You maybe aware of a quote from Henry David Thoreau – probably
something he came up with on a rainy day, when he was sitting at Waldon Pond,
which said, “most of us live lives of quiet desperation”. I’ve always found that quote
disquieting and I really feel that it doesn’t necessarily apply to everybody equally. And
I’ve never really felt that it’s applied to me. But there are times of quiet when I think
about the service that Opus provides to our clients. And I really try to understand the
value that we can bring to you, by utilizing our services.

I think its important that we all feel that we do something of value. And so I give this
probably more thought than other people do. And I really think the value is around
helping you understand motivation, what motivates you as an individual, what’s
important to you to help somebody confirm and affirm your own motivators, and then to
help you understand what motivates the people around you. Because if we understand
what people are motivated by, then we can understand what we can do to help them
accomplish what’s important to them.

And it’s not the things as much as it is the intangibles. We all have them, the desire to
win, the desire to be part of the team, the desire for security, the desire for harmony.
Whatever it is, we all have motivations that go beyond what we normally see. And
our job, and what hopefully we do well for you, is to help you understand your own
motivation and what motivates others. And for doing that then maybe, maybe Thoreau
didn’t get it right as it relates to OPUS.

One of the great things about what I get to do for a living is that I get to talk to people all over the world. I mean, I can be on the phone with a candidate for a client in Moscow or Singapore or Detroit or San Francisco or anywhere. And it’s great because it’s such a big, big world that we get to work in.

Something happened to me last week which really convinced me that as the saying goes, it’s a small world after all. I had a chance to do a profile of a candidate. And as part of the small talk, we talked about where the person was from and as it turns out, he’s from the same town that I’m from.

This is a little tiny town on the east end of Long Island. And when he gave me the family name it registered with me, and I said, “Not only do I know that you’re from the town that you’re from, I know what street your family is from.” He said, “How could you possibly know that?” I said, “It’s because your family was my next door neighbor.”

So I want you to think of the odds of that. Think of the odds when you’re talking to people all over the world that I could end up talking to the grandson of my next door neighbor. So when I recounted the story to my mom later in the day, she said, “Well you know that his Aunt Vivian was your babysitter when you were growing up.” And I just couldn’t believe it. Aunt Vivian was my babysitter?

Well, it really struck home with me that although the world is big, in so many ways what we do brings it all close together. Now I grew up in a family business where we sold merchandise in one small town and we really did get to know our customers. We knew what color of clothes they like, what sizes, what brands, and what they bought last year for Christmas. We knew all of that.

Well as much as the world has changed, there is still a lot to be said for understanding that you could be talking to your next door neighbor and your reputation of who you are and what you stand for still matters. It maybe a big world but you still can’t hide from your Aunt Vivian.

Thanks for your attention.

I want to talk to you today about how companies could inadvertently destroy the morale of their employees although they are well intentioned in their efforts.  I want to talk to you about a sales woman by the name of Miller.  She went to a sales training class where she was learning about complex sales and this is the type of a training class that many companies have and one of the exercises that they did at the beginning of the class was a very simple personality assessment kind of a tool, not something that we offered in this particular class but the kind of work that we actually do.  Well, after the sales people went through the exercise, they were broken up into the different behavioral styles that showed up in the group.  There were people that were high in dominance and there were people that were high in extraversion, people high in patience and people high in conformity.  My friend, Miller, happens to be in the high conformity group.  Well, the sales trainer who perhaps was a high dominance person himself started to talk to the class about all of the positive things about being a high dominance sales person.  The competitive nature, the desire to win to do what ever needs to be done at all costs and then proceeded to pretty much slam the other three behavioral styles that the high extraverts talk too much and the high patience people don’t know how to create conflict and the high conformity people get all wrapped up in minutiae.  And my friend Miller didn’t come out of this feeling very good about herself.

Well here is the amazing fact, the week before on the last day of the quarter, my friend Miller closed a $5.3 million deal in software licenses for her company and all of those high dominance people that were fist pumping and chest bumping themselves about the great personality styles… They didn’t close anything.  And if you really look at what the skill set is for handling a complex sale that involved a year’s worth of discussions and demonstrations at the technology level, at the application level, meeting after meeting after meeting at all different levels of the organization.  You can understand that Miller’s high conformity trades really served her very, very well because after all was said and done the buyer bought from her because they genuinely believed in her competence and her ability to have her company deliver what needed to be delivered.  Now that’s not to say that high conformity people are the only strong behavioral profile for sales but we get so wrapped up and thinking that what we need is the aggressive no hold bars type of a behavioral style that we forget that the complex sales cycle requires many different talents.  No one brings all of them to the table and as a manager’s job it is your responsibility to understand what your people naturally do best and help them focus on adapting their style to meet the other requirements and providing them with the resources that they need, so they can be successful.

By the way, this was a new name, new logo account and they beat out their number one competitor who was the incumbent who by the time the deal got done was prepared to provide the license software to the client for free.  So think about that and think about what the behavioral style must have been of the sales person who had just taken over this account for the competitor.  So don’t be so quick to put down the other sales people on your team that may not bring that very aggressive “A” type personality to the table.  They may be just what you need, in fact my friend Miller told me that the other sales person who was the high conformity sales person in the group is about to get a $10 million deal this quarter.  Why? For basically the same reasons.  Thanks for your time.