document sharing, and seamless collaboration, making remote sales teams as cohesive as in-person ones.

3. Sales Enablement Platforms: Platforms like Highspot and Showpad go beyond simple content management. They provide analytics on content usage, effectiveness, and customer engagement, offering invaluable insights for tailoring sales strategies.

4. AI-Powered Sales Automation: Automation tools now harness AI to personalize customer interactions at scale. They analyze customer data to tailor follow-up emails and content, ensuring each lead receives a highly personalized sales experience.

5. Data-Driven Analytics Tools: Tools like Tableau or Power BI transform sales data into actionable insights. They offer customizable dashboards that track key performance indicators, giving sales managers a powerful lens into team performance and market trends.

6. E-Learning and Development Platforms: Continuous learning is vital. Platforms like LinkedIn Learning and Coursera offer courses in everything from negotiation skills to advanced analytics, ensuring sales teams stay at the forefront of industry knowledge.

7. Enhanced Mobile Capabilities: Mobile CRM apps now offer much more than access to customer data. They enable on-the-go deal management, real-time updates, and even location-based insights, empowering sales reps to be effective from anywhere.

Key Strategies for Leveraging These Tools:

• Data-Driven Decision Making: Use analytics tools to make informed decisions based on market trends and customer behaviors.
• Personalized Customer Journeys: Utilize AI-powered automation to create customized experiences for each lead or customer.
• Continuous Learning and Adaptation: Engage with e-learning platforms to keep skills sharp and knowledge current.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls:

• Overreliance on Automation: Balance automated interactions with personal touchpoints to maintain genuine customer relationships.
• Underutilizing Data Insights: Ensure the data collected is actively used to inform sales strategies and operational improvements.

In conclusion, the modern sales professional’s toolkit is rich with advanced technologies. From AI-driven CRM systems to sophisticated data analytics and beyond, these tools are reshaping the art of sales. However, the real mastery lies in strategically utilizing these resources to enhance relationships, drive sales, and stay ahead in a competitive landscape.

There’s a common critical stage in many sales processes that demands your attention and it's about addressing your customer's concerns lingering under the surface. This is something for you to consider before stepping into negotiating and finalizing your complex deal. Overlooking what's discussed below may completely jeopardize your entire effort until this moment, so watch out!

Whereas in smaller transactions the risks are more contained, in strategic enterprise sales, the risks aren’t just higher – they multiply. We’re dealing with situations involving more stakeholders, increased competition, and prolonged decision-making timelines. Each of these elements can introduce unforeseen challenges.

Just as the complexity of your solution tends to increase, so do your client's apprehensions, worries and anxieties.

Insights from Neil Rackham’s book "Managing Major Sales" have been invaluable to me, especially regarding what he calls the "resolution of concerns" stage of a complex deal. This isn’t something that is encountered in every sale, but it’s something crucial for you to keep in mind when trying to conclude any sort of a larger agreement.

In my experience, buyers' fears vary greatly. Some might be straightforward, like concerns about timely delivery or worries with the installation. Others, however, are more sinister. They can be deep underlying trust issues in your ability to deliver, or they may have to do with buyer's own doubts of driving organizational acceptance for changes that are needed.

Such kinds of deeper psychological concerns having to do with human emotions, egos and perceptions are what Rackham refers to as "consequence issues", and they can be the silent deal-breakers if not recognized and addressed effectively.

Objectives of the pre-negotiation stage

• Determine whether consequence issues exist.
• Clarify and understand these issues.
• Aid the client in navigating and resolving these concerns. It’s important to remember that resolution of these issues lie with the client, not with you as the seller.

Understanding the roots of consequence issues

Consequence issues are essentially the risks or downsides that a client perceives possibly resulting from deciding in your favor. Often, these are disguised as concerns about pricing, which are the more acceptable way to express deeper underlying issues to the seller. Noticeably, price concerns tend to fluctuate, dipping in the middle of the sales cycle and peaking again later when discussions pivot towards finalizing the deal.

The pattern in price concern visible in the illustration above can be attributed to a shift in focus during the deal cycle – from initially understanding the benefits of a solution to then starting weighing the costs versus benefits and finally to negotiating and concluding the agreement. The cost side of the buyer's equation may not encompass just the price tag itself but any amount of other potential risks such as implementation challenges, internal politics or other hassles.

Research done by Rackham indicates that in many instances, price concerns are a facade for other, more intricate issues. It’s simpler for clients to attribute their hesitation to cost rather than to delve into more nuanced issues like trust problems or other potential risks. As such, price often serves as a convenient smokescreen for other possible deeper underlying concerns.

Identifying consequence issues

Spotting these sorts of consequence issues demands sensitivity and a keen eye for noticing their typical manifestations and recognizing characteristics of situations where they tend to arise. Here are some factors that are conductive for consequence issues to start lingering under the hood without manifesting themselves openly to the seller:

• Scale of decision:  Is the decision significant for the buyer?
• Visibility and pressure: Is there pressure related to decision's visibility in your customer's organization? Would the impact resulting from your product or solution's be felt across your customer's entire enterprise?
• Competitive landscape: Are there established or existing competitors present or trying to enter into the account?
• Technological unfamiliarity: Does your product or service represent a significant departure from familiar technology? This can heighten your client's risk perception.

Some concrete indicators of existing consequence issues may include the constant resurfacing of old issues that you thought you had already addressed and resolved with your client. The price concerns may be completely disproportionate, or unexplained delays or sudden changes in your accessibility to previously available decision-makers may come up. Any of these signs can point to underlying concerns lingering beneath the surface that the client is hesitant to voice.

Handling consequence issues

Recognizing consequence issues is the initial step. Effectively addressing them requires a nuanced, empathetic approach. In short, here is what you must consider in your deals:

1. Recognize and acknowledge their existence: Ignoring these issues doesn't make them vanish. Being aware of their potential impact is crucial.
2. Build trust and cultivate relationships early: Establishing a foundation of trust early in the sales cycle is key for a more open dialogue later down the road.
3. Help the client resolve their issues: The resolution of consequence issues is ultimately up to the client and their journey. Your role is to facilitate a conducive environment for their resolution. Don't make the mistake of trying to overcome them forcefully.

Rackham cautions against three critical mistakes sellers tend to make when trying to manage consequence issues – (1) minimizing, (2) prescribing, and (3) pressuring. This only aggravates the problems instead of aiding in their resolution.

Actions to avoid and the "deadly sins"

Navigating consequence issues is akin to a tightrope walk – it requires a delicate balance. While it’s crucial to recognize and address these issues, how you approach them can significantly impact the outcome. In my experience, and as aptly stated by Rackham, there are certain pitfalls that we, as sales professionals, must consciously avoid to ensure we don't inadvertently compound these issues:

1. Minimizing client's concerns: One of the most common missteps is to belittle or downplay your buyer's concerns. It’s easy to fall into the trap of reassuring them with a simple “Don’t worry about it,” or “It’s not a big deal.” However, this approach can backfire. It might come off as dismissive, suggesting that you are not fully acknowledging the weight of their concerns. This can drive the real issues underground, allowing significant concerns to remain hidden and unresolved. It’s essential to validate the client's worries, showing that you understand and take them seriously.
2. Prescribing solutions: Another pitfall is jumping too quickly to offer solutions. In the eagerness to resolve the issue, you might start providing recommendations or dictating how the client should address their concerns. However, consequence issues are not your typical straightforward problems; they are often complex, involving layers of emotions and perceptions. Offering solutions too early, especially before fully understanding the problem, can lead to increased resistance from the client. It’s more about guiding them to find their own solutions rather than dictating your own. This is not so different from how psychologists or counselors tend to help their clients with various types of complex emotional problems and perceptive issues they may have.
3. Exerting Pressure: In sales, there’s always a temptation to push a little to close the deal, especially when we’re so close to the finish line. However, applying pressure in situations where deeper consequence issues are at play can be counterproductive. It can heighten the client's stress and amplify their concerns, making them even more hesitant to commit. The key is to give them space and time to process and decide. High-pressure tactics, which might work in simpler sales scenarios, can often backfire in complex, high-stakes situations.

In handling consequence issues, it’s paramount to tread carefully. Depending on the type of sale and situation at hand, before starting negotiations, our role could be thought of as being facilitators – someone who listens, understands, and helps the client navigate through their concerns, rather than pushing the sale with force.

Your focus should remain on building trust, creating a safe space for open discussion, and guiding our clients towards finding their own resolution to any of their possible deeper emotional, perceptive or organizational issues and concerns. It’s a subtle art, requiring patience and empathy, but mastering this can significantly enhance our effectiveness as sales professionals acting in a complex environment.

Concluding thoughts

During late stages of the sales cycle, understanding and managing consequence issues is essential. This article has highlighted the tell-tale signs of such issues, the intricacies of addressing them, and the importance of fostering trust and relationships early on in the sales process. It’s crucial to remember that resolving these issues lies with the client. What we can do as sellers is to identify these concerns and bring them out of obscurity and on the table to be dealt with more effectively. Avoiding the trap of minimizing, prescribing, and pressuring is key to navigate these complex scenarios with professionalism and tact, resulting in better deals and more impact.

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Welcome to the world of hard and soft differentiation, a less understood way to propel successful sales strategies. We will continue our journey of elevating the sales professional's role from a transactional job to a consultative one.

In complex sales, understanding micro and macro differentiation is crucial. Macro differentiation is about the broad marketing strategy of your organization, highlighting the main features of your product or service that set you apart in the market. Micro differentiation, on the other hand, is the personal touch at a sales level, where the unique needs of each customer are addressed with customized solutions.

When wielded skillfully, sales professionals tailor their approach to address the specific desires and needs of each customer, transforming broad marketing claims into potent benefits. How's that for a true sales superpower?

Differentiation can be divided into working with hard and soft factors that your customer considers during their purchasing process, and it's important to acknowledge that both have a pivotal role in your sales cycle.

Hard factors are quantifiable and measurable attributes such as cost, functionality, or efficiency. They are like the concrete that forms the foundation of a house. You love dealing with them, don't you? High-energy, high-volume salespeople certainly do. They can rattle off spec sheets and cost comparisons, turning those numbers into convincing narratives and high revenue numbers. If your offering possesses a lot of these, you're likely to draw increasing amounts of revenue fast and with little effort.

However, outside of market leaders and even amongst them, sales teams must often focus on less tangible factors like customer experience, responsiveness, and personalized service resulting in more work across a variety of complex sales scenarios and longer sales cycles. To heighten the impact of soft factors, consider "hardening" them. This can be achieved by working with independent outside experts or inside specialists that can provide credibility and objectivity to the less tangible or concrete aspects of your offering.

On the flip side, instead of hardening, it's worth mentioning that sometimes in competitive situations it can be beneficial to "soften" criteria by focusing on overall benefits and unique selling propositions, rather than getting entangled in those pesky feature-by-feature comparisons.

This brings us to the art of conducting a vulnerability analysis. By examining how your prospective customer perceives your product relative to competition, you can anticipate potential challenges, arming yourself with the right counterarguments, and fortifying your position. This isn't about undermining your competitors, but about understanding the terrain you're navigating, helping your product stand out in its unique ways.

Conducting vulnerability analysis is an important step worth considering at the level of each individual customer case. It's easy to do and involves a deep-dive into how the client perceives your product in comparison to your competitors. Understanding these perceptions can guide your strategy, helping you address potential objections preemptively, highlighting your unique strengths, and avoiding unnecessary discussions around the strengths of your competitors.

Let's get a bit more practical before closing things off.

First, consider the concept of micro and macro differentiation. Imagine you are a sales professional for a software company that provides project management solutions. Your macro differentiation strategy, agreed at the marketing level, may emphasize that your software uses artificial intelligence to predict and prevent project delays. However, when selling to a specific customer, say a small software development company, you employ micro differentiation addressing their particular situation and discussing how your software could help track their coding sprints, streamline bug tracking, and foster better communication among their dispersed teams.

Now, let's explore the interplay between hard and soft factors using the same context. A hard factor would be the functionality of your software – its ability to integrate with other tools, responsiveness, real-time progress tracking (quantifiable aspects). On the other hand, soft factors might involve your company's reputation for excellent customer service, the intuitiveness of the software, or even your ability to provide personalized, attentive service to the client.

Differentiation becomes potent enough when combined with hardening and softening of criteria. In its basic form, given that a prospective client is fixated on a hard criterion like price, you could soften this by highlighting the potential for your software to save them hours in project coordination time, which could more than compensate for the initial cost. On the contrary, if a customer is concerned about the user experience (a soft factor), you could harden this by sharing testimonials, expert reviews, or even quantitative data on user satisfaction rates.

As for the vulnerability analysis, consider another situation where your main competitor's software is less expensive and they are using this point to their advantage. To address this, you'd need to understand your prospective customer's perception of your product and its value. If you find that the customer perceives your software as too expensive (and it's not an excuse for some other reason you haven't been informed about), you can go as far as to counteracting this by telling you've had a more barebones lower-cost option available in the past which was cheaper than that of your competitor, but its ability to prevent project delays, and result in potential cost savings in terms of efficient project management was not all that high for what your clients were expecting, resulting in your current more advanced and consequently more expensive configuration you are offering today.

In such cases, based on objective knowledge of your own vulnerabilities, your understanding of your customer's perceptions at a given stage of their purchasing process, as well as your knowledge of the strategic interplay between micro and macro differentiation, hard and soft factors, and a thorough vulnerability analysis let you craft a more compelling, personalized, and effective sales strategy. It enables you to build stronger rapport with your clients, addressing their unique needs, and consequently, securing more sales.

In conclusion, your ability to distinguish between broad marketing messages (macro differentiation) and personalized selling points (micro differentiation) enables you to effectively respond to varied decision-making criteria of your customers. Understanding and working with these decision criteria, combined with a thorough vulnerability analysis, can significantly reduce your vulnerability and enhance your competitive position. Such an approach will ultimately help you establish stronger customer relationships, foster trust, and drive successful sales outcomes, especially if you manage to extend this understanding across your entire sales team.

As you navigate your sales journey, remember – it's often the hard factors and relentless work that get you in the game, but it's often the soft factors and understanding of their interplay that help you win it.

Traditional sales doctrine tells us to always get face-to-face access to decision makers at all costs. However, I keep hearing that it's increasingly difficult to get in front of these "centers of power" in our modern-day busy marketplace. So what can we do? The answer is to leverage our internal champions at our customer's identified focus of dissatisfaction, so they can successfully keep selling the topic internally and push the process on our behalf.

As always, it's easier said than done. You may be familiar with a situation early in the sales cycle where after your prospect insisted, they took over and had a critical conversation or delivered your presentation in an absolutely butchered manner and zero effect. Bam, and your chance was gone.

In reality, we oftentimes don't have the chance to join our client's internal discussions in the first place. So it's critical for you to trust your internal sponsors and people you've identified to actually have the pain you can solve. They are your internal champions who have understood the value of your solution and vouch for it internally on their end.

Therefore, a question comes up regarding how you can best prepare your client-side champion to make a convincing internal presentation? If you just list the topics and benefits of your solution, things will inevitably get omitted, filtered and watered down by the time they will be discussed. Oftentimes, no matter how hard your champions try, they won't be able to present your message as convincingly as you could – and it's that kind of artificial flair with which the decision maker will be informed about it too.

What you need to do instead is to rehearse and coach your champions. It sounds difficult to put in practice, but asking and probing for the impact and value your product provides to their organization, they'll be able to dress your impact and value into their own convincing words and talking points. We as the seller want to essentially shift our sponsor's mind into that future state where the problem we've identified is already tackled and where the implications, and the payoff of our solution is already far into improving their organization. What is the impact it is having? What have we mitigated or improved? On the other hand, what will happen if their problem remains unsolved?

This way sponsors themselves can craft the exact details of your common message according to their own liking and a way that works best for them, and consequently, for you. It's because they understand clearly the value and purpose of bringing your product on board and into their organization's further consideration. Coaching your sponsors with "Implication" and "Need-payoff" questions familiar to us from Rackham's SPIN framework, will help you frame and probe for the understanding of your product and its impact by your champions.

This way your sponsors are ready to go and present your solution internally. They'll do it in a convincing and effective manner so that maybe – next time – you'll have a true chance to be invited and join the conversation while gaining valuable access to the right decision makers and budget holders of your client organization.

Soon already, with a better chance you'll be well on your way to proceed in your customer's complex b-to-b buying process. Good luck!

Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with SPIN or Neil Rackham in any way. Only some limited Amazon affilitate links are used on this site.

A lot of the text is almost directly cited from Holiday's collection so if you find it interesting I recommend you to check out the book on Amazon or elsewhere.

The post consists of three sections:

1. An Introduction
2. A collection of my favorite stoic quotes
3. On getting busy with your life's purpose

If you like this post, learn about additional principles of staying blanced and happy, read one of my best book reviews, the Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, or dive into Naval's summarized wisdom. I'm sure you won't be disappointed.

Introduction

The philosophy asserts that virtue (meaning, chiefly, the four cardinal virtues of self-control, courage, justice, and wisdom) is happiness, and it is our perception of things — rather than the things themselves — that cause most of our trouble.

Stoicism teaches that we can’t control or rely on anything outside what Epictetus called our “reasoned choice” — our ability to use our reason to choose how we categorize, respond, and reorient ourselves to external events.

The Stoics all held vastly different stations in life. Some were rich, some were born at the bottom of Rome’s rigid hierarchy. Some had it easy, and others had it unimaginably hard. This is true for us as well — we all come to philosophy from different backgrounds, and even within our own lives we experience bouts of good fortune and bad fortune. But in all circumstances — adversity or advantage — we really have just one thing we need to do: focus on what is in our control as opposed to what is not.

Right now we might be laid low with struggles, whereas just a few years ago we might have lived high on the hog, and in just a few days we might be doing so well that success is actually a burden. One thing will stay constant: our freedom of choice — both in the big picture and small picture. Ultimately, this is clarity.

Whoever we are, wherever we are—what matters is our choices. What are they? How will we evaluate them? How will we make the most of them? Those are the questions life asks us, regardless of our station. How will you answer?

These weren’t abstract questions. In their writings — often private letters or diaries — and in their lectures, the Stoics struggled to come up with real, actionable answers. They ultimately framed their work around a series of exercises in three critical disciplines:

1. The Discipline of Perception (how we see and perceive the world around us)
2. The Discipline of Action (the decisions and actions we take—and to what end)
3. The Discipline of Will (how we deal with the things we cannot change, attain clear and convincing judgment, and come to a true understanding of our place in the world)

By controlling our perceptions, the Stoics tell us, we can find mental clarity. In directing our actions properly and justly, we’ll be effective. In utilizing and aligning our will, we will find the wisdom and perspective to deal with anything the world puts before us.

A well-known writer once complained that after becoming successful, wealthy friends were always inviting him to their beautiful, exotic houses. “Come to our home in the south of France,” they would say. Or, “Our Swiss ski chalet is a wonderful place to write.” The writer traveled the world, living in luxury, hoping to find inspiration and creativity in these inspiring manors and mansions. Yet it rarely happened. There was always the allure of another, better house. There were always distractions, always so many things to do — and the writer’s block and insecurity that plagues creative types traveled with him wherever he went.

We tell ourselves that we need the right setup before we finally buckle down and get serious. Or we tell ourselves that some vacation or time alone will be good for a relationship or an ailment. This is self-deceit at its finest. It’s far better that we become pragmatic and adaptable — able to do what we need to do anywhere, anytime. The place to do your work, to live the good life, is here.

That self-assurance is yours to claim as well. No matter what happens today, no matter where you find yourself, shift to what lies within your reasoned choices. Ignore, as best you can, the emotions that pop up, which would be so easy to distract yourself with. Don’t get emotional — get focused.

The Stoics were mercifully spared the information overload endemic to today’s society. They had no social media, no newspapers, no television chatter to rile them up. But even back then, an undisciplined person would have found plenty to be distracted and upset by.

Part of the Stoic mindset then was a sort of a cultivated ignorance. Publilius Syrus’s epigram expresses it well: “Always shun that which makes you angry.” Meaning: turn your mind away from the things that provoke it.

If you find that discussing politics at the dinner table leads to fighting, why do you keep bringing it up? If your sibling’s life choices bother you, why don’t you stop picking at them and making them your concern? The same goes for so many other sources of aggravation.

It’s not a sign of weakness to shut them out. Instead, it’s a sign of strong will. Try saying: “I know the reaction I typically take in these situations, and I’m not going to do it this time.” And then follow it with: “I’m also going to remove this stimulus from my life in the future as well.” Because what follows is peace and serenity.

The Stoics were pioneers of the morning and nightly rituals: preparation in the morning, reflection in the evening. Looking at the beautiful expanse of the sky is an antidote to the nagging pettiness of earthly concerns. And it is good and sobering to lose yourself in that as often as you can.

Timeless quotes

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…” Epictetus, Discourses

“The proper work of the mind is the exercise of choice, refusal, yearning, repulsion, preparation, purpose, and assent. What then can pollute and clog the mind’s proper functioning? Nothing but its own corrupt decisions.” Epictetus, Discourses

“So in the majority of other things, we address circumstances not in accordance with the right assumptions, but mostly by following wretched habit. Since all that I’ve said is the case, the person in training must seek to rise above, so as to stop seeking out pleasure and steering away from pain; to stop clinging to living and abhorring death; and in the case of property and money, to stop valuing receiving over giving.” Musonius Rufus, Lectures

“How many have laid waste to your life when you weren’t aware of what you were losing, how much was wasted in pointless grief, foolish joy, greedy desire, and social amusements — how little of your own was left to you. You will realize you are dying before your time!” Seneca, On the brevity of life

“The diseases of the rational soul are long-standing and hardened vices, such as greed and ambition — they have put the soul in a straitjacket and have begun to be permanent evils inside it. To put it briefly, this sickness is an unrelenting distortion of judgment, so things that are only mildly desirable are vigorously sought after.” Seneca, Moral letters

“Don’t act grudgingly, selfishly, without due diligence, or to be a contrarian. Don’t overdress your thought in fine language. Don’t be a person of too many words and too many deeds… Be cheerful, not wanting outside help or the relief others might bring. A person needs to stand on their own, not be propped up.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“When you see someone often flashing their rank or position, or someone whose name is often bandied about in public, don’t be envious; such things are bought at the expense of life… Some die on the first rungs of the ladder of success, others before they can reach the top, and the few that make it to the top of their ambition through a thousand indignities realize at the end it’s only for an inscription on their gravestone.” Seneca, On the brevity of life

“Let’s pass over to the really rich—how often the occasions they look just like the poor! When they travel abroad they must restrict their baggage, and when haste is necessary, they dismiss their entourage. And those who are in the army, how few of their possessions they get to keep…” Seneca, On consolation to Helvia

“If you wish to improve, be content to appear clueless or stupid in extraneous matters — don’t wish to seem knowledgeable. And if some regard you as important, distrust yourself.” Epictetus, Enchiridion

“Indeed, if you find anything in human life better than justice, truth, self-control, courage — in short, anything better than the sufficiency of your own mind, which keeps you acting according to the demands of true reason and accepting what fate gives you outside of your own power of choice — I tell you, if you can see anything better than this, turn to it heart and soul and take full advantage of this greater good you’ve found.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Trust me, real joy is a serious thing. Do you think someone can, in the charming expression, blithely dismiss death with an easy disposition? Or swing open the door to poverty, keep pleasures in check, or meditate on the endurance of suffering? The one who is comfortable with turning these thoughts over is truly full of joy, but hardly cheerful. It’s exactly such a joy that I would wish for you to possess, for it will never run dry once you’ve laid claim to its source.” Seneca, Moral letters

“How disgraceful is the lawyer whose dying breath passes while at court, at an advanced age, pleading for unknown litigants and still seeking the approval of ignorant spectators.” Seneca, On the brevity of life

“At this moment you aren’t on a journey, but wandering about, being driven from place to place, even though what you seek — to live well — is found in all places. Is there any place more full of confusion than the Forum? Yet even there you can live at peace, if needed.” Seneca, Moral letters

“Silence is a lesson learned from the many sufferings of life.” Seneca, Thyestes

“It’s ruinous for the soul to be anxious about the future and miserable in advance of misery, engulfed by anxiety that the things it desires might remain its own until the very end. For such a soul will never be at rest — by longing for things to come it will lose the ability to enjoy present things.” Seneca, Moral letters

“Won’t you be walking in your predecessors’ footsteps? I surely will use the older path, but if I find a shorter and smoother way, I’ll blaze a trail there. The ones who pioneered these paths aren’t our masters, but our guides. Truth stands open to everyone, it hasn’t been monopolized.” Seneca, Moral letters

“Heraclitus would shed tears whenever he went out in public — Democritus laughed. One saw the whole as a parade of miseries, the other of follies. And so, we should take a lighter view of things and bear them with an easy spirit, for it is more human to laugh at life than to lament it.” Seneca, On tranquility of mind

“The founder of the universe, who assigned to us the laws of life, provided that we should live well, but not in luxury. Everything needed for our well-being is right before us, whereas what luxury requires is gathered by many miseries and anxieties. Let us use this gift of nature and count it among the greatest things.” Seneca, Moral letters

“I judge you unfortunate because you have never lived through misfortune. You have passed through life without an opponent — no one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.” Seneca, On providence

“Consider who you are. Above all, a human being, carrying no greater power than your own reasoned choice, which oversees all other things, and is free from any other master.” Epictetus, discourses

“Try praying differently, and see what happens: Instead of asking for ‘a way to sleep with her,’ try asking for ‘a way to stop desiring to sleep with her.’ Instead of ‘a way to get rid of him,’ try asking for ‘a way to not crave his demise.’ Instead of ‘a way to not lose my child,’ try asking for ‘a way to lose my fear of it.’” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Leisure without study is death — a tomb for the living person.” Seneca, Moral letters

“But the wise person can lose nothing. Such a person has everything stored up for themselves, leaving nothing to fortune, their own goods are held firm, bound in virtue, which requires nothing from chance, and therefore can’t be either increased or diminished. Seneca, On the firmness of the wise

“Keep constant guard over your perceptions, for it is no small thing you are protecting, but your respect, trustworthiness and steadiness, peace of mind, freedom from pain and fear, in a word your freedom. For what would you sell these things?” Epictetus, Discourses

“This is the true athlete — the person in rigorous training against false impressions. Remain firm, you who suffer, don’t be kidnapped by your impressions! The struggle is great, the task divine — to gain mastery, freedom, happiness, and tranquility.” Epictetus, Discourses

“Meditate often on the interconnectedness and mutual interdependence of all things in the universe. For in a sense, all things are mutually woven together and therefore have an affinity for each other — for one thing follows after another according to their tension of movement, their sympathetic stirrings, and the unity of all substance.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Since habit is such a powerful influence, and we’re used to pursuing our impulses to gain and avoid outside our own choice, we should set a contrary habit against that, and where appearances are really slippery, use the counterforce of our training.” Epictetus, Discourses

“You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere — not in logic, nor in wealth, fame, or in any indulgence. Nowhere. Where is it then? In doing what human nature demands. How is a person to do this? By having principles be the source of desire and action. What principles? Those to do with good and evil, indeed in the belief that there is no good for a human being except what creates justice, self-control, courage and freedom, and nothing evil except what destroys these things.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Don’t trust in your reputation, money, or position, but in the strength that is yours — namely, your judgments about the things that you control and don’t control. For this alone is what makes us free and unfettered, that picks us up by the neck from the depths and lifts us eye to eye with the rich and powerful.” Epictetus, Discourses

“Hecato says, ‘cease to hope and you will cease to fear.’ ... The primary cause of both these ills is that instead of adapting ourselves to present circumstances we send out thoughts too far ahead.” Seneca, Moral letters

“Our rational nature moves freely forward in its impressions when it: 1) accepts nothing false or uncertain; 2) directs its impulses only to acts for the common good; 3) limits its desires and aversions only to what’s in its own power; 4) embraces everything nature assigns it.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“We are like many pellets of incense falling on the same altar. Some collapse sooner, others later, but it makes no difference.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“How satisfying it is to dismiss and block out any upsetting or foreign impression, and immediately to have peace in all things.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“You know what wine and liqueur tastes like. It makes no difference whether a hundred or a thousand bottles pass through your bladder — you are nothing more than a filter.” Seneca, Moral letters

“All you need are these: certainty of judgment in the present moment; action for the common good in the present moment; and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“The mind must be given relaxation — it will rise improved and sharper after a good break. Just as rich fields must not be forced — for they will quickly lose their fertility if never given a break — so constant work on the anvil will fracture the force of the mind. But it regains its powers if it is set free and relaxed for a while. Constant work gives rise to a certain kind of dullness and feebleness in the rational soul.” Seneca, On tranquility of mind

“What is the fruit of these teachings? Only the most beautiful and proper harvest of the truly educated — tranquility, fearlessness, and freedom. We should not trust the masses who say only the free can be educated, but rather the lovers of wisdom who say that only the educated are free.” Epictetus, Discourses

“I will keep constant watch over myself and — most usefully — will put each day up for review. For this is what makes us evil — that none of us looks back upon our own lives. We reflect upon only that which we are about to do. And yet our plans for the future descend from the past.” Seneca, Moral letters

“If someone asks you how to write your name, would you bark out each letter? And if they get angry, would you then return the anger? Wouldn’t you rather gently spell out each letter for them? So then, remember in life that your duties are the sum of individual acts. Pay attention to each of these as you do your duty… just methodically complete your task.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“It’s not at all that we have too short a time to live, but that we squander a great deal of it. Life is long enough, and it’s given in sufficient measure to do many great things if we spend it well. But when it’s poured down the drain of luxury and neglect, when it’s employed to no good end, we’re finally driven to see that it has passed by before we even recognized it passing. And so it is — we don’t receive a short life, we make it so.” Seneca, On the brevity of life

“Pass through this brief patch of time in harmony with nature, and come to your final resting place gracefully, just as a ripened olive might drop, praising the earth that nourished it and grateful to the tree that gave it growth.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

On getting busy with your life's purpose

“Stop wandering about! You aren’t likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or the anthologies you’ve collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life’s purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue — if you care for yourself at all — and do it while you can.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

For more content like this, consider subscribing to the occasional hand-made LBS newsletter, see you around!

This movie was some top-class entertainment by the way, a strong recommendation. So, let's get down to business. This will help you seem confident, trustworthy and professional. Hint, don't take this all too seriously.

1. Relaxed body language

WHY: It helps other people feel relaxed too and builds up your confidence.

HOW: Spread yourself out comfortably. Move yourself freely. Have eye contact on special occasions.

2. Be non-reactive

WHY: If you are non-reactive it shows you are not pressured by what’s happening around you and have all the control.

HOW: Simply don’t react, stay silent under pressure. Pause and breathe.

3. Don't try to convince other people

WHY: It helps you be persuasive.

HOW: Frame yourself as an equal partner, be willing to walk away.

4. Signal good health

WHY: Healthy body carries a healthy mind.

HOW: Keep your back straight, posture upright and radiate positive energy. Try to smile.

5. Believe that you will be ok

WHY: This helps you tell the truth. You'll stop worrying about rejection and will never be weak.

HOW: Live it and be practical.

6. Bonus: Help your clients believe in you

WHY: How much would you trust being on a plane with a first-time pilot? What about being on a table of a first-time brain surgeon?

HOW: Emit competence. Make decisions swiftly and act firmly. Don’t hesitate.

A word on competencee

In business, your ability to project competence is essential to win over new customers and keep your existing ones. People will look closely to your actions for assessing your integrity, skills, and trustworthiness.

Everything you do, such as the way you react in certain situations, says a lot about who you are as a business owner. It has often been said that actions speak louder than words, and you'll "find more success" if you can show who you are by some good habits, manners and graces.

Download

Feel free to grab the plain text version of this checklist.

Confidence (LBS)

Confidence This helps you focus on how to seem confident, trustworthy and professional. Principles These are some basic principles to glance over and implement, especially in stressful situations. Else you might seem panicky and lost. 1. Relaxed body language WHY: It helps other people feel ...

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Let me know if you liked this kind of a post for once. I'm sizzling with ideas... Anyhow, feel free to leave a comment below, see you around!

Since I moved further up north, I’ve been mind blown by how quickly autumn transitioned into a proper, snowy and white winter!

Many years ago I lived on the southern coast of Finland where snowy winters became increasingly rare. It was depressing to have just a couple of hours of sunlight per day while the rest of our time was spent in the darkness. It’s not a good environment for a human to be in if you ask me!

⛷ ⛸ 🛷 ☃️

We’re getting ready to take out our ice-skates and skis to get the best of it! Let’s see if a snowy white winter makes things more bearable, or dare I say even, enjoyable...?

✍️ 📚

Since the last time I wrote you, I’ve published two new articles on some of the psychological principles that I got interested to write about thanks to Cialdini’s book on Influence, you will find them below.

In addition to these two articles, I wanted to also share with you an idea I thoroughly enjoyed about what it means to be well-educated according to a widely respected cognitive scientist and philosopher Noam Chomsky.

Meanwhile I’m wishing you a great weekend, and talk to you soon! I’ll just head out into that snowfall…

Best,
Santeri

The principle of reciprocity and becoming a good negotiator 👨‍💼

🤝 Analyzing the idea behind reciprocity

Do you remember feeling a little indebted to someone after receiving a valuable favor?

This is a great example of psychological reciprocation, a mechanism that is built into all of us as part of being social animals. After receiving a favor or a concession from someone else, most often you will justifiably feel like giving something back in return.

The principle of reciprocity is not only especially relevant in politics, business and diplomacy, both systematically and organically, as well as legally and illegally (in the form of corruption), but also a critically important factor in our daily lives, a fact that is quite interesting when examined more closely.

Read the full post.

What it means to be truly educated 📖

👨‍ Hi, my name is Noam Chomsky,

I'm a retired professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where I've been for 65 years. I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject.

For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively independently without external controls.

To move to a modern counterpart, a leading physicist who talked right here, used to tell his classes it's not important what we cover in the class, it's important what you discover. To be truly educated from this point of view means to be in a position to inquire and to create on the basis of the resources available to you which you've come to appreciate and comprehend. To know where to look, to know how to formulate serious questions, to question a standard doctrine if that's appropriate, to find your own way, to shape the questions that are worth pursuing, and to develop the path to pursue them.

That means knowing, understanding many things but also, much more important than what you have stored in your mind, to know where to look, how to look, how to question, how to challenge, how to proceed independently, to deal with the challenges that the world presents to you and that you develop in the course of your self education and inquiry and investigations, in cooperation and solidarity with others.

That's what an educational system should cultivate from kindergarten to graduate school, and in the best cases sometimes does, and that leads to people who are, at least by my standards, well educated.

- Chomsky on being truly educated. As directly quoted from the original video.

Commitment and consistency 📝

🔮 Why do sales organizations forecast?

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

   - Ralph Waldo Emerson

We all strive for consistency and predictability, but at what cost? And when does it lead us in the wrong direction?

Say you approach a sales manager working in a large company and question him on why sales teams are required to forecast exact amounts of revenue for up to three months in advance? It’s a valid question to ask as salespeople are often required to internally commit to getting a signature from a customer by a certain date, no matter the complexity of the deal.

Throw in the difficulty of “committing” to an exact deal size to be brought in, particularly when asked to be written down “on paper” at an early stage, and it can all sometimes feel borderline absurd. Why?

Read the full post.

End note

As always, thank you for your time and for being a great subscriber!  🎉 

In case you find this content interesting or useful, I'd be super thankful if you could share the LBS with one or two of your friends. You can also directly reply to this email if you have any feedback that I could incorporate into future issues. 

Did you find an interesting article yourself? Let me know about that too! Maybe we can include it here next time.

All the best,
Santeri

Let's kick things off with an unassuming quote:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

We all strive for consistency and predictability, but at what cost? And when does it lead us into a wrong direction?

Say you approach a sales manager working in a large company and question him on why sales teams are required to forecast exact amounts of revenue for up to three months in advance? It’s a valid question to ask as salespeople are often required to internally commit getting a signature from a customer by a certain date, no matter the complexity of the deal.

Throw in the difficulty of “committing” to an exact deal size to be brought in, particularly when asked to be written down “on paper” at an early stage, and it can all sometimes feel borderline absurd. Why?

The answer you’ll most probably get from the manager will be somewhere along the lines of: “Our revenue forecasts are passed up to the leadership team so we can give appropriate guidance to our investors. As a a publicly traded company we have a lot of requirements we need to adhere to in terms of reporting, planning and decision-making…”

Does this mean that all reliable and consistent salespeople sought by companies are nowadays not just expected to bring in a ton of revenue, but need to rapidly start forecasting this revenue for up to three months in advance? Yes, and pigs can fly!

Nobody asks the weatherman to realistically forecast exact temperatures beyond the near future of 10-days, so why are salespeople committing their forecasts for over a quarter ahead?

Let’s say we accept this practice in larger and more established companies with a strong product portfolio and a track record, but today you’ll find the exact same practice followed by organizations of all sizes, including even the smallest and least established businesses or startups. Why all the craziness?

The psychological factor of consistency

As Cialdini writes in his book Influence, horse-race bettors are not alone in their willingness to believe in the correctness of a difficult choice once it is made. Indeed, we all fool ourselves from time to time to keep our thoughts and beliefs consistent with what we have already done or decided.

Once we realize the power of consistency is formidable in directing our own action and the actions of others, an important and practical question arises: How is that force engaged? What produces the click that activates the powerful consistency tape in our minds? Social psychologists think they know the answer, and it is commitment.

As Cialdini writes: “If I can get you to make a commitment (that is, to take a stand, to go on record), I will have set the stage for your automatic and ill-considered consistency with that earlier commitment.”

So once a stand is taken, there is a natural tendency to behave in ways that are stubbornly consistent with that stand.

Commitment strategies are often aimed at us by “compliance professionals” of nearly every sort. Each of the strategies is intended to get us to take some action or make some statement that will trap us into later compliance through consistency pressures, and this is what Cialdini talks about extensively in his book.

Additional background

According to research findings mentioned in the book, it is then that we need to be very careful about agreeing to trivial requests (Freedman and Fraser). What can feel like a tiny agreement can not only increase our compliance with very similar, much larger requests, but it can also make us more willing to perform a variety of larger favors that are only remotely connected to the little one we did earlier.

It’s this second, general kind of influence concealed within small commitments that should scare you. Signing up to something you are not sure about, say for example a petition, can be so powerful that it alters your self-image. For example, “I’m now an environmentalist…” And once person’s self-image is altered, all sorts of subtle advantages become available to someone who wants to exploit that new image.

So, according to Cialdini, people can use small commitments to manipulate your self-image, and this has wide-spanning applications in all aspects of your life. Citizens can be turned into “public servants”, prospects into “customers”, prisoners into “collaborators”, and so on. And once they’ve got your self-image where they want it, you should comply naturally with a whole range of requests that are consistent with this view of yourself.

According to a study mentioned in the book, people were asked to read and re-write a piece of text written by a person who, slightly sarcastically, admired a dictator. An interesting result of the study was that even if it may have been sarcastic, without any strong evidence to the contrary, people who read the text assumed that the writer really meant what he said. Without going deeper into results, when the readers were then asked to re-write the text themselves, the outcome, no matter how ridiculous it seems, had an effect in altering that person’s own perception on the topic.  

Spurring sales personnel to greater and greater accomplishments

Cialdini states that back in the day, Amway Corporation hit upon a way to spur their sales personnel to greater and greater accomplishments. Members of the staff were asked to set individual sales goals and commit themselves to them by personally recording them on paper.

Ever since, many companies have learned a beautifully simple trick that makes salespeople perform much better than what they possibly otherwise would. They merely have the salesperson explicitly provide some effort and commit to their sales target instead of just plain and simply giving them out and waiting for results.  

In simpler settings, this psychological principle holds true also in the form of asking customers to fill out order forms instead of a salesperson doing it for them. When a person has gone to commit something on paper, the heavy sub-conscious pressure of consistency is engaged.

As Cialdini states: “According to the sales-training program of a prominent encyclopedia company, that personal commitment alone has proved to be a very important psychological aid in preventing customers from backing out of their contracts”, continuing “like the Amway Corporation, then, these organizations have found that something special happens when people personally put their commitments on paper: They live up to what they have written down.”

Getting your customers to engage with you

A thing to keep in mind is that the effort the counterparty needs to show and provide is critical. To be effective, one should not make the commitment too easy and hands-off for the counterparty. If they don't show with actions that they are doing things, you can directly consider it as a bad signal.

For example, you can give small pieces of "good" and interesting types of work to prospective customers for this effect to be in full play. To gauge the commitment level of a prospect, salespeople can therefore ask before a sales meeting for some agenda points to focus on, or when conducting an extensive sales case, involve stakeholders in some clever and subtle ways early in the process.

What are the implications on internal communication?

As the saying goes: “Underpromise and overdeliver?”, right?

Cialdini writes: “It appears that commitments are most effective in changing a person’s self-image and future behavior when they are active, public, and effortful.”

For leaders, as well as salespeople then, there is a key aspect to meditate upon for making sure that this psychological principle is effective, a fact that is often executed less than desirably in practice:  

“As social scientists have determined, we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressures. If we are forced by outside pressure, or encouraged by a large reward, it may get us to perform a certain action, but it won’t get us to accept inner responsibility for the act.”

This means that if the manager is forcing his salesperson to forecast a certain amount while the salesperson is reluctant, the effect will be lost.

“Consequently, we won’t feel committed to it. Strong threats or huge rewards might motivate immediate compliance, but they are unlikely to produce long-term commitment.”

This is something we must keep in our minds.

Foolish consistency

Consistency is considered a hallmark of logic and intellectual strength by people among us, while lack of consistency, on the other hand, is what is often tied to intellectually scattered and weak people. Coming back to the quote Cialdini mentions in his book as said by Emerson:

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

The keyword here is "foolish". Remembering this quote can be an effective defense against psychological weapons of influence, but perhaps also help us, as the Stoics would say, live a "smoother flowing life”.