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Speaker: Hello, and welcome back to yet another episode of the Commercial Leader podcast. My name is Bram Lagrou, and I have a question for you. Which one of the two do you prefer?
The off-the-shelf product, a suit which you can basically buy in any retail store
Or the tailor-made version like this one here. Which one would you go for?
Well, let me share my two cents on why this is relevant to you as you are a leader or a business development person.
As a leader, would it be fair to say that as you deal with external and internal stakeholders, that a large extent of your leadership influence depends on your ability to motivate other people to do what that you want them to do at the time that you want them to do it and at the quality levels that you want them to?
Equally, in business development, if you are opening up a door and creating an [00:01:00] opportunity, and then you wanna convert that c- opportunity from no dollars spent to actually money in the account through the products and services that you can offer those people, well, once again, they both have the same skill that is required.
And too often I see people still using the off-the-shelf approach as opposed to the one where you tailor-make your approach to your stakeholders, whether as a leader or as a BDM. It doesn't matter. The same psychological principles apply.
Here's the thing though.
People, as I always say, are predictable. So if you understand where people are coming from and you can appreciate in your heart, you know, as in you don't just learn how to think like them, but you actually can also feel them And relate to them at their level on the same wavelength, then [00:02:00] suddenly you're not basically having somebody, for example, pitch an idea for support in a hard rock type, fashion to somebody who's very easygoing and likes classical music.
I'm using a lot of analogies. I understand, but bear with me. if you are a salesperson and you're a bit fast-paced and you're big picture and you don't like details, well, of course, you don't wanna pitch your proposal in a very fast point way and ask for quick decisions of somebody who's very analytical, very risk-averse, and very quality-focused, somebody that wants to do their due diligence and take their time and so on and so forth.
Notice here, if we do the same as we all got taught the golden rule, which is treat people the way that you wanna be treated, well, you're gonna be setting yourself up for failure in advance more so than success. And I don't know about you, but I like success formulas.
[00:03:00] Something where when you put it in, it works like a mathematical equation. Two and two and you add 'em up, you got four. It's not depending on my personal judgment or my personal preferences. It just is. It's a fact. It works here in Australia, works in Hong Kong, in China, it works in, France, Paris, or anywhere else in the world.
It's a fact. It works 100% of the time.
Well, the challenge is, though, that most of us, we're still wearing the other suit. We're still wearing the one off the shelf that you can buy anywhere. That is becoming very dangerous because as a leader, you have to engage everybody in order for your purpose, your mission, your projects, your objectives, your KPIs, and so on.
In order for them to be fulfilled, you need other people to come along on the journey. And so your [00:04:00] ability to speak the other people's language is key. But most people aren't taught how to do that. And so if we suddenly have a very forceful driver on our team, then we might very easily, make them very agitated and frustrated with us if we don't get to the point very quickly and show 'em what's in it for them.
If we can't do that really fast and up our feet, we lose them, guaranteed. Equally, if you have somebody who's very methodical, precise, step-by-step, and we try to get them on board on a new project without explaining to them what the journey looks like and all the steps involved, and give it enough time for people to come along on the journey and to voice their concerns and confide in us on a one-on-one level, if we haven't factored that into the engineering of the change project, the transformation bit that we're seeking, you're gonna end up with change fatigue, [00:05:00] as I just heard from several senior leaders in the Army.
I went to a defense leaders breakfast, spoke to some of the commanders in charge. They were the panel speakers. And I asked them, "What do you see that is actually happening with your people?" And they straightaway unanimously said, "Change fatigue." So that means leaders have a golden opportunity to go about driving the change and rolling out the change and letting people, you know, own that change, to go about it differently.
Because otherwise, you're setting yourself up for failure in advance. And let's be honest, all of us who have ever gone through a massive IT transformational project with a new ERP system, a new CRM system, or anything else like that, you know how complex it gets and how easily frustrated people get, and how low the adoption rates can be if it's not executed well.
And that's again [00:06:00] where I see that all commercial leaders, whether general leaders like CEO, C-suite, general managers, directors, heads of departments, and the likes, if those people need to get their people on board, this is an opportunity for you here to start wearing the bespoke suit where every piece of communication is tailored to the receiver.
Almost like, having all of the typical music, channels in terms of radio stations all under one roof. So if somebody's really attuned with hip-hop, you can speak to them in hip-hop language. If somebody's very classical music-minded, you can speak to them in classical music ways. And if somebody is a lot more, say, R&B or pop or funk, again, you can cater for the needs of your people internally and externally.
Now, why would you again care about this? Well, if you don't get this right and you [00:07:00] keep wearing the off-the-shelf one, and you keep treating people, everybody the same way, you are guaranteed gonna have sooner or later great people leave your business, not because of the business, but because of them not feeling heard, acknowledged, respected, and valued the way they are by you and other people.
Two, there's also a serious risk that if conversations are had with staff members and some of those conversations don't land well, meaning people take offense, people get hurt, people feel that they were dismissed or not taken seriously or even belittled. If any of these things happen, you also might risk a legal claim against your business and potentially even personally.
And as a director or a business owner, that means that your own reputation is potentially on the [00:08:00] line. So that's another one. From a change impact perspective, of course, any time y- when you invest in a HubSpot, a Salesforce, a Microsoft Dynamics or any of these other systems, we all know that the larger your organization, the more money is going to be invested in just the IT.
But what about all the other costs involved? The costs of mistakes happening. The costs of, potential reputational damage. The costs of legal cases coming against you. The costs of great people walking out the door and basically having a higher turnover rate. All of these costs are real, and they are on the back of serious change.
So whether that's IT related, it is a change in marketing approach, it is a change in sales, a change in service, it does [00:09:00] not matter. If it's even a merger or your business was just bought by and it needs to be amalgamated and centralized, or there's a huge restructure on the cards.
So for all these costs and many more, it's important that we get our communication engagement strategies right. The costs are real. The opportunities are real too. And organizations that get this right, they really see a lot of uplift in key performance indicators of a successful, healthy business. Other reasons, by the way, if psychological safety is important to you and inclusion, and if, staff engagement is important and retention, all of these factors are directly related to how leaders show up and how leaders treat their people.
From a sales perspective, once again, the same psychological principles of human behavior apply. And as I said before, [00:10:00] people are predictable One key thing that I keep talking about is doing assessments and profiling of your people. Because the more of that data you have available, the more you can put that data to work for your organization to improve all the key metrics that make up a healthy organization and a very profitable business as well.
From a sales perspective, we all know that great salespeople, you don't find them easily. They are the bespoke tailor-made suits in a sea of large department stores with off-the-shelf product. And so whether you are in engineering or you are in IT or you are in financial services or professional services or any of the others, manufacturing perhaps, your salespeople largely are an expense to your business, but they become a great [00:11:00] asset where the return on that investment made in those people can easily double, triple, quadruple, and sometimes even do times 10 with a bespoke salesperson compared to an off-the-shelf one.
So imagine now that if you have to employ 10 people in the same industry to generate the output and the productivity and the sales and the profit that one salesperson in contrast can do, this is where Elite really wins the race above anyone else. And I think the opportunity for anyone listening or watching this podcast, is to fully come to grasp with the opportunity.
That is to build capability, act internally and externally to have communication become a builder that fits like a bespoke suit on anyone's body, [00:12:00] whether they're slim or really wide. Each body type has a personal feel or a personal design that really is fit. And the better the fit, the easier it is to make it work as a leader and in business development and sales.
For example, consider this. If you're in sales and you're very relationship-focused, 'cause a lot of people in sales are people people. They are either very flamboyant and warm and charismatic and energetic, or they're very, methodical, step-by-step, easygoing, relaxed, and more like a listener than a talker type people.
Sometimes they're a mix of both too, but most of them are in there. Then there's also a few of them that either, depending on the product and service that they represent, will become more analytical and detailed or more results-driven and fast-paced and very kind of aggressive in their approach, or competitive call it.
This is all psychological makeups. [00:13:00] You have them in your sales team, and you have them in your leaders and in the rest of your team. All of these profiles act very predictably in the work environment with their other team members, with their bosses above, with people below. It all is very predictable what patterns they will do well in and where they will cause issues,
So if, for example, you know that you have an emerging leader that is a bit of a highly competitive person, and that really wants to push hard and has very high expectations, and sometimes also changes their tack pretty quickly. They often do a lot of damage along the way because they're not communicating enough and expecting everybody to be as fast as they are.
And so if that's the case, you can work with those people and slow them down where needed and give them the missing skills to better engage their people and get better results together with their [00:14:00] people. Right? These are all very predictable patterns. The second P that I haven't shared with you yet in this podcast is that issues with people are preventable because it's all based on what you got in-house.
Once you have the data, you can make very smart strategic decisions that increase all of your KPIs, all of your goals in a measurable way once you built the capability to fill the gaps. And I'd be really curious to hear what your thoughts are on this.
We started off this podcast talking about either the tailor-made suit versus the off-the-shelf suit, and the question then is which one would you prefer?
Most people would say, "You know what? After I've experienced what a tailored suit feels like on my body, I'd choose that anytime, especially if the money was not an issue." Obviously, you pay more for that. But guess what? As a leader, if you're the bespoke suit versus an off-the-shelf, [00:15:00] or as a BDM and sales professional, if you're the bespoke one, you will outdo anyone else around you because you're part of the elite.
And I think the more that organizations build that sort of eliteness in their ranks, in their company, the more their future is guaranteed because your competitive advantage is not just your product or your service. It is the people that actually are either selling it servicing it or implementing it.
And that is still, even in the age of AI, a human-to-human relationship. How that relationship pans out, how it's developed, what the conversations look like between two people and more people largely dictates the outcomes.
So this is again yet another episode of the Commercial Leader. Any thoughts or questions, I'd love to hear from you.
My name is Bram Lagrou. I look forward to seeing you again to the next one, and I appreciate you tuning in with us [00:16:00] anytime.
