President of Urgency Based Selling. Look for Andy's book, Innovate Now - Scale Up With 16 Sales Breakthrough Techniques.
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For your business’s long-term survival and flourishing, you develop a scalable model. You typically focus on scaling sales, operations and finance. What about your entrepreneurial core — is this scalable?
Your entrepreneurial core is your creative fount, your ability to manage uncertainty, to deal with black swan events.
Could there be a single decisive activity that positively shifts your entrepreneurial core?
The core includes:
• The “do or die” ethos.
• Transcending social mores — elevating business over social.
• Embracing the scientist’s mindset.
And perhaps most important of all,
• Identifying, challenging and overcoming self-limiting assumptions.
Components Of Your Entrepreneurial Core
1. The “do or die” ethos. When dealing with sufficient uncertainty — for example, in business or product development — best efforts won’t suffice. In fact, best efforts often necessitate failure. We need “do or die” commitment — total ownership.
2. Transcending social mores. All too often in business interactions, we prioritize social relationships over business relationships and results. This is particularly true in selling, where salespeople frequently form social relationships that aren’t productive; we need business relationships. A major stumbling block to forming business relationships is social mores. We avoid conflict; we avoid challenging the prospect’s thinking. And we fail.
3. Embracing the scientist’s mindset. If it doesn’t work, we need to try another approach. Attachment to failing methods predictably leads to failure. We require an open-minded team with a learning mindset.
4. Self-limiting assumptions. We often fail because we assume we can’t do something, that it's impossible. A classic illustration was running the four-minute mile. It was assumed no one could run a four-minute mile, so it didn’t happen. Until Roger Bannister believed it was possible, trained for and broke the four-minute mile.
The Paradigm-Shifting Activity
To activate or jump-start our entrepreneurial core, we seek a paradigm-shifting activity — one that overcomes a self-limiting assumption and shows the team how a positive attitude and a little bit of effort can be a game-changer.
Securing testimonials will frequently shift the entrepreneurial core for the sales team. This is generally easy to do, and very impactful to mindset in a sales team with few or no testimonials.
Why don’t these teams have testimonials? Social mores probably explain most of the deficiency. Salespeople typically want to treat customers and be treated by them as friends or family. We don’t ask friends for testimonials. We don’t brag in polite society.
In selling, we need to prove our case to a skeptical audience. Securing the right kind of testimonials — which address objections — can help our proving. More importantly, they show the sales team they were probably hostage to a self-limiting assumption: You can’t get testimonials. Overcoming this assumption opens the mind to this self-assessment: “What other self-limiting assumptions are holding us back?”
Almost 30 years of practice suggests you will get 80% of the testimonials requested of big fans.
Overcoming a self-limiting assumption activates these elements of the entrepreneurial core:
• The “do or die” ethos.
• Transcending social mores — elevating business over social.
• Embracing the scientist’s mindset.
A paradigm-shifting activity is not limited to the sales department. In a recent sales training assignment, we also enrolled these functions in a paradigm-shifting activity.
1. HR. Secured testimonials from employees to help recruit a new candidate.
2. Marketing. Embraced a shift from branding to developing selling tools for guerilla marketing.
3. IT. Researched, discovered and dramatized ways the function gives the company a strategic advantage.
The sooner we embrace a paradigm-shifting activity — for example, securing testimonials — the more prepared we are to implement necessary change, to take advantage of opportunity and to weather the challenges of black swan events.
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