Author: Bob Bannister

I can see clearly now the rain has gone… Effective Management Direction

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

For many years I thought the opening line of Johnny Nash’s hit was “I can see clearly now Lorraine has gone”  The realisation that the lyric was about the weather brought for me a whole new meaning to the song!  Seeing clearly is such an important thing for teams that managers really should think more about it.  Rather like that vet on the glasses advert (who can’t find the pulse in his assistance fury winter hat), managers who don’t provide clarity for their teams are making a serious mistake.  

I want to suggest that there are two-forms of clarity that managers could all do with, the long view and the short view.  Perhaps it’s my engineering apprenticeship origins (having a big and a tiny hammer in the standard issue toolkit), but I’ve always warmed to these two extremes.  The little car and the big car, the little suitcase and the big suitcase.  What more do you need in life, isn’t the middle always a compromise 😉 

Great managers who get the fundamentals right will always look to bring clarity for their teams, at both these extremes.  

Long view clarity

Long view clarity is about purpose.  It’s the big picture stuff.  Where are we heading? What’s the main thing, the direction we are going to travel together?  Getting this right provides a guiding star for the team to follow.  It’s vital not only at an organisational level, but definitely at a functional.  You as the manager need to get this clear, because if you don’t understand it, then your team members never will!  You have to have a precise view of your teams future world, what will you be, what will you have achieved, how will you be operating?  Articulate this as clearly and precise as possible.  Write it down, discuss it with your boss and your team, fine tune it and make it the guiding star that ensures you are all focused on the same thing.  

Once you’ve got it mapped out, then you have to make it live.  It’s got to be front of mind, not bottom of drawer!  Simply that means you have to keep drawing attention to it.  Pointing it out and reminding every one of it.  You need to aim at highlighting at least an aspect of it once every  month.  It will become the barometer by which you and the team understand whether they are busy about the correct things.  

Short view clarity

The short view is equally important.  If the long view gives purpose and direction, the short ensures that the team operate within the correct boundaries.  What you need to do is drop into the day to day, every day.  

Now let’s be clear, I’m not advocating micromanagement, but leadership.  

Everyday it’s your job to steer, to nudge, to point in the right direction.  You have to set the boundaries of what’s ok what’s not.  Every manager has to be the custodian of the standard.  If you don’t draw the operational lines where they are needed, the team will assume that what they do is perfectly OK (even when it’s not).  See it as highlighting the sequence of events that will lead to the long view position.  It’s probably true to say that nothing happens without a sequence of events, so it’s a management foundation to ensure that the whole team understands what it is and is therefore working towards it in an acceptable way.   

Clarity is one of the two foundations of being able empower your team (the other is competence).  Step up your effort in making sure that the long and the short clarity exists for everyone you manage.  You do that, then you’ll find the going is so much easier, even if the rain has come!  

Check out our other management foundations in our up and coming open course.  

Bob Bannister

Ships Captain

3 weeks to the Festival of Work 2019 at London Olympia

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Three week to go before the festival of work kicks off.  We’ve a brand new stand to show off this year, although we did have a few problems trying it out in the office!  iManage 1, light fitting 0!

We’ve just been granted a speakers slot too, so if you’re there on the Thursday (13th June 2019) come to the Learning and Development stage for 1045hr to see Bob present on ‘Designing learning solutions for remote/virtual team managers and workers.’

Be sure to come and say ‘hi’ to us.

 

VTMT – The simplest way in the world to write a SMART objective.

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Most people seem to have heard of the SMART objective. An acronym to help you have all the correct ingredients when crafting an objective. There are loads of different versions of it too, my favourite being: Specific, Measurable, Awesome, Ridiculous and Time-bound 😉
But the traditional amongst us may be more familiar with Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.

It’s not a bad guide, the problem is that hardly anyone I meet really understands how to translate these 5 ideas into the written objective. So here’s my solution; the most incredibly simple sentence structure that will not only give you a smart objective, but will:

  • provide a consistent look to your objectives,
  • ensure that the objective is singular (not multiple objectives rolling into one paragraph),
  • plus it will stop you dropping into the task level (how to deliver the objective) which is always more motivating and empowering for the owner of that objective.

So here it is. A super simple four part sentence structure:

  1. Start with a good verb to describe the journey that needs to take place. E.g Increasing; Decreasing.
  2. add the target area. E.g. Use of keyhole surgery procedures,
  3. add a measure for the target. E.g. 10%; £10,000; 500m; 1 hour,
  4. add the time over which the objective is to be achieved. E.g. July 20XX; The end of Quarter 2.

So that is verb, target, measure and time (VTMT).

Here’s a couple of examples:

  • Increase number of open days by 10% by March 2016.
  • Increase the number of twitter followers to over 10,000 by the end of 20XX.
  • Maintain the customer satisfaction level at 4.5 out of 5 throughout the 20XX sales period.
  • Implement the SCAT software for all staff by the end of November 20XX.

I’m going to argue that it’s possible to fit any objective in the world to this format! I’ve been challenged many times on courses, but always found with a bit of care you can work it into the format.

What’s great is that you don’t even have to worry about the ‘SMART’ thing. It will have all those elements, just by writing a VTMT sentence.

I can also tell you from my own experience, that the measure element will usually be one of four types. It’s not an exhaustive list, you may be able to find another type of measure, but most of the time these four will cover it. They are:

  • Quality measures, how well the work is performed. Quality can be measured in a variety of ways, including the accuracy, effectiveness, or usefulness associated with the objective.
  • Quantity measures, the actual amount or capacity of work produced. Performance objectives measured via quantity will almost always involve a numerical benchmark, such as raw numbers, percentages, or level of productivity.
  • Timeliness measures, how quickly the work is performed. Performance objectives measured via timeliness include some sort of a time frame.
  • The final way to measure performance objectives is in terms of cost-effectiveness. Typically, when we think of cost-effectiveness, financial savings come to mind. However, cost-effectiveness can also refer to personnel savings or time savings.

That’s pretty well all you need to know in order to craft really SMART objectives. It’s something that’s a great management foundation, one of those simple techniques that can transform the clarity of your team objectives.

You will always do a better job if you agree short concise singular objectives over those wordy paragraphs that tend to emerge. Give VTMT a try, I promise you’ll be pleased you did.

Bob Bannister
Ships Captain

Management Communication – Your Top 3 priorities

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Are there key things that managers should communicate?  Well, yes, there are actually!  Three things that are vital for all managers in all organisations to communicate well and regularly.  

I see them as weekly leadership and management communication priorities.  Areas you should think about every Monday morning in preparation for the week ahead.  Great managers will work at this, developing open and regular dialogue with all the direct reports in the team.  We shouldn’t leave something as important as this to chance, but think through each area in a clear and logical way.  It’s not difficult to do, but it is difficult to become consistent at this.  So help yourself and create a weekly table you can complete identifying who you need to say what to, under each of the following headings, during the course of each week.  

Priority 1 – Issues and risks for escalation.

Each week there are likely to be exceptions that your team need your support in resolving.  It’s vital that you keep an open channel for them to keep you up to date with these.  As the manager, the buck stops with you, so you need to keep abreast of potential problems and offer the team the support they need to work through them.  This is the most important communication priority, offering support, insights, decision making and on occasions ‘making things happen’ for your  team.  

Ask who do I need to say what to about the issues and risks we are facing this week.  In a good week, there may not be anything for escalation to you, but unfortunately that makes this priority easier to drop off the radar.  So you have to keep asking, checking in on anything that may be on the horizon that needs your input and guidance.  

Priority 2 – Focusing objectives and the sequence of events. 

Your second communication priority is to ensure that there is absolute clarity across the team about what’s got to be achieved this coming week.  This is both at the level of team and individual deliverables.  Every person needs the focus you as the manager can bring.  

Are we doing the right stuff, are we working on the things that deliver the goals alone, or is some resource being diverted inadvertently to other things?  I’m really quite hard about this; I don’t have spare resource in my team to have anyone doing anything that is not directly contributing to the goals we have set ourselves.  It’s not that people are actively wasting time and energy, it’s just that without clarity people will start picking up work which is peripheral to the main thing.  Our job is to keep people focused on that main thing.  That way we will create momentum and direction across the team towards the things we need to achieve.  

Priority 2 asks, who do I need to say what to about this weeks objectives and the sequence of events?  Everything has a sequence of events, everything.  A good manager will recognise this and ensure that the team have got it.  When people fail to see the sequence of events needed to deliver the objective, they often fail to deliver it (at least in a timely way).  

Priority 3 – Motivational and developmental feedback. 

Your third priority is to give feedback.  There are only two types of feedback that you need, motivational and developmental.  Please note ‘constructive criticism’ does not exist on this list!  It is singularly the most inappropriate phrase that managers have adopted in the last few decades.  Nobody (including me) wants constructive criticism.  My dad used to say “you can’t make a purse out of a pigs ear” neither can you make criticism a good thing by adding the word constructive! 

You need to give feedback, every week.  It will either be motivational; feedback that affirms the good things people are doing, or developmental; feedback that increases the competence of the team.  Competence is one of my pillars of a great team, alongside clarity (spoken about in priority 2 above).  

Each week you should work out, who to say what to, that is either motivating them to continue and/or helping them to do even better next time.

So three priorities you need to implement to polish your management communications skills.  These are management foundations in my opinion, things we ought to have been told on day one but probably weren’t!  The great thing is that they are specific, so often people talk about management communication in such generic terms.  It’s a pet frustration of mine that people speak about the need for communication, without the pointedness of what that really means to you and I as leaders and managers.  Start introducing these three to your weekly task list and become known as the manager that supports, directs and develops their people like no other.  

Why not check out our Management Foundations open course to fast-track your management capability.

Bob Bannister

Ships Captain

The only three reasons you need a presentation slide!

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Is it possible that the presentation slide has become the nail in the coffin of good presentation?  A rhetorical question, but just in case you are wondering, I think the answer is yes!  If we wound back the clock a few decades to when I was a young lad in the workplace, PowerPoint never existed, no really.  There was a time in living history when we all worked without computers and apart from the occasional telex we had to rely on getting the job done with a pen and paper (or sometimes find a typist to ‘type it up’ for us).  In those distant days, a presentation was a presentation, not a set of slides.  In fact to be blunt a presentation was you, you were the presentation!  It had been the same since time begun, you stood up and presented to your audience, engaging them, drawing them in, teasing them with hooks and stories.  You were responsible for bringing the presentation to life.  

Now at the expense of sounding like an ageing baby boomer, it was (I’m afraid to tell you), way way better!  Today, so many presentations are dull, slide ridden, disengaging monologues.  Today the slide deck is the presentation – and we so need to change that! 

So here’s a starter for you.  I’m going to suggest that there are only ever three reasons that you need to have a presentation slide.  Use this simple rule and you will begin to move the presentation away from being the slide deck, back to it being you.  They are the 3 E’s of presentation slides…

1. Slides that entertain

Look at any good presenter and they will entertain you.  No matter how dry the content of their subject.  It’s true, I’ve seen excellent presenters bring the most technical of subjects to life by entertaining and lightly amusing me.  Entertainment (according to google) is to provide someone with amusement or enjoyment.  An appropriate slide is a great way to do this.  Let’s face it, we are not all naturally witty and engaging!  So lets find a good slide that does this for us.  Entertainment is all about engagement, so find content that engages, even if it’s something really technical.  Wow us, hook us, tempt us, tickle us.  

2.  Slides that emphasis

The second good reason to have a slide in the presentation deck is to emphasis something that I’m talking about.  Sometimes it’s really useful to draw particular attention to something in the presentation.  Bingo – that’s a great use of a slide.  When I’m covering a key fact, when I’m drawing attention to a specific action, when I’m highlighting the importance of a particular step, then I want it on the screen.  Work out what needs emphasis in your presentation (a really good thing to do by the way), and build your slides around those things.  

3.  Slides that explain

The only remaining reason you will ever need a slide in the presentation deck, is to simplify and explain something that is somewhat complicated to talk about.  This is where you drop in your diagram, chart, process flow, picture – whatever.  To see something complicated laid out clearly gives the revelation needed for your content to hit home.  Imagine teaching an alien to make a cup of tea! Where do you start? Suddenly the process looks complex and bewildering, especially if our particular aliens don’t even have need of drink!  Then a slide would be useful, simply laying out the steps of the process.    

So there we have it, 3 E’s that will vastly improve your presentations; it will stop you having too many slides and make you the presentation instead of the deck.  Why not take up my challenge, pull out your last presentation deck and strip out every single slide that is not entertaining, emphasising or explaining.  Everything else you can bring to life yourself, it’s for you to deliver, for you to present that stuff.  Just you direct to your audience.  In both PowerPoint and keynote a press of the ‘B’ key while in presentation mode will turn your screen blank (black), so why not loose it from the screen and start your own personal slide deck revolution. 

Bob Bannister

Ships Captain 

Stop managing, start leading!

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

We work with a lot of managers, literally thousands of them over the years from all walks of organisational life.  One of the big things we always find ourselves addressing is the tendency to succumb to the gravitational pull of activity.  The stuff that keeps managers buried in the day to day operations and therefore failing to get some height and lead their teams.  Everyone we meet seems to know that this is not ideal, that it hinders the growth of team members, that it frustrates the people working for you, that it lacks any thought of the future and buries us in the now.  But even so, most managers struggle to ‘take off’ get some height and lead rather than do.   

The reasons for this are many.  It’s very easy to give a reason as to why you, as a manager has to be involved in the day to day doing.  Many of those reasons will be genuine, but I want to suggest that stepping up and leading is always a choice you have as the manager of any team.  The skilful piece is working out where and when you can choose to lead rather than defaulting at all times to being operational.  This may be simpler than it seems. Here are six steps you can follow to work this out in an intelligent way, to stop managing and start leading.  

Step 1 – Understand the territory.  

This is the easiest part of the exercise but I would still encourage you to think it through carefully, capturing your ideas somewhere so that we can work with them during the following steps.  

I like to do this in a three by three box grid.  That gives you nine areas (that’s not too important as you may only have a few areas or maybe nine is not enough), but spreading your list around the page will give us some space for working on each area later.  

Simply list all your areas of responsibility.  What are the blocks of work that you have to be concerned about as a manager in your role?  By way of example, here are my nine areas; Finance, People, Marketing, Sales, Customers, Organisational learning, Face to face training solutions, Online learning solutions, Processes.  

What are yours?  Work it out and write it down somewhere.  

Step 2 – Evaluate clarity. 

Now take each of your defined areas in turn and ask whether there is a high level of clarity about what is required of you and your team.  Is there consistency, is there repetition, do you have predefined outcomes and or procedures, are the goals clear?  Can you say under each area what it is you are striving to achieve?  If the answer to these questions is a strong yes, then assume a good level of clarity exists, even if you might question how well these things are known throughout the team.  Mark each area high or low for clarity, then move to step 3.  

Step 3 – Evaluate competence. 

Next you need to think about the competence of your team members.  This can be collectively or individually if appropriate.  Do they have the requisite skills to deliver the desired outcomes of each area.  Think about how it is today, rather than your aspiration.  Take each area in turn and ask whether they could (A) deliver it without additional experience, (B) would need support and or (C) would need training from the beginning.  Add your teams competence levels to the page you are building.  

Step 4 – Identify where you could lead today. 

Now go back over each area and identify those that have both high levels of clarity and competence.  I like to put an ‘up arrow’ to indicate height and leadership against these.  These are the areas that you can and should be leading, not doing.  This is where your choice comes in, it’s up to you to choose not to be operational in these areas.  It’s like a premeditated response every time this type of work comes up – you make the choice to lead it, not deliver it.  My own example of this would be in my Finance area.  There is absolute clarity about what my finance people are required to do, there are monthly process, there is clear intent.  But as well as this, there is complete competence.  I know that I can rely totally on the team to know what to do and how to do it to a standard I am happy with.  So if anything finance comes up, anything whatsoever, then I will lead on it, but I will not deliver it.  I will actively avoid the doing, so that I can step up and give direction.  You can do the same. Take a look across your areas and make the choice to lead. 

Step 5 – Identify where you have to be operational. 

Here’s the practical reality, there will always be some areas that you will still have to have an operational focus.  These are where you either have low levels of clarity or low competence, and or a combination of the two.  Obviously this can change in the future, but for now you need to accept that you’re going to be doing less leading and more delivering.  For me the example is with sales activity.  We have good clarity concerning the goals and the processes, but I do not have the competence or resource within the team.  That means until I actively change this, I have to deliver the sales activity for iManage.  I use a down arrow to indicate this next to the area.  

Step 6 – Identify potential movements. 

Our final step requires us to assess whether there are any areas that are currently down (operational for me) that with a little work could start to be things I could lead in the future.  There will always be two things I’ll have to work on to be able to properly lead; the clarity of what’s required and the competence of the team in delivering it. Sometimes it will be both, sometimes one or the other.  Go back through your list of areas and ask whether there’s something that you could do to begin the process of shifting that area from being operational to leading it.  My example is face to face training.  Each month I’m actively seeking to do less training delivery myself, as I transition from being totally operational a couple of years ago, to some future point when I might become totally strategic and only lead in this area.  Right now it’s a mix of the two, so I use an up arrow with the arrow head placed halfway up the line to indicate this.  Take another look at your list and identify any areas that you could work on to become less operational and more strategic.  Mark them on the page.  

This exercise can really pay dividends if you take some time aside and work through the steps methodically.  Start becoming the leader that you need to be, and create a competent team that know exactly what they’ve got to achieve.  Help yourself by remembering your team will never develop unless you step up and give them the opportunity to learn.  Stop kidding yourself that you have to be so operational, the best managers are always those that lead and empower the ability of their teams.  For me, this is like the 101 of being a great manager, they actually stop managing and start leading!  

 

Bob Bannister

Ships Captain

Working remotely? Then you need your own brand! 

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

In this age of increasingly mobile ways of working, it’s becoming highly important to have a distinct personal brand.  The reason for this is simple, being away from the team workplace means you are less visible, especially if this is your main mode of working.  Less visible means being less in the mind of others, the boss, the organisation.  As remote working becomes more common, people are realising that it’s suddenly more difficult to get noticed, to build a reputation and ultimately, even to get promoted. 

What you need is to have a presence, even when you are not physically present.  So yes, on top of everything else, you need to factor into your daily role ways to promote you!  

Now, I’m not suggesting that you have to blow your trumpet at every single opportunity.  No one likes the person who’s always ‘shouting off’ about how brilliant they are.  This requires something much more intelligent than that.  This requires a marketing strategy, similar in many ways to how unknown manufacturers need to create a market presence for their products.  Here are a couple of key ways you can think about this:  

Leave a trail! 

We all know when a snail has visited our garden chair, even though they are nowhere to be seen.  So think about how you leave a (less sticky) trail so that anyone can see what you’ve been up to.  Technology can be useful to us in this regard.  Many systems now leave an activity trail, logging what you and others have been up too.  We use Basecamp, but there are lots of databases and crm tools that do the same thing.  Don’t miss the opportunity to log where you have been and what you have been doing.  If you have a social tool within the business, a Slack or Yammer type facility, don’t be shy about communicating with your team about what’s been happening.  

Work on your personal identity. 

It’s an obvious thing to say, but it’s important to recognise that when you do meet physically with colleagues it’s a much bigger deal, especially when you normally work separated from them.  We would do well to go along to get along.  Using physical meetings as more than a way to get the work done, but also as a way to secure our personal brands in the minds of the others is crucial.  That means you need to sort out what your brand is!  It’s not hard, just think about how you want others to perceive you, even before you’ve opened your mouth, through to the moment you walk away from them.  Write down a few descriptors.  List ideas about the impact you want to leave with others, then use that to inform everything from the way you dress to the way you interact while with them.  

There are many advantages to working in a remote environment, but it’s important to recognise that there are some disadvantages too.  Work out how you can inject back in some of those things that are lost as a result of working in a dispersed team.  There are lots of ways to do that, the hurdle is recognising the need in the first place.  Start to develop your own strategies for being ‘present’ even when apart, it’s a long game of influence, but like any good brand you have to invest in taking it to market.  

Bob Bannister

Ships Captain

Influencing skills – it’s in the minutiae

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Being able to increase your level of influence in almost any situation puts you in a position of advantage.  What most people don’t realise is that influence in business seldom occurs in a single instance, it’s in the many interactions that bring about the outcome.  

It’s pretty hard to influence people in a moment, unless you have a gun or something equally unpleasant to wield!  The reality of great influencers is that they recognise they must nudge outcome in tiny increments over as many interactions as they can. They condition the outcomes that they seek.  Once you understand this you can begin to look for those micro nudges and start to develop your position.  

We all do this all the time, so we are not highlighting anything new, it’s just that we don’t always nudge deliberately.  Often what happens is that we know what works, because the approach has worked for us in the past, so we simply repeat that same nudge next time.  Other times (especially when we haven’t got past experience) we can leave the nudge to chance, not pre planning it.  This will have a variety of results from really good to very bad.  A nice simple example of this would be about asking someone to stay on late and help complete a needed piece of work.  We might say: 

“I don’t suppose you could stay on tonight and help me finish this…”  

Compare this to an alternative nudge:  

“We’ve got to deliver this to the client tonight, I really need your help to get this completed…”

The first is just slightly more easy to turn down, compared to the second.  They both may or may not achieve the desired outcome, but the second version has a much stronger influence towards achieving what I need.  

It’s in the minutiae!

The little things always matter in a big way when it comes to nudging outcomes.  There are some great examples of this.  Take Amsterdam airport who in 2009 introduced an image of a little fly to their urinals giving men a target to aim for.  It reduced mess by 80%.  The UK tax office chose to add messages to the reminders of people in arrears stating, “9 out of 10 people in your area are up to date with tax payments”.  The result was a 15% increase in payments from those who received these messages.  A client we work with deliberately asked for a sample of managers to express higher levels of thanks in the weeks before their company survey took place.  In every case the survey found these teams expressed higher satisfaction with their roles than those who were not included in the experiment.  A quick search will provide dozens of such examples, we are amazingly influenced by these little changes.  

If we are try to influence outcomes, we are always better to plan it.  Preparing the words to say (or email) will nearly always improve the outcome if we have this nudging phenomena in mind.  I often find my self writing emails and using the word ‘just’. “I’m ‘just’ writing to…”.  When I spot it, I always backspace and rewrite the sentence.  Why belittle my message from the start, it’s an unhelpful nudge.  In sales I will never say “if we go ahead with the training”, preferring to use “when we deliver the training…”.  It’s a tiny change, but that’s where influence happens.  

Start becoming more attentive to your nudge choices, it’s good to learn from the past successes and failures, but add to that a more considered approach to changing outcomes and influencing others.  

Bob Bannister

Ships Captain at iManage Performance Ltd. 

Discover effective communication skills to bring about a change

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

The word ‘communication’ has a mysterious quality in the training room – you can use it to answer almost any question and you’ll nearly always be right!  The problem with that of course, is that it’s just so vague, bordering on worthless because, where comms are concerned we have to get specific.  

So here’s a few specifics about communicating for a change.  Any change, any situation where you want the other party to shift their position or behaviour.  This is so useful in change management, influencing, in presentation skills and in almost any situation where you want people to change as a result of your communication.

They need to get you before they get the issue. 

If you want people to get your message, remember that they need to get you first.  This is a simple rule of psychology, often referred to as ‘pacing and leading’.  People will be more willing to be lead by us if we have ‘paced’ with them first.  I like to use the analogy of those 1980’s style trains.  Some of us oldies can remember running alongside the train, opening the door and jumping aboard just as it started to pull out of the station.  The platform staff would be blowing their whistle at us, but we all did it from time to time!  The point is, you couldn’t just get on the train, you had to get up to speed with it (they were a lot slower then and I was a lot younger and faster 😉 ) or you would simply smash into the side of the carriage.  Pacing is similar, we have to get up to speed with other people before they will accept our lead.  We have to build rapport and connection at a human level.  Where communicating change is concerned, I can tell you a specific way to do this… 

Talk first about your connection with the topic you’re communicating.  Give an example, personalise it, show how and why you connect to the subject which is about to follow.  What’s the impact or benefit to you personally.  Show how you are also implicated in the change.  

It might sound something like this: “I don’t know about you, but I find it really frustrating that I need to enter the customers details twice, both on the CRM databases and the accounting software record”. 

Once they’ve got you, they need to get the issue. 

The second thing you’ve got to communicate, is how the topic connects with them.  I like to outline a number of examples of how they personally connect with it.  This is especially the case when presenting to a group, I may not know exactly how each person relates to the topic, so I have to cast my net wide and give as many examples as I can to try and capture everyone in the audience.  In other situations (where I have a better understanding of the listeners situation) I can be more specific.  Either way I would spell out how the topic connects with them by posing a rhetorical question. 

So it might go something like this: “Maybe for you it’s the same as me, but perhaps your frustration is due to how slow the current CRM database is, the fact you have to wait for it to approve after each submission? Or maybe you find the lack of ability to cut and paste a real pain?”

Now shine a light on the issue. 

Now you are ready to position the key detail of the issue, change or topic.  Don’t over do it, remember that most people will ‘zone out’ of a communication if it’s longer than a couple of minutes.  You just need to shine enough light on the topic to illuminate it.  Give the details that matter, you might use a little repetition as well to help people hear, but then cut it off – don’t start to waffle.  

So it might go something like this: “Well I’m really pleased to announce that we are about to introduce a brand new software package for the business.  It’s called… etc.”

Next resolve the earlier tension. 

The next phase of the communication or presentation needs to outline the engagement required to make the change.  We are seeking to apply the issue to the listeners personally, so they know exactly what is expected of them from this point forward.  We should spell out the activity and timelines required to bring about the change.  

So it might go something like this: “To implement this we require all of you to undertake a full database cleansing activity for each of your areas.  This must be completed by June and include the following areas…” 

Finally inspire the action you need from each of them. 

The last part of communicating for a change is to cast a vision of the new future.  They need to see how the proposed change plays into their personal struggles issues or opportunities as highlighted earlier in what you had to say.  So take the time at this point to make those connections overt.  

So it might go something like this: “So once we go live this will mean, no more double entry on the two systems, no more waiting around for the system it will be instantaneous and you’ll all be able to cut and paste into any entry feed you like.”

So there you have it, a way of communicating for a change.  Follow these five content steps for any situation where you need people to come onboard with the change, whether that’s written or verbal comms, an email or a presentation.  Don’t leave engagement to chance, work at creating that buy-in from the start by adopting this easy to follow structure. 

Bob Bannister

Ships Captain at iManage Performance Ltd.  

How to be a smart sales negotiator in a tough market

Bob Bannister
by Bob Bannister on

Whether it’s #Brexit nervousness or a general downturn, we’ve recently been invited to deliver negotiation skills programmes for a number of clients.  Are we seeing organisations preparing for the a potential downturn by making sure their staff are well equipped to deal with it?  

Negotiating in a tough market is of course a blessing and a curse, it just depends on your perspective; buyer or sales professional.  Let’s face it, the buy side is in its element when suppliers are under pressure. They can capitalise in a tight market and leverage their spend in a somewhat crude yet effective way to get the best deals.  Drop your price or we’ll take our business elsewhere is the typical brick bat approach!  Sales teams however are under massive pressure driven by the scarcity of demand.  You better be a smart negotiator if you’re selling into a tightening market, it can be the difference between results or failures. 

It’s not just about holding your nerve and using every technique in the ‘how to negotiate’ handbook, it’s that you have to step up the market insight in a big way.  

Your market and competitor knowledge is vital

Negotiating blind isn’t recommended at any time, but in a difficult market it’s suicide.  Understanding the position of the competition is the only way that you can be confident about when to hold out, or push forward, or concede whilst in the throws of negotiation. 

Mining for accurate competitor data is a significant task, that’s why many negotiation teams have researchers as part of the crew.  If you don’t have that luxury, then you probably have to step up and work creatively at uncovering as much information as you can yourself.  

One route to a deeper, richer insight about what your competition is doing is to propagate and use a ‘buying advocate’.  

Establishing a buying advocate

This is someone within the buying organisation who (for whatever reason) is positively inclined towards your companies sales offering.  ‘Buying advocates’ occur for a host of reasons; they may have prior experience of buying from you; they may like your offering more than the competitors; they may simply warm to you for any number of reasons.  Sometimes you will not even know why they are positively disposed towards your solution, it’s just clear that they are.  It is also possible that your buying advocate will not be part of the formal purchase decision team, and probable that they are not from the professional procurement community.  Whoever, their contribution to your market research can be invaluable.  

A strong buying advocate can provide you with all kinds of information and insight.  For example, an understanding of who the key players and influencers are in the buy decision, or insights into the buy process and it’s progress towards a contract. But most importantly, they can give you inside perspectives concerning what your competitor organisations are offering.  

In a tight market, having or not having a strong buying advocate can make the difference between winning or losing an opportunity.  Be a little more bold, ask them what they think, what the organisation is thinking, who the other suppliers in play are, how does your offering compare?   You’ve got little to lose, they can always choose to withhold if they like, but often may share gems of information that can help you tweak your positioning to great effect.  

Bob Bannister

 

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