Selling With Noble Purpose. Lisa Earle McLeod

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СКАЧАТЬ of what happens to your brain. The first time—when you describe your job—you're using your brain at a very basic level, almost on autopilot. The second time, when you describe making a difference, you ignite your frontal lobe. This is the part of the brain associated with reasoning, planning, problem‐solving, language, and higher‐level emotions such as empathy and altruism.

      Describing the meaningful impact you had on another person engages a higher‐level part of your brain than when you describe your job function. Here's what I observe when people do this exercise: When people talk about what their basic job function, they:

       Smile politely

       Use rote language, such as reseller, provider, end‐to‐end solutions, implement, and so on

       Sit relatively still

      And their listeners nod nicely.

      When people describe making a difference, they:

       Smile with their whole faces

       Use colorful details, such as describing the look on someone's face or the setting

       Become much more animated and describe the impact they had on someone

      And their listeners lean in and ask questions.

      People share the two experiences—what they do for a living versus making a difference—within five minutes of each other. When you stand on the stage, watching people respond, you'd think it was a completely different day. They look like an entirely different group of people.

      The first time, it's just a regular crowd of businesspeople politely speaking to one another in low voices. The second time, volume cranks up. The people get engaged. They start laughing. Some people even stand up when they tell the second story. They can't help themselves.

      There's more energy and enthusiasm in the air. When you watch them the second time, you'd think they'd just won the lottery or heard some great news. And in a way, they did. By describing how they made a difference to someone, they got the best payoff a human being can have: they were reminded of just how much their life matters.

      These are the kind of powerful emotions that selling with Noble Purpose can ignite.

Customer Centricity Is Not Enough

      A lot of organizations prioritize customer centricity. It sounds good in theory. Let's rally our organization around customer needs. Go team! But customer centricity as it's typically implemented is missing a crucial element: impact.

      Meeting the customer's needs is certainly better than ignoring your customer's needs. But it can put your team in a reactive position, one that is no different from any of your competitors. If customers are telling you their needs, they're also telling your competition. Most customer‐centric strategies as they're practiced today rely on the unspoken assumption that the customer has the best and most accurate understanding of their needs. In many cases, this isn't true. As Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

      It's not that sellers should be arrogant and ignore customers' needs. But they should have expertise that the customer does not. Exceptional sellers have insights into how customers can achieve their goals: insights customers may not have thought about.

Telling your team to simply focus on the customer could mean anything from helping the customer achieve their goals, to giving the customer a lower price. Without clarity about the impact the organization wants to have on customers, people can wind up feeling like indentured servants. Consider the difference between an organization that says, “Our goal is to meet our customer's every need,” versus an organization whose stated purpose is “We improve the way our customers do business.” Which organization feels more empowered? Trying to please the customer is nice, but it's hardly galvanizing, and it's rarely differentiated. When you have clarity about how you want to improve the customer, you create a more innovative organization.

       Selling with Noble Purpose goes beyond pleasing customers; it's about improving customers.

      When your people understand that we are here to improve our customer's lives and businesses in ways they may not have even known were possible, your team has a clear North Star. The customer is at the center of the business, but instead of merely reacting to customers, the team is proactive about helping customers get to an even better place.

      The stakes become higher, and the role of everyone on the team becomes more important.

The Two Big Human Needs: Belonging and Significance

      Once you get beyond basic needs like food and shelter, human beings have two core emotional needs: belonging and significance. We want to be connected to other people, and we want to know that what we're doing matters to someone. The need for belonging and significance transcends age, culture, sex, race, and socioeconomic status.

       Our deepest desire is to make a difference in the world, and our darkest fear is that we don't.

We don't just want to make a difference in our personal lives or through philanthropic activities. We want to make a difference at work. We spend the better part of our waking hours at work. Those hours ought to mean something. When you know that your job matters to people, you come alive. Your frontal lobes light up, and you have greater access to problem solving, language, and empathy.

      Yet for some reason, many teams seem to operate as though some bizarre memo went out years ago saying, “Please don't bring any emotions to work.” This mentality is entirely unhelpful. When was the last time you heard a CEO say, “I wish my people weren't so motivated and excited”? Any good leader knows, achieving peak performance requires emotional buy‐in. The reasons people resist addressing emotion at work is because:

       Emotions are messy and hard to understand. When you bring in the good emotions, you're also going to have to deal with negatives. This can feel like Pandora's box; people resist opening it.

       People aren't skilled at dealing with other people's emotions. Even the silent, stoic boss is generating an emotional response from his or her team. It may not be acknowledged, but it's there. It feels safer to back away from other people's emotions rather than owning the role you may play in creating them.

       We delude ourselves into believing our business decisions are logical. One look inside any merger or acquisition will tell you that emotion plays a role in every business decision. Logic makes you think; emotion makes you act.

      Ignoring the emotional element doesn't make it go away; it simply prevents you from leveraging it. When we acknowledge the role emotions play, we can learn to tap into them for good. If you want to create a highly engaged team, you can start by strengthening their emotional connection to their work.

You read in the introduction about a top‐performing biotech salesperson who outsold every other rep in the entire country three years running. She achieved this because every day when she went on calls, she remembered a grandmother she had helped. СКАЧАТЬ