You’ve been hired by a company, or are forming a start-up, because of what you bring to their business table. What you bring, that special “touch” of yours, are your core capabilities, or core competencies. Your core capabilities are one or more areas of specialization or skills that you and your company or start-up perceive as being central to establishing and retaining your functionality, your relevance, your worth. Your core capabilities are your contribution to the business. They are your contribution to generating revenue for your startup.

Your core capabilities are your differentiator.

Your core capabilities aren’t your academic degrees and certifications. There are a lot of engineers. There are a lot of MBAs and PhD’s. The acronyms appearing after your name on your business card let folks know you have completed some formalized type of education and training. Those acronyms appearing after your name on your business card set up expectations about the minimum viable delivery of your certification and academic degree. After that, your success in the globally competitive marketplace is based on how you deliver, time and time again, no matter whether the project or customer is different, the timeline is long or brief, or the team is less than ideal.

Your core capabilities are the “spin” that you, and only you, put on how you deliver based on your education and training. Your core capabilities are how you translate what you know and what you can do into something tangible and transactional for your company or venture.

Your core capabilities are unique to you; they are all about how you deliver your professional DNA.

It’s not simply a matter of responding to feedback on a performance review or making sure you deliver against KPI’s. There’s more to your own equation than someone else’s metrics.

You can begin finding out all the people your deliverable, your output, touches. What are the results of your core capabilities after your own last “touch?” It’s more than delivering results to an interdisciplinary team meeting and thinking your participation is “collaboration.” It isn’t.

Where does your data go, and why? Could you have provided better output and insight if you only had understood the needs from all of your internal customers, as well as their external customers? Who are the folks who really use your output, but are never at the team meetings? How can you work with them before, during and after you hand-off your output, so that your productivity not only is translated to that person, but also becomes an important component of the final business transaction?

That is how “what you do” translates into revenue creation for your company.

It’s no longer acceptable to play “small” in your organization. Your contributions, your core capabilities, are far more important than you give yourself credit for. Or they could be. If you would only take the time to stretch your perspective beyond your quarterly sales quotas or your engineering design output or the tactical aspects of project management.

You are responsible for understanding and articulating, in language everyone can understand, how your core capabilities, your products, your services, your platforms, your intellectual property, provide value to your colleagues, your organization, and your clients. (From Do YOU Mean Business?, p 61)

When you begin to collaboratively create output with the knowledge of exactly where your output goes and who needs to extract value from it, you differentiate your relevance and value to your organization.

How will you start to put this strategy into play this week?

 Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo back into small and mid-sized businesses and creates revenue-producing business strategies for technical start-ups seeking investors and early customers. Babette is recognized as one of the “2013 Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers.” Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page.

Many established companies are introducing new products, platforms, and services using what’s worked for them in the past. Their current venture initiative comes crashing into the reality of why strategies and tactics that worked in the past may not apply within today’s digital millennium marketplace. Time to retool and recalibrate.

 My take on entrepreneurship boils down to:

1) Entrepreneurs don’t take “No!” for an answer.

2) Entrepreneurs get up one more time than they fall down.

3) Entrepreneurs assume accountability and responsibility for Everything in their Enterprise.

4) Entrepreneurs don’t have thin skin.

5) Entrepreneurs aren’t enamored with the entourage and trappings of their enterprise as much as they buy in to the experience and leadership demands of their enterprise.

6) Entrepreneurs understand that if they built it, it’s their obligation to sell it. Generating their revenue stream is their responsibility.

7) Entrepreneurs want their venture to make a difference, and a long-term one. They don’t consider their venture to be flavor-of-the-month.

8) Entrepreneurs give in order to receive; sharing knowledge, expertise, insights, advice.

9) Entrepreneurs don’t delegate.

10) Entrepreneurs know what to do next, and leave themselves open to all possibilities of what Next looks like.

Which got me thinking.

The bottom line is that the bottom line is part of everyone’s job responsibility whether stated or not. Every person you have working for your venture, your enterprise, your startup, your company impacts revenue creation in one way or another. Either they are eating up way too many resources or they are part of service quality delivery fueling customer satisfaction and retention. Either they contribute to input-throughput-output or they create obstacles for other folks, including your customers.

It’s all hands on deck. All of the time.

What is your goal, as the head of your venture or even your small to mid-cap company? Is it to grow your venture so that you can lean back in your chair and become a Visionary Leader? I’m not sure that even I know what that phrase means, but I have heard that sentiment expressed as the Ultimate Business Goal by more than a few folks I coach.

That type of goal makes me uncomfortable. How about you?

Obviously, you want to get your company running and humming. However, it’s not prudent to think that your enterprise will ever become self-perpetuating. Your role as the Entrepreneur-Owner-Visionary, whatever you decide to title yourself, is perpetual. Because the possibilities you create when you launch your venture and lead your company can be infinite.

If you are going to lean back and reap the benefits of the insights you had once upon a time, you may become myopic instead of visionary.

If your strategy is all hands on deck, all of the time (and I’m not talking about micromanagement either), then you are aware of trending, engaged in continuous learning, understand the value of employee and customer engagement, and are always thinking beyond your personal and professional horizon.

You know when it’s time to stay the course. You are prepared to make the hard calls that result in pivots and streamlining operations. You know where the buck stops: with you, at all times.

The days of leaning back in your armchair and delegating to others got pretty much squashed after 2008. That’s post-industrial era mindset. In today’s globally competitive digital marketplace, you can lean back in your armchair. I recommend that your armchair better be placed in the virtual and physical cockpit of what it takes to run your organization.  

There’s no Easy in Entrepreneurship. Then again, if it were easy, wouldn’t everyone be doing it?

What’s been your experience?

 Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo back into small and mid-sized businesses and creates revenue-producing business strategies for technical start-ups seeking investors and early customers. Babette is recognized as one of the “2013 Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers.” She’s also a Certified Six Sigma Quality Green Belt. Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page.

The majority of us think about Quality as something amorphous that’s “out there” hovering in the back of our brains. Oh yeah, that Quality thing. Quality is a noun in search of a descriptor. Sure, we want to do “quality” work every day, and most of us strive to do so. Except the “quality” of our output can range from low to high, can’t it?

If you are honest with yourself, you may not think about processes and practices in the sales, marketing and service community until something happens with your deliverable. It’s usually not something positive. Then you pull out your Quality hat, assemble your team and try to dissect the situation and find the root cause. After the fact.

You feel Quality is something Customer Service is hired to deal with, not you. You don’t have time to make Quality part of your daily deliverable. The Quality buck stops on someone else’s desk. Besides, if you were constantly aware of Quality, it would slow time to market and time to cash.

Perhaps those of you who own or work for small manufacturing companies, or are part of the Executive Team in a startup, react to lapses in quality rather than being proactive about preventing those lapses. Your Quality guy or gal may wear multiple hats in your organization. The drill is a matter of filling in forms and assessing raw materials and assembly issues…. after your customer tells you your deliverables fell short. Or you decide to walk the floor of your metal forming company, and begin to quantify the number of rejected parts that you see, perhaps for the first time. Talk about a rework issue. Or you are a startup whose business plan doesn’t include one sentence about Quality.

The real question is: as a startup or small to mid-cap company, do you feel you can afford to have a full-time employee whose job function is 100% devoted to Quality? You know the next question: can you afford not to have such an employee?

This post is written to address the question posed by ASQ CEO and Influential Voice Paul Borawski: “What is the most important challenge the quality community faces in ensuring that the value of quality is fully realized for the benefit of society?” That’s something to ponder, isn’t it? How many of you are aware of the Quality initiative within the organizations you work for? How many of you form your own companies with Quality principles and practices in mind?

For those of you who are in the service industry, consider the overall Service Quality Delivery of your products and services. We as consultants and sales people work very hard to identify trigger events,  build relationships, position value and ROI, negotiate contracts for our products/services/platforms. Then do you keep your fingers crossed when the contract is won, the work comes in-house to be implemented or, alternatively, is sub-contracted out for others to execute? Is that where things can, and frequently do, fall apart – with you having to take responsibility for the shortcomings involved with input-throughput-output?

To me, Quality is not applied-as-needed: either as a result of a quality output issue or when a big customer is vetting your business processes as you compete for a major contract. In my world, business development is part of everyone’s job description, whether stated or not. So, in fact, is becoming familiar with and conversant in what consistent and superlative Quality delivery brings to your revenue stream.

What place does Quality occupy in your business model and business strategy?

Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo back into small and mid-sized businesses and creates revenue-producing business strategies for technical start-ups seeking investors and early customers. Babette is recognized as one of the “2013 Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers.” She’s also a Certified Six Sigma Quality Green Belt. Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page.

This stuff makes you short-sighted, defensive, and less-than-innovative and responsive to business development opportunities – which may be right under your nose. Except you can’t see them in your overwhelming “To Do” tactical clutter.

It seems like there’s not enough time for you to spend on continuous development of YOU. That’s where WE come in.

I’m challenging you to identify folks within sales, marketing, and business development whose blogs and insights can pluck you out of your own status quo mental mire. They will inspire you to always do your best work. 

I’ll make it easy for you, as well. These are the same folks I turn to for constant insights and a way of thinking about things ever-so-slightly differently, which leads you to: “Aha!”

Everyone needs “Aha!” moments.

The Top Sales World team, led by Jonathan Farrington, just published their new list of 2013 Top Sales & Marketing Influencers. I am humbled and honored to be included in this year’s list of the folks I, myself, turn to when I need to get “unstuck.” The diversity of approaches around the common theme of selling allows you to select the folks whose perspectives align with your own business development needs.

Your needs may change throughout the year. Guess what? This team has your back, continuously.

Each member of our team always writes about topics which cause you to think about the same thing, only differently. That slight difference on how we all see the same things makes a big difference in how you meet your business issues.

Allow yourself this luxury, daily. Set aside 30 minutes first thing in the morning before you become a business firefighter. Read what our team has to say. You got yourself into your current mire. We will feed you daily lifelines to extricate yourself from “where you are today” so that you can chart tomorrow’s course.

You are not alone anymore. We have your back. We’ve been where you currently are.

What strikes me about the Top Sales World group is their sense of collaboration, for and with each other, and always with their readers. Yes, each one of us is a consultant in our own right. Yet it’s our willingness to continuously share consistently high-quality content and – some of our “secret sauce” as well – that makes the team’s overall contributions to sales, marketing and business development unique in today’s globally competitive marketplace.

While you can choose to hire these folks to help your business, you can sample what we bring to your business table on a daily blogging basis, as well as through the monthly Top Sales World publication. I don’t need to emphasize how much the world of sales and marketing has changed since the financial debacle of 2008. 

Take the time to continuously re-educate yourself by sampling the content from this fascinating team. Learn from some of the top minds in the business, before you chose to hire them. Connect with them on Twitter, sign up to receive our individual blogs via RSS feeds as well as newsletters.

You owe yourself the gift of self-development. Our team gives you a place to start your own continuous sales and marketing improvement initiative.

Let me know which blogs and business perspectives strike a common chord with you.

Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo back into small and mid-sized businesses, particularly in the manufacturing sector. She builds vibrant revenue-producing business strategies for technical start-ups seeking investors and early customers. Babette is recognized as one of the “2013 Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers.”  Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page.

The word is prettied up, and called lots of other sweet-sounding names, like customer conversations, customer discovery, and investigational dialogues. When it comes down to it, however, it’s still that four letter word. SELL.

Transacting business, where someone pays you money for your products, services, and platforms, is selling. The goal of the business transaction is to sell something to a customer who is so jazzed about your offering, that they are willing to exchange currency in return for their ability to use or access your deliverable. That entire sequence is called making a sale.

Getting funded by an investor, such as an Angel, venture capital or private equity company, is not the objective of becoming an entrepreneur or forming a startup. These entities aren’t your customers. They are the folks who want a chunk of your company and its potential revenue stream. You aren’t creating your products, services, and platforms to please your investors.

Many entrepreneurs are confused about this point. Think about it.  Investors aren’t going to be interested in investing in your company if they don’t think you are going to be able to find customers for your deliverables.

Customer discovery involves a series of discussions with potential early-adopters which result in the eventual finalized design of a product/service/platform for targeted market segments. Trouble is, most startups are too busy collecting design specification data and aligning it with customer preference during customer discovery. They forget to have a business development discussion at the same time.

Customer discovery really is where the potential sales conversation begins. Did you ever think about these conversations in this manner?

Failing to collect business development information represents one of the most overlooked purposes of a customer discovery conversation. It’s fine to talk about functionality, interoperability, integration, and ergonomics with the folks whom you feel represent target markets and user personas. It takes more than that type of customer discovery data to move your product to market.

How many of you have done your homework before you engage a person in customer discovery? Find out more about that individual with whom you are speaking. Gather information about the company they work for. What’s their track record in industry? Does this company lead or follow? Do they innovate or are they status quo and traditional? Will they be your champion or will they be risk-averse?

How are decisions made in this company and who makes them? If you currently are not talking to that identified decision maker as part of customer discovery, find out what it would take for you to have a chat with them.

Where does your venture fit into this company’s top priorities for the current fiscal year? Assess whether your venture could be classified as a priority. If this type of company represents a huge opportunity for your venture, rework your value propositions to align with their priorities.

There’s nothing cheesy and sleazy and sales-y about the processes I’ve just described. Have you been limiting yourself, and the progress of your venture, by focusing on whether or not a particular customer liked your minimum viable concept?

Customer discovery is not selling. It’s not transactional. However, if done well, customer discovery is the front end of the business development cycle. And business development, if done well, takes the translational value of your venture and can result in SELLING.

Something to think about before you schedule your next customer discovery conversation?

 Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo back into small and mid-sized businesses, particularly in the manufacturing sector. She builds vibrant revenue-producing business strategies for technical start-ups seeking investors and early customers. Babette is recognized as one of the “2013 Top 50 Sales & Marketing Influencers.”  Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page.

Many of us have accepted LinkedIn relationships (“Connections”) with individuals over the years with folks we don’t know very well. Perhaps these connections were contacts of a contact and their backgrounds appeared to have affinity with ours. Anyway, for one reason or another, we accepted the relationship and they now form part of our LinkedIn Connections.

Many of these folks aren’t necessarily people we would ask to Recommend us (equated with our having performed services for them or having a highly developed professional relationship). However, the Endorsement function on LinkedIn now gives anyone the ability to endorse anyone else in their list of Connections.

Your Connections can endorse you for any type of expertise recommended by LinkedIn. Therein lies the “catch.”

If someone endorses you, LinkedIn will send you an email message, as well as indicating the endorsement in the top banner of your home screen. LinkedIn also gives you the option of adding these skills to those already listed under your areas of domain area expertise which you created in your profile.

I recommend reading what you’ve been endorsed for, before you accept the endorsement – especially from the folks in your network you don’t know very well. LinkedIn will pull various skills and expertise from the keywords you mention in your profile, as well as from other “who knows where” areas on their site.  Jill Konrath and Ardath Albee surveyed power users of LinkedIn and found they utilize the breadth and depth of the site for business and brand building quite differently than simply building up endorsements.

Make sure the skill sets you are being endorsed for align with your domain area expertise and your personal and professional brand-building strategy. You do have a strategy, don’t you?

Otherwise, you end up with a large list of often amorphous skill sets which may overwhelm anyone reviewing your profile for the purposes of hiring you! You may end up looking like a Jack-of-All-Trades, trying to be something for everyone. Rather than complementing your niche-specific Profile, containing all of those value propositions you worked so hard to develop, you end up looking like a generalist.

You end up looking like everyone else on LinkedIn.

Unfortunately, the proliferation of endorsements by any and everyone on LinkedIn is beginning to go the way of “you endorse me and I will return the favor.” Sort of like the Facebook LIKE craze.

The overuse, and abuse, of LinkedIn endorsements, especially when people end up being endorsed for skill sets that don’t even fit their profile, potentially cheapens and commoditizes what you offer to the professional community.

Several of my LinkedIn connections were endorsing me daily. I didn’t know them very well. I thanked them via InMail for their endorsements. I did not return the favor since I wasn’t familiar with their work. They didn’t stop! Every day my Inbox was full of their latest endorsements of me.

I ended my connection with them when it became obvious that they were merely – and indiscriminately – collecting endorsements to enhance their self-perception of what they felt they offered the marketplace. I ceased to want to be connected with them when it also became obvious that they were endorsing me for skills that had nothing to do with the core competencies I offer to my constituents. It became obvious – and sometimes humorous – that they weren’t even reading the skills what they were endorsing me for!

Perhaps I’m an outlier here. I feel that Endorsements are equivalent to Recommendations. You earn them based on personal and professional relationships accrued over time.

What’s your own experience with LinkedIn endorsements?

Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo back into small and mid-sized businesses, particularly in the manufacturing sector. She builds vibrant revenue-producing business strategies for technical start-ups seeking investors and early customers. Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page. 

I think of this song every time I walk into a room of engineers, sales and marketing folks, CEOs, and, well, you get the picture. Everyone is speaking their version of what appears to be the same language of business. It might as well be folks from Mars, Venus, and Pluto.

There’s a lot of duologue going on, but not a whole lot of dialogue.

Depending on where we sit around the business table, we see the same things, only differently. We communicate these same things differently as well. There is the language of finance, the language of business, the language of marketing research, the language of technology. We assume everyone knows what is in our minds, what we are trying to say.

I don’t know what you mean. Unless you make an effort to communicate it to me.

I’m not talking about dumbing down what you are saying. You still are the smartest person in the room, hands down. I’m asking you to find a way to communicate what you are saying so that not only I understand, but the rest of the team also grasps the significance of your insights.

Yes, I understand that your corporate culture still perpetuates “Us versus Them”, discipline-driven, siloed mindset: techies versus sales, geeks versus marketing, R&D versus… well, you understand. That’s no longer acceptable in the globally competitive business environment of the digital millennium – no matter what the size of your company.

What are you planning on doing about liberating yourself from the status quo of business and technical lingo?

Perhaps it’s a matter of choosing the common denominator between everyone’s discipline, and a set of vocabulary that everyone agrees upon. Perhaps it’s a matter of learning how the other person processes information: analytical or creative, right brain or left brain, tactical or strategic, yin or yang. Perhaps it’s a matter of putting on the other person’s shoes and walking around in them for a while.

When you see the business and technical landscape from the perspective of your customers and investors, you can focus outcomes on What’s In It for Them… instead of What’s In It for Me.

This week, pay attention to what’s happening in those round-table discussions you engage in. They are valuable; everyone’s time is not to be squandered. What can you do to ensure that everyone seated around your business table this week understands what is so desperately trying to be communicated?

When everyone strives to attain this common goal, you all get to “aha” together. Perhaps you are making short strides initially, instead of giant steps. When everyone is on the same page, pulling together, the outcomes of your team’s efforts make all the difference.

Oh, and start this week off by treating yourself to this song: “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” Except don’t.

Instead, carry on. Together. Collaboratively.

Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo back into small and mid-sized businesses, particularly in the manufacturing sector. She builds vibrant revenue-producing business strategies for technical start-ups seeking investors and early customers. Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page.

Your customers have had their feet dragged over the coals so many times by sales folks seeking to define pain, that the real pain is the risk of scheduling yet one more appointment with one more sales person who is going to attempt to, yup, you’ve got it, define their pain.

The truth of the matter is that it’s not only the language of selling that has changed. The intent of selling has changed as well.

Your customers are looking for conversations that make them pause and think about their context in a completely different manner. Your customers are looking for questions that indicate you did your homework about them, their industry, their sources of revenue, investment and valuation.

You don’t learn this kind of stuff from a script or a one-size fits all sales training course. You are the artist who creates that dialogue based on the breadth and depth of your own learned expertise. You will reconfigure your available knowledge with each conversation you have with customers and prospects.

No one does this kind of homework for you. Your customers and prospects know immediately who will be their partner and who won’t. You either get their mental wheels spinning or you don’t. You either inspire them to find new ways of approaching what they used to think was a status quo, insurmountable set of odds. Or you won’t.

Believe me, if you think you need to meet your quarterly quota, your customers may have more important topics on their minds than helping you make your numbers. They may be trying to keep the lights on and pay for raw materials net immediately, while their customers are stringing them along on net 120 on receivables. How can you think of selling at them, when you don’t take the time to do situational analysis about the context in which you are asking them to making a buying decision?

The language of selling has changed. It now reflects the nature and intent of the sales process, placed within the context of the current economy of the business development ecosystem. (Chew on those sentences for a while).

The fine art of Selling calls for individuals who are comfortable and confident to put all these factors into business discussions that may make a greater difference to the buyer’s longevity in the marketplace than they do to your short term goal of winning the quarterly sales contest.

Are you one of those sales folks who is comfortable and confident having these types of conversations? You may have to create your own “script”, in the absence of your company providing you with anything meaningful in terms of marcom materials. It will take some practice, and some back-and-forth real-time conversation with real-time customers instead of role playing. You will find that customers are far more forgiving when you engage them in a give-and-take, realistic conversation that impacts both of your outcomes.

If what I’ve just described sounds foreign to you, then stop what you are doing. Do your homework. Reconfigure your sales brain and habits. Selling doesn’t sound or look like status quo selling anymore.

Your customers will thank you for the difference you will make to them.

Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo back into small and mid-sized businesses, particularly in the manufacturing sector. She builds vibrant revenue-producing business strategies for technical start-ups seeking investors and early customers. Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page.

As CEO of your company or venture, you occupy a unique position. You have the privilege of leading your enterprise. How many of you take advantage of this opportunity that your “job title” provides you?

In addition to social platforms in which you participate, how many other networks are you a part of? How do you utilize your position and participation within these networks to grow your business?

There’s more involved in this initiative than going through the motion of status quo social networking activities, joining various trade associations and assuming your membership – or even sponsorship – means people “owe” you business contracts because you both are members of the same organizations.

Opportunities to demonstrate domain area expertise happen in the time between trade shows, professional events, and social events. Do you remain a static spectator, or are you actively engaged in demonstrating why your company needs to be top of mind to potential customers?

You can do your sales and engineering staff a tremendous favor by choosing to flex your leadership muscles and play the CEO card within the various trade, professional and social organizations in which you are a member.  It’s one thing to ask your sales staff to bush-rustle and lead generate and go out there and sell-sell-sell. It’s another thing for you to sit down with your sales and engineering team and strategize how your attendance at various trade shows, your social networking acumen and your traveling to various geographies can enhance their own business development efforts.

There is tremendous value to becoming a pre-sale CEO.

Think about how you can create business opportunities by contacting prospective CEOs that your sales and engineering team have identified, and doing something only the two of you can do. Have that CEO peer-level discussion pertaining to your mutual industry perceptions focused around issues impacting both of your businesses.

Far too many CEOs prefer to take a traditional Figurehead role within their organization rather than leading the troops on the pre-sale side of the equation.  Only you can capitalize on your professional network to create these types of up- and down-stream business development opportunities for your company.

Your networking skill set may need some recalibration to become more impactful in today’s digital marketplace. It starts with your willingness to utilize your social and professional network and become more participatory in your company’s revenue generation efforts.

How would you characterize your role today? Are you a traditional Figurehead-Delegator or are you a Pre-Sales CEO Leader? One title certainly has a nicer, more relevant ring to it.

Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo back into small and mid-sized businesses, particularly in the manufacturing sector. She builds vibrant revenue-producing business strategies for technical start-ups seeking investors and early customers. Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page. 

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this model. If every sales team embracing this model were successful, there wouldn’t be as many sales training programs and consultants around as there are.

It is not easy to achieve homogeneous results, especially if you are targeting the latter third of the proverbial Gausian Bell Curve instead of being complacently happy with folks who fall into the middle. You  desire the top 30% of achievers. More like the top 5% of a skewed curve. What you get is the average.

Trouble is, you are looking for needles in haystacks to operate homogeneously in a buying environment that’s not at all static or homogeneous. It’s like hitting a constantly shifting target.  Piece of cake, huh? (You should try this with Six Sigma).

Let’s take a page out of agriculture. In fact, let’s talk about breeding cherries and a story from NPR.   As a former evolutionary geneticist, I’m attracted to this kind of information. It makes me think about how these biological insights can be applied to other types of organic systems. Like sales teams, for example.

Fact of the matter is that when 100% of the cherry tree genome in Michigan is identical, and there is an early Spring (durn those groundhogs) and a late frost, there’s catastrophe. Which is why there were virtually no Michigan tart cherries in 2012. The answer? Seeking genetically diverse, equivalent species for cross breeding.

How genetically diverse is your sales team if you are constantly selecting for an identical sales DNA? How responsive to sales, buying, industry, regulatory, economic and buyer persona trending can your homogeneous sales team be, if they are trained to see the same situation the same way, always? How innovative, collaborative, and competitive can your team be, in comparison to every other company’s homogeneous sales team – over the long haul?

Instead of seeking diversity in your sales team, however, you let your new biz sales underperformers go without ever evaluating whether they might best function as your retention specialists, as their numbers showcase. You know, customer retention played pretty large in 2008, when new biz dried up.  You let your geeky sales team members go (the ones that understand all your new technical products and can converse with both the sales types as well as the engineering types) because they want to build clocks during sales meetings and therefore prolong sales cycles on your more complex technical offerings, instead of going after the higher commission short-cycle items on your product menu.

Are there any trailblazer sales teams out there who might want to have a diverse set of sales specialists and see where that model leads them by the end of the year? Are there any trailblazer sales managers who are comfortable leading this type of team in this type of diverse sales environment? Are there any trailblazer sales cultures who might adapt this diverse team model into one which eliminates territories as well and fosters collaborative cross-selling in its broadest sense?

Seller-Doers understand this principle. So do startups. Often their companies are small, and their sales teams are either composed of themselves or a small group of staff wearing multiple hats.  It’s all hands on deck. I’m not saying they practice sales team diversity any better. They just have no other choice.

Sales life certainly isn’t a bowl of cherries. However, I’m wondering whether you and your sales people are under-utilizing the breadth and depth of the available sales DNA on your team by focusing on homogeneous outcomes.

You never know when a late frost is going to hit.

Babette N. Ten Haken, Founder & President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers, LLC, brings entrepreneurial mojo back into small and mid-sized businesses, particularly in the manufacturing sector. She builds vibrant revenue-producing business strategies for technical start-ups seeking investors and early customers. Download her newest White Paper at her Free Resources Page.