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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Don't let anyone tell you that you have to choose between making money and making a difference. Selling With Noble Purpose: How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud, 2nd Edition is an update of the acclaimed book that changed the game in sales. Using real-world data, compelling stories and psychological research, Selling With Noble Purpose explains why salespeople who genuinely understand how they can make a difference to customers outsell those who only focus on internal targets and quotas. Sales leadership experts McLeod and Lotardo reveal how a Noble Sales Purpose (NSP) can drive a team to outstanding sales numbers. Whether you're an executive, manager or aspiring sales leader, you'll discover how to find your own Noble Sales Purpose and create a sales force of True Believers. This new edition covers: * How firms overcome ferocious competition and how you can do the same * Why sales organizations with a clear NSP outperform traditional sales teams * How to avoid the trap of behaving like a transactional salesperson * Why well-intended leaders often unknowingly erode purpose and differentiation * How to use your NSP to increase customer engagement * Why an NSP gives you clarity during times of uncertainty In an era where organizations often believe that money is the primary way to motivate salespeople, Selling with Noble Purpose offers and exciting and sustainable alternative.
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Seitenzahl: 458
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
What Is Selling with Noble Purpose?
The Curbside Conversation Where Selling with Noble Purpose Was Born
How Noble Purpose Plays Out
The Changing Face of Business
Note
PART 1: Sales: A Noble Profession?
CHAPTER 1: The Great Sales Disconnect
What Lack of Purpose Costs a Sales Force
Reframing the Sales Profession
What's Gained from Approaching Sales with Purpose
Why Selling with Noble Purpose Becomes Self‐Reinforcing
What This Book Can Do For You
CHAPTER 2: How a Noble Sales Purpose (NSP) Changes Your Brain
Customer Centricity Is Not Enough
The Two Big Human Needs: Belonging and Significance
A 10‐Degree Shift Can Change Your Direction
You Don't Have to Create World Peace
Why Mission and Vision Aren't Enough
Preventing Your Personal Wells Fargo
Surrogation: When the Metric of the Strategy Takes the Place of the Strategy
How NSP Drives Shareholder Value
Shareholders vs. Stakeholders
CHAPTER 3: Why Profit Is Not a Purpose
Why Leaders (Unintentionally) Overemphasize Profit
The 6 Ps: Putting Profit into Perspective
How NSP Drives Innovation
Numbers Provide False Certainty
CHAPTER 4: Where Passion Falls Short
The Power of Being Steadfast
Managers Are the Front Line Belief‐Builders
CHAPTER 5: The Leadership Question That Changes Everything
How Words Create Worlds
How NSP Helps You Close Bigger Deals
A Sample NSP Coaching Session
Marketing
Product Development
Sales Engagement and Support
PART 2: Naming and Claiming Your Noble Sales Purpose
CHAPTER 6: Crafting Your Noble Sales Purpose
Discovery Question #1: How Do You Make a Difference to Your Customers?
Discovery Question #2: How Are You Different From Competitors?
Discovery Question #3: On Your Best Day, What Do You Love About Your Job?
Create Your NSP
CHAPTER 7: Why Specificity Is Sexy
Choose a Big Enough Lane
How to Avoid the Bookcase Problem
CHAPTER 8: The Stories That Make Your NSP Stick
Build Belief: Create Sticky Stories
A Memorable Customer Impact Story
Sticky Stories Create Meaning
The Formula for Sticky Stories
Jumpstart Purpose with Customer Impact Stories
CHAPTER 9: Why Seemingly Sane People Resist Noble Purpose
Set the CEO Up for Success
Be Intentional with Your Early Supporters
How to Deal with the Eeyores (If You Must)
Restoring Nobility to the Sales Profession
Skip the “Aha! I Was Wrong” Moment
PART 3: Activating Your Purpose with Customers
CHAPTER 10: Making Your NSP More Than a Tagline
Creating a Differentiated, Purpose‐Fueled Sales Experience
Interaction vs. Infomercial
Deep Schemas Drive Engagement
Avoiding the Data Dump in Demos
Activation vs. Proclamation
CHAPTER 11: The Customer Intelligence You Didn't Know You Needed
The Five Categories of Critical Customer Information
How Information Improves Your Win Rate
Questioning with Purpose
CHAPTER 12: Three Places Where Differentiation Goes to Die
Call Openings
Presentations and Proposals That Generate Urgency
Keeping Your Purpose Alive in Negotiations
Go Beyond Normal
CHAPTER 13: The Dirty Little Secret About Sales Training
Sales Training Addresses the Symptoms, Not the Cause
Two Distinct Mental Abilities of Top Performers
How Sitting with Uncertainty Reduces Objections
Your Customers Are Mind Readers Whether They Realize It or Not
The 10‐Second Game-Changer
CHAPTER 14: Using Technology to Humanize Customers
How Your CRM Affects Sales Calls
Why Computer Screens Are More Powerful Than Sales Managers
CHAPTER 15: How Fear Flatlines a Sales Team
Why Fear Causes Salespeople to Fail
Don't Take Your Lizard Brain on Sales Calls
An Eye‐Opening Lesson in Fear‐Based Leadership
The Ripple Effect of Fear
Why Shared Commitment Gives You Courage
How to Conquer Fear When You're Broke
PART 4: Creating a Tribe of True Believers
CHAPTER 16: Sustaining the “High” of the Close
“Kill the Competition” Is Not a Rallying Cry
How to Keep the Serotonin Flowing
Gratitude: The Gateway Drug to Happiness
CHAPTER 17: Sales Meetings That Inspire Action (from Everyone)
Why Traditional Meetings Can Unintentionally Erode Morale
Small Shift, Big Impact
CHAPTER 18: Noble Purpose Sales Coaching
Before the Sales Call
During the Sales Call
After the Sales Call
CHAPTER 19: Training Your Frontline to Be Noble Purpose Sellers
Learning vs. Lecturing
Self‐Discovery Experiential Training Is Stickier
Why Maria Montessori Would Have Been a Great Sales Trainer
CHAPTER 20: Incentivizing Purpose
What the Marshmallow Experiment Tells Us About Sales Incentives
Hit Your Goals with Momentum
Why the Winner‐Takes‐All Model Fails Midyear
Reward the Right Behaviors
Giving Everyone a Trophy Is Not the Answer
Why Public Recognition Is Powerful
Nine Ways to Incentivize Your Purpose
CHAPTER 21: Winning Top Talent
Join Us If You Want Make a Difference
Onboarding Should Get People More Excited, Not Less Excited
CHAPTER 22: How to Keep Your NSP from Dying in Accounting
How Overattachment Costs You Money
Why Silos Turn Into Turf Wars
The Cost of Overemphasis
How to Bring the Customer's Voice into the Room
CHAPTER 23: Build a Noble Purpose Culture (and Have More Fun at Work)
Cascading Meaning
Noble Purpose Culture‐Builders
Conclusion: Life on Purpose
The Second‐Most‐Important Person in the World
Making the Mundane Meaningful
Your Self‐Story Becomes Your Life Story
APPENDIX A: Techniques and Tools
Implementing Noble Purpose in Your Organization
The Three Discovery Questions
Customer Impact Stories
The Five Categories of Critical Customer Information
The You‐Me‐You Call Opening
The 10‐Second Game‐Changer
The Game‐Changing Question
The Six CEO Moments of Purpose
APPENDIX B: Glossary
APPENDIX C: Frequently Asked Questions
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Praise for Selling with Noble Purpose
“McLeod combines a wealth of field experience with unique insights to drive revenue.”
Marshall Goldsmith
#1 Leadership Thinker in the World (Thinkers50—Harvard Business Review)
“If you sell based on a deep mission and purpose, revenue will follow. As Lisa Earle McLeod explains in this remarkable book, you have to start with how to change another life … then work back from that purpose.”
Tom Rath
Author of StrengthsFinder 2.0
“Lisa McLeod is the expert in sales leadership. McLeod has coached top‐tier sales teams at Apple, Kimberly‐Clark, and Procter & Gamble, where we both began our careers. She shows you what it takes to drive growth.”
Jim Stengel
Former Chief Global Marketing Officer, Procter & Gamble
Author of Grow
“Selling with Noble Purpose is eminently practical. I strongly recommend it for any leader or salesperson. McLeod is right about the big picture and gets down to the nitty‐gritty of how to make it happen.”
Steve Denning
Forbes
“Follow McLeod's teaching and—not only will you be hugely more financially successful—you'll LOVE what you're doing even more!”
Bob Burg
Author of The Go‐Giver and Endless Referrals
selling with noble purpose
How to Drive Revenue and Do Work That Makes You Proud
Lisa Earle McLeodwith Elizabeth Lotardo
2nd Edition
Copyright © 2020 by Lisa Earle McLeod. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per‐copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750‐8400, fax (978) 646‐8600, or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748‐6011, fax (201) 748‐6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Cover Design: WileyAuthor Photo Credit: Jon Rizzo Photography
For Jay Earle:a man who believed work should be meaningful and fun!
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
—Antoine de Saint‐Exupéry
Introduction
What Is Selling with Noble Purpose?
Hearts are the strongest when they beat in response to noble ideals.
—Ralph Bunche, winner of the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize
“The words selling and noble are rarely seen together. Most people believe that money is the primary motivator for top salespeople and that doing good by the world runs a distant second. That belief is wrong.”
When I first wrote those words in 2012, I had no way of knowing the first edition of Selling with Noble Purpose would upend traditional beliefs about sales and spur a global movement. At the time, the notion that you could galvanize a sales force around something more meaningful than money was a new, and not always welcome, idea. Thankfully, times have changed. At least in part.
We started writing this new edition of Selling with Noble Purpose before the COVID crisis began. By the time we were finishing this book, the weight of the crisis was upon us. Markets had become volatile, businesses were closing, and people all over the world were afraid. They were afraid for their health, afraid for their livelihood, and afraid of what the future might hold.
We are experiencing a reset like never before. Business norms are being challenged, and teams are being called upon to innovate, reinventing what they sell and how they sell on a daily basis. A growing chorus of customers are asking: Is your sales team here to help me? Or are they just trying to close me?
Here's what we know to be true: amid disruption, one thing that can keep a salesforce motivated and committed to delivering the highest results is a sense of purpose.
The teams you'll read about in this book use their purpose as a North Star to guide them during times of uncertainty and unrest. Purpose enables them to make quick decisions and to put their highest ideals into action.
Over the last five years, purpose has become a hot topic in business. Organizations proudly announce their purpose across social media. Leaders talk about their purpose during the annual meeting. Yet what the COVID crisis has revealed with stark clarity is that purpose must be more than a mantra or management technique: during disruption, purpose is a lifeline to your customers and your team.
The core idea of this book is that sales teams with a noble purpose bigger than money—whose aim is to improve life for customers—outsell transactional teams who focus on internal targets and quotas. During a crisis, the contrast between transactional sellers and noble purpose sellers is on display.
It's long been assumed that sales teams are primarily driven by economic incentives alone—when in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.
We stand in a place and time where the role of business in the world is being questioned. The pressure for short‐term profit is a constant, yet there is equally forceful pressure to do right by our people and customers and make the workplace more meaningful for all. Sales is where money and meaning come together. It's time for us to harness the fierce urgency of now to transform the way we conduct business and restore nobility to the sales profession.
The Curbside Conversation Where Selling with Noble Purpose Was Born
A decade ago, I was part of a consulting team asked by a major biotech firm to conduct a six‐month double‐blind study of its sales force. The purpose of the study was to determine what behaviors separated top salespeople from average ones. The study revealed something no one expected: the top performers all had a far more pronounced sense of purpose than their average counterparts.
The salespeople who sold with Noble Purpose—who truly wanted to make a difference to customers—consistently outsold the salespeople who were focused on sales goals and money.
It was a startling discovery that I might have missed, had it not been for a curbside conversation at the Phoenix airport.
I was finishing a two‐day ride‐along with a sales rep. As she dropped me off at the airport, I asked her a question I hadn't asked the other reps: “What do you think about when you go on sales calls? What's going on in your head?”
“I don't tell this to many people,” she confessed, looking around the car as though someone was going to hear her secret. “When I go on sales calls, I always think about this particular patient who came up to me one day during a call on a doctor's office.
“I was standing in the hallway, talking to one of the doctors. I was wearing my company name badge, so I stood out. All of a sudden, this elderly woman taps me on the shoulder.”
“‘Excuse me, Miss,” she said. ‘Are you from the company that makes this drug?’ pointing to a pamphlet on the counter.
“‘Yes, ma'am,” I replied.
“‘I just want to thank you,’ she said. ‘Before my doctor prescribed your drug, I barely had enough energy to leave the house. But now I can visit my grandkids; I can get down on the floor to play with them. I can travel. So thank you. You gave me back my life.’”
The sales rep told me, “I think about that woman every day. If it's 4:30 on a rainy Friday afternoon, other sales reps go home. I don't. I make the extra sales call because I know I'm not just pitching a product. I'm giving people their life back. That grandmother is my higher purpose.”
Sitting in that blistering Phoenix heat, I realized she had said something incredibly important. I thought about that conversation during my entire flight back to Atlanta. I kept turning it over and over in my head.
Our consulting team had spent months shadowing salespeople all over the country. We'd conducted in‐depth interviews and analyzed every aspect of the sales calls. But this was the first time anyone had opened their heart and spoken in an authentic, emotional way about what truly moved them. While others had spoken in corporate platitudes, here was a salesperson speaking the language of the soul.
Was this what spelled the difference between average performers and top performers—this seemingly esoteric construct; this thing called purpose?
Keep in mind: this was 10 years ago. At that time, the conversation about meaning and purpose at work was the realm of ministers and non‐profits. Yet here I was in a corporate setting, and I knew I had spotted something important. I went back to the transcripts of the interviews, looking for purpose. I didn't see it at first. Then I looked closer—and there it was, in the rep who said, “My dad was a doctor. Doctors have an even harder job than most people realize. I want to make it easier for them.”
It was there in the rep who was thrilled to be discussing the science, and who practically glowed when he said, “Isn't it amazing the way that we're able to do these things?” There were other reps who spoke about the impact they had on nurses and patients. Although none of these people actually used the word purpose, the essence was there.
At the end of the project, the client asked us to look across all the reps and identify who we thought were the top performers. It was a double‐blind study, so the other consultants and I didn't know who was at the top and who was just average.
I had found five representatives who conveyed a sense of purpose in the interviews. I told the client, “I think these five are top‐performing salespeople.”
Every single one was correct. And the rep in Phoenix who went on sales calls thinking about the grandmother? She was the number‐one salesperson in the country three years running.
Imagine the scene: a science‐based firm with commercial endeavors around the globe. The leadership team is largely doctors, scientists, and MBAs. They've gathered around an impressive marble conference table to hear the results of the extensive sales study. I have now just seemingly magically identified the top sales performers without knowing any of their sales numbers. Of course, the next question is pretty obvious.
“How did you know?” they asked, looking at me as if I was some kind of wizard.
The answer I came up with left something to be desired. The best way I could describe it at the time was to say, “The top performers have a different story in their hearts.” It sounded fuzzy.
It was fuzzy. I could tell it wasn't resonating. I (painfully) elaborated, “It's like they're being guided by something more noble.” Still blank stares.
The senior leadership team was looking for something more concrete. I knew I was seeing something, something that went beyond the traditional business approach. It was deeper, and it was real. I remember thinking to myself, if we can bottle this, we can create magic.
That initial study revealed what larger research projects would later validate: The top performers weren't driven solely by money. They were driven by purpose.
Ironic, isn't it? The salespeople who cared about something more than just money wound up selling more than the salespeople who were focused only on quota. Years of client work and several research studies later, the findings leave no doubt: a Noble Sales Purpose (NSP) is the difference between a sales force that is merely adequate and one that's truly outstanding.
It took the better part of a decade to decode and bottle the magic I had observed in that first study. As it turns out, my initial assessment was actually accurate: the top performers do carry a different story in their hearts. What took a bit longer to figure out was how the story got there, what the story meant, and how to scale it across an organization.
And here's the most exciting part. While selling with Noble Purpose is innate to top performers, it is not limited to top performers. It can be activated in almost everyone. Noble Purpose is a philosophy and strategy that can scale across even the largest of organizations. The result is a differentiated sales team who show up in a much more powerful way for customers. But it's even bigger than that. Noble Purpose drives exponential business results, and it also helps us become better human beings. It connects us and advances our relationships and our society in a way that we need now more than ever.
How Noble Purpose Plays Out
Imagine two salespeople. They're both waiting in the lobby to meet with a customer. One salesperson has been told by his boss, “Your purpose is to close deals.” The other salesperson believes her Noble Purpose is to improve the customer's business.
Which salesperson is going to ask better questions and uncover more customer intelligence: the seller focused on the deal, or the seller focused on the customer? Which rep is going to be more innovative and engaging: the seller focused on the single transaction, or the seller focused on improving the client's business?
Now let's put you into this scenario. Imagine you're the customer. Which salesperson would you rather have calling on you: the one sitting in the lobby thinking about his deal? Or the one sitting in the lobby thinking about helping you?
The answer is obvious. Customers would rather buy from a salesperson whose purpose is to help them than a salesperson who is only trying to close them.
Organizations have tried for decades to get sales teams to be more consultative and customer‐oriented. They try sales training and they adopt customer‐centric strategies, yet progress is often only incremental at best. The reason is that the cadence of daily business is still focused on internal numbers. We need look no further than the auto industry to see what happens when salespeople lack a Noble Sales Purpose.
The automotive industry has powerful brands. They have innovative engineers and do extensive research to identify exactly what we might want or need in a car. Their marketing people create compelling campaigns building brand value. Dealerships tout their service. But what happens when you start talking with a salesperson? The first thing they want to find out is, “How much can you spend?”
Years of work, thousands of hours, millions of dollars building a brand, and it can all fall apart on the showroom floor if you encounter a transactional salesperson.
As anyone who has done it can attest, buying a car can be an absolutely soul‐sucking experience. Most car salespeople don't care about making a difference in your life. All they care about is closing the deal—because closing the deal is the only thing their sales manager has told them to care about. Closing the deal is at the center of their sales training. It's what their CRM system and comp plan point them toward. And it's what their manager's boss emphasizes on a daily basis. The entire sales ecosystem is focused on the close instead of the customer.
This plays out in very obvious ways in the auto industry, but the same thing happens to teams who sell million‐dollar software systems, health care equipment, banking services, and everything in between.
The internal conversation becomes the external conversation. If your internal conversation is only about targets and quotas, with little or no mention of customer impact and value, that's the way the sales team will approach customers.
Salespeople whose Noble Purpose is to improve the customer outperform salespeople whose purpose is to close the customer.
Lest you have any doubts about the power of purpose, the research tells us:
Organizations with a purpose bigger than money outperform their competitors.
A 10‐year growth study of more than 50,000 brands around the world shows that companies who put improving people's lives at the center of all they do outperform the market by a huge margin.
1
The study, done by an independent consulting group in partnership with my colleague, former Procter & Gamble chief marketing officer (CMO) Jim Stengel, reveals that “Those who center their business on improving people's lives have a growth rate triple that of their competitors, and they outperform the market by a huge margin.”
The economics of self‐interest are not sustainable or even accurate.
The traditional business model based on the assumption that the workforce is self‐interested—motivated only by money, prestige, and promotion—has proven ineffective. In their book
The Economics of Higher Purpose
, distinguished scholars Robert E. Quinn and Anjan V. Thakor cite research about employees who are “positive energizers” who are not risk‐averse or effort‐averse, and who are motivated by intrinsic rewards. The authors, who have extensive expertise in economics, describe purpose as a valuable “off‐balance sheet resource” that can unleash these positive energizers.
Noble Purpose sales teams have a competitive advantage over quota‐focused teams.
In our work with over 200 firms, we tracked the behavioral differences between teams with a Noble Sales Purpose and those with a conventional economic mindset. Purpose‐driven sellers consistently have a better understanding of customer issues, gather more robust customer intelligence, create more client‐focused presentations and proposals, get to more senior levels within client companies, and are less likely to experience pushback on pricing.
Salespeople with a sense of purpose put forth more effort and are more adaptable than quota‐focused reps.
In her study “Understanding and Leveraging Intrinsic Motivation In Salespeople,” Dr. Valerie Good from Michigan State University asserted, “A sense of purpose—the belief one is making a contribution to a cause greater and more enduring than oneself—is an important contributor to sales success. Yet one that has rarely been studied.” Dr. Good was inspired to conduct her research because of her father‐in‐law, who sold truck wheels. He'd been a top salesperson for decades, driven by his belief that the right wheels on an 18‐wheeler saves people lives.
Good's study revealed, “Intrinsic motivation—inherent enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose—is more positively associated with increased salesperson effort and adaptability than a desire for money over time.” The internal drive to make a difference that she observed in her father‐in‐law proved to be the underpinning behind long‐term sales success.
The data is clear, and it confirms what we already know in our hearts to be true: a Noble Purpose engages people's passion in a way that spreadsheets don't.
The Changing Face of Business
Business is changing because customers and employees are changing. People are no longer willing to settle for a transactional work life—or even a transactional sale. They want more.
Making a living and making a difference are not incompatible goals. The traditional business model tends to separate money and meaning. Making money becomes the organizing element of the organization, while making a difference is relegated to an optional byproduct. Improving lives is nice; we'll try to do it if and when we make enough money.
Yet a growing body of evidence tells us this model is wrong. In fact, it's completely backward. When targets and quotas become the primary organizing element of your business, the result is mediocrity at best. Instead of making more money, you wind up making less money. Profit is crucial, of course. But it's not the best starting point for driving sales revenue.
It doesn't have to be this way. As you'll discover in this book, there's a widespread, unspoken problem in sales. It's the startling gap between what organizations want salespeople to do when they're with customers versus what most organizations really reinforce on a daily basis.
Let's be clear: wanting to make money for your family or to buy yourself nice things or build wealth is not immoral. Noble Purpose does not conflict with economic motivation; it adds another dimension. Noble Purpose unleashes a largely untapped source of motivation, and it creates an organizing framework that differentiates you from a traditional, economic incentive‐based organizational mindset.
When the Business Roundtable, a group of America's most prominent CEOs, announced that the shareholder primacy model—dictating that organizations must maximize profits for shareholders above all else—was no longer working or appropriate, they gave an official voice to what many leaders were experiencing.
The traditional “shareholder primacy, profit‐at‐all‐costs” model creates a transactional relationship, with employees and customers who (correctly) discern that numbers matter more than they do. It's not surprising that during the decades when shareholder primacy rose, employee engagement tanked. In an age of internet‐forced transparency, organizations who are primarily self‐focused are quickly revealed.
Yet as an increasing number of firms embrace the value of higher purpose, many organizations still struggle to bring purpose to life with their sales team.
The message from the top is, “We have a purpose.” But the daily sales cadence of “close the deal” drowns out the purpose conversation. It's a costly missed opportunity.
Sales is where purpose can come alive or wither and die. As the center of a commercial model, sales can deliver outsized returns on purpose, emotionally and financially. When you activate a sense of Noble Purpose in sales, it drives engagement, innovation, differentiation, and ultimately revenue.
For the last decade, this is what I've been studying, researching, and speaking and writing about. I'll share what we've learned from implementing selling with Noble Purpose with over 200 organizations. I've had the privilege of working with teams at organizations like Google, Salesforce, Dave & Busters, and Roche, helping them enhance their culture and drive sales performance. But Noble Purpose is not just for a few sexy high‐profile organizations. We've also worked with less‐well‐known firms who have achieved even more dramatic results.
In this book, you'll meet a concrete company whose blue‐collar team is redefining an entire industry; a commercial bank that went from malaise to winning awards; and a team of travel salespeople who bring so much passion and purpose into their client interactions that customers from around the world ask them for sales calls.
These seemingly everyday companies harness the power of purpose to break sales records and become leaders in their spaces.
In this new, updated edition of Selling with Noble Purpose, I'll cover the dramatic changes in the business landscape and in customer and employee attitudes that have made Noble Purpose a business imperative. I'll also share:
The direct impact of purpose on profitability (it's more than originally anticipated)
Why so many purpose‐driven organizations struggle to activate their purpose in sales, and how to overcome this challenge
Examples of firms who experienced exponential financial payoffs from Noble Purpose, and how they did it
Examples from firms whose purpose programs failed, and a breakdown of what went wrong
Strategies for turning managers into belief‐builders for your organization
Why most sales ecosystems can have a chilling effect on customer engagement, and how to align your sales ecosystem toward customer impact
Innovative training techniques for activating purpose in frontline salespeople
We've deepened our study of Selling with Noble Purpose, yet one thing remains the same:
When you tap into someone's desire to make a difference, you unleash a force more powerful than anything found in a traditional business model.
When you cultivate a Noble Purpose through your sales team, you create a tribe of true believers: a team who can beat even the most formidable of competitors.
It's called a Noble Sales Purpose because it is:
Noble:
In the service of others
Sales:
Based on what you sell
Purpose:
Your reason for being
You don't have to create world peace. Your Noble Sales Purpose can be about making your customers more successful or about improving your industry.
This book is about getting your entire sales organization aligned, empowered, and excited about making a difference to customers. When you are clear and specific about how you want to help customers, and you activate your Noble Sales Purpose across your entire sales organization, you create an unstoppable team.
A friend of mine who was burned out from two decades of working in politics once told me, “In every office, there's always a TB.”
“What's a TB?” I asked her.
“A true believer,” she said. “That starry‐eyed optimist who still believes they can make a difference. But here's the thing all the jaded staffers don't tell you—everyone else in the office is secretly jealous of the true believer.”
I've come to understand the reason everyone is jealous of the true believer: we all have a secret true believer inside us, just waiting for permission to come out.
Selling with Noble Purpose is about igniting the true believer that lurks in the heart of every salesperson. Because as much as salespeople want to make money, they also want to make a difference.
Note
1
Millward Brown Optimor, “Stengel Study of Business Growth.”
PART 1Sales: A Noble Profession?
In the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.
—Jim Collins, author of Good to Great
Making a living and making a difference are not incompatible. As a leader, you can do both. You must do both.
In Part 1, you'll learn how a Noble Sales Purpose (NSP) can reframe your sales narrative to create more competitive differentiation and emotional engagement. And you'll learn why an NSP is crucial during times of uncertainty and volatility. We'll explore what an NSP is and what it's not—and why it matters to you and your sales force.
We'll look at some surprising information about why overemphasizing profit has an alarmingly negative effect on salespeople and customers and how you can reframe the profit question inside your company. You'll learn the brain science behind NSP and where it fits within the structure of your larger organization.
You'll also learn why passion, despite its high value, is not enough to sustain performance. Finally, we'll address the leadership question that changes everything, and how you can use it to jump‐start your team.
If you're thinking, “We're just an average (accounting, software, landscape, furniture, fill‐in‐the‐blank) firm. I'm not sure our work is noble,” we'll tell you right now: if your customers are buying from you, then you are adding some value. You do have a Noble Purpose, and it's time for us to find it.
CHAPTER 1The Great Sales Disconnect
I stayed the course … from beginning to the end, because I believed in something inside of me.
—Tina Turner, entertainer
Suppose you wrote the following goal on your office whiteboard: “I want to make as much money as possible.” Now suppose your clients saw it. How would they feel? How would you feel knowing that they'd seen it? Would you be proud or embarrassed?
What if you went over your prospect list, and the only thing written next to each prospect's name was a dollar figure and a projected close date? Would your prospects be happy if they saw that? Would they want to do business with you? Probably not; it reduces them to nothing more than a number. Yet that's exactly how most organizations talk about their customers on a daily basis.
Imagine a salesperson walking into a customer's office and opening the sales call by plopping a revenue forecast down on the customer's desk announcing, “I have you projected for $50,000 this month. Give me an order now!”
That rep would be thrown out in a second. Yet that's the kind of language most organizations use when they talk about their customers internally. It's like two different worlds.
Think about the typical conversation a sales manager has with his or her sales rep. It usually goes something like this:
“When are you going to close this? How much revenue will it be? Are all the key decision‐makers involved? Who's the competition? What do you need to close this deal?”
All the questions are about when and how we're going to collect revenue from the customer. These questions matter, but they aren't enough to create any kind of differentiated conversation (internally or externally).
Very few managers ask about the impact the sale will have on the customer's business or life.
We expect salespeople to focus on customers' needs and goals when they're in front of customers, but the majority of internal conversations are about the organization's own revenue quotas.
Although it's an unintended disconnect, it's a fatal one.
Unfortunately, the current sales narrative of most organizations is flawed, fatally out of sync with what really matters to salespeople and customers. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff articulates the transactional mindset that so many sales teams used to embody, describing it this way: “If you were meeting with a customer, your singular goal was to leave the room with a signed contract—in as short a time as possible.”
Benioff points out the flaw in this approach, writing in his book Trailblazer: “It didn't incentivize anyone to consider whether the customers on the other side of these transactions really needed the software or whether it helped them make progress on their business goals.”
In a traditional sales organization, the entire ecosystem surrounding the sales team—the customer relationship management (CRM) system, weekly sales meetings, conversations with managers, recognition, and everything else that influences seller behavior—are all pointed toward targets.
It's assumed that sellers will focus on customers when they're interacting with customers. But are we surprised when they don't? Everything in the ecosystem is driving them toward thinking about nothing but their own quota.
Most organizations want to have a positive impact on their customers' lives. It makes good business sense, and it appeals to our more noble instincts. Yet when managers are caught up inside the pressure cooker of daily business, their desire to improve the customer's life is eclipsed by quotas, quarterly numbers, and daily sales reports.
This results in salespeople who don't have any sense of a higher purpose other than “making the numbers.” It sounds fine enough in theory, but customers can tell the difference between the salespeople who care about them and those who care only about their bonuses. Sales targets are important, but they don't create a compelling narrative.
The great disconnect between what we want salespeople to do when they're in the field (focus on the customer) versus what we emphasize and reinforce internally (our own targets and quotas) results in mediocre sales performance.
What Lack of Purpose Costs a Sales Force
When the customer becomes nothing more than a number to you, you become nothing more than a number to the customer—and your entire organization suffers.
When you overemphasize financial goals at the expense of how you make a difference to customers, you make it extremely difficult for your salespeople to differentiate themselves from the competition. And the problem doesn't stop there. It has a ripple effect, causing salespeople who:
Think only about the short term
Fail to understand the customer's environment
Cannot connect the dots between your products and customers' goals
Cannot gain access to senior levels within the customer
Then the problem escalates:
Customers view you as a commodity.
You have little or no collaboration with them.
Customers place undue emphasis on minor problems.
Contracts are constantly in jeopardy over small dollar amounts.
Salespeople's default response is to lower the price.
Sales has a negative perception in the rest of the organization.
Top performers become mid‐level performers.
Salespeople view their fellow salespeople as the competition.
Customer churn increases.
Salespeople try to game the comp plan.
Sales force morale declines.
It's not a pretty picture. When the internal conversation is all about money, the external conversation becomes all about money. And all of a sudden, that's the last thing you're making.
Companies have tried a variety of methods to solve this problem. Organizations spend millions on sales training programs teaching salespeople how to ask better questions and engage the customers. They spend even more millions on CRM systems to capture critical customer information. They host off‐site retreats to create mission and vision statements. They hire expensive consultants to craft lengthy slide decks articulating their value proposition.
The results are short‐lived at best. Salespeople abandon the training the minute a high‐stakes deal is on the table. No one updates the customer intel in CRM. The mission and vision are put on a meaningless placard in the lobby. And the value story is reduced to a bunch of pretty slides that sound just like everyone else's.
The reason these solutions don't deliver sustained improvement is because they address only the symptoms. They don't tackle the root cause: the lack of purpose.
Peter Drucker, widely considered the most influential management thinker in the second half of the twentieth century, famously said, “Profit is not the purpose of a business but rather the test of its validity.”
I'll take that a step further: Driving revenue is not the purpose of a sales force; it's the test of its effectiveness.
If you want to create a differentiated sales team, you have to point them toward a different target. Instead of pointing your team toward a number, which is likely what your competition is doing, point your team toward a Noble Sales Purpose (NSP).
A Noble Sales Purpose is a definitive statement about how you make a difference in the lives of your customers. It speaks to why you're in business in the first place. Used correctly, your NSP drives every decision you make and every action you take. It becomes the underpinning for all your sales activities.
For example, one of our clients provides IT services for small businesses. Their NSP is simply, “We help small businesses be more successful.” It's not elaborate or sexy or poetic. Instead, it's clear and effective. It drives everything they do. Every decision, large or small, must pass through that filter: “Will this help us make small businesses more successful?” If the answer is no, they don't do it. Every new product and service they create—every sales call—is focused on how they can make their customers' small businesses more successful. You'll read more about how this team used their NSP to drive a decade worth of growth later in the book.
For now, notice how this simple statement goes beyond the standard value proposition or product description. It doesn't include “and our community” or “through our values like integrity and hard work” or anything like that. It's simple. And clear. That's why it works.
Their NSP describes the impact they aim to have on customers. It serves as the North Star for the organization.
The leadership team first began implementing their NSP in 2009, during the height of the recession. In a tough economy, when customers were cutting back on outside IT services, the NSP approach helped the company post double‐digit sales growth. While other firms were descending into transactional sales to get business, they stayed true to their NSP and won clients away from competitors. As the economy improved, their NSP drove even more growth. Their reputation grew, and their customers became their best sales ambassadors.
Profits are the result of your work, not the sole purpose of your efforts.
The evidence tells us that purpose is the secret to driving more revenue. As one of my favorite purpose colleagues, Roy Spence—who has worked in the purpose space for decades—says, “Purpose is your reason for being; [it] goes beyond making money, and it almost always results in making more money than you ever thought possible.”
An NSP approach can be counterintuitive for leaders schooled in a “managing to the money” style. For some, it's almost heresy. Yet the results speak for themselves.
Our client Doug Williams, the CEO of Atlantic Capital Bank, articulated it best when he said, “I've realized I need to manage to the numbers, but I need to lead to the Noble Purpose.” Later in the book, you'll read about how Williams and his team used their NSP—“We fuel prosperity”—to transform their organization, grow income from continuing operations by 81%, and be voted a Best Place to Work based on anonymous employee surveys. Eighteen months after they began their Noble Purpose journey, Williams was on the cover of American Banker Magazine as one of the top bankers in America for his team's remarkable turnaround.
An NSP drives more revenue than financial goals alone because an NSP taps into a human instinct even more powerful than our desire for money.
Reframing the Sales Profession
As the famous saying goes, nothing happens until somebody sells something. Salespeople are linchpins; they're the ones who bring in the revenue that keeps everything else running. If you want to create a prosperous organization, you need to sell. Personally, I believe a role in sales is one of the highest callings you can have in an organization.
Unfortunately, not everyone feels this way. There are two widespread misperceptions about sales:
Sales is sleazy.
Sales is easy.
Scott Jensen, a former sales coach at Deloitte, tells a story about being a young sales manager with another company. Upon walking into an internal departmental company meeting, he heard one of the other department heads say, “Here comes the commission whore.” The rest of the group laughed at the joke.
This story makes my head spin. How can an organization create differentiation and pride if they believe their sales team is only self‐interested? The simple answer is, you can't. Differentiation and pride come from a deep‐seated belief that your work is actually helping people. That's where you come in: your job as a leader is to build that belief across your organization.
What's Gained from Approaching Sales with Purpose
Your Noble Sales Purpose points you in a nobler and, ultimately, more profitable direction. It's the starting point for a series of changes that can dramatically improve your sales force and the bottom line.
An NSP:
Brings the customer voice to the front and center of the conversation
Provides an organizing framework for planning and decision-making
Improves the quality of your existing sales training
Helps mid‐level performers set more ambitious goals
Helps top performers stay focused on delivering value
Differentiates your conversations with customers in a way products and specs cannot
Acts as a reset button during times of challenge and change
This book is written for sales leaders because you set the tone for your organization. Whether you're the Chief Revenue Officer, a sales manager, an aspiring sales leader, or a CEO who wants to change the way your team approaches customers, your mindset, language, and strategy are where everything starts.
An NSP is not a tactic. It's a strategic shift in the way you approach your business. It's more than a simple sales technique; it's a sales leadership philosophy that turbocharges all other techniques. It's the missing ingredient a sales force needs to take their performance to the next level.
You gain the following from approaching sales with an NSP mindset:
Your sales team becomes more resourceful since they're always looking for ways to help customers' businesses.
Clients take you to the higher‐level people in their organizations because they see you as a resource and not someone in it only for their own quota.
You shorten the sales cycle. You ask more robust and second‐tier questions, delving into critical customer business issues and creating urgency.
You bring the customer's voice into your organization, which helps you create better products, services, and marketing.
You create proposals and presentations that are more compelling and persuasive because they're organized around the client's goals, not focused on your product's or service's features and benefits.
You don't have to “act like” you care about your customers, because you really do care.
You love your job because you have a more noble purpose than just “selling stuff to make money.”
You're more likely to talk about your job in social situations, and when you do, people are more likely to be interested in hearing about it—since making a difference in people's lives is exciting.
Sales coaching improves because leaders speak in depth about client situations and goals.
You're better able to manage obstacles because you don't get defensive and take them personally. You see them for what they are: simple requests for help.
Your NSP becomes your North Star: a way of resetting yourself during tough times.
Why Selling with Noble Purpose Becomes Self‐Reinforcing
Unpack the inner drivers of most salespeople, and you'll find that money occupies a substantial part of their mental real estate. But people are complex; we have multiple motivations.
When we did a deep dive into the internal motivation of salespeople, we found the top performers do care about money. They're not complete altruistic do‐gooders. Many (myself included) initially got into sales because they wanted to make good money.
But here was the notable difference. Over time, the top performers added a layer of purpose. It often developed as a result of seeing their positive impact on customers. Because they were more attuned to it, they saw it more readily; it stuck and then became self‐reinforcing. It became their default.
For top performers, their internal talk track, the narrative in their heads that drives their daily behavior, is about the impact they have on customers. It doesn't matter what's going on inside their organization; their internal compass always resets back to the customer.
Mid‐level performers, on the other hand, tend to mirror the prevailing organizational story, whatever that may be. If the organization emphasizes a financial carrot‐and‐stick mentality, that's where their brains will go. If the organization has a narrative of a higher purpose, that's where their brains will go. The organizational talk track becomes their internal talk track.
When we do deep dives with salespeople who aren't top performers, we usually find that they too have a secret desire for purpose and meaning. They simply haven't reflected on it or spoken about it because nothing in their organization prompts them to think that way. It's not their default setting.
Their potential Noble Purpose is there, but it has yet to be activated. It's like a switch in the off position that needs someone else to turn it on. This book is about flipping that switch to on.
In his book Drive: The Surprising Secret About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink writes, “The science shows that the secret to high performance isn't our biological drive or our reward‐and‐punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep‐seated desire to direct our own lives, to expand and extend our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.” Pink goes on to say, “Humans, by their nature, seek purpose—a cause greater and more enduring than themselves.”
The discord between what social science knows (humans crave purpose) and business does (the carrot and stick) creates a transactional relationship with both employees and customers.
Nowhere is this dissension greater than in sales, where organizations continue to dangle incentive programs, bonuses, and trips in front of salespeople, hoping that it will motivate them. Yet time and again, the incentive programs produce short‐term spikes in performance from a small percentage of people. In most organizations, the top performers remain the same year after year, while the rest of the sales force stays stuck in the mediocre middle.
What's ironic is that many organizations do make a difference to their customers, serving a larger purpose. They just don't talk about it with the salespeople.
We once worked with a security firm that was literally saving people's lives. The executive leaders made a regular practice of describing the meaningful impact their services had on customers to the tech team, the customer service group, and even the accountants.
