Lighten Up! From my great friend Kathleen Peterson

Lighten Up ... The Magic of Leadership Levity

This is my brief end of year message to all of us in the Customer Care/Experience/Service business ... Lighten up! I am strongly recommending taking a good, long, hard look in the mirror and asking yourself, "Do I need to lighten up? Does my organization need to lighten up? Have levity and wit taken their leave?"

My guess is that most of us could use a little levity. The levity I long most to see in this industry is "leadership levity." The word levity is defined as "an inappropriate lack of seriousness," and yes, this is what I am advocating. Leaders in our business seem to have adopted an "inappropriate level of seriousness" and I see leadership levity as the only way to counter this condition.

Just to be clear ... I am NOT advocating being stupid, inappropriate, or irresponsible. But for goodness sake, many leaders I talk with today are so attached to the "dour" side that it is scary. Why is this? Is it too many hours staring at Excel spreadsheets looking for the right question to put with the "answers" found buried in the data? Is it too many hours wringing hands over budgets or too many hours looking at what is wrong with people and things in your Contact Center? Is it too many hours with nothing "funny" happening ... too many hours without smiles? Dourness is a toxic habit, very much supported and even encouraged by today's socialization of fear; fear keeps folks focused on the dark side. Levity requires light!

Leadership levity must be carefully crafted. You don't want to get too happy too quickly; people will talk! Caution must be a partner in lightening up your space, your corner of the corporate world. I'd like to offer some suggestions. First, conduct a visual check of your environment. Does it look nice? Inviting? Warm? Light Spirited? When you look out over those folks engaging customers ... do they seem "engaged?" Are you proud? I hope so. If not, it may be time to "lighten up."

How exactly does one "lighten up?" How do we adopt leadership levity? Begin by monitoring your inner chatter. If you look out across the sea of caregivers and all of your internal chatter is negative or full of obstacles ... this is your starting point. Our minds must be a partner in our efforts to "lighten up."

Explore your leadership approach. Is it focused on what is wrong and needs to be corrected? Is it focused on your team's weaknesses rather than their strengths? When we hire, we are accepting candidates as much for their potential as for their existing skills. Are the leaders in your camp focused on what is missing, or what is as yet undiscovered?

Ask your team to describe the learning plan for the upcoming year. Is it based on "potential" or simply on corrective action pointed out by metric analysis? We must acknowledge in this industry that potential is often the "unchartered" territory. Many of the folks that "wind up" in Customer Care come from places that may have "locked up" their potential for years. We may want to believe that we are recruiting the best of the best, but the reality is that we are often faced with educating on any number of academic, emotional, and social skills. Skills development will only occur in a nurturing environment. Many have never enjoyed the benefit of positive reinforcement in their professional or even their personal lives.

Leadership levity assists in opening minds and hearts to a new level of care and attention. When leadership is approached with a bit of levity, it is likely that the view will change considerably. The view will morph from one of weariness to one of excitement and engagement. Sadly, many in leadership roles focus on disappointment or disdain with regard to those they manage. This is evident to me when the front line embraces disdain for the customers. It is the pecking order ... behavior at the front line is a mirror of leadership.

If you don't like what you see when you look out upon your front line, get that mirror and ask "What have I done to contribute to this malaise?" If your response is "nothing," keep asking until an answer comes to you. When leaders are uptight, when there is a tendency to train by corrective action rather than by pro-action, when all discussions center around what is NOT possible, then it is time to lighten up. Negative thinking only yields negative outcomes. Possibility thinking yields possibility.

If your environment has been damaged by a lack of levity, it is going to be a challenge to introduce a "lighten up" strategy. My recommendation is to start with the front line; begin by asking questions. My personal favorite ... "What are the dumbest things we do here?" I have never seen this question asked without an enthusiastic response from the front line. Make it a contest - anonymous and funny - in its construct and output. What earned the most frequent mentions? Post it, study it. Perhaps there is a process improvement opportunity. This exercise puts the front line in a "thinking" mode combined with a bit of levity. It demonstrates a willingness at the leadership level to "hear" that perhaps not everything leaders do is so brilliant after all.

The next event in this exercise is to ask, "What are the smartest things we do around here?" Again, this is a thinking exercise. It provides an opportunity for leaders to learn about how the front line sees the operational and experiential world in which they reside for a significant number of their waking hours.

Another front line exercise is to routinely ask each team every week for a year, "What did you learn about our customers this week?" Imagine the book you would have after a year ... something magnificent to share with the rest of the company! This story will gain visibility for Customer Care as a value added resource and a strategic asset to the enterprise overall.

Push the knowledge of the brand, the plans for the business, the goals, the vision, etc. These are grand markers for performance. Many uptight environments coach only to the incidental metric markers so popular and common in the Customer Care business. They neglect to coach to the experience, based on brand, vision, and business objectives.

Contextualize performance within a grander view; use a more holistic and professional approach than simply a metric driven scorecard or quality form. Metrics certainly play an important role in evaluating performance and coaching plays the most important role in changing behaviors. But coaching to isolated data points creates weary students. Lighten up your coaching within a context shared by all. Of course, this assumes that a strong and branded experience has been defined and reinforced with something greater than "you were late three times." The better reinforcement is that there are "three vision violations due to tardiness." The Customer Experience, brand, and vision are at risk each time someone is unwilling or unable to meet their "contribution" to the Contact Center's capacity model (Contribution to Capacity Rant, October 2009). Be true to what you are trying to accomplish. It is not simply to beat the front line into submission; their role is to facilitate an experience. Absences and tardiness put that objective at risk.

An environment where we "lighten up" will allow more growth. Be cautious however. If your reflection on your environment has yielded concern, don't try to introduce "light" by a pizza party or free lunch. That may be more like feeding ice cream to combat troops. Change in the environment must emerge from the largest force and that is generally the front line. Engaging those closest to the action will generate a sense of involvement and begin the journey to an environment that enjoys the benefit of "lighten up." Doing something fun with the yields from the initial discovery exercises will allow the tide to be turned towards a more inviting environment. I reiterate my belief that it is leadership's role to create an environment in which people can be motivated rather than attempting the tireless and impossible task of actually trying to motivate people. Intrinsic motivation is the key to long term enthusiasm. Growing your people requires building the environment first and foremost.

Here are a few other questions that may be worth considering: Training - What would you most like to learn? Quality - How can we improve our Quality program? Scorecards - Does the current scorecard accurately represent your contribution? The Customer Experience - Write the top 3 to 5 most important components of the Customer Experience. Study, evaluate, and publish your answers!

As time goes on, a front line "spirit committee" could emerge to work with leadership and continue to ask questions, plan celebrations, create contests, etc. But remember that committees of this sort are NOT the starting point. If the environment is damaged, it first must be carefully detangled, and what better time than year's end to begin!!

Once leaders adopt a bit of levity - that is the ability to hold that mirror up to ourselves - communication barriers begin to break down and we can enjoy the full contribution of ALL the brains in the operation. Goodness knows, in this day and age of doing more with less, we need all the help we can get!

Lighten up your leadership and perhaps the yield will be the momentum that propels you toward the next great thing. Wishing you a very Happy New Year!

"There is always some levity even in excellent minds; they have wings to rise, and also to stay." Joseph Joubert, French Moralist

My Best,

Kathleen

PowerHouse Consulting, Inc.

We simplify complex business processes.

www.powerhouse1.com

Inside Professional Selling . . .

“ . . . the only difference between our inside and outside sales reps are that one uses a car, the other uses a phone . . . “

Aside from the relatively obvious observation within this mildly compelling, moderately hip statement, the list of similarities between these two types of sales professionals is fairly short. The longer list of differences includes performance competencies, incentive compensation, recruiting and training strategies, process design, technology utilization, selling solutions as opposed to products, segmentation (especially where an outside sales force exists in parallel), functional collaboration, sales operations -- the list goes on and on. The goal to simply apply the same attributes of a field sales organization to a team that doesn’t leave the office is a cool aspiration but not really much of a strategy.

A study by Dr. James Oldroyd at SKK University found that over the next three years, inside sales jobs will grow at a rate that is 15 times higher than traditional outside sales (7.5% versus 0.5% per year). That equates to roughly 800,000 new sales jobs - all inside. Underscoring this trend, we’re seeing professional associations emerge in this space (such as the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals), along with credentialed training and accreditation. Growth in this industry has also translated into a very busy practice area for ESG, which blends the experience of our team members who have achieved extensive transformation results in customer service, sales force and support optimization, and CRM.

The success profile for an inside selling professional is different from their field sales counterpart – it’s a combination of solution selling, customer service, and mastery of technology across myriad social contact channels. As Generation Y & Z move into the workforce as buyers and sellers, the reality is that they have grown up in large part with all of these rapidly changing social channels and mobile computing technology. In the future, it’s going to be less about process and more about discretion and decision making when advocating on behalf of a customer. This emerging workforce won’t have it any other way, on either the buy or the sell side.

Inside sales frequently gets confused with telemarketing (don’t we all have a telemarketer story we like to tell?). Traditional telemarketing is a scripted, single call that is typically about pitching a small-ticket item to a consumer (B2C). Professional inside sales is much more involved, and requires multiple contacts through a variety of channels to both develop new clients and penetrate existing ones – and the trend is exploding in the small and medium business (SMB) space, particularly in business-to-business selling environments.

Companies pursue an inside sales strategy for different reasons - cost reduction, channel and segment differentiation, deepening customer relationships, account penetration, control, creating a unique customer experience, and so on. But it’s dramatically more complicated than one sales professional showing up for an appointment and the other placing a phone call.

Executed well, the cost for a professional inside selling organization can be as much as four to five times less than its counterpart field sales organization. Costs aside, the improved effectiveness is the holy grail for the macro selling organization. A well-designed touchpoint and contact strategy that can be executed and measured across large numbers of prospects and customers can far outweigh anything a field sales organization can do - especially within the SMB portion of the spectrum.

As rich data builds up about individual customer needs (not those of a company) through a well-organized command of channels (direct mail, email, customer service, transaction systems, telephone, chat, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, text messaging, and video), the ability to leverage that data over time can be huge. The well-trained inside sales professional is at the center of the loyalty proposition based on their specific knowledge of the customer contact as an individual, and is deeply equipped to understand their needs, their history, and opportunities to provide solutions – and ultimately, more sales.

We’re certainly not advocating nor predicting the end of field selling organizations - in fact, they are more valuable than ever. But as a company’s costliest selling and service resource, deploying them properly in a ‘hunting’ capacity and in concert with a highly-effective inside team becomes an exciting recipe for improved competitiveness and market dominance.

Our practitioners at ESG have designed, developed, and implemented some of the largest and most effective B2B inside selling and support operations in the world. Our expertise in design and planning, process engineering, technology configuration and deployment, competency and curriculum development, labor and market analytics, site selection, center design, recruiting, and program management dramatically differentiate us from the theorists and the big consulting firms. Our clients retain us because, as they say, we’ve “been there and done that”, over and over again.

Contact us today to schedule a strategic briefing on this rapidly developing space and new practice at ESG, and let our proven, real-world experience get to work on making your selling strategy as powerful and effective as it can be.

Transforming the OP Industry

To followers of the Office Products industry, this is an interesting webcast replay to listen to as to where Office Depot is focusing. ESG proud to be a part of the Inside Sales initiative referenced in Austin TX. Possibilities are exciting . . .

http://investor.officedepot.com/phoenix.zhtml?p=irol-eventDetails&c=94746&eventID=4188701

"Making Strategy Happen" Newsletter Published

We just published our first newsletter to over 2,000 in our network; initial response has been tremendously positive, supportive and exciting; thanks to everyone!!

http://conta.cc/nzXTef

"We don't give these guys the easy things to do . . ."

A number of years ago, my CEO used the above phrase to introduce our team to the Chairman of his Board. While not scripted, his comment gave me valuable insight regarding the value we brought to his business. He went on to say that "when it comes to the most complicated of our strategic initiatives, especially those that are hugely transformational, this team allows the business to keep moving by tackling the big one-time changes that we're just not good at, driving collaboration across the company, and providing me with the visibility we need to assure success."

Today at ESG, that CEO's description describes our value proposition. Our clients know their business, they've got great people and understand their strategy, but if extensive transformation needs to happen, they tell us they "just don't know where to start and for that matter, who can do the work?" Making strategy happen has been especially challenging over these last few years of economic turmoil, when many large projects and associated initiative resources have been jettisoned, and leadership is already stretched to the limit with its focus on operational execution. Couple those factors with a relative level of inexperience in strategy execution and the disruptive effect of change on a company can be huge or alternatively the strategy remains unexecuted.

At ESG, we view ourselves as experienced practitioners --"specialists"-- when it comes to executing complex business transformation initiatives (or strategy). Our people have owned these transformational initiatives from the inside of large companies. They've owned the P&L's impacted by them. And they know their way around the boardroom and have managed the expectations of senior executives.

We're proud to have worked with more than a dozen firms over these last three years at ESG, and are excited to continually broaden our scope of experience. If your firm is focused on complex integration, consolidation, sales force effectiveness and improving your overall customer experience (and we're willing to bet that none of those are "easy things"), we'd love to explore ways we can help make your strategy happen.

Inside Sales . . . A Great Path to Improved Sales Effectiveness

Congrats to Office Depot! ESG has been a proud partner on this exciting project in Austin TX. Check out the announcement from Gov. Perry's office a few weeks back . . .

http://governor.state.tx.us/news/press-release/16437

Gov. Perry Announces TEF Investment in Office Depot to Create More Than 200 Jobs in Central Texas

Friday, July 29, 2011 • Austin, Texas • Press Release

Gov. Rick Perry has announced the state is investing $300,000 through the Texas Enterprise Fund (TEF) in Office Depot Inc. for the creation of the company's new Inside Sales organization in Austin. Contingent upon the completion of a local incentive agreement, this investment will create 203 new jobs and a multi-million dollar capital investment.

"Texas' job creation climate continues to receive national and international attention thanks to our low taxes, reasonable and predictable regulatory climate, fair legal system and skilled workforce," Gov. Perry said. "This TEF investment in Office Depot will create more than 200 jobs and millions in capital investment in Central Texas, and will further strengthen our state's diverse economy."

"Office Depot, the State of Texas and the Austin region have a partnership that goes back nearly two decades. We opened our first store in Austin in 1995 and are proud to call Texas the home for 156 of our retail stores," Office Depot Chairman and CEO Neil Austrian said. "The Austin region is a thriving business community with a talented workforce and we are looking forward to a successful new venture with our inside sales organization, which will be dedicated to serving many of our small business customers."

Office Depot is investing in building its Inside Sales organization into a well-defined, well-trained, well-equipped extension of the company's field sales organization. The newly-created inside sales organization will be dedicated to managing the accounts of small and medium-sized business customers, providing a best-in-class, high-quality customer experience.

"This is an excellent example of regional cooperation between multiple entities working together for the economic growth and health of the overall region," Opportunity Austin Chair Tim Crowley said. "The economic prosperity of the region is predicated on quality employers bringing a diversity of good jobs to Central Texas."

"This decision by Office Depot is another example of the strong business climate that has been created here in the Austin region and in Texas as a whole," State Representative Larry Gonzales said. "Businesses will always migrate to areas that foster success, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, Williamson County, and the Governor's office have all helped create what will be another success story."

The Legislature created the TEF in 2003 and re-appropriated funding in 2005, 2007 and 2009 to help ensure the growth of Texas businesses and create more jobs throughout the state. TEF projects must be approved by the governor, lieutenant governor and speaker of the House. The fund has since become one of the state's most competitive tools to recruit and bolster business. To date, the TEF has invested more than $435.6 million and closed the deal on projects generating 58,382 new jobs and more than $14.6 billion in capital investment in the state.

For more information about the TEF, please visit http://www.texaswideopenforbusiness.com/financial-resources/texas-enterprise-fund.html or http://www.governor.state.tx.us.