Читать книгу Selling With Noble Purpose - McLeod Lisa Earle, Lisa Earle McLeod - Страница 13

Business is changing because customers and employees are changing. People are no longer willing to settle for a transactional work life—or even a transactional sale. They want more.

Making a living and making a difference are not incompatible goals. The traditional business model tends to separate money and meaning. Making money becomes the organizing element of the organization, while making a difference is relegated to an optional byproduct. Improving lives is nice; we'll try to do it if and when we make enough money.

Yet a growing body of evidence tells us this model is wrong. In fact, it's completely backward. When targets and quotas become the primary organizing element of your business, the result is mediocrity at best. Instead of making more money, you wind up making less money. Profit is crucial, of course. But it's not the best starting point for driving sales revenue.

It doesn't have to be this way. As you'll discover in this book, there's a widespread, unspoken problem in sales. It's the startling gap between what organizations want salespeople to do when they're with customers versus what most organizations really reinforce on a daily basis.

Let's be clear: wanting to make money for your family or to buy yourself nice things or build wealth is not immoral. Noble Purpose does not conflict with economic motivation; it adds another dimension. Noble Purpose unleashes a largely untapped source of motivation, and it creates an organizing framework that differentiates you from a traditional, economic incentive‐based organizational mindset.

When the Business Roundtable, a group of America's most prominent CEOs, announced that the shareholder primacy model—dictating that organizations must maximize profits for shareholders above all else—was no longer working or appropriate, they gave an official voice to what many leaders were experiencing.

The traditional “shareholder primacy, profit‐at‐all‐costs” model creates a transactional relationship, with employees and customers who (correctly) discern that numbers matter more than they do. It's not surprising that during the decades when shareholder primacy rose, employee engagement tanked. In an age of internet‐forced transparency, organizations who are primarily self‐focused are quickly revealed.

Yet as an increasing number of firms embrace the value of higher purpose, many organizations still struggle to bring purpose to life with their sales team.

The message from the top is, “We have a purpose.” But the daily sales cadence of “close the deal” drowns out the purpose conversation. It's a costly missed opportunity.

Sales is where purpose can come alive or wither and die. As the center of a commercial model, sales can deliver outsized returns on purpose, emotionally and financially. When you activate a sense of Noble Purpose in sales, it drives engagement, innovation, differentiation, and ultimately revenue.

For the last decade, this is what I've been studying, researching, and speaking and writing about. I'll share what we've learned from implementing selling with Noble Purpose with over 200 organizations. I've had the privilege of working with teams at organizations like Google, Salesforce, Dave & Busters, and Roche, helping them enhance their culture and drive sales performance. But Noble Purpose is not just for a few sexy high‐profile organizations. We've also worked with less‐well‐known firms who have achieved even more dramatic results.

In this book, you'll meet a concrete company whose blue‐collar team is redefining an entire industry; a commercial bank that went from malaise to winning awards; and a team of travel salespeople who bring so much passion and purpose into their client interactions that customers from around the world ask them for sales calls.

These seemingly everyday companies harness the power of purpose to break sales records and become leaders in their spaces.

In this new, updated edition of Selling with Noble Purpose, I'll cover the dramatic changes in the business landscape and in customer and employee attitudes that have made Noble Purpose a business imperative. I'll also share:

 The direct impact of purpose on profitability (it's more than originally anticipated)

 Why so many purpose‐driven organizations struggle to activate their purpose in sales, and how to overcome this challenge

 Examples of firms who experienced exponential financial payoffs from Noble Purpose, and how they did it

 Examples from firms whose purpose programs failed, and a breakdown of what went wrong

 Strategies for turning managers into belief‐builders for your organization

 Why most sales ecosystems can have a chilling effect on customer engagement, and how to align your sales ecosystem toward customer impact

 Innovative training techniques for activating purpose in frontline salespeople

We've deepened our study of Selling with Noble Purpose, yet one thing remains the same:

When you tap into someone's desire to make a difference, you unleash a force more powerful than anything found in a traditional business model.

When you cultivate a Noble Purpose through your sales team, you create a tribe of true believers: a team who can beat even the most formidable of competitors.

It's called a Noble Sales Purpose because it is:

 Noble: In the service of others

 Sales: Based on what you sell

 Purpose: Your reason for being

You don't have to create world peace. Your Noble Sales Purpose can be about making your customers more successful or about improving your industry.

This book is about getting your entire sales organization aligned, empowered, and excited about making a difference to customers. When you are clear and specific about how you want to help customers, and you activate your Noble Sales Purpose across your entire sales organization, you create an unstoppable team.

A friend of mine who was burned out from two decades of working in politics once told me, “In every office, there's always a TB.”

“What's a TB?” I asked her.

“A true believer,” she said. “That starry‐eyed optimist who still believes they can make a difference. But here's the thing all the jaded staffers don't tell you—everyone else in the office is secretly jealous of the true believer.”

I've come to understand the reason everyone is jealous of the true believer: we all have a secret true believer inside us, just waiting for permission to come out.

Selling with Noble Purpose is about igniting the true believer that lurks in the heart of every salesperson. Because as much as salespeople want to make money, they also want to make a difference.