I'm not talking about atomic hairdryers here - I'm talking about real, simple, concrete things you can do to make a difference for yourself and others.

(If you are a regular subscriber to our newsletter, you may recall our "Things you can do today" portion in just about every issue. Our goal is to inform people that, for many situations in business, there is hope - and then provide one or two things you could do to get going in 15 minutes or less.)

I'd like to share a source of great information and inspiration along these lines - Fast Company.

You may or may not know of the magazine, which is a bit trendy and edgy. I read it for years before I really started diving into their online resources - and that's where the real treasure lies.

Two great sources

First, Gina Trapani has a series of short, entertaining videos with great ideas for implementation called Work Smart. These tips are presented well, they are practical and make sense, and the style helps them memorable. Here's just one example: How to Remember Endless Passwords with a Simple Trick.

Second, there's a series called The 30-Second MBA - which is about timely questions posed to business leaders the best 4 answers are posted. It takes all of 3 minutes to explore others' thinking about important issues affecting businesses like yours. The archive is pretty decent as the project has been going on for a while.

I'd love to know if you have any places you go for great information and inspiration. Comments, anyone?

Did I find out that I had a lot to learn!

Part of every incoming Advisor's responsibilities here at Trebuchet Group is for the Advisor to pretend we're a client company and put us through whatever best stuff that Advisor has to offer. It's a real win-win situation - as a company we benefit from the experience and skills of the Advisor, and the Advisor benefits because everyone in the company not only knows about but has actually experienced his or her best stuff.

Jerry Touslee is our newest Advisor, and while he'd probably downplay his part in it, he blew my socks off when he put us through his Business DNA program. Again, I figured that his half-day workshop would mostly be about educating others - yet I was surprised to discover quite a bit about the company alongside my colleagues.

I was drawn in by the simplicity of the process - just a few simple questions that allowed everyone in the room to share their perspectives in a way that wasn't hokey or contrived. The entire team - me as leader included - offered real insights into who we are and why we're different.

Here is just a tiny sample of the results we achieved - for example, here are the most powerful rewards we believe we provide our clients:

• Confidence - the deep down knowledge our clients have that they are on the right track with the right people doing the right things
• Better Future - not a rosy view but an actual improved future that everyone in the client organization can look forward to every day
• Capability - our clients have an increased ability to do what needs to be done through being more effective and more efficient with the resources and people they have

You can't sense this, yet I am completely jazzed even writing this to you because it is so deep inside what I believe our company is truly about. And I know our team aligns around this just as strongly because of how Jerry helped us create this together.

So if sounds interesting, or you just want to find out more, send Jerry an email at jerry@trebuchetgroup.com. He'd love to share and help you get the kind of passionate connection with who you really are that I'm feeling right now.

1. Get clear. Help everyone in the organization really understands success. Pick the top 3 things that need to happen. Make sure they are measurable and doable. Write them on a wall, and stick to them. Bonus points if you see or hear other people using those objectives to figure out together what they should do next.
2. Unite departments. Help teams understand they should focus on organizational success first, and their success second. Look for a goal that will require their cooperation to achieve, and make it the goal for all teams involved. Bonus points if the teams come back with a better goal than the one you picked.

Here are a couple of specific ways to make the above actions happen in your organization.

• ·         Over communicate. Help everyone focus on key results by over-communicating what the results are for the organization. Once you have the top 3 things, share then continuously. Post them on the wall (or discuss them) at the beginning of each meeting. Ask “So how does what we’re working on right now connect with our top 3 goals?” During discussions ask people how well we’re doing at reaching our goals. You get the idea.
• ·          Listen actively. Help teams by listening first to concerns to understand issues from their perspectives. Whenever you think you need to drive home a point – stop. This is the exact place to ask a question since you are probably assuming something that’s making you want to push harder. Think about what you’re assuming, and then ask a question to find out what other people’s perspectives are on the issue. You might just get surprised – and you get bonus points because people know that you care about what they think more than pushing your own agenda.

A quick question for you:

What have you done (or seen done by others) that helped an organization get clear and unite around the most important goals?

Let us, and everyone else reading this blog, benefit from your experience – comment below! (And yes, it’s ok to obscure the participants to protect the guilty ;o)

The hard way to build your business base is to crab your way through one sales call after another hoping that your pitch, your skillful handling of objections, and your super duper closing skills will make some sales and help you reach your goals.

That’s traditional sales. Purely transactional. I’m the seller, you’re the buyer, let’s do business.

If you believe that’s working for you these days, you’re either extremely lucky or, well, delusional.

If everybody sells (yes, I assert it's true) it stands to reason then everybody can unsell. Your receptionist can unsell, your accounting department can unsell, your CEO can unsell, et cetera, et cetera.

What does it mean to unsell?

One of the things it means is to sabotage your brand promise. What is your unique value proposition? Is it your fabulous customer service? If so, how do you treat people trying to do business with you? Do you answer all phone calls promptly?  Does your accounting department have a proactive, win-win attitude in all internal and external communications?  Does your CEO think of herself as the company’s Number One customer service agent?

Another thing unselling means is to ignore the fact that we live in an extremely connected world. An environment of social networking, influentials, and dynamic interdependence. Your success or failure can depend on “ratings” created by people you barely know.

Has your inconsistency, inadvertent rudeness, failure to live up to your promise damaged your potential business relationships?

Referrals are based on positive experience, positive brand awareness, and positive relationships you’ve created with folks that you know and folks you may not know so well. You may not know the influentials in your community who have the ability to help or harm your business prospects, but their impression of you counts.

If you’re building your business (and who isn’t?), the most important single thing you can do is to identify the folks whose sneezes will spread the virus you want spread. If you dis the wrong person, no antibiotic in the world will save you.

The top and bottom groups are nearly identical in Thinking Styles; they are similar on the Assertiveness, Manageability, Accommodation, Independence and Objective Judgment scales.

Most striking however, is the difference in their patterns on the Energy and the Decisiveness scales.

The most successful salespeople have very high Energy scales (in the upper 16% of the working population). Top performers also rank very high in Decisiveness, averaging  10 out of 10 on decisiveness!

You can screen for these "top seller" characteristics either before or after hire. Call Trebuchet Group for more information.

This has been a big challenge for us recently – and maybe for your organization as well . It's quite difficult to have a substantive and open discussion around what people really want to do in their business. Many people will talk at a polite, social level about how they're doing, but won't go further even when asked.

Why is that?

Could people be so unsure about the future that they are reluctant to talk about it for fear it will suddenly come true?

Are people so exhausted putting on a brave face and dealing with the challenges every day that they can't see a brighter future?

Are people are so worried about spending money that they become reluctant to share anything with us for fear that we will suddenly turn purple and seize them with rows of sharp teeth and never let them go?

We're not sure - yet we think we've found a possible remedy.

We believe we can get real conversations that enable people to rise above the sea of fear out there and truly see the possibilities for their organization.

Regardless of whether they decide to do anything about those possibilities.

With us or anyone else.

And we believe the answer is to ask them help others.

Here’s a drawing of the situation we - and frankly any service provider - faces today:

To get to the possibilties that are in the very center of the diagram, we have to bring together the two client-centered realities on the right and bottom, and be transparent about our desire to help on the left.

We believe that nearly every organization has significant unmet needs that it has become complacent about (meaning the pain of change is perceived as greater than the pain of staying the same). We believe that nearly every organization is running at no more than 60% of their actual capacity in terms of effective systems and fully engaged people. And we know that our desire to help is real and powerful - it's what gets us out of bed every day.

The problems are in the intersections around the possibilities.

When we match our desire to help with unmet needs, the response is "Are you saying something is wrong with me? You just want to cause problems to make money."

When we match our desire to help with untapped capacity in the organization, the response is "Who cares? Frankly, we are doing just fine with our resources and know that change could make things worse. You just want to cause problems to make money."

And when we match unmet needs with untapped capacity, the response is "Can't get there from here. Been there, done that. If we really had all these needs and capacity we would have fixed this long ago. You just want to cause problems to make money."

(Notice the commonality?)

Yet in the very center of all three of these conditions is an amazing triple play. Your needs and capacity + our desire to help = possibilities for your business that could explode your results.

And the way we're going to get into these great conversations is to ask for help.

That's right - ask people to help us refine a tool to help others see what's possible in their business.

We're calling it...Possibility Generator. (Original, I know.) And our goal is to walk 100 companies through the exercise by 1 December 2010.

We figure we're going to have to call quite a few companies to hit our goal.

"Hi, this is Chris Hutchinson with the Trebuchet Group. Could you spare your top 4 people for 2 hours to help us refine a process we believe has the potential to help a lot of people?"

Of course if you'd like to help it's ok for you to call first.

We'll let you know how it goes.

Thanks.

Please click here to go right to that post!

The thing that caught my attention was a short list of questions I put at the end of the slideshow in case the interactive discussion with the 150 participants wasn't as, well, interactive as I predicted it would be. It turned out that we didn't end up getting to the "Thoughtful Questions" I had prepared.

And it turns out that these questions are pretty timely today:

1.     What does your company look like right now?

a.     Be honest and realistic

2.     What could it look like in 5-10 years?

a.     What do you really want?

b.     Let your passion guide you

c.     Paint a broad picture

3.     How much does your team share your vision?

a.     Is it just words on a wall somewhere?

b.     Do you feel like a broken record?

4.     How much can they influence the pace and ability for your company to get there?

a.     Must be willing

b.     Must be able

c.     How much might they be holding you back?

5.     How much are you personally setting the example for them to follow?

a.     Your example is the strongest teacher – relationships, money, growth, reasons behind doing things

b.     How can you encourage them to enlist in your effort?

So, how's this list for you?

As I advise companies on how to build effective sales teams, the topic of compensation looms as the 400-lb gorilla in the corner. This gorilla is a very opinionated fellow.

He’s distinctly of two minds.

On the one hand, he believes that in order to develop a committed sales team, a system of commissions that give top sales folks the opportunity to make lots of money is essential. The terms you hear are “uncapped”, “incentive-based” and “performance-based”. Under this scenario, a salesperson will only perform if there is a LARGE carrot. This gorilla is deeply committed to the idea of greed and self interest as a motivator.

On the other hand, he’s also seen the results of that paradigm and thinks there may be another way. Nicely encapsulated in a recent inc.com article, our gorilla thinks sales folks shouldn’t have a completely different pay plan as the rest of the company. After all, there are superstars in every department, why shouldn’t they be compensated on effectiveness and effort?

So, our gorilla is in a quandary. To commission or not commission?

Over the years I’ve observed many sales teams and the impact of both salary and commission-based compensation plans. What have I seen?

1)     In commission-plan orgs: sales teams become stratified with top performers performing at 100-200X the performance of the lowest performers. The top performers are highly focused hunters, rarely team players, highly resistant to management, and extremely effective in their use of time and resources. Lowest performers take the lion’s share of manager’s time (most of whom come from the top performer camp) and rarely are able to improve their skills enough to make a difference. Of course, the managers, since they have the mindset of top performers, are usually unable to effectively coach the low performers. The result? Relatively stable top performers set and a conveyor belt of low performers.

2)     In salary-plan orgs: these teams are generally composed of middle-to-low performing sales folks. Top performers are not attracted to these organizations. Managers also come from this middle-performing set. Generally they are better at getting “good” performance from their folks, so the low performers may improve their skills and achieve mid-level performance. Consistency is a feature of this type of organization, but mediocrity is more often the result.

So what is the answer? If you’ve ever seen the desperation on the face of a salesperson just short of goal on the last week of the month, you can understand why a commission-only plan can create more problems than it solves. A middle ground of base plus commission is probably a good compromise. Care must be taken that the sales team is part of the whole company’s culture.

Stay tuned for more on this fascinating topic!