8
Experiment and Take Risks
MADDIE FLETCHER KNOWS EXACTLY HOW LONG it took for one beverage company to give her a chance: 198 days. During that time, Maddie doggedly emailed, called, dropped by, and texted regularly. She knew her company could succeed where multiple suppliers had failed. She just needed a chance to prove it.
Her prospect had only been in business a year, offering fresh, full-flavored craft beverages with all-natural ingredients and no GMOs. The founders' vision was to support nonprofit and community events to uplift and unite people. But first they needed a package design that would get them into retail outlets and consumers' hands. They had a great design concept. They just couldn't find a supplier who could bring their vision to life.
After working with several packaging, labeling, and printing companies, they turned to Maddie and were interested in seeing what her family-owned company could do to create expressive package decoration leading to meaningful consumer brand awareness. After six months of frustrating trial and error with other suppliers, this buyer was relieved to find a seller like Maddie.
The hurdle for other suppliers was applying the label the way they wanted. It was to be thin, form-fitting to their uniquely shaped bottle, vibrant, tamper proof, and providing 360-degree coverage with a seam that was precisely positioned and barely visible. These custom specifications were usually for high-volume orders, but this company was selling just 30,000 units a year.
Maddie went to work with the design team on form, fit, and function. Despite the low volume, they designed a full-body shrink sleeve to fit the bottle size and shape. The sleeve covered the entire bottle, top to bottom, with perfect seam placement. They approached this challenge as engineers would; testing each modification along the way. They experimented and went back to the drawing board several times. They used a full array of quality assurance tools, involving a series of testing and inspection processes. They verified density and depth of color to scientifically match the color and ink impression and then tested each color in a full range of lighting environments to be certain it was precisely and consistently what the buyer wanted.
This effort was exactly what the buyer had been hoping for. The look, feel, and vibe of the bottle was everything they'd imagined. Thanks, in part, to the packaging design, sales the following year surpassed 100,000 bottles. Because of the job's complexity, Maddie's company won a prestigious industry award, given to only eight other labels from around the world.
To achieve the extraordinary, you must be willing, like Maddie, to do things that have never been done before. You have to investigate unproven strategies. You have to break out of the norms that box you in, venture beyond the limitations you usually place on yourself and others, try new things, and take chances.
There's a statistically significant relationship between the extent that sellers report that they experiment and take risks, even when there is a chance of failure, and their productivity. Those who most frequently engage in this leadership behavior report a productivity rate that is three to four times that reported by sellers at the other end of the continuum.
Leaders take this one step further. Not only are they willing to test bold ideas and take calculated risks, but they also get others to join them on these adventures in uncertainty. The difference between an exemplary leader and an individual risk taker is that leaders create the conditions under which people want to join them in the struggle.
Paradoxically, leaders make risk safe. They turn experiments into learning opportunities. They position change as putting one foot in front of the other, step-by-step, toward the vision rather than employing bet-the-company tactics or taking foolhardy actions.
Exemplary leaders make the commitment to Experiment and Take Risks. They know it's essential to
- Generate small wins
- Learn from experience
These essentials help you transform challenge into an exploration, uncertainty into an adventure, fear into resolve, and risk into reward. They are the keys to making progress that becomes unstoppable.
Generate Small Wins
Leaders dream big but start small. They set milestones along the way to measure progress and keep the project moving forward. They celebrate incremental victories along the way and generate momentum with small wins. A small win is defined as “a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance.”1 Small wins make big projects seem doable. They minimize the risk of trying and reduce the costs of failing. Once people achieve a small win and feel successful, it sets in motion natural forces that build momentum and favors progress over setbacks.
As a seller, you know the benefits of small wins. Each advancing step a buyer makes through your pipeline represents a small win. Each micro-commitment a buyer makes—to research your products, review your content, take your call, book an appointment, answer your questions, hear your demo, consider your solution, champion your vision inside the organization—is a small win for you. Each progressive step makes you feel successful and boosts motivation so you will take the next step and the next step, until you reach your goal.
As a leader, you also must create small wins for your buyers and internal partners. They need to feel successful, too, and this motivates them to take the next steps toward your shared vision. Imagine what it's like for buyers like Kelly. She oversees learning and development for a North American shipping company. The inside sales team, based in eight locations, keeps expanding and now numbers nearly 250 agents. New hires often leave within six months, citing an inability to succeed because there's no sales training. Kelly doesn't have a sales background and doesn't have anyone on her team who could develop a sales training curriculum. She needs an external resource to help her develop and deliver on-boarding and selling skills training.
Kelly has been trying to get budget approval and move this project forward for two years. The problem keeps growing—seemingly constant hiring of new sales agents, continual turnover, disappointing sales numbers due to retention issues, frustrated sales managers, lost sales opportunities, and lots of pressure on her to get training in place. When Kelly finally received budget approval, it came with one key condition: gain consensus from all eight regional sales directors about the training vendor and program. Kelly was shocked that they did not immediately accept her recommendation to use the training company she'd selected after an exhaustive search and comparative analysis. She felt as though she was back at square one, with three of the sales directors lobbying hard for sales trainers they'd worked with before.
If you were the seller Kelly had originally selected, you'd want her to feel committed to you. You'd want her to feel motivated and inspired by the shared vision you'd created with her. You'd also want her to feel so strongly about doing business with you that she wouldn't cave in to the regional sales managers' demands, something she might be tempted to do just to start this project.
Your role as a leader is to prepare people like Kelly for moments like these. Along the way, small wins might have helped Kelly be a stronger internal champion and put this training program in place sooner. With coaching, she might have been able to win those regional directors over, one by one. With some sample tools from training, she might have been able to demonstrate early success with a pilot program. Booking a meeting for your training company to present to sales directors would also have been a small win, one that would have increased familiarity and top of mind awareness. These incremental successes would have empowered Kelly to proactively pursue change.
There's a delicate balance in play here. The shared vision between a buyer and a seller must be big enough to be exciting and ennobling. But it can't be so bold that it seems impossible and overwhelming. While buyers are reaching for great heights, you want them to feel excited by the possibilities, not fearful of failure. You must break the work down into small steps to make it something they want to be involved in and are committed to long term.
With any change, there will be hiccups, hardships, and setbacks. Leaders aren't able to eliminate all the struggles, but they are able to help people feel supported even as they are struggling. That's what Kelly needs in her current situation, a seller who will step in as a leader so she doesn't feel alone, unsupported, anxious, and frustrated.
Supporting others in challenging situations is easier to do when you have fortitude, stamina, and thick skin of your own. Psychologists have discovered that people who experience a high degree of stress and yet can cope with it in a positive manner have a distinctive attitude, one they call “psychological hardiness.”2 People with high psychological hardiness are much more likely to withstand serious challenges and bounce back from failure than those with low hardiness.3 Hardiness is a quality people can learn and leaders can support.
Haley Katsman told us how she found herself in a situation that most sellers experience at some time in their careers. For Haley, it was when she was a field sales rep at a software startup. She juggled inbound leads, generated her own outbound leads, and closed deals. She saw opportunity with a mid-size technology company and had attempted to make inroads with numerous contacts in the organization. She hoped to generate interest and find an internal champion. After numerous emails, voice mails, and social connections, she finally received a response from a potential decision-maker. She opened the email with great anticipation, but it wasn't what she'd hoped to see.
I was immediately disheartened. It was such a brutal response. He began by telling me that he wasn't interested and critiqued each line of my email. I was first surprised, then irritated, and then angry. After staring at my computer screen for a few minutes, I took a deep breath and thought about how I would respond.
Instead of deleting his email or sending a rude response, I used this opportunity to try to build a relationship. I read his email again, without assuming bad intention. I considered his advice and sent a response that acknowledged each of his comments. I explained how we might be able to help him and his team based on the points from his email. I also put together a pitch deck, tailored to his team and company. It was definitely a long shot, but I figured it was worth a try.
Haley demonstrated the three ingredients of psychological hardiness—commitment, control, and challenge—in responding to a setback. She turned adversity into advantage and committed herself to doing something about it. She took control of the situation, rather than letting it control her. She didn't sit back and wait. Instead of seeing the situation as a threat, she saw it as a new challenge. She seized the opportunity to learn and decided to try to make something happen, even though it was a long shot.
Before the day's end, I received a phone call from the prospect. I was shocked. His opening line was an apology for being so rude in his initial response. He proceeded to tell me that he was very impressed with my email and the pitch deck, plus the fact that he'd received a response at all. He wanted to set up a meeting to learn more about our platform. Fast forward three months later, and I received a signed contract from this same prospect. Some of my best wins come from unexpected or unusual scenarios.
As Haley's experience demonstrates, the ability to cope with disappointments and challenges depends on your mindset. To respond the way Haley did, you must believe you can influence the outcome. You must remain open to the possibilities and look for ways to learn at every turn. With a hardy attitude, you can transform stressful events into positive opportunities for growth and renewal. And you can help buyers feel the same way.
Haley's story has a happy ending. She turned the critical prospect into a satisfied customer. Her real win, though, came from her mindset when she wrote that response. She saw a way to reclaim something positive from the exchange, and she proved to herself that she was strong in standing proud.
Learn from Experience
Mindset matters.4 If you believe you are powerless to effect change, you'll miss your opportunities to do so. Instead of learning from challenges and disappointments, you'll feel negatively about them. Negativity is contagious and repels buyers. When you fail, look for ways to reframe your failures as learning and growth experiences.
You can formalize this process and conduct “lessons learned” reviews. With your buyers or internal partners, talk openly about what worked and what did not. Don't dwell on blame or shame for what didn't work. Instead, ask what you could do differently next time. Make it a priority to learn together anytime things don't go as expected. One buyer told us such “lessons learned” meetings with sellers were very important, a top priority. Another said, “It's good to work together as a team and to go over things—positive as well as negative—and to think about how we can better ourselves and the company in the future.”
For some sellers, the idea of baring your failures and errors to buyers may seem strange. But consider these three very important truths:
Your Buyers Already Know Something Didn't Go as Planned or Promised.
Concealing mistakes plants seeds of doubt in the buyer's mind. They may wonder if you're aware of the mistakes. If it appears you're not aware, they may feel apprehensive because now there's a good chance the mistakes could happen again. Buyers need to know you're in control when there are mistakes. You want your buyers to feel the way this one did after a problem occurred: “The product had an issue, and the seller was helpful with fixing it, by listening and being open and honest. The seller came up with solutions on how to prevent this from happening again. It made me feel great, less stressed, and more confident in the seller as a long-term partner.”
When You Acknowledge Mistakes and Seize Opportunities to Learn from Failure, You Set a Standard for Your Buyers.
Perhaps they won't let their fear of failure prevent them from taking risks to champion your shared vision when the going gets tough. You want your buyers to think of you the way this one thinks: “I have a vendor that often faces issues with their raw material suppliers. They always focus on our relationship first. Then they look for creative ways of overcoming the obstacle. It's all out in the open. I've learned a lot from their approach.”
Being Vulnerable and Open Makes You More Trustworthy.
In the buyer/seller relationship, trust is hard to build and easy to lose. Being transparent keeps buyers like this one happy: “There was a problem with an order I placed with the seller. They were on the ball communicating with us, no smoke and mirrors, and they did everything in their power to make sure we were happy. They gave us a discount for the mistake they made, and they were very professional. It made us have confidence in that company and trust in those sales people.”
Failure is bound to happen at some point when you're pursuing possibilities and challenging the status quo. It's what you do in response to the failure that matters most. That's what experimentation is all about, and that's how you should think about it even before you begin. There's bound to be trial and error involved in testing new concepts, new methods, and new practices. Your buyers don't expect perfection. They expect effort to prevent problems as well as acknowledgment when failures or setbacks do occur. You can proactively set expectations on the front end, too, so no one is surprised when learning opportunities manifest.
There are opportunities for learning in everything you do. Learning is essential for leading. In fact, the best leaders are the best learners. A series of empirical studies sought to find out whether leaders learned differently from others; was there something special or unique about their learning styles?5 The studies concluded that you could learn leadership in a variety of ways, and certain learning styles contribute to more effectiveness in some leadership practices than others do, but there is no one best style for learning everything there is to know about leadership. The style is not what led to achievement.
What turned out to be most important was the extent to which individuals engaged in whatever learning style worked for them. As you are learning to lead your buyers, dedicate time to learning. Throw yourself wholeheartedly into experimenting, reflecting, reading, or receiving coaching—do more of whatever learning approach works for you.
Learning is a master skill. In a rapidly changing world, it's also a survival skill. Your willingness and capability to learn from experience and to subsequently apply that learning to perform in different situations and circumstances will make you more successful.6 This is the concept of learning agility. People who are highly agile learners continuously seek out new challenges, actively seek feedback from others to grow and develop, tend to self-reflect, and evaluate their experiences so they can draw practical conclusions.
When you demonstrate openness to learning and willingness to grow, you create a climate in which others can learn, too. As a leader, you'll have to model some vulnerability to let people know you're serious about learning. Ask your buyers for feedback about how you're doing. Learn from constructive criticism even though it stings to hear it. View the success of others as an inspiration and not as a threat. When you believe you can continuously learn, you will. Only those who believe they can get better make an effort to do so.
The climate for learning starts with what you model and grows when there is a high degree of trust. Without trust, people can't be vulnerable enough to admit when they don't know something or to ask for help. This is one reason why you must build trust before you openly challenge your buyers. When trust has been established, they'll understand your positive intentions whenever you challenge them. They can have a more open and honest dialogue in response to your challenging questions. Without trust, they'll assume your challenges are self-serving. They may become defensive and agitated. No one can learn when these unproductive assumptions and responses take over.
With a climate of learning, you can facilitate brainstorming and idea generation, along with discussion about how to improve and how to achieve your shared vision. You can make it fun to learn and dismantle some of your buyers' natural aversions to taking risks. The openness and experience of learning can contribute to the awesome connecting experience your buyers desire. Part of that experience, buyers told us, is how much they like it when sellers ask questions that make them pause and think. Buyers are busy, and they may not slow down to reflect on long-term vision and big-picture thinking. They may not set aside and dedicate time for learning. When you bring learning into their experience with you, you create value for the buyer that is relevant and timely.
Persevering and believing deep down that you can make an impact will set you apart as a leader. Devoting yourself to continuous learning and growing will strengthen your will and your skill. You will overcome great odds, make progress, change the way things are, and achieve extraordinary sales results.