Leadership Principles Flashcards
Customer Obsession
Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
Example- Bestbuy sale
Frankly, this has been part of my sales training from the beginning of my career. During my time at EMC and Syncsort, both companies focused on value-based selling methods. One of my better skills is managing the discovery process in my sales campaigns. If you get close to the customer and understand thir needs, not only do you have the upper hand in the deal. But you’ve also earned thier trust in the process. A recent win at bestbuy is a perfect example of this. I was able to understand their current need for a VDI project, but also gather information about future requirements on the same infrastructure and tied value around features my competition couldn’t offer.
Ownership
Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job”.
This one his particularly close to my current situation at Coho. Since the beginning of my tenure here, we’ve had lots of CHANGE. Changes in strategy, product, GTM, human resources etc. When I started at this company, my focus was player/coach role with the intention of building up the team. After the changes in our sales leadership, I’ve stepped up and handle the responsibiltiies for our VP of sales role. This means inventory planning, GTM messaging, interfacing with marketing and engineering to make progress on new releases. The point is, in an early-stage startup. I do several jobs, many of which are outside of sales. All of which require ownership and accountability
Invent and Simplify
Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here”. As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.
This is an interesting point, I’d argue it should be” re-invent.” Fact is, the ground beneath you can become hollow at any time. The moment you assume the same thing will work time & time again in this industry you’re wrong. Looks what’s happened to companies like EMC, Dell, HP IBM etc. Your competition is smart and trying to out innovate you at every turn. At my company, when we lost a significant portion of ou marketing and inside sales team. I led the effort to automate the email marketing efforts through my team’s sales efforts. We were able to automate almost 100k outbound emails monthly to our targeted prospects. Tough circumstances are often the best way to find more ways to become more effective. The show must continue.
Are Right, A Lot
Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.
Working in startups, every path taken is generally a new one. So many times, it’s not just about being absolutely right but also being expedient. So while offten times, I find myself huddling the team to debrief on a meeting. How we stack up against expectations, competition and best course of action. Being right is generally about making an informed decision and gaining consensus from those involved. I believe this compliments other leadership principles like being obessed with your customers and digging deep. Being right is a 360 degree thing.
Learn and Be Curious
Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them.
In my career, I’ve had the opportunity to sell lots of different products. I consider myself a student of the industry. Which in my case means incessant nightly reading of google alerts. Often gives me an ability to sometimes disarm a potential prospect and share my opinions about the industry and the tech in a more meaningful way. I like to learn first because i’m a technologist at heart and engineer many moons ago. However, nothing is more embarassing than being misinformed. In order to gain trust, one must be certain of your talk track.
Hire and Develop The Best
Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.
In my most recent role, I’ve had the pleasure of building and managing my own team. This has been one of the most exciting and challenging times in my career. Since leadership is about mentoring and stepping in when your team needs your help. At Coho, I pride myself on developing my people. I personally trained them, had them shadow my meetings. Recorded several conference calls and videos about being more effective in the field. I also trainings on specific topics to help my team become more effective and make sure a campaign is tight and repeatlable.
Insist on the Highest Standards
Leaders have relentlessly high standards - many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver high quality products, services and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.
As a current sales leader, this particular pillar is critical to leadership. If you want to hold others accountable, you’ve got to live by the same standards. In my current role, I have weekly calls with support to discuss active tickets and possible resolutions to ensure the customer knows issues are being moved forward. Integrity is a very important aspect of building trust. Customers want to know someone is in thier “corner” advocating for thier success. One of my managers at EMC said something to me that always stuck. Sell yourself, sell the company, then sell the product
Think Big
Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers.
I believe thinking big is often a matter of setting higher goals of yourself both personally and professionally. I’ve always set pretty clear goals from being an inside sales person, to handling named accounts at EMC. Coming to Coho was an opportunity to lead and start a business from scratch. I feel like i’ve accomplished a bunch here, but my skills today are focused around improving my business acumen and ability to execute customer successes. At Coho, I’ve been directly responsible for multiple public customer case studies. I consider myself thinking big about AWS because, it’s a change i’d want to make not need to make. If you look at case studies like Capital One, it’s amazing to see a banking organization commit to public infrastructure at that type of scale and industry. Clearly, the FUD around public cloud has really turned a corner.
Bias for Action
Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking.
I agree with this school of thought generally. In my time at Coho, time is your enemy. The deals we’ve been most successful, have been ones where we might fail and keep working through issues. Issues inevitably come up, but there are never perfect conditions for a drag race. Here are Coho, we recently won a transaction at Bestbuy Canada because we ran a highly informative sales campaign in 2 meetings to close over a competitor because the competition was posturing over pricing. Sometimes you just have to strike first and set the table.
Frugality
Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense.
As you can imagine, this isn’t an area we typically have a problem in. Funding in startups is tight and dollars are very wisely spent. Even with the significant decrease in marketing spend. We were able to maintain the same amount of activity and create better quality pipeline by focusing more successful use cases for the product. At this point, we implemented a named account strategy and more specific qualification criteria before moving deals forward.
Earn Trust
Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.
Every team, every campaign, every customer is different. Therefore, what’s most important is understanding who can help you drive the opportunity forward at various stages. I’ve used every single leader in my organization to overcome objections. For example, I had a customer that had concerns about out level of integration, knowledge and support for VMware products. Knowing that we were a TAP alliance partner and had a roster of qualified personnel. I orchestrated discussions with this group to ensure the customer was able to press the flesh with the team that would support them ultimately. It’s small gestures like this that earn trust. My goal with a customer is to become a trusted advisor and someone they can speak with about issues they’d like to address. Funny enough, one of my former managers called me the “storage psychiatrist” because of my commitment to understand their needs.
Dive Deep
Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them.
I’ve experienced this a bunch most recently in my time at FIO and Coho where POCs are very common. You have to measure twice, cut once and still brace for impact. Since I work in a very flat organization, I’m part of the entire lifecycle of a deal. Because of that, we’ve often discover new ways to improve certain processes to ensure more transparency across the team. This often goes hand-hand with having a backbone and maintaining high standards.
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.
This is the achilles heal of a small business. Sales needs features, engineers build things that are cool. Marketing isn’t creating enough leads. Sounds like a pretty typical recipe in a small organization. However, one of the key things I’ve learned is you must point out areas that require improvement. In my time at Coho, i’ve provided clear arguments that have enabled a change in our architecture. Because of common customer experiences and feedback during pilots and deployments. It’s not easy to tell a co-founder(s) his product needs work in a constructive manner. Being positive and constructive during these interactions are imperative and really help the team get behind a transformation when required.
Deliver Results
Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.
In my career, I pride myself on attention to detail and active listening. Making sure the deal and process is well understood. Bringing my team and mgmt into the win together. Therefore it’s never a surprise when business comes by generally. Inevitably, at Coho we often find ourselves developing creative language or terms to give customers the comfort level to execute. Delivering results comes back to understanding your risks and overcoming objections with solutions. In many cases that means pulling together other areas to help you bridge the gap. (operations, eStaff, engineering etc)
