admin, Author at Steve DuPlessis

The Secret – Leadership

January 16, 2015 by admin Leave a Comment

I don’t think I have ever read a book that hits home with me more than this one. It was an extremely easy read to boot. In MBA discussions or case studies on organization management, corporate culture, or human resources you may have come across the servant leader philosophy. This book does a great job of breaking it down into an acronym and wrapping it around a story.

Leaders are sometimes defined by their vision, execution or performance, however I have always believed it is by the amount of people that would follow them. I think that is what permits and provides for the other things to happen. I especially like the portion of the book that speaks to caring about your employees. I am not sure why, but I witness way too many managers keeping their employees at arm’s length. Another observation is that the employees they bring close to them are the ones that are performing as if surrounding themselves with performers make them a stronger leader by association. The best leaders I have worked with and now emulate are the ones that care about their entire team and look to understand performance at all levels and how they can impact each individual differently. I have heard get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus, but I prefer the idea that sometimes people are in the wrong seats and it is about leveraging their strengths. Interestingly enough, these were the teams that had the greatest amount of engagement, teamwork, collaboration,best practice sharing. It was as if caring was contagious.

I don’t want to give up too much of the book, but I will leave you with the biggest question, “Are you a serving leader or a self-serving leader?”

Maya Angelo – “I’ve learned people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

John C. Maxwell – “True leadership must for the benefit of the followers, not to enrich the leader.”

Jackie Robinson – “A life is not important except on the impact it has on other lives.”

If you should want the book, here is a link to it on amazon.

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Filed Under: Lead

Road Side MBA

December 12, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

Three former students from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management who have since received their PhDs from Stanford and Princeton and are now professors at different colleges decide to go on a road trip after the following experience. They pulled into a shoe store in Maine and noticed that the sales help was unusually pushy. After a few questions, they discovered the store had a “secret shopper” program, in which employees would be marked down if they were not sufficiently aggressive with customers. A lightbulb went off.

Instead of teaching the tried-and-true case studies involving GE and Microsoft, these three wise men decided to pull their heads out of their ivory towers and go in search of insights about product differentiation, pricing, brand management, building a team, and a host of other topics. Why take your cues on employee compensation from Wall Street when you can learn from a Main Street company like Couer D’Alene’s best crime-scene cleaner? Want to learn about scaling a business? Come meet Dr. Burris, the flying orthodontist, who operates multiple, profitable practices in rural Arkansas.

I recommend this book to finishing MBA students as it pulls in the lessons of an MBA program but demonstrates how these lessons have helped small businesses become successful. In some instances the business advantage may have been planned, but in others it feels as if it was happenstance that occurred through experience. In the end, the major lesson is that you can apply your MBA to small, medium and large businesses and corporations and if you are going into business yourself you should plan on incorporating the business lessons you have learned to your advantage.

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Filed Under: MBA

The Ten Day MBA

November 29, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

I finished my MBA in November of 2014 at the University of Texas at El Paso Graduate School. A common discussion in my cohort was how we intended to use our MBA in our organization or whether we would be pursuing a new situation. In every learning environment instructors are tasked with passing knowledge on to their students, although at the end of each class they must wonder if the students will retain the information. If you don’t have an opportunity to apply your new knowledge in a given period of time, then it is most certainly lost or at a minimum forgotten. If you don’t use it, then as the saying goes you lose it!

One way to recall information is to save all the items from each class into a folder and go through it when needed. This could include projects, case studies, presentations, etc. Another way is to create a library from each of the books that the instructors used. These two options can sometimes require a lot of time rooting through the information looking for that one tidbit you want to locate. I was fortunate to locate two books that I will recommend. This particular one I would label a reference book. A reference book is like an encyclopedia where you can quickly find a topic to learn or provoke previous learning.

I recommend The Ten Day MBA for this purpose whether you are starting or just finishing your MBA. For instance, an MBA is taught to use information in decision making. Quantitative Analysis is a subject in every MBA program as it teaches the individual how to evaluate information objectively using numbers and statistics when trying to solve complicated problems. The topics in this chapter around this subject include decision tree analysis, cash flow analysis, net present value, probability analysis, and regression analysis.

I found this book to be an excellent read.

Filed Under: MBA

Vendor or Consultant?

November 26, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

I have always prided myself on being a consultant to my customer even before the idea of Challenger Selling emerged. I felt that developing relationship and becoming a trusted advisor to my customer would lead to business under the right circumstances. I feel it is an obligation to provide insight to my customers on anything that can bring benefit to their business. If they didn’t do business with me, then it was because the other option was better for their business. I have always taken exception to being treated like a vendor. This year this has happened twice and it has caused me to reflect and write as I feel like I lost a friendship in one instance and the business in another instance because of a lack of trust.

The first step in the process is to define a trusted advisor and if you click on the words it will take you to an article I feel does a great job defining. I am passionate, excited and wholehearted about helping my customer’s business. I get up close and personal about their business and their goals. I work to be credible by researching their industry. I put my customer’s interests ahead of mine and I work to understand their underlying interests and not their surface wants. I am genuine and I am in it for the long term relationship not the short term gain. I am reliable and follow through on my commitments. I understand that I will not win every time, however I hope to never lose the relationship.

Does being a trusted advisor mean that you don’t sell? This previous question is linked to the next article that I like. I want my customers to understand that I am a salesperson and that I represent a company and their product and services. Thus, I am always learning about their business as a means of prospecting for opportunities where my product or service can help them achieve their business goals. This does not mean that the personal relationship doesn’t matter to me. IT DOES! This is the message for my first friend/customer. Your friendship matter to me and not in any weird way.

My message for the second customer/friend is to be careful of the vendor that says “Yes” to everything. Part of being authentic, is that I can say no and talk to the opportunity for compromise. In every relationship, there should be trust and room for compromise. I can not be accountable to your last relationship if bad; I can only tell you that I am in it for the long term relationship and not the short term gain. I am truthworthy and if I commit to something then I will deliver on my commitment to the best of my ability. My success is directly coorelated with my customer’s satisfaction and meeting my commitments.

To both my friends, I wish the best for you and your business and hope you will reach out to me in the near future to have a coffee, beer, or wine or possibly breakfast, lunch or dinner. Enjoy the Holidays and God Bless!

Filed Under: Sales

Actionable Insight

June 1, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

I have been in B2B sales for 17 years and it always surprises me when a word becomes part of every person’s conversation. Even more interesting is when you search on this buzzword and find out that it was discussed 3 years ago, but recently emerged as mainstream. I discovered this when I found the June 2011 blog article, “Actionable Insights”: Watchword or Buzzword? This term is directly tied to Big Data or Guided Analytics. Are these terms overused and have/will they become puffspeak as referred to in the article, What is an ‘Actionable Insight’? This article references a situation where the data led to a powerful insight around the misconception that saving poor people would lead to overpopulation. I was aware of big data at least 10 years ago when Google launched Google Analytics and probably sooner as a business person when discussing customer preferences and targeted or segregated marketing. However, this concept has penetrated my current field of sales and I am concerned with its misguided use. Therefore, I am writing this article to discuss how to use insight for selling.

I have read 3 books that speak to insight in selling. It started with SPIN Selling by Neil Rackman, I feel like an impact statement is along the lines of an insight statement only more focused on a specific business situation and problem. The Challenger Sale by Matt Dixon shares insight selling as a manner of creating constructive tension with your customer to bring about action. Finally, I just finished The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes and he writes about the 5 ways, trends or wow statements that will build rapport with a customer and lead to the action of them buying your product or service.

Now that we have established that insight statements are important in selling, what comprises an insight statement. I attended a training where I felt they did the best job of breaking it down. They shared that an Insight Statement = Facts + Objectives + Insight + Example + Compelling Question. It has been my experience that most sales people consider only the fact to be the insight statement. A fact is considered a general truth known by experience or observation, but I would take that one step further and use a conducted study. An objective is derived from research or existing knowledge. An insight interprets the meaning implied when facts and objectives are combined to present an opportunity to the prospect plus quantifiable example. This is the meat of the insight statement as it pulls everything together. Finally, a compelling question is just confirmation on whether or not the insight provide a wow statement and starts the two way conversation.

The final GOTCHA that I will write about is that an insight statement does not include a solution. If it is truly important to your prospect it can lead to your solution, but never starts with it or is mentioned during the delivery of an insight statement. I like Chet’s idea of being prepared with 5 statements. Most likely one will resonate with your prospect and provide next steps toward your solution. Even if it doesn’t, if done correctly you will have separated yourself from your competition because you will have provide them an education.

Filed Under: Sales

The Challenger Sale

May 28, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

What’s the secret to sales success? If you’re like most business leaders, you’d say it’s fundamentally about relationships-and you’d be wrong. The best salespeople don’t just build relationships with customers. They challenge them.

My third pillar to sales success is The Challenger Sale. I like information based on research and this was based on an exhaustive study of thousands of sales reps across multiple industries and geographies, The Challenger Sale argues that classic relationship building is a losing approach, especially when it comes to selling complex, large-scale business-to-business solutions.

The Challenger Sales representatives approach customers with unique insights. They tailor their sales message to the customer’s specific needs and objectives. Rather than acquiescing to the customer’s every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale.

The authors explain how almost any average-performing rep, once equipped with the right tools, can successfully reframe customers’ expectations and deliver a distinctive purchase experience that drives higher levels of customer loyalty and, ultimately, greater growth.

My takeaways from this read is that for a complex sale we need to move past the relationship and become the consultant; this is not the most astonishing insight. However, a consultant is respected and not always agreeable to the way an organization currently does things. They provide wow statements that provide new perspective.

We must equip our core sales force with the proper tools. Again, not ground-breaking but I am surprised with how many companies with robust marketing and research departments that have technical writers allow their sales force to create the messaging. To enable a complex sale, the company has to own this responsibility and provide what is important to specific industries and how their solution(s) can address the needs of their customers.

To gain the respect of your customer you must have the ability to challenge them and provide unique perspectives. This may be the most earth-shattering takeaway. Sale representatives and their managers typically believe they have to grow a relationship with their customer and so contesting the customer’s opinion was negatively perceived. Even offering a dissenting opinion internally in your organization is sometimes referred to as a negative attitude. There are ways to deliver a message that challenges our customer without offending them and this is referred to as constructive tension or constructive criticism. Equally important is understanding that feedback is important to every successful process.

Filed Under: Book

Social Media – LinkedIn 102

May 10, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

LinkedIn 102 – 5 Advanced Tips.

I have previously attended many Social Media training sessions and most of them spoke to the statistics of why you should use Social Media and the major Social Media sites that a business should start on. In every instance, I see the audience’s eyes gloss over with trying to figure out where to start and then there is an onslaught of questions about how to start. I reached out to the Greater El Paso Chamber of Commerce and explained the problem. People come to these trainings because they recognize the need to be on Social Media; they just don’t know how to get started. The Chamber has asked me to provide a presentation on a certain topic every once in a while. You can go to my LinkedIn site, http://www.linkedin.com/in/steveduplessis , and see a couple presentations that I have given.

The first step to LinkedIn is fully completing your profile. It is like your resume in that you can’t just provide your last job; you need to share a summary, your skills, your relevant experiences, your affilations, your accomplishment and your references. It as close to 100% completion as you can. However, once that is completed how do you use this tool? Most often, the question is growing your network but how do you use that network and how do you motivate people to want to be part of your network?

LinkedIn like all Social Media tools is changing to meet the needs of their customers and to understand how they can monetize their tool to provide a return to their shareholders in the near future. I researched and found several articles and presentations and discovered some tools have either changed or been removed, however here are the few free tidbits that are worth mentioning.

1. You grow your network using your colleagues and different people you have crossed paths with in your life. Did you know that you could open that person’s network and send invitations to their connections? What about if you joined a group that you can invite members of that group to join your network? I find these two ways beneficial as it normally doesn’t have a lock. I am able to meet people outside my circle at all different levels for no cost. LinkedIn Premium, a pay for service, will allow you to find people to add to your network by searching on location, function, seniority level, or company size if you want to cut down on time.

2. Be a thought leader! You should join a group that is tied to your interests or job and do a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly post. Clearly frequency plays a role, but so does quality. You can crowdsource, gain information from people, by posting a question or you can gain credibility by demonstrating subject matter expertise. This can grow your network and your knowledge base.

3. Join groups! If the two previous didn’t convince you, then you are missing the mark. Groups provide knowledge that is outside your circle of influence. This can stem off group think. You can control access if security if you worry, but personally I perfer subjects that aren’t confidential to allow the free flow of ideas. Hit the folder icon and select groups and type in an interest. Join the one that most closely resembles your interest, if nothing populates, then you have an opportunity to start a group.

4. Customize and Organize with Tags! Any course on marketing with speak to target and segmentation. This provides that ability as I can assign certain tags to my contacts. If I find and article or I am writing a post that is specific to an industry, function, or position, then I can pick who I send the message. A quick way to kill the value of LinkedIn is to inundate all you connections with every post that has no relevance to them.

5. Proliferation! It is very important to find ways to share your content over multiple venues. We are rarely in the same place everyday and content is everywhere, so how can you ensure your material is touched. Content, Time, and Frequency! You must create content that brings value. You must create metrics and use them to manage when to send them. It may be important to share good content mulitple times, so that it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. Careful with this one as I am not suggesting sending something everyday for a week. If it has value, then I might consider sending it 2-3 times over a 2 week span. I may use different ways to send (Aggregator, RSS feed, Different Social site) as to create the perception that it is being shared.

Thank you for reading my first article on Social Media and please subscribe as I will be publishing more in the future. I like Social Media Examiner and SlideShare and my LinkedIn groups for learning.

Filed Under: Social Media

SPIN Selling

April 26, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

Neil Rackman breaks the sales call into four distinct stages which he calls premliminaries, investigating, demonstrating capability, and obtaining commitment. He discovered a difference between the traditional small sale and the complex large sale in that the most important stage was the investigation stage and not the obtaining commitment stage that most companies teach. It is not the objection handling or the closing skills that will get you the large complex sale in fact they were required less in a complex sale. This is a pillar to sales success in that you learn exactly how to use questions to understand a customer problems and needs and the impact a solution can have solving and satisfying them.

The best-documented account of sales success ever collected and the result of the Huthwaite corporation’s massive 12-year, $1-million dollar research into effective sales performance, this groundbreaking resource details the revolutionary SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff) investigation strategy.

You will learn why traditional sales methods which were developed for small consumer sales, just won’t work for large sales and why conventional selling methods are doomed to fail in major sales. Packed with real-world examples, illuminating graphics, and informative case studies – and backed by hard research data – SPIN Selling is the million-dollar key to understanding and producing record-breaking high-end sales performance.

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Filed Under: Book

Are your printers acting like teenagers?

April 19, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

Are your printers acting like teenagers? Do you know where they are? Do you know what they are doing? Are they costing you too much? Are they frustrating?

I give credit for this opening to Keith Houghton a Director at Transcend360 Ltd out of the UK. I will also mention that I am blessed to have a wonderful daughter that is only slightly frustrating from time to time. I thank the Lord everyday that I haven’t had to worry about the first two questions yet even though she is beautiful.

Do you know where they are? They never seem to be where they say they are and when you need them to be at a specific place they are never there. The lost productivity associated with finding (your kid) the right printer for the right job is incredible. In the end, we select the most convenient printer which is most often the most costly.

Do you know what they are doing? This question is hardly ever answered with accuracy. In some instances we have an idea, but when we get all the information it can startle us. In other instances, we are just flat out flabbergasted because we had no idea and we just trusted blindly. I will do a NO COST PRINT ASSESSMENT for a business; they are always surprised by the amount of printers and the amount of print spend.

Are they costing too much? Is it fiscal responsibility or the changes in cost because of age, technology or inflation? It just seems like $20 doesn’t stretch nearly as far as when we were a kid. Print cartridges fall into this category as costs are rising and the yields don’t seem to last as long. Even worse, we aren’t tracking the expense. It is like giving a teenager a credit card and hoping for responsbility. The only difference is that you get a bill from the credit card company, companies rarely can tell me the amount they spent on print cartridges last year or even last month. I can provide a Xerox tool that can track cost and provide a report.

Are they frustrating? One word, “YES!” I love my daughter more than the world, but I am sure she is always testing me. Kids need rules and so do printers. There can be print governance.

I like the way Keith ends his comments that both must be managed and loved to get the most out of them. My daughter is probably equally frustrated with me as she understands that I will never stop loving and advising her. In her teenage words, “I will never stop bothering her.” She will take “the deep breathe” as soon as I ask if I can talk with her. What happens when printers go unmanaged? Take a look at the graph below and understand what can happen when they are managed from a cost standpoint. This doesn’t account for productivity and sustainability. I will help you “Print for Less” and then “Print Less” with Xerox Manage Print Services!

Manage Print Services Cost Saved

Filed Under: Business

Automating Process with No Capital Expense: Black Belt Project is a Winner

April 1, 2014 by admin Leave a Comment

Automating Process with No Capital Expense: Black Belt Project is a Winner

This may sound like an odd question, but….

Did you ever mix your white laundry with red? If you have (or haven’t), you may know that the red could “bleed” and turn the load pink. The same effect could occur in an Emulsion Aggregation (EA) ink toner production plant. However, it doesn’t, certainly not at Xerox. Cleaning the lines prevents this unwanted color mixing effect from happening. But it takes time, “changeover cycle time,” in production language.

What to do? An opportunity to improve this process came about through a Black Belt certification project. That’s how the “Changeover Cycle Time Reduction” project was born.

Marc Hagan, process productivity specialist at the Xerox Supplies Development Center (SDC) part of the Xerox Research Centre of Canada (XRCC) in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, explains. “The production runs at the SDC are smaller than those of larger facilities because of the diverse product mix we produce. As a result, the amount of changeover required between different colors and products is high.”

There’s more…. “All changeover cycle time is essentially non value add. As such, a need existed at the SDC to limit the amount of time spent cleaning instead of producing product. The changeover procedure was outdated and not well defined, which limited automating it. Thus, most cleaning was done manually.”

For his Green Belt project, Marc semi-automated a section of the changeover process. For his Black Belt certification, he revisited the situation. This time, he took on the whole system.

“In the spirit of full disclosure, I had an on-site advantage,” Marc admits. “I’ve been working at the SDC for years in process-oriented functions. I knew the control system and had ideas about how to automate it completely this time. Plus I could try out solutions while doing my day job.”

He credits Lean Six Sigma with giving him the resources to tackle this project. ” I analyzed the process flow by performing a series of measurements to arrive at a baseline for the process. I saw variability in cycle time, which pointed to the need to standardize the process.”

With what he refers to as a “Lean 101” mindset, Marc derived a series of “quick wins.” Putting tools at the point of use is a case in point. He then went on to streamline the changeover procedure. In total, he removed 143 manual operations, which equates to about 50 percent of the process. That cleared the way for him to automate the remaining steps with what he calls a “control system recipe.”

The new and improved system went live in October 2013. It offers an array of benefits, such as:

•Standardizing, eliminating, automating and leaning out the entire changeover process
•Reducing cycle time by 32 percent, which frees resources to do more value-added work
•Increasing production and revenue as byproducts
•Doing all of the above without incurring any capital expense!
There’s one more impact to take into consideration. “I’m one of the first in-position people to get Black Belt certified in the supply chain or manufacturing groups at Xerox,” he says. What does that mean? “I get to live the benefit of the improvements every day. And I’ve helped make work life easier for my colleagues. It’s rewarding and there’s more to come.”

Filed Under: Featured, Six Sigma Tagged With: Black Belt, Green Belt, Process, Six Sigma