News yesterday that Southwest Airlines is going to enter the international travel market by keeping the Mexican and Carribean routes they picked up in their purchase of AirTran.  They’re even talking about building an international terminal at Houston’s Hobby Airport, where they say they can add 25 daily flights.

This move is a major departure from Southwest’s traditional approach of great discipline and focused markets.  While they’ve been drifting from this strategy for some time, the question is whether it’s a good idea or not.

Basili Alukos, an airline analyst at Morningstar provides the same first impression I had, “Flying into more congested markets, now trying to go overseas … it seems like they’re becoming a legacy carrier,”

Has Southwest jumped the shark?

I don’t think this move is stupid on Southwest’s part, but I do think it’s a statement that Southwest’s traditional growth model is no longer viable for them.

It is my hope that Southwest can maintain the internal culture they’ve developed, and in an industry as bereft of value as the airline industry is, that may be enough to keep their customers loyal.  However, the radical difference between Southwest and other airlines is disappearing and I expect their overall performance will degrade.

Because Southwest is a public company, I understand their need to find new areas of revenue growth.  From a profitability standpoint, I think they would be better off to stay smaller and special.

There is still time to register for Wednesday’s webinar, The 7 Steps to Shortening The Sales Cycle.  I know that I just shared this a couple of weeks ago, and I apologize for the redundancy.  I just put the finishing touches on the presentation today, and I can’t remember the last time I was this excited to share insights.

In 60 minutes (or less), I’ll be sharing:

• Critical research that highlights what it is the customer really wants from selling organizations (and it may very well surprise you)
• The reason sales cycles are getting longer and longer, and how selling organizations are often contributing to the problem without even realizing it
• Of course, I’ll share the seven steps.

The steps can literally serve as the manual for building our your sales and marketing approach to drive faster sales, more sales and more profit per sale.

We’ll be recording the webinar and so that all registrants will be able to watch the webinar on demand.

I hope to “see” you there – you don’t want to miss it.

After years of being able to use GM as a prime example of what not to do, they buck a trend and announce that they are revisiting their entire spend on Facebook.

My favorite quote from the story:  “The sources said GM executives found the paid ads had little impact on car buying.”

How about that.  GM, one of the kings of advertising, finally learning that paying for ads, especially on social sites, has little impact on car buying.

GM is not giving up on Facebook altogether, as they find that can be an effective way to engage with their consumers and share content.  GM spends $40 million on Facebook, and I for one am quite confident that if they take that $40 million and reinvest in sincere, authentic approaches that, as my friend and client Steve Randazzo says, create deep emotional connections, they’ll find far greater returns.

I love the fact that GM is finally looking at results and not just process.  Maybe there is a rebirth in Detroit after all.  (I know, I know…don’t get carried away.)

Here’s the other quote I love.  It’s from Steve Goldner, a senior director at digital-media agency MediaWhiz.   He says this move “reflects that GM does not know how to integrate social-media into a winning marketing play.”

Well, maybe.  Or maybe it’s just that paid advertising doesn’t actually drive behavior.  Maybe there are more effective marketing “plays” that make a bigger difference.  As I share with my clients, just because something is popular doesn’t mean that it works.

For too long, marketing agencies and consultants have been making the marketing process and complex and trendy as possible to enable them to justify exorbitant fees and to hide from accountability.

I congratulate GM for stepping up.  I hope they follow through.  Then maybe, just maybe, I’ll be sharing other examples of GM is doing that should emulated.

What profession is best suited for a liar?

How do you know when a salesperson is lying?

It’s unfortunate that salespeople have become the butt of so many jokes.  In the past I’ve written about pests, peddlers and Demand Creators, and shared the advantages to being a Demand Creator.

As the world continues to move forward from the deep recession, there are still not enough companies that are building the organizational capability necessary to consistently grow profits.  Selling, on the whole, is not creating the value necessary to support higher margins and faster profit growth for small and mid-market companies.

Ineffective sales efforts are actually contributing to:

• Greater commoditization
• Lengthening sales cycles
• Greater price pressure

As I’ll be sharing next week in our free webinar on The 7 Steps to Shortening The Sales Cycle, businesses need to create a new path and implement new approaches to sales.  Now, more than ever, it takes an organization to sell effectively, not just a salesperson.

Done right, your sales effort is the most powerful, leverageable resource to accelerate revenue and profit growth, and to increase the value of your business.  Building the capability enhances your brand, allows you to bypass competition and serves as a virtually insurmountable competitive advantage.

Selling properly requires that you stop focusing on making a sale.  Instead, you need to focus on being relevant, helping your customers achieve their objectives and teaching your prospects how to improve their worlds.

It means slowing things down a bit, (really) putting customer’s interests first and understanding that sales, profits and business value are the result of a proper focus, and cannot be the focus.

When you realize that the job of sales is to help, and you build the system to make that happen, suddenly the sales process becomes easy.

The days of sending your salespeople into the field (or allowing them to wait for prospects to come to them) armed with product brochures, company glossies and boring PowerPoint presentations and expecting them to “dig deep,” “discover,” engage and close are over!

Today’s world is too tough and too competitive, you’re customers are too time-pressed and overwhelmed with other issues, and your salespeople must deal with unprecedented complexity.  Your organization can longer leave it to each salesperson to manage their sales effort independently.

Great companies have seized the opportunity presented by this challenge and are investing the time and resources necessary to create an organizational approach to sales.  These companies understand that to gain an advantage and drive powerful results, the organization must provide their salespeople the:

• Provocative story to open doors and gain buyer attention,
• Ongoing, effective communication of this story to their market,
• Sales tools that support the salesperson’s ability to share the story,
• Diagnostic protocol, training and insights needed to enable the salesperson to tailor the story to their prospect, and
• Road maps to enable the salesperson to choose their actions and anticipate what’s next.

While investing in this effort is certainly an undertaking, the pay-off is huge.  Companies that successfully implement this approach see their salespeople produce 200% more than the average in sales, while the profit difference is typically 4x – 10x average.

Plus, these companies build a momentum that makes sales and growth almost effortless, while the companies that are still doing things the old way are finding the market increasingly difficult and treacherous.

And please note, if you have great salespeople that are successful even without this type of support, you’re in grave danger of losing those salespeople to organizations that provide this support, where they’ll make more money and not have to work as hard.

The single biggest, most common, and most expensive mistake made by salespeople occurs when they go to their solution too early. The biggest cause of this mistake is the apparent readiness on the part of the prospect to hear about the solution.

The nature of most small and mid-market organization’s sales and marketing efforts leads to the primary contributor of this problem.  80% or more of the time, salespeople begin their interaction with the prospect after the prospect is looking for a solution. When they first meet with a prospect, or when a prospect first reaches out to them the conversation typical begins with the prospect asking them about their solution.

In my 25 years of selling and advising others in the sales process, the most important lesson I’ve learned is that just because the prospect asks about the solution, or appears ready to make a decision does not mean that the prospect is actually ready. Quite the contrary.  At this point in the process, the prospect is not ready to understand the value of your solution, or the difference between what you do versus what your competitors do.

When the sales conversation begins with the prospect asking about your solution, the most effective thing you can do is to slow the process down. Ask the prospect why are they looking for a solution.  Spend time clarifying and deepening your understanding of the issues and problems that the prospect has that leads them to believe that they need your solution.  Ensure that they understand what’s causing the problem every bit as much as they understand the solution and the results they desire.

The time you spend gaining a fuller understanding of their issues will also help them gain an understanding of their issues as well, and even more importantly gain an understanding as to how your solution is different and better than that of your competition.

When I share this advice with salespeople, they all nod in agreement.  When I ask what prevents them from acting upon this advice, the number one response is, “Well, the customer is asking me to explain what we do; they don’t want to take a step backwards.”

Please know, digging deeper and diagnosing IS NOT taking a step backwards.  It’s taking a giant step forward by demonstrating that you are not merely a peddler of products, but a true advisor that will enable them to solve problems and achieve critical results.

I’m a fan of top performers.  I love learning about them, figuring out what makes them tick and translating that into actionable ideas that can allow others to achieve top performance.  I call this .1% Performance.

I remember learning about this concept from an ex-Blue Angels pilot, who shared the amazing things he learned and did as a Blue Angel.  When you think about it, to be a Blue Angels pilot you have to be the best of the best…the top 1% of the top 10%.  The same is true if you want to make it to “the show” in professional sports, or virtually any endeavor.

A while back, I was talking with a client/business owner about the need for salespeople to master the new paradigms of business.  He asked me, “Just how important is it, really, to master it to the level your talking about?”  My response to him, was that it depends on what game he wanted to play.

The challenge I’ve always had, is demonstrating visually what .1% Performance requires.  I can easily point to the results of it, I just couldn’t articulate and show the real effort required to attain it.  Until now.

My top sales coach, David Fletcher, shared this video with me.  It comes from TCU’s baseball program.  Every time I watch I get motivated.  I think you’ll agree the attitude and effort shown here applies to more than just sports.  My two favorites lines from the video:

• What is each day but a series of conflicts between the right way and the easy way?
• Just make sure [your goal] is something you want, because the easy way out will always be there, ready to wash you away.

It’s the dream of many entrepreneurs. Coming up with that big idea, starting a business, growing it and ultimately selling for a sum of money that allows them to relax for the rest of their life.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve learned that there are, fundamentally, two types of business owners: those that have no desire to sell their business and are just looking to earn a nice (or substantial) income doing things they love to do; while others desire to sell their business, often viewing their business as the primary asset in their wealth creation efforts.

What I find interesting is that only about 10% of those owners that desire to sell in the future ever really stop to understand what really drives the equity value of a business. Unfortunately, the failure to consider this typically results in a business that fails to deliver either on its income or wealth creation potential.

In my experience, there is a major driver of equity value that is often overlooked, and yet it is the primary driver in the enhancing the long-term valuation of a business.

The ability to systematically, independently, predictably and consistently generate new customers, while protecting your margins is crucial to unlock the equity value of any business.

I will be writing more about this in the future here, but for now suffice it to say that if selling your business in the future, whether to an outsider, to your employees, or to your kids, it is critical that you develop a well articulated, consistent, predictable approach to the development of new customers. This ability will enable you to unlock the max value of your business, while also enhancing the profitability and income your enjoy in the meantime.

As many readers know, I coach college baseball. Last week the coaching staff got together because our team had hit little bit of a slump. We were trying to figure out why we had so much talent, but that talent wasn’t translating into the results that we expected on the field.

As the conversation progressed, I couldn’t help but get the déjà vu feeling that I had this conversation before, in the sales management arena. So often, too often for many small and mid-market companies, sales people who have talent and core ability to be extremely successful, yet they never meet their potential. This is a riddle that has confounded managers, trainers and consultants for years.

As we discussed the issue about the team, we came to the realization that not enough of the players truly hate to lose. And when I say hate to lose I don’t just mean that they don’t like losing, I mean hating to lose more than you enjoy winning.

Top performers in virtually any endeavor, share a common attribute – they loathe losing. Be it basketball, football, baseball, business or sales, top performers work hard, pay attention to the little things, learn and constantly improve because the feeling of a loss is simply detestable.

Everybody enjoys winning, and there are few people that I’ve met that dislike losing.  The question to ask when assessing your salespeople is just how much, and what, are they willing to do to stay out of the loss column.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about how losing is part of the growth and success process.  Since that post, I’ve received a lot of feedback.  The vast majority of it has been absolutely on point and I’ve been excited to hear some of the stories that have been shared with me.

The post, however, is not an excuse to accept losing.  When interviewing, managing and motivating salespeople, be on the look out to determine which camp they fall in – the ones who just enjoy winning or the ones that abhor