A leaders address

Recently our firm had a change in the leadership. The new CEO was in the sales office in New York for a Town Hall this week. Understandably, there was a fair mix of curiosity, skepticism, indifference and of course excitement. There were of course drinks to follow up the Town hall to mull over the messages in the evening.

The presentation which was more of an informal discussion lasted about an hour. It had all the elements of a good message. Right focus on priorities, values, direction with some good humor to fill in the gaps and break the ice with the crowd. I wanted to share some points that I found to be interesting. Also I think in any address that a leader makes to his team, this could be a good checklist to balance your message.

• Passion in an organization comes into play when intellect and emotion work in the right balance to produce results for customers.
  
• Any organization's cultures stems from their vision and values. Vision shows where we want to go and values show how we will get there.
  
• People are not in the middle of problems. Its always the process.
  
• Whenever clients buy products from you, the key question you need to ask yourself is "Why are they buying from us?" Answer to this question will help you make the corrections when they stop buying from you.
  
• Successful products are designed for the heart. You think of a product with the mind but you design for the heart!
  
• The secret to building great teams is "Hiring people who are better than yourself" and "People whom you want to work for"
  
• "Everyone in the company sells". If you have treated your janitor in a bad way, and he bounces into your client sometime in the corridor, imagine what he will have to say about your company. Always treat people with respect.
  

I personally found these messages quite thought provoking. One key action item that I have for myself is to come up with a list of things which have made me successful. This checklist will always be in my hip pocket to check when things are not all that rosy....

cheers !

Delivering a super presentation!!!

It has been quite some time that i have visited my blog. There has been a lot happening in the last few months. A couple of overseas trips for pleasure and business, a lot of travel in the US (braving all the weather in the US), a sales conference, a few home projects and in the middle of all this, trying to keep my sanity in place.
In these few weeks, on key aspect that I have been involved in is delivering client facing senior management presentations. Typically these sessions have been at the C-level, and they have involved globally distributed teams with different cultures, environments and of course needs.

In a way all of us are involved in presentations Its either as a contributor, presenter or as a SME..I wanted to share with you some good practices that have made my presentations really successful. Some of these might sound a little quirky, odd, but they are definitely worth a try! Here goes the list:

Logistics:

• "Have a bright room": Presenting to a dark room will avoid eye contact and not chemistry will develop in the room. Have a room that is well lit on the audience where you can have eye contact.
  
• "Try out the color schemes": Recently I was in a session where we were using a color scheme that was not tested before. We were using a really nice shade of Olive green. When this was projected in front of the client,it was really irritating fluorescent green! Beware of using unconventional colors. Usability plays a key role.
  
• "Good food and tea": In a presentation have some sweets and cookies. Sugar and chocolate are good mood lifters and its always a good idea to have some goodies!

Slide Decks:

• "Size does matter": No deck should be more than 15 slides for a 2 hour presentation. You can have slide separators etc. but the heart of the presentation should be 15 slides at most....
• "Dont be a victim of chair paralysis": Keep the dynamism alive in the room. Have a white board, let the client speak to a diagram, throw open ideas and challenge the discussion. Always remember, Intellectual thought leadership with humilty in the room is always respected by the client.
  
• "Adapt to change":There have been multiple instances when I showed up to a meeting and the client just wanted to have a chat across the table. Be well prepared mentally on the pitch. The environment should not be a hindrance in delivering a great story!
  

Tell a story:
All the great wisdom in the world has been transferred in mankind through stories and fables. There are Aesops fables, Tales of Narnia, Panchatantra etc. All of these stories carry in them a very profound message conveyed through a simple story. The bottom line is that all of us like to relate to a story and it creates for us a visual interpretation of the topic discussed.
When to present your idea to the audience, use some of these techniques:

• "Have a story analogy": Always have a story that the audience can relate to. For eg: if you are presenting on Web based applications, have a story about how you helped "Mike a really nice client and Director in IT in Minneapolis develop a solution that helped his global team collaborate and have more efficiency and fun at work". If you noticed, you would have already pictured Mike and his team. This is what I mean by Visual Interpretation....
• "Listen, hear and if needed speak": The key to a successful presentation is to have your client speak and share. The slides you present must have the right slide in's for the client to chime in a contribute. Remember, every one like to contribute to a winning solution! Let the client contribute and collaborate!
  

I have tried these techniques in various scenarios. Let me know if you have some other ideas to contribute. I welcome inputs and would love to do some experimentation!

Till next time a word of wisdom :"Take care of your customer.....or someone else will!"

Medici Effect for Sales Innovation....

I received a lot of feedback to my blog on “Know Thy Customer”. Specially noteworthy was the Dunkin Donuts example. One of my friends and blogger Rishi (http://rooshi.blogspot.com/) brought out an interesting point though. Do I always need the same cup of coffee and sandwich? What if I was thinking of a latte and a donut? Or may be I didn’t need a coffee at all?

In larger context, from a sales relationship standpoint it raises the following very pertinent questions:

1. Are you able to innovate and bring services that delight the client?

2. How do you drive innovation in a borderless world?

Bottom line “Are you feeding the clients the same menu or able to take them on a thrill ride of innovation?”

I will try to answer this question through a very interesting phenomenon called the “Medici Effect”. Frans Johansson coined this term. In my own words, Medici effect can be defined as “ When a very diverse group of human beings are put together for a common task, the environment produced can be an intersection for ground breaking innovation”.

I recently attended a webinar given by Frans and I must tell you it was an hour very well spent. He brings to the table some really interesting examples of intersections. For eg:

1. How a nest of termites and largest building in Harare have a common intersection for innovation!

2. How a 24 year old chef went onto become the youngest 3 star chef in New York city (in case you don’t know the restaurant scene in NYC, this is the equivalent of becoming the CEO of Fortune 500 company by 24)!!

3. How the latest Router from a leading telecom company and a trail of ants are principally the same!!!

If you are intrigued, I suggest you pick a copy of this all time best seller. The Medici family was one of the most influential families that controlled Florence in 1700’s. This family like all power centres does not have a really clean track record. However what they did was to provide an environment where in artists and thinkers of a very diverse background got together under one roof to work together. Way back then they would assemble teams from China, Siberia and all kinds of remote places to bring out some amazing works of art. Some of the prodigies that came out of this set up include the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci…

Frans took inspiration from this and went onto discover how diversity led to innovation. Some other amazing examples he covers are:

1. How do spiders and goatmilk come together for human diseases?
2. Why is HP’s quantum lab the most innovative place on the planet for HP?
3. What do MLK jr. and rock music have in common?
4. How the ipod mini’s and old transistor radio’s of 60’s essentially the same?

So taking inspiration from Frans, I have decided to embark on a journey of exploring how diversity can yield the most innovative sales solutions for my clients.

For starters a few ideas:

1. In my current solution pitch I am bringing in a really diverse team of software developers, architects and project managers from India and US.

2. In the next year, I will bring into my team a few people from engineering (guys who have been in industries like metals and cement) to work with a software engineering team.

Dream wish:

Get a team consisting of poets, microbiologists, software engineers and building architects to build the next generation complaint resolution system.

Hope this has been good food for thought.

Let me know how the reading on Medici Effect goes for you….

Cheers

Uday