Focus on the Details

What Lights on a Trunk and the Inside of a Laptop Can Teach You About Forming Great Business Habits

What makes a great brand? What makes a great company? Certainly a brand or company that has an inspiring vision would fit that description. A company looking to change the world would certainly be a company that I would like to follow. But really great brands and companies know to focus on the details. Focusing on the smallest pieces within your organization are just as important as having lofty goals. Consumers remember the smallest details as much as they remember the big dreams.

To better show you how to focus on the details within your company, I want to give you two real life examples from the business world. The first is the Mercedes-Benz S Class sedan and the second is the Apple MacBook Air laptop. What do these two products do better than any other product in their respective categories? They focus on the details.

The Mercedes-Benz S Class sedan is one of the most luxurious and awe-inspiring mass market high end sedans. Mercedes, across its entire vehicle line up, produces some of the best automobiles on the road. But what makes their vehicles truly great is their attention to the smallest details on their cars. One specific example is the lights on the base of the lid of the trunk.

Mercedes-Benz S Class Sedan (Image courtesy of Mercedes-Benz)

The only time you would ever notice these lights is when you have the trunk open at night. This may seem like an insignificant addition, but at a time when a driver is outside of her vehicle at night standing over her trunk with her back to traffic having lights visible on her car to warn oncoming traffic that there is a pedestrian near the road is not only a great design feature but it also a great safety feature. Without paying attention to these little details, the company would be failing at upholding its inspiring message: "the best or nothing."

One of the enduring legacies of Steve Jobs at Apple is his utmost attention to focus on the details. Specifically, Jobs would force his designers to make sure that the things Apple consumers would never see still look perfectly designed. Case in point, the MacBook Air is a 13-inch laptop that weighs less than two pounds, yet is every bit as powerful on the inside as it is modern and sleek on the outside.

Apple 13-inch MacBook Air (Image courtesy of Apple)

What Steve Jobs knew about design is that no artist is ever completely satisfied unless every bit of his art was perfect. That included all the pieces that the consumer would never see. If you were to ever open a piece of Apple hardware, you would notice that the components and circuitry are perfectly laid out in a clean, neat and organized manner. This was not by accident. The only way Jobs would put his stamp of approval on an Apple product was if the inside was as beautifully designed as the exterior.

Having great and lofty visions and goals for your company is important to show your clients that you care about the long-term success of your company. But, consumers will remember the smallest details about your company just as much as they will remember the inspiring vision. If you do not focus on the smallest details, you could alienate the consumers you are trying to reach. The next time you have a decision to make within your company, make sure to focus on the details.

Leaders Take the Middle Seat

Southwest Airlines has a unique seating arrangement for its travelers. While most major air carriers assign individuals a specific seat on their planes, Southwest simply places travelers into groups. Then, groups are boarded on to the plane and travelers get to pick their ideal seat. Naturally, the window and isle seats usually get selected first.

No one chooses to take the middle seat.

There are several personal requirements for businessmen and women to transform themselves into leaders. While some people are just born with leadership qualities, other leaders require years of training and practice. Regardless of the route taken to get to leadership status, all leaders must have a sense of humility in their arsenal of professional development skills.

In today's culture, most travelers expect to get on the plane as quickly as possible. They expect to get to their most desired seat as fast as possible. And they expect to put their luggage in the most convenient storage spot as possible. Sadly, this mentality leaves little room for anyone other than the individual traveler. I must get on the plane as quickly as possible, I have to get to my seat first, I have to put my roll-a-board into the overhead bin first.

Where you choose to sit on a plane says quite a bit about your leadership tactics.

Those that quickly take the nearest window seat are the selfish dreamers. While always thinking with your head in the clouds isn't considered a normal way to handle situations, it has its merits sometimes. But when you take the window seat, you are effectively saying that it does not matter to me what's going on around me. Leaders can't think like that.

Those that quickly take the isle seat care more about their own needs and desires than those of the people around them. Isle passengers are the first ones to stand up and fight for the exit door when the plane pulls up to its gate. Often, they stretch their legs into the isle, giving themselves more legroom but making it more difficult for those around them to navigate the isle. Leaders can't operate like that.

Leaders choose to take the middle seat.

The middle seat is the bridge that spans the gap of the opposite ends of the spectrum, from those who only have their heads in the clouds, to those that only care about themselves. In giving up a great view and by letting others have some extra space, the leader can put the priorities of the team above herself.

It is important for leaders to be humble. Humble leaders put the successes of others first and take the blame for any and all of the faults suffered by the team. According to William M. Lambert, the CEO of MSA Safety, Inc., in a recent Wall Street Journal article, "leaders need to have a strong ego, but not a big ego."

Choosing to sit in the middle seat not only means you do not have a big ego, but it also shows that your ego is so in check that you are willing to let others have what they want first.

The next time you have the opportunity to put the needs and wants of others around you first, make sure you take it. It is not only the right thing to do, but it also the thing that great leaders do. Nobody every gives praise or thanks to the man who only does things for his own benefit. Instead, gratitude is bestowed upon those who let others first. Leaders let others first. Leaders choose to take the middle seat.

Leadership is Like Mortar

Leadership is Like Mortar

When you look at a brick wall, what do you see? You probably see the bricks first and the mortar second. In fact, you might not even notice the mortar at first glance. You might only notice the mortar if there is something wrong with it, or if you know what to look for.

The same can be said for leadership.

Leadership is like the mortar in a brick wall. You should never notice that it is there. Yet the mortar is the most crucial part of the wall. Without mortar, the bricks would simply be stacked on top of one another with no support. A gentle push of the wall or the removal of a handful of bricks would make the wall come tumbling down.

The same can be said for leadership.

Without leadership invisibly holding the pieces of a family, a classroom, a team, or an organization together the slightest push can cause the entire family or team structure to implode.

Without mortar, a brick wall fails. Without leadership, your organization will fail.

Let's imagine you see another brick wall, but this time the first thing you notice is the mortar. That usually means there is something wrong with the mortar or there was something wrong with the way the mortar was installed. The masons may have put too much mortar on one brick, or not enough mortar on another. This might cause the mortar to overflow on to the front face of the brick wall. Or, over periods of time, the elements may have simply eroded away the mortar. Either way, the mortar is no longer invisible.

When it comes to leadership, the best leaders are invisible.

A good leader knows that for his or her team to succeed, he or she must do everything within their power to place the team above themselves. They must set aside their own ego and let the employees or the students shine. When you look at an organization and the first thing you see is the leadership, you might as well be looking at a brick wall with the mortar overflowing the bricks. While the brick wall may be standing, it certainly doesn't look right.

Finally, when you look at a brick wall, what else do you see? You see the bricks, each one approximately the same size, shape, color, and durability. You also see the mortar. But unlike the bricks, the mortar is pliable and easily molded to fit whatever shape it needs to fit.

The same can be said for leadership.

The individuals on your team, in your classroom, and within your organization are the bricks in the brick wall. While one brick by itself may not be remarkable, as a whole, all of the bricks can make remarkable things. However, the bricks can only make remarkable things when the mortar has the flexibility and pliability to fit into the areas where the bricks cannot. Together, the bricks and the mortar can make remarkable things.

The leader within you must be forced to take various shapes - invisibly - in order to make your group stand out and be the best it can possibly be.

So the next time you look at a brick wall, what will you see?

8 Ways to Improve Your Prospecting

The following article is an original blog post and was recently published in NAR's young professional blog.

As a sales professional, you should be conducting direct sales activities everyday that will add new prospects into your lead list. But sometimes you get into a rut or you need new ideas to help grow your list. Here are eight ways to improve your prospecting routine in order to get more clients.

Inspect Your Lead List

The most crucial checklist for anyone working in a sales position is your lead list. Your lead list will identify potential clients and where they stand in your sales cycle. At a minimum, you should be inspecting this list on a daily basis. For some people, checking this list multiple times a day is useful as well.

Having an adequate system – whether an online CRM, a spreadsheet, or index cards – to track, upgrade, downgrade, and to make notes on a particular lead is the lifeblood for a sales associate. You should always know exactly where your client is in the lifecycle of the sales process. Plus, if you can identify the likelihood of closing a particular lead, the more worthwhile your lead list.

Calendar Checking

As a sales professional, you probably rely on the records in your calendar just as much as your do as the data in your lead list. You probably note the time, date, location, and with whom you are spending every meeting, every breakfast, and every networking event with. Why not tap into all of that useful data?

Go back one day, one week, one month, and one year in your calendar. Look at what you were doing during those intervals. Who were you meeting with? Where were you meeting? Did you have coffee with a potential new client a month ago? Were you at an out-of-state conference last year? Follow up with all of the people to stay in touch or remind them of your encounters. It is an easy and free way to stay in front of your clients.

Warm Calling

Inspecting and checking your lead list is a great internal control to see where each one of your clients are in the lifecycle of your sales process. But if you never talk to any of your leads, then your lead list is practically worthless.

Use your lead list to engage in warm calling. Email your existing clients just to say hello and catch up. Text some clients who are just starting in your sales loop to give them some useful bits of information about your industry. Call a lead that may have been lost a few months ago to follow up and see if there is anything you could have done better to keep them as a client.

Networking Events

The best and most meaningful form of sales comes from face-to-face, in-person meetings. The only way to get these types of meetings is to meet new people in the first place. That is where networking events come in.

Look at your calendar for the coming weeks and if you have some openings, fill them with networking events. The beauty of networking events is that they can be anything from a kickball game with your friends to an industry specific seminar. Great sales professionals know how to network!

Social Media Engagement

By now, you should have a profile on at least three different social media outlets. The more social media outlets you have a profile on the better. But, it isn’t just about the number of profiles you have. The most important metric in social media is engagement.

To really see a return from using social media, you need to engage those on that social media platform. Don’t just post and spread your content. Like, follow, and comment on other people’s content. Start discussions with other people. Make connections with the influencers on each social media outlet so you can grow your sales by making more strategic connections.

Write a Blog Post

If the adage in the traditional media world is “content is king” then the adage in online media should be “new content is king.” Everyone with a website should be posting new blog content at least once a week. The more original, quality content you can promote the better. There are studies showing significant gains in traffic the more often you post content.

Unlike social media engagement where you are purposefully finding and communicating with other people on the different outlets, posting an article is an insightful way to get your message to your audience. Writing lots of new and inspiring content not only will get you more social media engagement, it will also start to brand you as an expert in your particular craft.

Make a Video

If writing a blog post is meant to establish yourself as an authority in a particular subject and to grow your audience, creating a video is how to spread your message exponentially quicker. If one of your social media profiles isn’t already on a video sharing outlet, you need to add it to your portfolio immediately.

Currently, nearly 3 billion hours of online media content is watched on a monthly basis in the United States alone. That means every person living in America is watching a little less than 10 hours of video online per month. If your videos aren’t part of those programming decisions, you are missing out on a great deal of potential traffic.

Cold Calling

Finally, the least enjoyable of any sales activity for most sales professionals is the cold call. Whether it is dialing every business in a certain radius or canvasing office parks in a certain part of town, cold calling can take many different shapes and styles. While today’s consumer is less and less likely to buy into a service or product from a cold call, it is still a way to make new connections. Once you have this new connection in your lead list, it is up to you how well you can cultivate them into a new client.

The next time you sit down at your desk and scratch your head as to what to do next in your sales career, think back on some of these routine refreshers and you’ll be growing your sales list in no time at all.

Winning in Business Like Jim Furyk Wins in Golf

This weekend is The Open championship. The Open, commonly known as The British Open here in the United States, is the premier major golf tournament in Europe. It features the best players around the world competing at the oldest and most prestigious golf venue, St. Andrews.

Nearly 200 of the world’s best golfers, including Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Rory McIlroy, and Jordan Spieth, will compete to win the top prize, the Claret Jug. The world of professional golf is cutthroat, competitive, and arduous. These players and many others will exert an extra level physical and emotional strength to win this major.

Much like in the business world, there are many players and the competition can be fierce. However, only a few businesses turn out to be winners. You can learn a lot from the style and habits of the most prominent business winners or the most rapidly expanding companies, but those traits may not be so easy to duplicate.

Instead, to truly win in business, focus on longevity, focus on consistency, and focus on character. In other words, to truly win in business, you need to win like Jim Furyk wins in golf.

Undeniably, even for those that do not follow professional golf, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are widely regard as household names. More recently, Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth can be added to the list of household names as truly great and rising stars in the game of golf. But for those that do not follow golf, here’s a name you might not know: Jim Furyk.

Jim Furyk has been playing golf professional since 1992. Since then, Jim has climbed to number four on the all-time money earning list, collecting nearly $65,000,000. Mr. Furyk has won 17 tournaments, including the 2003 U.S. Open. His first tournament victory came in 1995 and he most recently won in April of this year. He also won the 2010 FedEx Cup. Since 1996, he has collected 22 top-10 finishes out of 75 major appearances. 

Yet, despite all of these accolades, you probably have not heard much of Jim Furyk outside of the golfing world. That is exactly how Jim Furyk likes to win. He focuses on longevity, consistency, and character. And that is exactly how you should plan to win in business.

In the business world, we are often caught up with the greatest of all time or the brightest stars of today. Think of the IBMs, the Coca-Cola’s, the Berkshire Hathaway’s, and the AT&T’s of the world. These companies are behemoths that have been winning in business for a very long time. Everybody knows who they are and everybody likes to talk about them. In the golfing world, you can compare them to Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.

Then, there are the rising stars of the business world that everyone can’t stop talking about. Think of the Ubers, Facebooks, and the Teslas of the world. These are new companies with new ideas that are out to change the world. In the golfing world, rising stars like Rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth are looking to shift the conversation to the next generation of stars.

While there is nothing wrong with being a big company or a growing business, are you focusing on the right things to win in your business? Are you focusing on longevity? Are you focusing on consistency? And are you focusing on character? Jim Furyk has been playing golf professional for over 20 years, winning a tournament nearly every season, ranks number four on the all-time career earnings list, and has given away hundreds of thousands of dollars through his foundation.

If you focus on winning in your business like Jim Furyk focuses on winning in golf, you can truly be one of the great companies.

The 3 R's of Becoming an Expert

The following blog post was written in response to a presentation by Shawn Rhodes, a top-20 Toastmasters International speaker and business and leadership consultant, about the importance of employee engagement and the success of a company by becoming better in everything that you do.

Think of the experts in your field, or think of the experts that you readily know in other fields. Imagine the Bill Gates’, the Payton Manning’s, the Meryl Streep’s, the Warren Buffett’s, the Annika Sorenstam’s, and the Neil deGrasse Tyson’s of the world. These people have all reached the pinnacle of their respective fields, from business to sports to entertainment and to science. But what makes them any different from the average individual in that same industry?

As you will soon discover, there are three important ways experts differentiate themselves from other people doing the same things you do. Obviously, hard work, luck, timing, and perseverance all have their hand in elevating an individual to expert status. However, some of these factors may be out of your control at times. Instead, focus on these controllable ways to set yourself apart from the pack.

Results

The first – and best – way to distinguish yourself as an expert is to produce results. You must not only be able to produce in the short-term, but in the long-term as well. So called ‘one hit wonders’ are not considered experts. Those that produce high quality, better-than-expected work almost every time are the ones that deserve the moniker expert.

Each one of the named people in the opening paragraph have produced results time and time again. Bill Gates successfully started and grew one of the largest hardware and software companies in the world. Payton Manning elevated himself as one of the best quarterbacks in the National Football League both on and off the field. Meryl Strep consistently produced award-winning work every time she appeared on screen. Warren Buffet is simply known as an ‘oracle’ for being the best value investor of all time. Annika Sorenstam left her mark on the on the LPGA tour by winning more majors and more tournaments that any other woman golfer. Finally, Neil deGrasse Tyson showcased how scientists can also turn into rock stars.

Simply put, results matter.

Research

Anyone working in any field can produce high-quality work every now and then. The key for an expert to produce topnotch work on a consistent basis is for them to know and study their craft. Research isn’t all about holing yourself up in a library, pouring hours and hours into textbooks. Research is all about learning new perspectives, taking chances and risks, and honing your craft.

Going back to the examples in the opening paragraph, Bill Gates spent years tinkering on his computers and software until he found the best product to sell to the masses. Then, he continuously tweaked his products to make them better and more appealing (almost) every time.

Payton Manning is legendary for the amount of time he spends watching game film of his opponents and studying the playbook. He knows every assignment on every play for not only himself, but for every player on his team and every player on the other team. There’s a reason players spend six days practicing and one day playing in the game.

Before Meryl Streep steps foot in front of the camera, she knows everything there is to know about her character. And not just what her character will say, but what her character should feel and think about other things that are happening both on and off screen with her character. Audiences respond when they sense her emotions through her actions and not just her words.

The Oracle of Omaha, better know as Warren Buffett, can spend months or even years pouring through thousands of financial documents and management strategies of a company before deciding to buy or a sell a company. No one understands better than he does what fundamentals of a company make it the perfect acquisition.

If a great round of golf can be accomplished in under 70 strokes, Annika Sorenstam knows she must practice every one of those 70 strokes 700,000 times. Golf is not so much of a sport that relies on athleticism as it does near flawless repetition. For anyone who has ever played golf, hitting one, five or ten great shots on one particular day is easy. Hitting 70 perfect shots seven days a week makes you an expert.

Lastly, Neil deGrasse Tyson did not stumble upon becoming America’s favorite astrophysicists simply by passing a college physics classes. Neil spent years not only learning and surrounding himself with the top experts in his field, but he also taught the masses about astrophysics. Ask any teacher and they’ll tell you that they learned more about a topic by teaching it than by being the student.

To put it another way, an expert understands the more they do their homework the better the results on their tests will be.

Role Model

The last – and sometimes most challenging – way to make yourself an expert is to be a role model to those who aspire to be like you. There are several experts in their fields who have accomplished great results and have dedicated themselves to their craft. However, when it comes time for those to follow their lead, these so called experts fail.

For every Payton Manning there is a Tiger Woods. For every Meryl Streep there is a Charlie Sheen. And for every Warren Buffet there is a Bernie Madoff. These unfortunate examples, while great in certain regards, fail to live up to the highest of expectations of becoming a role model for others. An expert must make it his or her mission to not only produce great work but to also be a great person.

When studying the lives of experts, you will notice that several of them are products are great timing, luck, hard work, and exceptional perseverance. But, while some of these traits are sometimes out of our control, the best way to become an expert is to focus on the things you can control. Of these things, the three greatest ways to become an expert are to produce consistently great results all the time; to continuously hone and evolve your craft to make it better; and to make your life and your life’s work for the betterment of those around you. If you can do those three things, you are well on your way to becoming an expert.