Effective Salesmen

I received these links from a colleague on Friday and I thought it made for interesting reading...

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/06/the_seven_personality_traits_o.html and http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/09/top_reasons_salespeople_lose_b.html

Sunny Saturday, clouds on the horizon

The sun is shining this afternoon in Pau. I’m enjoying it streaming through my office window. After this week’s edition of the Economist dropped through the letter box this morning I read the following article and it initially served to lift my spirits… http://www.economist.com/node/21562915. The beginning of the end of the Euro crisis…wouldn’t that be nice?!... However this quickly made me think about another article which I read earlier in the week; http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100180151/the-euro-crisis-stand-by-for-years-of-slow-wretched-decline/. This second article muses over what a recession actually looks like. It suggested that the Euro crisis would never manifest itself as, “lines of men in cloth caps queuing at soup kitchens – and somehow doing so in grainy black-and-white footage”. The article went to say on that, “because journalists deal in drama, they like to frame the euro crisis as a choice between ‘a solution’ and a catastrophic breakdown. But surely there is a third option, namely that people carry on getting gradually poorer. Imagine that you lost your main source of income tomorrow. At first, not much would change. You’d still be driving the same car, sleeping in the same bed. Only as things broke, and went unreplaced, would your poverty become visible. Dilapidation would steal upon you progressively.”

So the question I asked myself was whether or not if we have indeed turned a corner, will people notice, will people recognize how close we came to the edge of economic meltdown, or will people just carry on expecting the government to subsidize bread and petrol (as in France)? Will people actually change their behaviour as a result of recent events, or did things just not get bad enough? Clearly many people were affected negatively and this posting is not to diminish their hardship, but were enough people impacted to actually mean more widespread change for the better? This human condition of only acting when things are really bad is actually quite depressing. In sales we even celebrate this type of behaviour – we rejoice when we find that, “the customer has a compelling event!” Why can’t people just do things because common sense dictates that it is the right thing to do? Surely there can’t be that much of a difference between Northern and Southern European common sense – surely everyone must understand the getting things for free can’t last forever? Surely everyone must realize that having someone else who has carefully husbanded their resources (Germany) pay for those who have not (e.g. Greece) is not right? Unfortunately many of my (sensible) Spanish friends suggest that there is indeed a slew of people who don’t share the same version of common sense that I do. Whilst I clearly am not advocating more recession or depression, it is why I worry that the beginning of the end of the Euro crisis won’t actually make any long term difference. I fear that in time history will simply say that what we’ve gone through since 2008 was just another protracted slump in the economic cycle. Right, where are those sunglasses (not bought using credit)…

The future’s an Asian female

Overall I had a good week at work. It really feels like we’re making progress. I’m on the verge of my third major signing in the space of two weeks. I think we’ve got an increasingly powerful story and it seems to be resonating with people – I am managing to get the team I want. I’m excited about getting all of these rock stars in front of our internal and external clients. That’s all positive, and having the right team in place will allow me to spend more time on our most intractable challenges, which includes working with the team in Spain who face the biggest obstacles.

All of that said, I can’t help but think that if I take a couple of steps back and look to my side or behind me, then there is another huge big hamster ball rolling my way full of Asians and women. These two articles from last week’s Economist only served to remind me of this… http://www.economist.com/node/21562195 and http://www.economist.com/node/21562174 Is the west finished? No, because in a globalized world place matters more than ever (http://www.economist.com/node/21561109), but I can’t help but think that by the time I retire, if I haven’t moved from where I am now, then I and the kids definitely won’t be working in the region of the world that is driving global growth; when Sandie says to me we can’t ask the house cleaner to wash the patio windows because that isn’t in her job description, then I can’t help but think of the people in India who would fight to work to earn that additional income...Are men finished? Absolutely not for lots of reasons including the fact that it isn’t us who bear children, but I do agree with the idea that the skills required to be successful today include adaptability and communication, (which surely must include the ability to speak multiple languages), which women generally tend to be better at than men. Work is going well and I am enjoying it, life in the south of France is extremely pleasant and comfortable; I will however keep my head down for a little bit longer otherwise one might be faced with some much more difficult questions with answers with big consequences.

Morning gory

It was going to be a bad day, but a good breakfast in the Hotel Du Louvre has set me back on the right track. After a fun evening last night with the French team at the horse racing at Vincennes I got back to a rather dingy hotel at around midnight. On arrival they told me the hotel was fully booked, but that they had arranged for me to stay in another hotel on the other side of town. Great. Worse still when I got to the next hotel - the unhelpful staff and sick on the floor (which stayed there all night until I pointed it out) belied its four star rating. I stomped out on an empty stomach at 7.36 this morning after they refused to iron a shirt or provide me with an iron to do it myself. It was all going wrong till a fine croissant and hot chocolate put the world to rights. Now off to brave the Parisian public transport....

Morning glory

OK, so I can complain as much as I want about excessive amounts of travel, but I have to say that (1) as a youngster I always found getting up in the middle of the night to get a plane e.g. to go on summer holidays, extremely exciting, and (2) as I sit here above a white fluffy blanket of clouds looking at the morning sun far into the horizon, I have to say it’s not all bad.

Cars and politics

One of my small pleasures in life is to go and check on the children just before I go to bed myself. It’s nice to see them relaxed and peaceful. When I walked into Maxime’s bedroom last night I went to put his quilt straight. I saw that he had taken two of his little cars out of their special garage and he was now fast asleep with one car next to his head and the other in his left hand. It made me think how enjoyable life must be at that age when one of your chief concerns is which toy you want to take to bed with you. I compare that with the world of pathetic office politics into which I am about to walk…

Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop

I took Gaston to mass this morning for the first time. It was a delight. Normally I go with Maxime who is somewhat more turbulent. The only real way I can get Maxime to sit still for an hour is if I take a Santa Claus size sack of toys and a full pack of chocolate biscuits (and even with that we still have to pay a visit to the candles and also the choir loft). Gaston on the other hand was delighted to sit on papa’s knee for the full duration. A crust of bread and solitary pencil was all that was needed and even then, I would contend that pencil was overkill. The whole episode got me thinking. It is fairly obvious that I will now be more tempted to take Gaston on a Sunday rather than his more active brother. However I wonder if this is the right response – surely a parent must be able to take a child into any environment and expect appropriate behavior. Furthermore I also started to wonder if you can really change the inherent nature of someone – even if I forced Maxime into a childhood of Sunday services and Gaston into twenty years of debauchery and night clubs, as soon as they left home would they not just revert to type… I suspect I am just realizing the age old nature versus nurture trade-off that all parents before me have had to face. Given that I do think that you should be able to take a child into a range of different environments I suspect that Maxime is destined for a few more religious outings and that the share price of United Biscuits (http://www.unitedbiscuits.com/brands-page.php) is not going to crash when the markets open tomorrow morning.

Our big Moyenne Section Winner

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to seriously think about the value or importance of being physically big (at work we’re always contemplating how we can become big in monetary terms). Maxime however seems to be somewhat preoccupied with it. He has just started his second year at school. After last year in “Petite Section”, he has now moved into the “Moyenne Section”. This change has not escaped him. In fact it has become a regular justification for a number of different, completely unrelated things e.g. I don’t have to hold your hand anymore because I’m in Moyenne Section, I can eat chocolate now because I’m in Moyenne Section, I can "--- insert phrase of your choosing ---" now because I’m in Moyenne Section. The other big change in Maxime’s development over the last couple of weeks is the fact that he has started to display one character trait that both of his parents possess; he’s becoming somewhat competitive… He happily beats his 2 year old brother and sister in the shortest of running races and he proudly exclaims that he is a “winner”. I’m already starting to see the advantages of this development; it’s never been so easy to get him to run up the stairs, brush his teeth and get his nappy on (yes he’s not that big yet) and into bed.

Two weeks in the life of

The focus of the week before last was five days of intensive Spanish lessons. I was in a mix of fun but grueling one on one grammar classes with one of four Spanish teachers, individual computer assisted hour long language labs, and evening group discussions. Each day lasted from 8.20AM until 9.15PM. The good news was that I managed to understand the structure of the language quite well (thanks in no small part my ability to speak French). The bad news was that after five days of talking Spanish my pronunciation was as good as, well someone who’d only been speaking Spanish for only five days i.e. not great (and with something of a French accent to boot). That said I left the language school in Den Bosch (yes I went to the Netherlands to learn Spanish) on Friday feeling happy confident and tired, armed with a little speech for my team in Madrid the following week.

Last week was my first week back at work after a month away. My first stop was Madrid in Tuesday. It was a super day with a lot of very productive and positive meetings. The team was also very complementary about my Spanish which was nice – I even managed to raise a (intended) laugh in Spanish. Wednesday was a day in Zurich with the Swiss team. One of the most important meetings there was a closing interview with a pre-sales guy. It was a very enjoyable conversation in which I discovered his passion in life was to build wooden boats by hand. I learned by the end of the week that we’d managed to complete the negotiations. It’s so much more enjoyable building teams rather than letting people go. However I firmly believe that the latter type of experience only helps you during the recruitment process – having to release people makes you so much more aware of what you’re doing when you bring new people onboard. Thursday was a day in Paris. We’re entering a period of not insignificant change in France, so I suspect I’ll be spending a serious amount of time there over the coming weeks. Friday was a day spent with my old friend Dell Latitude – i.e. a day of emails. By 1AM on Saturday morning I considered myself fully up to date after holidays…so now the real value add work can start…