It’s an exercise I have found helpful for setting goals and developing plans, even if I have often found a way to retain a theme simply by changing the word.

I have kept this practice since 2013 and here is my history of this exercise.

2013: Platform. Lean. Tribes.
2014: Pivot. Frames. Margin.
2015: Order. Depth. Lifestyle.
2016: Growth. Multiplier. Focus
2017: Integrated. Impeccable. Essential.
2018: Polaris. Via Negativa. Leverage.
2019: Velocity. Execution. Potential.
2020: Intentional. Lines. Performance.

A year is 8,760 hours. We perceive time as scarce because we overestimate what we can do in a day (and by a wide margin, deluding ourselves about what is possible in twenty-four hours). However, we underestimate–by an even wider margin–what we can accomplish in a week, a month, a quarter, a year, or especially a decade.

My Three Words for 2021

Here are my three words for 2021 with a short description.

1. Deepen

The charge here is to go deeper. To read deeper. To think deeper and produce works with greater depth, work of greater import, and weight. It’s also an intention to improve by working on the internal, to be more introspective, to deepen all my practices.

2. Polish

Polish commands that one make something smooth and shiny. It is to refine something, and by doing so, improving it. Apple is an excellent example of a company that excels at “polish,” where even the box that contains a device is beautiful, positively contributing to the experience. “Polish” also speaks to the surface of things, making it the perfect counter to deepen. Every holon has an inside and an outside.

3. Slow

There is no mystery around this word. Productivity, a measure of work, is often confused with tasks and busywork. Real productivity is a measure of the value of the work you complete, the work’s outcome, the impact of the work, and the contribution it makes towards your goals. Going slow gets more done at a higher level of quality, increasing your effectiveness.

Whenever you set a standard, it’s worth writing down a set of questions to test whether you are meeting it.

• Is this work deep enough to be both meaningful and useful?
• Is this work polished? Is it beautiful?
• Does this work need more time?

Happy New Year!

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If you’re a sales manager or CEO, send this to the entire sales team and put them on notice that they will be held to account. If you’re an individual sales contributor, address all of these issues now to save your career. I’m serious – stop screwing around with your success; be the professional you’re paid to be. Here are the things (in no particular order) that make your boss look bad and you look amateurish.

1. Not being across the detail of your key deals. 

Stop giving long-winded waffling answers when asked about the status of an important deal. The senior executives above you are busy and don’t want a bedtime story. Be succinct in your responses. Start at the end and provide a summary before diving into detail. Say something like: ‘It’s forecast for the 13th and their executive sponsor has confirmed with me that the date is confirmed with their internal team. Everyone in the power-base is on board and procurement is in the loop. There are two risks that I am managing…’

2. Failing to have a strategy. 

Never use the words ‘hope’ or ‘hopefully’. In every major deal you need to be thinking about what could go wrong and manage the risks. You must have a strategy for relationships, the competition (including their internal options), and engineering their processes for evaluation, selection and procurement. Hope is not a strategy. Being passive and failing to create any level of positive tension is professional malpractice. You’re not a professional visitor or observer who reports back. Make it happen by building positive relationships with the right people inside the customer organization.

3. Failing to work hard. 

Sustained success is never the result of consistent luck. Work ethic is prerequisite for anyone performing at the top. If you’re not ‘blowing your numbers away’, then you sure as heck had better be seen to be working hard. Work ethic is what smooths out the peaks and troughs of sales performance; to be consistent month-in and month-out. The time to be working hard is when you don’t feel you have a weak pipeline of qualified opportunities – things change quickly. earn your success with the sweat of your brow. Look yourself in the mirror, and your boss in the eye, knowing you’ve earned the right to be successful.

4. Wasting time and being late for meetings. 

Every meeting should have an agenda and confirmed in advance. Time is precious. If you can’t manage yourself, how in the world can you manage complex sales processes and expensive company resources. If you don’t respect the time of others, why should they respect you? Being on time means being at least 5 minutes early. Sit in a nearby coffee shop and prepare, think, plan – take the stress out of meetings. Arrive early and stake the perfect seat, arrange the room. Every pilot knows that their mind must arrive well before the plane if they are to be truly professional.

5. Failing to take notes and follow-up. 

It staggers me how often I see sales people not taking any notes in meetings. ‘I have a good memory’, they say. I don’t care if you have the memory of an elephant! It’s about the customer, not you. They need to see you being fully there and vitally interested in their every word. Taking notes also enables you to break eye contact (the only reason you should) and show them that they are important, that you don’t want to forget, that you’ll follow-up, that you’re a professional. Imagine how you would feel if a builder came to your home to provide a quote for your big renovation and he didn’t measure anything and failed to write anything down… ‘I have a good memory love; no worries, she’ll be right’… Next!

6. Not using sales tools provided to you. 

Your company has invested huge sums of money in sales methodologies and tools… use them! By all means pragmatically, but use them nevertheless. Show people that you’ve qualified the opportunity and that you have actions in play to address weaknesses and gaps. Complete call plans and share with your boss before all important meetings. Build close plans on all the big deals to show you understand the customer’s internal approval gates, procurement processes, compelling events and dates. Here is an ideal meta framework for opportunity management.

7. Not keeping the CRM up to date. 

How can you claim to be a professional when the CRM shows that the deal is still at qualification or discovery stage yet you submitted the proposal last week? Why is the CRM ‘next step’ something that is trivial and happened 3 weeks ago? Why are all of your forecast close dates the last day of the quarter? Professionals keep their records up-to-date to help their boss help them – if you want the resources of the organization invested to help you pursue big opportunities, then earn respect and support by how you operate. How can marketing assist you with inviting prospects to events if you don’t bother to put them in the system. Why should you be allocated any more leads when most of the ones you’ve been given are languishing in the CRM without any notes or change in status? No wonder so many marketing and management people have low opinions of sales people.

8. Being a shocking lone wolf. 

Being a lone gunslinger cowboy may suit your persona but success in complex enterprise selling is always a team effort. It’s amazing what can be achieved when you don’t care who gets the credit. Work well with others; collaborate and be a team player. If you read between the lines, The Challenger Sale says to fire Lone Wolves when they start missing their numbers.

9. Being a ‘Social Selling’ illiterate. 

LinkedIn is the new phone for securing appointments. Your LinkedIn profile is the platform for establishing your credibility before you even meet. Your LinkedIn Publisher posts are how you set the agenda and deal with objections in advance. Twitter is how you amplify your insightful publishing to spread the word. YouTube is how you avoid having to do high risk, time wasting, tire kicking, mind-numbing, Russian roulette high risk demos. Social selling is highly relevant in the world of B2B enterprise selling… get on board before your career sails away without you!

10. Failing to create the necessary value to fund your role. 

One of my European clients did an extensive study concerning the cost to the company every time a sales person pulled-up outside a client’s premises. Field selling is expensive… here is the answer $476. The number is accurate – they have annual revenues in excess of $1 billion in Australia and hundreds of sales people. They asked two questions of every manager and sales person in the company: When you visit a customer or prospect, are you creating $500 of value for them and us? If you asked the customer and your boss to split it; $250 each – would they be willing to both write you a check?

11. Breaking the circle of trust. 

Lying to your boss is the beginning of the end of your relationship with them. Trust is everything – with customers, colleagues, your partner, everyone! Without trust you have nothing in professional sales. Your personal reputation is the most precious thing you have. Who is in the mirror staring back at you? Is there a look of conviction or an empty suit hoping not to be found-out. Don’t cheat your boss out of time or steal their money. Be honest about the state of your deals.

12. Inaccurate forecasting and fantasy pipeline. 

Everyone above you has the living crap beaten out of them when they miss their numbers. It felt like I aged a whole year at the end of every quarter when I was managing the region for American corporations. Regular ugly surprises at the eleventh hour make heads explode. Squirming out of commitments damages you enormously… be a person of your word and don’t over-promise. Bad news early is manageable but consistently delivering ugly surprises at 3 minutes to midnight is terminal – for you or your boss.

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Recently I found that there has been a change in the way many are approaching ‘LinkedIn’.  Have you noticed it? It’s like a disease — mindless, endless connection requests of no value.

A swarm of people, all seemingly trying to RUSH to increase the size of their network trying to reach eye-popping levels. With what appears to be no real regard for quality, reaching out for a mindless connection.

My guess is they might be thinking that having 10,000 connections is essential, or more likely, will make them seem important to others. They might believe that at that level of connections, business will be pouring in through their Inbox. (It won’t) I think they’re gathering connections in the same way my teenage niece has thousands of ‘friends’ on facebook but yet she couldn’t tell you if she was standing next to 20 of them at the bus stop. Friends who are not really friends at all. Connections who are not really connected, or even interested. Think, how much are those connections really worth to you? Zero.

So with all those ‘useless’ connections are you truly ‘well connected’ or are you just overloaded & crowded?

If the quality of your connections is JUNK, what’s the QUALITY of your network? – JUNK. 

Your network is your Net Worth. What’s your NET WORTH?

Rubbish in – Rubbish out.

A FOOL with a TOOL is still a TOOL.

Interesting how I can use an old CRM saying and it seems relevant talking about LinkedIn. (LinkedIn has undoubtedly changed a lot in the last year or two).

Let’s say you do get to 50,000 connections. How would you credibly engage with them all? You can’t. NEWS FLASH. It’s not the shares, likes or views that matter in this game; it’s the quality of the engagement.

Social is social, that means interactions; it’s not a database; it’s not a calling list; it’s not a ‘number’ of connections; it’s not a CRM. If you can’t provide some insights or some value to those who want to connect with you or that they provide to you, then why are you connecting?

Having lots & lots of connections will not automatically make you a LinkedIn superstar. I suggest having the wrong connections will ruin your LinkedIn experience and, at the same time, make it significantly harder for you to use LinkedIn for what it is designed. A networking tool which should be helping you to drive great conversations and then, eventually, opportunities.

Of course, there are exceptions, enter, people like Tony J Hughes. He uses LinkedIn very well to publish. He wants as many people as possible reading his material, which I love BTW, He has a strategy which works for him. But it’s not a strategy which will work for most of you. It will work for 5% of people, maybe. (Have you seen how well he writes)?

I’d suggest, don’t connect with everyone you see and don’t connect with everyone just because they send you a connection request, that isn’t very smart.

Currently, I’m only accepting around 40% of the connection requests I get. The other 60% are simply not a good fit for my network and (here’s the rub) they are much better off without me in their network. I will drive them, their network, and their feed crazy with my sales orientated conversations and posts. (just like this one).

I’ve spent a significant amount of time DELIBERATELY crafting and designing a network which is high value to me, high value to my network as well as my business strategy. So, if you’re not going to add value to the network, to me, or I to you. I’m probably not going to accept.

The average person who needs to use or ‘leverage’ their LinkedIn account to help them to grow their business or perhaps find more business opportunities is misusing the platform if they are connecting without thought and without a clear, defined strategy.

I’ve written about this previously, and I’m sure I’ll need to repeat myself. You need to deliberately design your professional network in the same way as you carefully look for a workplace who has a culture you think will help you to be successful. Your social feed has its own culture.

Why? If you fill your network with ‘randoms’ it will be INCREDIBLY harder to shape your online conversations to be of any benefit to that broader audience. There are plenty of subject matter experts out there, so how can you ‘talk’ (post, share and comment) to a broad audience about everything? You can’t. You might find you’re not getting any traction at all with a broad, large, but weak network. Posting articles, posts, blogs, pictures etc are all designed to drive engagement if you’re connected to 10,000 people, and only 500 people are interested in your business proposition, or what you’re posting about. I’d argue you really only have 500 connections and 9,500 people who’s feed you are destroying with ‘rubbish’ which is not relevant to them. Do you want to be that person who is posting crap which nobody wants to read?

So think about your connection strategy (Do you have one)? And make the necessary changes to make sure your LinkedIn network has the best chance to give you what you need from a true business networking sense.

Failing to do so upfront, will potentially mean trying to ‘undo’ 10,000 poorly crafted connections, that’s not going to happen quickly. You will need to either

A: Abandon the platform altogether,

B: Forget about using LinkedIn as a BDM tool.

C: Delete your account and start again from the beginning.

That’s why I’m selecting ‘IGNORE’ – it’s the polite thing to do.

TO BE CLEAR: – If you’re in IT from Canada, I’m probably not interested – sorry. If you’re in any aspect of sales from within APAC and send me a PERSONALISED connection request, I’ll connect.

A personalised connection request trumps all. Tell me why you’d like to connect, and chance are I will. As will your perfect future customer. You might even start a conversation.

It’s all about the engagement.

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