Business Mastery

You’ll find the key for establishing leadership skills in your self within this article. Enjoy the material. We have found that most people equate managing and leading. They often interchange the terms managing and leading. Of course, in order to be an effective manager you have to be a leader. However, the opposite is not a case. One of the essential skills of management is leading, but leading and managing are not the same.

Think being a leader and being a manager are exactly the same?

Interesting question, but it’s not asked very often because people believe they already know managing and leading are the same concept. “They are the same thing,” most people believe. Particularly in a business environment, people think of their managers as the leaders. If you happen to be a member of an accounting department, for example, your manager is also your leader. And, it’s true. Leaders are often the ones promoted into managers. Also true that high-performing individuals are the ones getting promotions into management jobs. Great performing workers are not always your best management candidate, but that’s another story.

Is it crucial you have leadership skills to be a manager?

It’s certainly true if the manager happens to be a poor leader it’s a quick path to failure. You can’t be an effective manager if you don’t have great leadership skills. Imagine a situation where there is some sort of problem or crises on the job. The normal reaction during a problem is to look towards the boss. It’s expected she will provide leadership in that situation. If the manager has poorly developed leading skills, you’ll find the probability of success of solving a problem go way down. In most cases the workers want to focus on their job and leave problem-solving to their managers. They want and expect their manager to be leaders in those situations.

In general, people gravitate towards leaders. The majority of people like the security and the knowledge of knowing that someone else is in charge. They like knowing that they have a leader that is looking after them. As a result, they will always look to authority.

Is it possible that you could be a leader and not be a manager?

Of all the questions we’ve asked in this article, this is perhaps the best one of the bunch. In a word, yes. Your goal should be to have more people willing and able to lead than just your managers. Whenever a manager falls short one of the other leaders can pick up the ball. If in above example, one of the other people on the team, provided they possessed the ability to lead, could have easily picked up the ball and solve the issue.

Certainly the leading skill is a vital component of management. We have learned that leading and management are different. You must have excellent leading capabilities in order to be a highly successful manager. You want to have as many leaders as you can even if they’re not your managers.

Generally, you always want to have a majority of your employees able to step up as leaders from time to time. As it turns out good leaders know when it’s the right time to step up.

We have developed a great new set of tools to help. Take a look at our subsidiary company.

Revenue covers up a lot of sins. Even more revenue covers up a lot more sins.

Now, I’m not saying you should put up with a lot of sins, errors and omissions within your business. I’m making the point that increasing revenues certainly helps make them less obvious and hurtful.

The last couple of years has been a very telling time for most businesses in the US. The economic situation has generally affected every business not just isolated ones and selected niches.

So, you’ve got to get more revenue. And, you need to get it as fast as you can.

You really need to get yourself in front of more “hot prospects” under “favorable circumstances”.

Why?

When you have hot prospects under favorable circumstances your probability of converting them to a customer goes up exponentially.

First, let’s examine what a hot prospect really is.

A prospective customer should be considered a prospect when they have three clearly identified attributes.

1. A vital need
2. Authority to buy
3. Enough money

A prospect enters the arena of being “hot” when they have one additional attribute— urgency.

The next critical element is to create circumstances which or the most favorable to you. Let me illustrate.

One of the least favorable circumstances you can have is to make a cold call on a prospect. It really doesn’t matter if they have the attributes we’ve identified above. If you need to get to them via a cold call your probabilities of conversion go way down because the circumstances of your “introduction” are so poor.

At the other end of the spectrum, if a raving fan of you and your company introduces you to her prospect and physically takes you on a face-to-face meeting, you have the most favorable circumstances.

Fundamental lesson to be learned here is that you need to reconstruct your sales process to maximize referrals to highly qualified prospects.

I had the opportunity to visit with Bill Harris earlier this year.

Bill is the president of Centerpointe Research Institute and is a Certified Trainer of Neuro Linguistic Programming. He is also the creator of The Holosync Solution and The Life Principles Integration Process. Very fascinating stuff, but more on that another day.

A key part of his research is in the area of focus. He believes that focus is the real key to business success. I agree with that.

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According to my friend Andy Miller, there are several beliefs that, if internalized, will dramatically increase a sales person’s ability to turn from a plain Joe to a Pro.

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I have written in the past about Andy Miller, an extremely well respected sales training and sales execution authority.

This time I will tell you about the need to coordinate between the sales cycle and the buying cycle.

The sales cycle is a common term and is controlled in the main by the sales rep. The rep is the one determining the various steps in the selling process. The rep is the one driving the pipeline.

Andy has convinced me that the failure to recognize and match the buying and selling cycles is a major determination in blown deals.

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