Andrew Sobel

Sometimes, the best questions you could ask your clients in interviews, sales meetings, or casual conversations don’t occur to you until after the encounter. That’s happened to me more than once while driving home from a meeting.

Now you can be ready before your meetings with help from the new book, Power Questions: Build Relationships, Win New Business, and Influence Others, by Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas.

The book highlights 35 conversations with CEOs, clients, and friends to illustrate the impact of thought-provoking, incisive questions.

In this podcast, I ask Andrew to share his best power questions, especially those that can help you through a sales process. We also talk about the questions you shouldn’t ask.

7 Power Questions (out of 337 in the book)

• How did you get started?
• What in your life has given you the greatest fulfillment?
• What has surprised you?
• What did you learn?
• What parts of your job do you wish you could spend more time on, and what parts less?
• Can you tell me more?
• If an effective solution is found, how will it affect your own job?

Adapted from Power Questions, by Andrew Sobel and Jerold Panas

You might also be interested in our print interview, Andrew Sobel: Building Client Partnerships.

Podcast run time: 17:52

Intro music exluna by Jakub Koter

Here’s a roundup of news items, trends, and market data that I’ve come across recently.

Tim Berry, business planning specialist, gives us The Top Ten Business Plan Mistakes. You can also read an interesting article he wrote for us about business planning for consultants.

Over the past 30 years, Tom Peters has given more than 2,500 presentations. That’s a lot of time on the stage (and in airports). Peters now plans to publish a 23-part “mega-presentation” called “Excellence Now.” Every two weeks in 2012, he will release one section of the presentation materials in PowerPoint format. You can see Peters in a short video giving you a preview of what’s to come.

Facebook has become a target for cyber crime. You might want to consider these tips to keep your account safe.

Here are Gartner’s predictions for the IT sector in 2012 and beyond.

Want to be more organized? Try cutting in half the time you spend organizing yourself.

“No” is the new “yes.” Here are four practices to re-prioritize the things in your life.

What are the best US airports for business travelers?

Harvard’s Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin released the findings of their study on US competitiveness, Prosperity at Risk.

The unintended consequence of open office concepts, project teams, and group learning: Reduced creativity. Some privacy in the workplace makes us far more productive.

The inspector assesses the foundation of the house, the walls, floors, plumbing, and so on. Then, you get a report on ways to shore up the place.

As you kick off the New Year, take some time for a structural inspection of your business. In many cases, you’ll find that the key to better performance is in making small changes to how you do business, not in implementing some grand new strategy.

To find those opportunities, turn your attention to three parts of your business: your intellectual property (or content), your marketing approach, and your service offer.

Read the rest of the article in this month’s issue of The Guerrilla Consultant.

Daniel Goleman

Daniel Goleman is the bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence and Social Intelligence, and the co-author of Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence. Twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Goleman was a science reporter for the New York Times, and received the American Psychological Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his media writing.

His latest book, Leadership: The Power of Emotional Intelligence, is a collection of his key findings on leadership.

I asked Goleman three questions about the importance of emotional intelligence for leaders.

McLaughlin: Many consultants, though responsible for delivering results, often don’t have the authority to make all the decisions that impact those results. Any advice on how a consultant can lead in that environment?

Goleman: This dilemma–needing to get people to take action while having no direct line of authority–is epidemic in matrixed organizations everywhere. So consultants can use the same tactics as anyone who must lead indirectly.

One key is persuasion and influence, an emotional intelligence competence that has several levels. For starters, there’s making a persuasive argument. This requires knowing what matters to the person you’re talking with–what his or her motivations and needs are–and using that as the starting point.

But it also entails moment-to-moment empathy, being able to read the nonverbal, to know if your argument is working–or the person’s eyes are glazing over and switching tactics. Powerful stories are another part of excellence in this competence.

Beyond making a persuasive case, you have to know who to make the case to. Who are the emergent leaders in the group, that is, those whose opinions everyone takes seriously (not always the designated leaders)? At the higher levels of this competence, you know who the key players are, are able to persuade them, and have them deliver the message.

McLaughlin: In your experience, what’s the most common mistake that leaders make?

Goleman: Perhaps the common cold of leadership these days is a lack of empathy–that is, tuning out the emotional reactions of the people you are trying to lead. The art of leadership requires strong interpersonal radar, to pick up on how people actually feel about your message and your leadership.

The Type A leader who charges off in a direction and expects everyone to follow, but has no idea how people are reacting, may end up charging up the hill alone. Stopping to pay full attention allows deep listening. And in today’s hectic leadership world, with so many constant distractions, that is a dying art.

Another common mistake is tuning out your own stress. Leadership creates its own pressures and hassles. For one, many leaders become isolated as they rise, with fewer and fewer confidants with whom to mull over problems or blow off steam.

For another, leaders so often are held to targets not of their own making, which may not be realistic. Or they have to get to their own targets with insufficient resources in time, money, personnel, etc. If your ignore that stress, you can easily end up in “frazzle,” the brain state of constantly pumping out stress hormones that shrink the capacity of your executive brain to make good decisions.

Every leader needs time and a method to decompress from his or her daily routine; if you can’t control the external sources of stress, at least you can control how you react.

McLaughlin: Are there common misconceptions about the characteristics of effective leaders?

Goleman: Some hold with the stereotype that an effective leader is just “nice,” on the one hand, or must be dictatorial, on the other. In fact, the leaders who get the best results tend to be a combination of firm and authoritative as needed, but also supportive and warm–in other words, emotionally intelligent.

Find out more about Daniel Goleman.
You might also be interested in our podcast, Daniel Goleman: New Insights on Emotional Intelligence.

Looking for a searchable list of consulting firms? Recruiters at The Consulting Bench put together a comprehensive, indexed directory for US firms.

Wonder what’s next for the consulting industry? Fiona Czerniawska, of SourceforConsulting.com, offers a 12-minute video summary of a new report, Planning for Growth in an Uncertain Market.

Do you have what it takes to make the “challenger” sale? You can find out with this online assessment of your sales skills. Last month, the authors of The Challenger Sale did a podcast interview with me.

Here are six lessons for intelligent project management.

Google+ brand pages are getting off the ground slowly.

Twitter also launched its version of brand pages.

HubSpot: The Top 10 Marketing Infographics of 2011.

Consultants at Vynamic kicked off their Grammy-themed Holiday Party with this video–an interesting twist on intros.

Dan Roam

“We have become so enamoured of our ability to talk that we often delude ourselves into thinking that, if we can talk about an idea, we understand it well.”

In this podcast, I talk with Dan Roam, author of BLAH, BLAH, BLAH: What To Do When Words Don’t Work. Roam’s mission is to help us solve problems and sell ideas more effectively–not just with words, but by tapping the power of visual communication.

He’s written two other bestsellers on that topic: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Picture, and Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures.

Dan gives us some great (and easy) pointers for clarifying complex ideas and finding workable solutions to tough problems–using pictures!

The tools you use can be as simple as the picture below. To visit Roam’s site and learn more, click here or on the image below.

Podcast run time: 25:14

Intro music exluna by Jakub Koter

To address these questions, the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs surveyed more than 1,000 people and published their second annual report, B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends.

Be sure to grab the report. It’s full of interesting information and strategies that you should consider when making decisions about your marketing. Among the findings: The top three tools for effective content marketing are articles, social media, and blogs.

We’re making big changes to the site, its content, and even converting it to a blog platform.

For the next couple of days, we’ll be making the conversion. You’ll find that most things work just as you’d expect, but some may not–at least not yet.

Thanks for your patience!

Mike

Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson

In this podcast, I talk with Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, co-authors of The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation.

Based on their extensive survey of more than 6,000 salespeople, Dixon and Adamson have identified the profile of a seller who is four times more likely than others to be a top performer.

This powerful research, which skewers some of the most sacred cows of selling, is full of lessons that you can use now.

Podcast Summary: How Top Sellers Set Themselves Apart

A top seller..

• Offers the customer unique perspectives
• Has strong two-way communication skills
• Knows each customer’s value drivers
• Can identify economic drivers of the customer’s business
• Is comfortable discussing money
• Can apply pressure on the customer, if needed.

Adapted from The Challenger Sale, by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson.

You can learn more at www.executiveboard.com.

Intro music exluna by Jakub Koter

Podcast run time: 21:30

The chart above was a slide in an actual presentation. Looking at this slide, it would be easy to rant about PowerPoint abuses. Anyone who puts 26 bubbles and 25 arrows on a single slide and expects people to “get it,” shouldn’t be surprised if all eyes in the audience glaze over within 30 seconds.

Tempting though it may be to cram everything possible into a slide presentation, the result is bound to be counter-productive and boring. So ask yourself three questions before you finalize your next set of presentation slides:

Will I feel the need at any point to say to my audience, “I know this slide will be difficult to read for those of you in the back?” If a slide is tough to see from the back of the room, it’s likely a problem for those in the front too. If there’s a chance that people can’t make out the content of any slide, redesign it until it’s readable for everyone in the room. Once people have to start squinting at your slides, you lose their attention.

What is the point of focus? Your slides should reinforce and clarify your message. Look at them critically to see how each slide performs those important roles. Can your audience draw a connection between the concept you are explaining and the image you are displaying? If not, you’re probably not connecting with your audience on any level.

Minds wander during presentations, so focus each slide on the most important idea you want to convey. Then, move on to the next idea and slide. You don’t want your audience pondering the meaning of the bubble on “willingness to speculate” while you are talking about the bubble on “goals and values.”

What can come off this slide? Before you finalize your presentation, reconsider the content of each slide. Decide which elements you could remove. If any slide, for example, contains words or images that are simply a reminder for you to say something, get rid of it. Find another way to remember what you need to emphasize in your presentation.

Stand back from your slides as if you were in the back of the room. How will each person in the audience experience that slide? Too many people put too much on their slides. Be aggressive. Dump anything that doesn’t directly support your main ideas.

Our job is to enlighten, educate, influence, and be catalysts for action. That’s a tall order, but it’s even tougher if your presentation leaves clients confused, or worse, comatose.