hectorcadena.com Blog

Life is alot like golf in many ways.  First of all, the average golfer has a hard time making par.  That’s because we haven’t invested the time and the effort required in order to play the game at our highest level.  The typical golfer is a week-end hobbyist with very little professional training and a non-existent practice routine.  You can same the same about how most of us approach our careers.  We would much rather go home and watch television or surf the internet every day than invest any time in improving ourselves. 

Another observance that I have about golf is that in order to play well, you have to be loose, rather than tight.  By staying loose and not getting too tense, something happens during the swing that allows you to access some inner part of you that just “feels” right.  For one thing, a slower swing makes it easier to keep your eye on the ball as you strike it, a requisite for ensuring solid and accurate contact.  And for another thing, being loose while hitting the ball makes for a really nice feeling.  You golfers know what I’m talking about.  It’s when you’re the most loose that you hit those balls that keep you coming back.  That’s the way golf is supposed to be played and that’s also the way that life is supposed to be played.  Why would you want to go through life stressed out and tensed?  By staying loose and having fun, both life and golf are much more enjoyable. 

And another thing.  A round of golf takes a while to get through.  Eighteen holes takes approximately four hours, and then there’s the time spent eating and drinking after the game at the nineteenth hole.  I don’t know about you, but if I’m going to spend that much time with someone, then it better be people that I enjoy being around.  AFter all, at the end of the round, much like at the end of your life, what score your shot, or how much money you made isn’t really what it’s all about, is it?  It’s about trying your hardest to be your best, taking your time, enjoying your self and being surrounded by people that you love, enjoy and have fun being around.  
        

Good sales questions can help you better serve your prospects.  By understanding your prospects situation, you can better meet his needs, and the best way to understand his situation is by asking good, probing questions.  This is where a great salesperson separates himself from his competitors. 

If you just allow your prospects to control the selling process, and if they are talking to two or three of your competitors, the prospect is going to get the same information from everyone.   The only way that you can wrest control away from your prospect is by asking questions.  Whom ever is asking the questions is in control of the process. 

Plan your questions ahead of time.  Don’t wait til you are in front of the customer to come up with your questions.  With a little bit of pre-call research, you can anticipate your customers situation enough to have planned some good probing questions ahead of time. 

Your questions should be designed to get your customer to open up.  Most prospects won’t willing provide you with enough information to help you sell them.  That’s your job.  Most customers won’t come right out and tell you how good or how bad their company is doing.  How competitive they are in the market. Where their weak points are.  Some customers may not even know the answers to some of these questions and others won’t understand why the answers should have any affect on your services.  It is your job to make the customer understand and the most effective way to do that is by asking well thought-out, intelligent questions. 

 At the time of this writing, Tibet is under a great siege from the Chinese government.  Chinese military troops have been clashing with Lhasan protesters since March 10.  The clashes have turned deadly and the protests have spread to other provinces.  The Tibetan people are fighting to retain their culture.  Since the 1959 Chinese take over of Tibet, the Tibetan culture is disappearing.  It’s comparable to the way that the American Indians were conquered and subsequently vanquished to reservations in the late 19th century and the early 20th century.  Since then, of course the American Indian traditions and cultures have either changed dramatically or disappeared all together.  I hope we Americans can look back and see what a real tragedy that was for our entire country.  Once lost, like toothpaste in a tube, it can never be reclaimed. 

You may be wondering why I am even bothering writing about the Tibetan situation.  It’s on the other side of the world and it certainly doesn’t have anything to do with sales.  And on top of that, not only does it not concern you, but even if it did, you probably are thinking that there isn’t much that you can do.  Well, let me address all of these questions.

First of all, I am a passionate person.  Without passion, you cannot succeed at anything.  Whatever you decide to devote your time to, if you don’t do it with some passion, you will not be successful. One of my favorite sayings is “…if you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.”  

Second, you might not think that an event that is happening half-way around the world doesn’t impact you, but it does.  As John Doan put so beautifully:

…No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee…

And finally, what can you do about it?  All I ask if that you offer up a prayer to the Tibetan people.  A prayer of peace.  A prayer of hope and a prayer of charity.  Pray that the Chinese government find it in their hearts to prove their might to the world by their observance of love.  Pray that the world unites in their intention to create love and peace for the Tibetan people, the Chinese people and the world at large.

God Bless you all this Easter week-end. 

Nobody succeeds at anything their first attempt.  Or at least nothing significant and worthwhile, anyway.  Everybody fails at something, sometime.  And typically, many failures come at the beginning of a new venture.  But the biggest difference between success and failure is persistence and tenacity.  Just don’t give up!  There’s a old saying that goes something like this: “Defeat is only temporary.  It only become failure if you quit.” 

Sales is one of the hardest careers that you can have.  Especially when you first get started.  It’s so easy to think that you know everything and that everyone likes you.  There are also many misconceptions about sales, like salesman are born and not made or that you need to have a natural gift of gab in order to succeed in sales.  Neither of these two statements are even close to the truth.  Yes, some people do seem to be born with more likeability than others, but being liked can be learned.  And talking isn’t necessarily the best trait to have for a successful sales career.  In fact, sometimes it can work against you.  Listening is the greatest attribute that a master salesperson can possess and anyone can learn to listen.

My point is that before you will ever be successful in sales, you will more than likely be a failure first.  Early on in your new sales career, you will encounter many temporary defeats.  Nobody likes to lose.  What you do after you lose a few times is what determines your character and your character is what determines who you are.  If you fold up your tent and give up at the first sign of defeat, you will never learn from your mistakes. 

Fear is our greatest enemy regardless of the situation.  Fear is the invisible voice inside your head that wants to save you from future pain.  The problem is that in life, some pain is inevitable.  No one gets through life unscathed.  But if you listen to that voice in your head, it always blows the future pain our of proportion, because the pain is never as bad as your fears anticipate it will be.  But the thing to keep in mind about fear and pain is that the best lessons in our lives always come from our fiercest battles.  Remember, anything that doesn’t kill you only make you stronger.  So go ahead and make that sales call that you’ve been putting off and fearing.  After all, it’s not going to kill you.     

Written any cards or letters lately?  If you’re like most people, then probably not.  I mean, what’s the point you ask?  E-mails and faxes and telephone calls are much faster and much easier, right?  Well, that is precisely the point.  The fact that sitting down and actually taking the time to write a letter to your customer or to a prospect or just to a friend for that matter is sort of a hassle makes it have the impact that it has. 

I mean, think about it.  When was the last time you received a hand written letter from someone?  How did it make you feel?  The thought process when you get a letter from someone forces you to think about the person that sent it and that fact, in and of itself makes it worth the effort of the sender.

The art of letter writing is a lost art.  It’s an art worth reviving.  Try it.  It only takes a few minutes.  Pick someone special that you like and send them a hand written letter.  Share your thoughts with them.  It’s an intimate way of connecting with some one in a way that they will find pleasantly surprising.  Once you get into the habit, it could become addictive.  If you’re lucky, you might even get a letter back.  But don’t count on it.

Not all customers are created equal.  When it comes to profits and customers relationships, some customers are much more valuable to you than others are and vice versa, you are more valuable to some customers that you are to others.  In order to break out of the commodity price trap, you have to be able to create more value for your customer.  But you cannot create value unless you have access to your customer and you won’t get access to your customer unless you have a strong relationship. 

The more access you have to your customer, the more information about your customer that you have access to.  The more information that you have access to, the better able you will be at crafting a value creating proposal.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that some customers are easier to bond with than others.  Your ability to pinpoint which customers are willing to develop a relationship with you and which ones are not is your key to higher profitability.

You’ve heard of the 80/20 rule before.  The 80/20 rule applies to many situations.  For instance, on average, the top twenty percent of the salespeople in this country make about eighty percent of the sales.  Another example is that twenty percent of your customers account for eighty percent of your profits.  Using the 80/20 rule as a guide can help you decide which accounts to focus your resources of time, energy and effort.

Company culture is your window into your customers thought processes, their purchasing processes and also their relationship processes.  Company culture, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the overall psychological profile that a company has manifested through its employees by virtue of the management profile of the company leadership.  In other words, whatever characteristics the leadership of the company emphasizes to its employees will be the same profile exhibited by those employees to its vendors.  If top leadership emphasizes and rewards an open and accessible leadership style, then those traits tend to be inherited by the employees that work under them.  If the top leadership emphasizes closed thinking and protective politics, then the company culture will generally follow suit.  Sometimes by design, but mostly by accident, a company passes down their culture to their employees, simply by rewarding specific behaviors or sometimes by failure to reward other behaviors.

It can sometimes be easy to spot a company culture that isn’t very open to forging relationships.  The typical signs are low employee morale, lots of office politics and a self-centered psychology focused on individual goals rather than on corporate goals.  This type of company culture results into low profitability, low quality output and a commodity pricing mentality for their product offerings.  It should go without saying that if a company has a commodity pricing mentality for their own products and services, then their purchasing processes will also focus on commodity pricing mentality as well.  By recognizing your customers company culture, you can make better decisions on how much you want to allocate your time, energy and efforts.  The quicker you learn to recognize the culture of a commodity pricing mentality, the quicker you can decide to get out of the selling process before you’ve invested too many resources on a little or no profit account.  This frees you up to better focus your resources on the twenty percent of clients that understand that you have more value to offer them other than just the lowest price.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t ever go after any business with companies that are focused on commodity pricing.  This is just a way of helping you identify what type of purchasing thought processes that you are dealing with so that you can make the appropriate selling strategy.  Remember, according to the 20/80 rule, you will always have some portion of your clients that are transactional focused, meaning that they are only interested in price.  But by thinking about company cultures and how they affect your access into their business, you begin to recognize your ability to provide value creation solutions and you can re-allocate your time appropriately.  Ideally, you will probably want to spend eighty percent of your time with twenty percent of your customers.   

Across the entire country, the rising price of gas and the record setting price of a barrel of oil has been front page news for the past few weeks, if not months.   

This Tuesday morning, when I first arrived at work, I was greeted with the news about a price increase in a different commodity, copper.  If you haven’t been paying attention, the price of all precious metals has under gone drastic increases just in the last few weeks.  Copper in and of itself is up more than 25% year to date, with the lion’s share of that increase coming within the last few weeks.  Gold, silver, platinum and aluminum have all followed similar patterns. 

Wednesday morning, I turned on my television just in time to hear the news that grocery prices were rising.  A gallon of milk is now more expensive than a gallon of gas, and I don’t have to tell you how expensive that is. 

Thursday morning there was even more bad news.  The stock market had taken a severe tumble the day before.  And to top it all off, there was an article in the Austin American’s Stateman today detailing the woes of the American dollar.  It seems that no one wants our dollar anymore. 

Where am I going with this?  Well, the reason that I’m telling you all of this is because it’s an election year and I want to make something perfectly clear.  “It’s the economy, stupid.” 

Don’t let yourself be swayed at the voting booth by political rhetoric about abortion or race or religion or gun control or any other sleight-of-hand issues.  Owing a gun won’t protect you from political tyrants.  There are so many guns and gun owners in the United States and little by little we’re still losing our country and our right to self-determination, not to a military coup, but to shysters and swindlers with a pen and a suit. 

So I want to urge you to vote with your pocket book.  The middle class in this country is shrinking and the amount of people living paycheck to paycheck keeps on growing, and yet, election after election we let ourselves be side-tracked by political issues that have very little impact on our daily lives and our quality of life.

It’s been a while since I’ve touted a new book in my blog, but I’m in the middle of reading a great sales book and I just couldn’t wait to get to the end before I told you about it.  It’s called What The Customer Wants You to Know by Ram Charan.  If you’ve never heard of Ram, he is a former CEO of Honeywell and has co-authored two great books with Larry Bossidy, former CEO of Allied Signal and C-executive of GE.  Larry and Ram’s books are Execution and Confronting Reality, both excellent books and must reads for business managers.  Execution was written first and is about operations and Confronting Reality is about Business Models and and plotting business strategies.  Being a big fan, I was suprized to find Ram had written a book about sales.  Nothing that I have ever read by him indicated a background in sales, but since his other books were so inciteful, I decided to puruse it and I liked what I read. 

It’s a very short book, less than 200 hundred pages, and the book itself is very small.  But I am only up to Chapter 4 and it’s very informative.  One of the main reasons that I decided to invest in the book was because I thought it might give me a bird’s eye view into the world of selling into the C-Level of companies, since Ram is a former CEO.  I hit the bulls-eye.  It builds on what I have always preached and practice, relationship selling and goes even further.  The book articulates much of what I have already been practicing in my sales career, but it crystalizes the process by focusing on Value Creation.  Focusing on your customer’s customer is one example of how you would create value for your product or service offering. 

As a student of sales, I’m always looking for ways to enhance my value to my customers.  If you want to move away from selling commodities and chasing RFP’s, What The Customer Wants You To Know is a must read. 

It’s 7:45 in the morning, and it’s a new day.  Today is Sunday, the first day of daylights savings time.  The clocks have been set forward an hour and Spring is just around the corner.  Not only is it a new day, but it’s a New Earth, according to Eckhart Tolle.  If you haven’t heard of Eckhart Tolle yet, you will soon, because Oprah Winfrey is his new best friend and sponsor.  Tolle is best known for his New York Times Best-seller ”The Power of Now”.  But his newest book, entitled “A New Earth-Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose” is being strongly supported by Oprha.  And of course, I think everyone knows that when Oprha get’s behind you, the world get’s behind you.  Just ask Barack Obama. 

Oprah, the richest women in the United States and the well known television talk show host has been long known for pushing her favorite books through her broadcasts.  But this time, Oprah is going all out.  Not only is she putting the full weight of her world-wide populatiry behind “A New Earth”, but she putting her money where her mouth is.  For the next ten weeks, (nine now, last Monday was the first lesson) Oprah is sponoring an online “class” with Tolle as the teacher and Oprah as the moderator.  These are ninety minutes sessions at no cost to the public.  It’s cutting edge technology like we’ve never seen before.  Skype, an obscure, internet based telephony technology company, up to now only known to computer nerds and other technologist, is one of the main sponsors and has set up as part of the online experience an internet conection that allows you to call the show live in real time to ask questions of the host and guest.  There’s also an online ”journal” that you can keep to record your personal thoughts and also you can answer questions that have been pre-formulated by the web sites’ producers.

I’ve never been a big Oprha fan in the past, but this time I have to give Oprah her due.  Although Tolle’s books reference Jesus and the bible from time to time, his overall message is more new age and incorporates parts of Buddism, Hinduism and other spriitual teachings.  So not only is Oprah putting her money and time and energy on the line, but she is gambling with her main stream popularity as well.  By alighning herself with a new age spirituality teacher in this fundementally religious country of ours, Oprah is putting herself directly in the firing line for every right-wing group in America.  So God bless her. 

It’s time for a change.  It’s time for a shift.  As this world becomes more populated and people live in tighter and closer quarters than ever before, as the internet and television and cell phones and instant communication become more and more ubiquitous, our borders and our cultures are beginning to become less defined and more blurry.  I believe that we stand on the precipice of a world changing time.  We can either come together as a world community or we can come apart.  As we stand now, religion and religious zealots have done very little to bring our globe together.  On the contrary, more wars have been started and more people have been murdered in the name of religion than any other cause.  As far as I am concerned, God is love and love is God.  No amount of ideology can change that fact. 

It’s a new day and it’s a New Earth.  God Bless you all. 

Not that Oprah needs my help, but here is her web site link: http://www.oprah.com/index.jhtml

There is absolutely no way to be great at what you do if you don’t enjoy it.  Not a week goes by that I don’t thank God that I stumbled into a career in Sales.  I honestly don’t know what I could be doing that I would enjoy as much as my sales career.  And to think that I got into sales entirely by accident. 

I remember when I graduated from High School, way back in the 70’s, I knew that I wanted to go to college, but I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what it was that I wanted to study.  I was so naive.  I had no idea how the business world operated, and the only thing I knew about salesmen was the stereotypical bad reputation of high pressure car salesman.  Ironically, I actually ended up selling cars as one of my first sales jobs.  I could never have imagined myself as a salesman, but after flunking out of college and quickly getting married and having a baby, I needed a job in a bad way.  My first job out of college was ironworking, and I knew pretty quickly that I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life.  Luckily I was young and fit and was able to take the physical labor and punishment that ironworking entailed. 

It was during an economic downturn when I was between construction jobs that someone brought up sales as a career.  It was something I had never really considered before, but when they offered me a job, I jumped at the chance and have been in sales ever since.  That was almost 25 years ago. 

I wish I could say that it was a smooth road after that, but honestly, it was slow going at first.  I showed some signs of brilliance and I took to the job like a fish to water.  I was born to talk and had good interpersonal skills.  But even though most people outside of sales assume that those two skills are all that you need to success in sales, there was so much more to learn.  Over the next 25 years, I learned mostly by trial and error, on the job straining, and the school of hard knocks.  I was fortunate enough to encounter great salespeople along the way that helped and mentored me.  The best sales advice I ever got was early on in my career.  “Find the best salesperson in your organization and watch what ever they do and say and do the same things that they do and say the same things that they say.”  Great advice.  But my most enduring attribute was that I always loved selling.  Some jobs were better than others and some products that I sold were worse than others, but overall, I loved getting “belly to belly” with prospects and trying to help them with their needs.  When your desire to help people is genuine, your passion will show and your sales will bloom as a result.  There will be good times and lean times and in-between times.  But if you love what you are doing, the good times will always out-weight the lean times and during the lean times, your love for your job will carry you through.  So find a job that you love.  Don’t get into a career in sales simply because you’ve heard that you can make a lot of money.  Do it because you like people and you want to help them.  If you do that, you’ll end up loving your job.  And if you love what you do for a living, you’ll be great at it.