Todd Bida

Gratitude to Em Beihold and Leah Leach for a great show last night in 02138 and for spreading the word about www.activeminds.org/

Em Beihold is an empathetic voice of this generation on the mental health crisis in young adults: speaking up on the challenges and opportunities of opening the aperture…expanding the dialogue…and normalizing the broader/deeper conversation and engagement on young adult mental health issues that are rampant today.

The melding of mental health and music comes naturally to Beihold, who began writing at the family piano when she was just 7 years old. “Writing has always been my therapy; I was always going to be writing regardless of whether there was any success attached to it because that’s what made me feel alive and OK,” she says.

Founded 20 years ago, and now with a presence at more than 800 campuses, schools, communities, and workplaces each year, Active Minds works to reduce the stigma surrounding young adult mental mental health, creating communities of support, and saving lives. Our proven approach is unique to Active Minds – reaching 1.8 million people nationwide last year alone.

Mental health issues among young adults are on the rise. They are especially pronounced among Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) young adults.

Through award-winning programs and services and with a health equity lens, Active Minds is inspiring and empowering a new generation to change the mental health culture on campuses, in schools, in the workplace, and across communities.

Sales Coaching from The Boss: “You have to first take your mind to where you hope your ass will follow.”

Bruce Springsteen’s ‘mental jiu-jitsu’ (aka cognitive reframing) and strong work ethic was the spark for this riff on the value of digging into the 'every day’ for frontline sellers. (Shout out to Billy Oppenheimer for the source post.)

The Spark

“It’s like anything else: you have to first take your mind to where you hope your ass will follow. You’ve got to imagine the person you want to be before you can become that person. But then you need to acquire the skills to actually become that person…(but)…most people …don’t do the work to acquire the skills.” — Bruce Springsteen

On May 2, 1972, Bruce Springsteen auditioned for the record producer John Hammond. Hammond had signed icons like Bob Dylan and Aretha Franklin—two of Springsteen’s heroes.
“I would’ve been in a state of complete panic,” Springsteen said, “except on the way up in the elevator, I performed a little mental jiu-jitsu on myself.”
“I thought, ‘I’ve got nothing to lose…The worst thing that can happen is I come out of here exactly as I am…If nothing happens, I’m going to walk out of here the same person as when I walked in.’”
With this mindset, Springsteen said, instead of panicking, he walked out of the elevator feeling confident.
Hammond said, “play me something.” “When I was done I looked up,” Springsteen writes, “and I heard him say, ‘You’ve got to be on Columbia Records. That was wonderful.“

The Riff

HOW was Springsteen able to switch gears and get his BEHAVIOR to overrule his panic ATTITUDE to fuel his success?

Before Springsteen walked in to audition for John Hammond, he had generated a lot of evidence:
“I had a lot of experience when I got signed,” he says in the video below. “I’d been playing everywhere—every fireman’s fair, every bowling alley, every pizza parlor—for 8 or 9 years by that point.
I’d played a thousand nights, I’d played for a lot of people, and I’d heard a lot of applause before I walked in to see John Hammond.”
So when he walked in to see John Hammond, Springsteen had confidence. 

To ‘bring it home’ for your sellers: Springsteen gives us a great example of people can only manage what they can control. For your sellers that’s what they do (or don’t do) every day.

Long before meeting Hammond, Springsteen had reverse engineered his ‘sales funnel’ and had taken control of his consistent every day BEHAVIOR: ’playing everywhere’ all the time.

Coming off the elevator, Springsteen reminded himself he couldn’t control the outcome of the Hammond conversation, so he set aside his panic ATTITUDE and just did the 'every day’ BEHAVIOR he’d become good at.

What’s the behavioral plan for your sellers (or you as a sales leader) to know and DO what needs to happen every single day in order to make your success an ongoing reality?

'Find out what you’re afraid of and then go do it anyway…with discipline, vitality, and guts’. 

“The Mundanity of Excellence.”

Olympic champions don’t train more than the average swimmer. Instead, they train differently. In particular, they do “what others see as boring.”

From a recent Billy Oppenheimer post:

Thirty-eight years into being a stand-up comedian, Jerry Seinfeld was asked how his daily work routine has evolved over the years. “It’s the exact same,” he said. “I do the exact same now as I did when I was 21 in 1975.” He sits down with a yellow legal pad, he said, and “my writing technique is just: You can’t do anything else. You don’t have to write, but you can’t do anything else.”

That’s your day? the interviewer asks. That’s what you’ve done every day for thirty-eight years? That, to me, sounds torturous. “It is,” Seinfeld admits. “But you know what? Your blessing in life is when you find the torture you’re comfortable with…Find the torture you’re comfortable with, and you’ll do well.”

+++

In the early 1980s, the sociologist Daniel Chambliss spent 5 years studying swimmers at every level of ability.

In 1989, he published his research in a paper, “The Mundanity of Excellence.” Essentially, Chambliss found that Olympic champions don’t train more than the average swimmer. Instead, they train differently. In particular, they do “what others see as boring.”

Chambliss tells the story of a group of coaches from around the world visiting a U.S. Olympic Team practice. “The visiting coaches were excited at first…then soon they grew bored, walking back and forth, glancing down at their watches, wondering, after the long flight out to California, when something dramatic was going to happen.”

“They all have to come to see what we do,” the U.S. Olympic Team coach said. “They think we have some big secret.”

There is no secret. There is only the doing of the mundane, boring, torturous work, day after day. Find the mundane, boring, torturous work you like, as Seinfeld said, “and you’ll do well.”

Continuous improvement

It’s either an aspirational buzzword or it’s embedded in your company’s mojo. It works better when culture is paired with tools to fuel a flywheel of problem-solving and optimization. 

Quantum Metric posted a related riff a while back with Andrew Glover at Netflix on the magic that happens when single-source-of-truth signals/insights are stack-ranked by value and autonomously routed/wired into next-best-actions that matter most.

Yes, Quantum Metric fuels Netflix continuous product improvement, but their impact is even more compelling in the context of how Netflix culture organizationally aligns on, demands, and supports its team members who never cease ”Seeking Excellence” everywhere else throughout the company as well.

Excerpts from Netflix’s Culture mantra https://lnkd.in/eUNs2PJb are here:

Dream Team
We model ourselves on being a professional sports team, not a family. A family is about unconditional love. A dream team is about pushing yourself to be the best possible teammate, caring intensely about your team, and knowing that you may not be on the team forever. Dream teams are about performance, not seniority or tenure.
Honest, Productive Feedback
At Netflix, positive and constructive feedback is part of everyday life—not only an annual event. Meaningful feedback can be hard to give or accept. But like any new habit, it gets easier with practice. So we help people learn to give and receive feedback through coaching and modeling the behaviors we want to see across the company. It takes courage and selflessness to ask someone what you could be doing better, or to ask yourself what feedback you have yet to share with a colleague. Both rely on trust and positive intent, which is why we invest time in developing strong professional relationships. We know this level of candor can be especially challenging for new hires, people in parts of the world or cultures where direct feedback is uncommon, and if there’s a power imbalance. But it is an important part of getting stronger, as individuals and as a company, because it’s what fuels our dream team.

Does this sound like your company? If not…carpe diem…life’s too short to sub-optimize where/how you create value and make a positive impact.

—
Spark for this post: https://lnkd.in/eUYcttnk Netflix strong earnings out this past week.

If you can “use the difficulty just ¼ of 1% you come out ahead”.

Sir Michael Caine announced his retirement from acting this morning (at the celebrated age of 90). I’m reminded of his powerful professional and personal mindset: shared here and initially sparked for me by a chance meeting with him many years ago.

Carpe diem…

Tell a more valuable story

Required in this economic environment: relentless, selective, motivated RELEVANT outbounds to crush your quota. Nobody needs your Salesloft-generated spam. (Special thanks to the Databook team).

Pipeline may ‘cure all’, but only when built through persistent relevant account-based cultivation of coaches, champions, and economic buyers within each prospect. How: with prospect-relevant informed outreaches. Quality and relevance in your outreaches does not guarantee success…but will always outperfom SPAM and doing so trains you - the seller - to better build substantive connections in an otherwise noisy market.

Crucial also is the alignment of marketing and sales to back-stop & fuel frontline sellers with value-based, account-based messaging that is consistently broadcast at all touchpoints. With marketing and sales saying the same thing to prospects, sellers can better leverage differentiation and dial-in with account-based specificity on each prospect’s pain points with platforms like RollWorks.

The impact: shortened sales cycles, increased deal sizes, maintained margins, better-blocked competition, and increased conversion rates.

More about account-based mareketing: its roots trace to the groundbreaking thinking of Martha Rogers and Don Peppers in the early 1990’s. Gartner’s 2022 Magic Quadrant maps out significant resources in the space today.

Pipeline Cures All

Instructive post for sales leaders from Joe Morrissey on mindset, tool, and capability shifting sales teams to inject OUTBOUND into their DNA and daily operating rhythms.

(Outbound) can be a real shock to the inbound-driven, “create and close” culture of many growth stage startups. For most sales reps and frontline managers, building pipeline is the least fun part of the job, and very few account executives (AEs) or frontline managers will want to do the grunt work of cold outreach. As a result, just telling your sales team to “build more pipeline” can be a bit like screaming “get more goals!” at the scoreboard.

Your top sellers are already doing this…they did not become top sellers by order-taking on inbound leads. The requirement, in every kind of market is to set up the outboud flywheel mindset and practice for the rest of your driven sellers to adopt as their own. (Those sellers who don’t adopt can become someone else’s headache.) The following is an abbreviated wayfinding checklist from the full artcle for ensuring that your sales team is equipped to own and execute:

Create a playbook
Culture alone doesn’t make an effective outbound motion. You also need an outbound playbook so your team has a clear and consistent method and message when building pipeline. One of the best ways to create a playbook is to set up a tiger team with individuals from different key GTM functions to:

Prioritize: What are the top target accounts and buyer personas?
Research: What should SDRs be looking for, both internally in customer and intent data and externally in annual reports and 10Q forms, when researching accounts on their list?
Tools & KPIs: What, if any, new tools will the team need? What activities, by channel, will they be measured on each day, week, month, and quarter?
Outbound messaging and sequences: How will you ensure messaging is relevant, timely, and targeted?
AE & SDR partnership: How will AEs and SDRs work together? What information do SDRs need to provide in their pre-meeting notes for AEs?
Discovery process: What does a great discovery meeting look like? What high yield questions should we ask?
Qualification process: What’s the best way to uncover and test a potential champion? How will the customer determine success and what metrics will they use?
Execute: What constitutes a qualified business meeting?

Once you’ve outlined the playbook and reviewed all of the sections with the appropriate cross-functional stakeholders, it’s time to build the materials—messaging and sales enablement, account/prospect prioritization dashboards, account research templates, AE:SDR 1:1 templates, SDR qualification guides, and so on—to onboard and train your sales organization.

You can’t forecast your way to growth

As People.ai’s Art Harding points out in a recent article, pipeline quality will strengthen forecast accuracy more than any standalone visualization or forecast data entry tool. 

Pipeline generation is a data-driven process, which when optimized, must stack-rank and convert multiple data points into serially actionable insights for:

• sales leadership to inspire, coach, inspect, and hold their team accountable
• sellers to consistently achieve better outcomes: higher conversion rates, larger deals, more renewals, shortened cycle times, and better margins.

No company today can afford forecasting calls filled with wishful thinking that leave people feeling like deck chairs are getting rearranged on the Titanic: some accurate data, some fantasy, all adjusted with arbitrary changes to CRM values, and re-packaged as reliable, when it’s not.

The antidote: AI to drive the aggregation of disparate data points into actionable insights to accelerate GTM success. Companies like People.ai are leading the way in helping their customers get the GTM outcomes they require.

In the article, Art maps out a path forward for sales leaders to course-correct with confidence and clarity: transforming business activities like email, call notes, research, and meetings, and aggregating those disparate data silos through AI-fueled account and opportunity management tools that increase sales rep productivity, accelerate revenue growth, and maximize ROI. Better collected, better contextualized, and stack-ranked data will fuel better outcomes now, while there is still time to improve multi-threading, drive or shape future meetings, and penetrate key buying centers on every open opportunity.

..the forecast call has been the center of the world for sales leaders and sales operations, and requires teams from across the organization to consistently capture and roll up qualitative and quantitative data points about the past, present, and future.

….modernized organizations do not require sales teams to perform heavy data entry for activity capture. Instead, these forward-looking organizations ask the sales team to provide valuable context and direction about an account or contact with little more effort than a few simple points and clicks.

Build coaching capability throughout all levels of your management team

As Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular pointed out in a 2019 ‘new classic’ HBR article: Rapid, constant, and disruptive change is now the norm, and traditional command-and-control management practices don’t work. The role of the manager, in short, is becoming that of a coach.

This is a good reference article on how to transform your approach and model behavior to enhance the positive impact of all levels of your management team.