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Michael Bungay Stanier shares what he learned while working with Seth Goidin and the Domino Project to launch his book End Malaria.
"This manifesto is for every sales person who is committed to becoming a rainmaker no matter what the product or service. Rainmakers are the sales elite, typically outperforming average sales people by 300 to 500%—often by a lot more. Success as a rainmaker depends on your ability to lead masterful sales conversations from 'hello' to 'let's go,' but the first sales conversation, the most important sales conversation, happens before you talk to actual prospects. The most important sales conversation you have... is the one you have with yourself."
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"We all have thoughts that limit our potential. Some of these beliefs come from our individual experiences; they take hold over the years. "I'm not good at taking credit. I'm much better working behind the scenes. I'm lucky to have this job." Other beliefs are a result of the gender stereotypes that are all around us. They creep into our heads over time. "It's my job to nurture everyone else before I take care of my own needs. I am selfish and self-centered if I choose to indulge my ambition." Still others are simply erroneous conventional wisdom. "I can have it all without compromise. I'm a failure if I can't make it look easy."
We get in our own way when we buy-into these limiting beliefs. But it does not have to be that way. We can nurture the beliefs that will sustain us and help us grow. To rise to the highest ranks in business, women need to unwind some of the traditional thinking that holds us back. We need to rethink the conversations we are having in our heads and tell ourselves a new story. We need to break our own rules."
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"How do you capture a new market? There's a lot of traditional business strategy you need to throw out the window. New markets are too poorly understood and change too quickly for the standard approaches of graphing trend lines and computing market share. Here are 10 approaches that work—for businesses and the people within them—when the market is fuzzy and in flux ... "
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"Let's face it: All too often, life is a succession of hassles. There's an endless array of frustrations, inconveniences, complications, disappointments, and potential disasters lurking in most of our daily experiences. Even very good products and services (we'll call them simply "products" for simplicity's sake) have their weaknesses and drawbacks. My new smartphone sometimes drops my calls; my favorite hotel chain sometimes loses my reservation; those new lightbulbs last longer but produce less light; my new hybrid car gets better mileage but the engine feels less peppy ...
Managers, marketers, designers, service suppliers, and salespeople for the companies that provide these products don't focus on their weaknesses. That's understandable. They devote their lives to making products that are as good as they can possibly be and then to promoting them as enthusiastically as they can. Who wants to concentrate on the negatives? Yet we've found that organizations that excel at demand creation do exactly that. They examine the lives of customers through the lens of what we call a Hassle Map—a detailed study of the problems, large and small, that people experience whenever they use their products."
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