Unless you’re stuck on a remote island with no means of communication with the outside world, you have likely witnessed the recent public outcry for President Obama to display more emotions when dealing with the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.  As the media continues to debate the pros and cons of rational versus emotional decision-making, I started thinking about how much discussion I’ve seen around emotions recently in the business world.

Recently, two of our sister programs conducted independent studies on completely different topics  yet came to a similar conclusion that emotional arguments often trump rational ones.

-    The Customer Contact Council focused their study on identifying the drivers of customer effort as a way to mitigate customer disloyalty in the service channel. The study revealed that customer effort is largely driven by how customers feel during their service interaction versus what they do.  The breakdown is one-third “do” and two-thirds “feel.”

-    The Communications Executive Council studied what makes different stakeholders more likely to actively support the company and found that “emotional connection” with a company far outpaced all other factors, including actual company experiences, corporate citizenship, and business strength.

So, what about Sales? When trying to close a deal, are we missing the point by focusing on such practical arguments as “we offer the highest ROI” or “we have the lowest prices” instead of targeting customers’ right side of the brain?   Read More »

I was talking to the global VP of Sales of a member company  the other day, and she said something that made me think of, arguably, the biggest social phenomenon of the 21^st century – the power of social networking , and the role it plays (or could play) in the world of Sales.

The member said, “I love what my twenty-eight-year-old MBA graduates bring to the table, I just can’t stand the way they communicate.”

At the risk of stereotyping, I’d agree that Millenials are generally more informal and bold than the corporate world would like, but they are also more willing to share and listen to each other.

This makes me wonder, in an age when one can have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook and can summarize “War and Peace” in less than 140 characters on Twitter, why wouldn’t sales organizations encourage these informal networks among its sales force for collaboration and sharing of customer insight? 

A study done by The Network Roundtable at the University of Virginia found that networks play a critical role in organizational excellence by feeding organizational innovation, creating sources of competitive advantage, and improving staff engagement and quality of work life. 

So, why not capitalize on these benefits by giving employees an outlet for sharing their knowledge and experience? And, more importantly, why not use this channel to push frontline knowledge to the top? Read More »