When seeing is believing

No matter how flat you make a pancake, it’s still got two sides.

Dr Phil

Whenever we’re trying to forge a connection, it’s easy for us to go out imagining our pancake has only one side, the one we are interested in, and interested in promoting.?That’ll get us so far in forging connections, but only so far.

This week's Thriving Leader is about how to incorporate perspectives into your thinking so you harness their connective energy. Many of say we do this but often we're not really listening and seeing with open eyes, we approach our connecting with our solution in mind and in our hearts is a mission to persuade people we are right and we know best. So this week's article is out to challenge you and illustrate the benefits of connecting well.

ARE YOU UP FOR A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE OR YOU REALLY LOOKING FOR PEOPLE WHO AGREE WITH YOU?

When we incorporate different points of view, those differences can be mild alternative perspectives or radically alternate perspectives.?It’s often easy for to think, I’ll accept the mild ones because these folk are really similar to me or they’re close to be converted to my point of view.?It’s even easier to set to one side those you don’t really understand and dismiss them as “unconnectable” with no prospect of connective energy.

Yet sometimes these are exactly the people you need to go for in order to gain the different perspectives you need.??What they bring is a different perspective.?Wherever we stand we have a landscape set out in front of us.?When we shift our position, we see the landscape with another perspective.

James was a sales manager at Captive Corporation, which sold computer software to other businesses to help them with their accounting and auditing.?One of James’s biggest frustrations was going out to clients, convincing them to buy into Captive’s products and yet when it came to the fulfilment team organising the welcome experience, designing the training and onboarding of the client and the support they’d need to first use the product, he found this experience frustratingly unreliable.?

Marcie, was head of client fulfilment and responsible for this onboarding.??From James’ perspective sales would be a whole lot easier if client fulfilment just pulled their finger out and go on with the onboarding.?Marcie, was equally frustrated with the sales team.?Her budget and resource was set on the basis of the number of user licences that sales could sell – in effect a proportion of every licence sale contributed to her team’s support budget.?Yet Marcie’s team found themselves tied up onboarding new clients who often expected the product to do more than it was actually designed to do.

A frustrated James and a frustrated Marcie, both backed into their corners and little constructive action and a lot of frustrated clients.??Marcie couldn’t understand why sales would allow a client to imagine there was more functionality in the product than it offered.?James couldn’t understand how Fulfilment couldn’t see that if clients didn’t get what they had asked for then there’d be no revenue to pay for all those folk over in fulfilment.?

Whilst James stewed in his own juices complaining to his fellow sales managers, Marcie decided to take two decisive actions.

Marcie called up James and asked if she could do on a field visit with him when he next had a client.?James thought this was a great idea because it would “teach Marcie a think or two about how hard it is to secure a sale in this competitive market”.??Yet Marcie kept her cool and went out with James on a day of client visits.?At the end of a tiring and exhausting day Marcie and James reflected on how the day had gone.

Marcie explained to James she had little idea how tiring the role was but also how clients had a combination of ambiguous and specific needs of the software.??James was very meticulous in explaining what the software absolutely could do and yet Marcie could see no matter how meticulous James was, the clients would always develop a greater appetite for more functionality and more use of the software once they started to use it.

Sharing this information with James, he started to see how the questions asked of Fulfilment were slowing down the whole process of onboarding clients.?It wasn’t anyone’s fault, it was just the way things were.?Yet they were still missing another perspective – that of the client.?And that’s when things moved up a gear.

Taking advantage of the fact that Marcie had already spent a day with James, James asked Fred at Simpsons, one of the clients they went to see that day if he’d be willing to participate in a new trial programme free of charge that the company was interested in exploring to improve customer satisfaction.??Fred said yes.

Marcie and James went back to meet Fred to discuss the onboarding approach for Simpsons.??Between the three of them they outlined priority uses of the software.?Fred explained whilst they company was excited about what they could gain from Captive’s software the first order of business was to keep the lights on and ensure they could continue doing what they do now, using the new software.??Then he outlined a range of other problems and opportunities for Simpsons.??

With James keeping a careful eye on the commercials, Marcie used her experience of the level of support each of those problems and opportunities would take and suggested a priority order for Fred.??Fred agreed that some of the demands were going to take more hands on support from Captive’s fulfilment team to realise the opportunity, allowing James to customise the pricing for the product and ongoing support.

Although no one really knew at the time, the breakthrough came from Marcie.?Marcie had been in a similar role in another software house.?Realising this issue of mismatched client expectations must be quite commonplace she reached out across her network for ideas how to make the experience better.??Back came the answer loud and clear – you will not be able to do this without the client’s perspective.?And that spurred her into action.

Roll forward a couple of months and Marcie and James have improved their process for client satisfaction even further.??Realising that Fred only knew what he was being told by the supervisors at Simpsons, they offered Simpsons an on-site “meet the expert” session.?This proved to be a great success:

·???????The staff at Simpsons got a lot of small questions they felt were not important enough to raise to Captive’s support team there and then

·???????These little questions formed the basis of insight that Marcie could use to improve the FAQs for the software

·???????Both James and Marcie, witnessing the software in action could see which bits were being used a lot as well as elements of functionality that could benefit Simpsons but they just weren’t using them.??Working with Fred, they were able to devise an 18 month adoption roadmap and a support package that generated some additional revenue for Captive as well as releasing more efficiency and productivity benefits for Simpsons.??

·???????Another sale was made and yet it never felt to anyone like a sale, it felt like a meeting of minds where everyone had chosen to look hard at the problem, step into each other’s shoes and witness things from a new perspective

TAKE THIS ACTION TODAY

When you’re looking to improve your connective energy, it pays to do some travelling, to step into someone else’s shoes and see things from another perspective.??Here are a few tips to try:

-???????When meeting someone on their turf, ask the open questions that allow you to absorb – what’s happening right now, what’s working well, what’s tough right now – focus on their interests not yours, you’ll learn a lot and the connection points will emerge anyway

-???????Look around at the environment and what might be going on and different to the way you’d imagined, don’t feel the pressure to bat stories backwards and forwards, that for every snippet of a story you’ve been told you need to sell something back

-???????Look for the opportunity to bring people together to form triangles of perspectives – ask what does this now mean, what can we do together now we see these different perspectives and the opportunities will emerge

So be brave and go out of your way to find people outside your normal tribe, it'll feel uncomfortable because we all love the dopamine hit of being told we're right. But nothing is worse than investing deeply in something that all your friends say is awesome but in the end no-one else is buying.

That’s it for this time, let me know what you think and share your experience in comments, if you like Thriving Leader why not share with someone you think would benefit. We’re all trying to grow.

Check out more resources and how to reach out if you want a little extra help at www.ianbrowne.com