Category Archives: Get Clear

Know whose problem you solve, how, and how well.

Get Aligned, Get Clear, Grow, Sales Matters

Understanding Two Perspectives: Differentiating the MtL WHY and Sinek’s Why

September 18, 2024 Peter DiGiammarino Leave a comment

In business and leadership, understanding your “Why” is pivotal for success and meaningful connections. This newsletter compares two distinct perspectives—the MtL WHY and Simon Sinek’s Why—that drive your organization’s purpose and strategy.

The MtL WHY: Understanding Your Customer

The Manage to Lead (MtL) WHY is based on the principles outlined in the book Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World, by Peter DiGiammarino. The MtL WHY explains why your business exists in the eyes of your customers and focuses on understanding their motivations to choose to purchase or fund what your organization provides.

Key Characteristics:

External Focus: Centers on your customers’ beliefs and needs.
Purpose: Foundation for defining your organization’s Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Application: Helps craft Unique Value Propositions (UVP) and tailored messages that connect and engage. Guides marketing, lead generation, sales, and account development efforts.

Why the MtL WHY Matters

The MtL WHY helps leaders create compelling value propositions, develop messages that resonate, and build strong customer relationships by aligning offerings with customer motivations.

Sinek’s Why: Understanding Your Team

Sinek’s Why delves into the core beliefs and values that drive your organization and its people. It focuses on understanding the internal motivations and deeper purpose beyond just making profits.

Key Characteristics:

Internal Focus: Centers on your organization’s core beliefs.
Purpose: Explains why your business exists in the eyes of its members.
Application: Guides leadership decisions, shapes company culture, and inspires stakeholders.

Why Sinek’s Why Matters

Sinek’s Why helps build a purpose-driven culture, attract like-minded employees, and inspire loyal customers who resonate with your organization’s beliefs.

Differences Between the MtL WHY and Sinek’s Why

MtL WHY: Explains the need fulfilled for prospects who become customers and why they stay—why the business exists in the eyes of its customers.
Sinek’s Why: Explains what drives people to join and remain with the organization—why the business exists in the eyes of its members.

Align Purpose and Motivation for Synergy

Aligning internal motivations with external customer needs creates a holistic strategy that is meaningful and, often, unbeatable. Those who master both stand out because they understand why they matter—to themselves and to their customers.

About IntelliVen

At IntelliVen, founded by Peter DiGiammarino, we specialize in helping leaders and organizations clarify their purpose, align their strategies, and achieve their fullest potential. Through our eponymous Manage to Lead (MtL) Cohort Course, leaders and teams learn to get clear, align, and grow. Whether you’re seeking to understand your customers better or to reignite your organization’s passion, we’re here to guide you on your journey.

Learn More

Explore the principles in “Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World” by Peter DiGiammarino.
Join our MtL Cohort Course to transform your leadership and organizational effectiveness.
Visit our website at IntelliVen.com for resources, insights, and support.
WHAT-WHO-WHY Tool and Method

Get Clear, Manage to Lead, Sales Matters

Elevate Your Skills: Don’t Just Build—Create a Legacy

May 18, 2024 Peter DiGiammarino Leave a comment

The most successful professionals don’t just list skills when pitching a prospect—they frame their expertise as a solution to an urgent business problem. Whether you’re laying bricks or building castles, the labor may be the same, but the way you present it changes everything. By shifting from listing tasks you will perform to solutions you will deliver, you communicate the value you bring as a strategic partner.

Imagine walking into a prospect’s office and, instead of describing what you know how to do, you present a fully formed solution to a pressing issue. When you highlight the problems you solve and the measurable outcomes achieved, you differentiate yourself as one who puts the vision into their mind, inspiring them with a clear path forward, and then gets paid a premium to bring that vision to life. Rather than deploying skills at labor rates, you’re instantiating a vision and charging full price for delivering strategic, transformative results.

Shift Focus From Tasks to Outcomes

To elevate the perception of your value, shift the focus from tasks you perform to outcomes you deliver. Here’s how:

Study past projects to zero in on the business goals you helped achieve.
Describe your skills in terms of the problems they solve.

For example, if your offering is to help people in different departments of a client organization to work together to prepare to perform at a high level in an emergency:

Move beyond “meeting facilitation” by offering instead Cross-Functional Emergency Training and emphasize its role in improving interdepartmental coordination during crises.

Rather than “data integration,” present it as a Crisis Management Solution that uses existing technology to enable real-time decisions in high-stakes situations—at no additional cost.

By adjusting your message this way, you’re no longer just laying bricks—you’re building castles that address critical business needs.

Build Your Toolkit: Case Studies and Competency Frameworks

Once you’ve demonstrated how your expertise solves real-world problems, package it to make your value tangible and repeatable:

Document insights from past projects to build a knowledge base of best practices for future engagements.
Create frameworks that map your skills directly to specific business challenges.
Develop and share case studies that clearly outline the challenge, your approach, and the impact achieved.

These artifacts enable you to communicate your capabilities in a way that resonates with clients and prospects, clearly showing the value you bring.

Steps to a Sale

When communicating with prospects, focus on how your solution will transform their operations or market position. Here’s how to effectively structure your message:

Articulate the key challenge your solution addresses and why this issue is difficult to solve.

Explain what top performers in the industry do to overcome the challenges, and emphasize that your approach encapsulates these best practices—and that you’ve done it before, ideally with customers the prospect admires.

Reinforce your expertise with success metrics, client testimonials, and case studies, to suggest that no one can deliver the solution as quickly, efficiently, or with as little risk as you can.

At this point, your prospect has three options:

Ignore your advice.
Attempt to implement your suggestions on their own.
Proceed with outside help. (i.e., and since you brought the solution, have a proven track record, and have established yourself as the expert, why would they go elsewhere?)

Turn Your Business into One That Can Scale

Moving from tasks to solutions makes your sales process both more efficient and more successful. Perhaps even more importantly, this shift enables you to build a business that inspires clients with the vision of a castle and then delivers on that vision. By adopting a repeatable approach, you make it easier to sell, easier to deliver what you sell, and easier to develop and deploy resources for both sales and delivery. You’re architecting a business that will stand the test of time, growing in both scale and value, with each new engagement amplifying its impact.

From Vision to Action! How to Align Your Team and Execute Your Plan

September 10, 2023 Whitney Bembenek 2 Comments

In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, having a clear and well-defined strategy to win the game you are playing is critical. It’s the roadmap that guides your organization towards its goals and ensures that every action and decision aligns with your vision.

However, crafting and implementing an effective strategy can be a complex and daunting task. This is where the IntelliVen Strategy and Planning Offsite comes into play.

Why the Strategy and Planning Offsite with IntelliVen?

If you’re at the helm of an organization, you understand the importance of strategic planning. You also know that it’s not enough to simply have a strategy; strategy needs to be translated into a practical operating plan that guides your team’s actions throughout the year. The IntelliVen Strategy and Planning Offsite helps leaders like you bridge the gap between strategy development and successful execution.

The Strategy and Planning Offsite empowers you and your executive team with:

Clarity: Achieve a clear and common understanding of your organization’s current state, the case for change, and your target next state.

Strategic Initiatives: Identify strategic initiatives that will propel your organization from its current state to where you aspire to be next and prioritize actions that will close the gap based on their impact and feasibility, culminating in a roadmap for implementation.

Resource Allocation: Determine roles, responsibilities, and resource requirements for your most important initiatives. This includes allocating the staff, time, money, and other resources needed to make them a reality.

Financial Alignment: Align your financial and operational plans with your strategic initiatives. This ensures that your strategic initaitives are not side-jobs to be done as time permits but, instead, are woven into the mainstream of day-to-day activities.

Effective Communication: Develop a clear communication strategy to convey your vision and plan to all stakeholders, including your board, investors, employees, and partners.

The Outcomes

Working with IntelliVen Senior Oprating Partners, leaders will achieve key outcomes from their Strategy and Planning Offsite:

Alignment: Participants agree on your current state, case for change, target state, and the necessary actions for each strategic initiative.

Implementation Readiness: Lay the groundwork for the successful implementation of strategic initiatives, and establish a governance process understood and agreed upon by all participants.

Team Cohesion: Participants leave the offsite with a deeper understanding of each other and a stronger commitment to the organization’s mission and leadership.

Get Started with IntelliVen

If you’re ready to take your organization to the next level, it’s time to consider the IntelliVen Strategy and Planning Offsite. Contact us to learn more about how our team can help you identify and reach your strategic goals for the long-term.

Invest in your organization’s long-term future with the IntelliVen Strategy and Planning Offsite.
Contact us now!

Get Clear, Sales Matters

Sales — whose problem is it anyway?

June 2, 2023 Peter DiGiammarino

Background

A credible organization consistently performs and grows according to a plan. Such an organization will invariably be a system of three systems:

A system of delivery.
A system of sales.
A system of growth in capacity to deliver and to sell.

It is not uncommon for an early-stage organization to be good at delivery and good at growth but stuck at square-one when it comes to its system of selling. Leaders of such organizations often find themselves consumed with delivery and with never enough time to develop and drive a system that generates new sales opportunities.

Extend Expand Find New Nearby Black v2 — Click for a presentation on how to drive sales in a services business.

Interest and competence in sales starts at the very top of an organization. It is in everyone’s best interest for a top executive to own the challenge to determine how to systematically create demand for what the organization offers. Once a leader figures out how to sell, the method can be routinized and taught to others to execute, manage, and scale.

If no one on the leadership team happens to have passion and skills for selling, their instinct is often to contract out the sales problem, or to hire a rainmaker, or to get better at writing proposals. Such approaches rarely pay off. Selling is not a side-job and great proposals are not enough.

Approach

Any top executive can systematically generate opportunities to deliver more value if they:

For Current Client Development

Assign someone to pull together intelligence on who to speak with about what in a current client organization to cultivate new opportunities to deliver great value in other parts of the client organization.

Conduct Client Development Reviews to assess, govern, and guide sales efforts on the most promising current clients and then follow through on the best ideas.

Turn what works into methods that systematically extend and expand opportunities to do the same thing in other current clients.

For Lead Generation

Develop a way to present the best examples of value delivered to current and past clients that you want to do again for new clients in a high-quality form such as a blog, a publishable article, an e-book, white paper, or slide presentation.

Do research to identify named individuals, not just organizations or positions, in targeted organizations who would be insane not to become customers.

Find or develop a forum in which to present the high-quality presentation and invite the targeted individuals to attend a workshop in which a top existing or past client describes the value they received. Follow up with attendees who ask questions and contribute to group discussion to cultivate interest.

Action Plan

Top leaders need to make sales a priority for everyone. Develop and aggressively use language and an orientation towards sales in meetings, hallway conversations, performance goals, performance assessments, promotion criteria, position descriptions, hiring criteria, and employee training. In so doing it works well to think about sales competence in terms of mechanics and process.

“Mechanics” refers to skills and behaviors professional sales personnel use to cultivate prospects to close. For example carefully chosen words in a conversation can be used to elicit expressions of need that can then be fulfilled through a sale. Sales skills training along these lines was developed and formalized by work Xerox did in the 1960’s and ‘70s that today can be accessed via methods and tools known, for example, as:

Other tips and techniques have been formalized by sales masters such as:

Sandler
Zig Zigler
Dale Carnegie in: How to Win Friends and Influence People
Jeffrey Gitomer in: Little Black Book of Connections

Process refers to a systematic approach to launch and manage campaigns that cultivate demand for an offering across stakeholders in a single targeted organization over a period of time (usually many months and even years). Examples of such methods include:

Further developed sales processes are described in IntelliVen Posts in the Sales Category including especially:

It is also a good idea to connect to a continuous stream of sales advice such as the Weekly sales letter from Clarity Advantage and to conduct sales training. Keep in mind that any sales training is better than none and whichever you go with will need to be tweaked and adapted for your organization. Take what works and turn it into system that you monitor, teach, evolve, and use.

Summary

Every once and a while, a big new sale may come out of nowhere but such events are rare and cannot be counted on to build a reliable demand-creation system. Neither can the problem be contracted out to a third party or solved by writing better proposals or hiring another rainmaker, though all of these may be good things to do.

Sales is a broad and deep area of functional competence that requires its own leadership, language, systems, and processes. One among the top team must have or develop sales as a primary focus in order to figure out the pattern of proactive selling, build the sales system, and drive and guide that system to scale.

The one so assigned need not start from scratch as a great deal of material on the subject is easily accessed. Go after it all and decide what and how to share with the organization that which has the best chance to generate the most lift the soonest. Learn from and institutionalize what works and drive to scale.

Get Clear, Manage to Lead, Operations

The #1 problem with teams is not what you think

August 1, 2022 Peter DiGiammarino Leave a comment

Every leader needs to know that they and their team agree on the problem they solve for whom. While this seems simple enough, in practice almost nobody in their organization answers in exactly the same way, and even small differences can disrupt operations.

Examples, practice cases, and your own case reveal that even well-known firms have a WHAT-WHO-WHY that is surprisingly different than it seems. In the highly interactive WHAT-WHO-WHY Workshop, participants learn a tool and method they can use to reveal disconnects and align their team.

The WHAT-WHO-WHY method reveals disconnects and aligns your team.

The WHAT-WHO-WHY method has helped create $Billions in value and is 100% recommended by users.
You will learn to:

Describe any organization in terms of whose problem it solves.
Discover disconnects in your team’s thinking about their business.
Align your team’s thinking about their business.

Use this link to:

Schedule a Zoom call with PeterD to see if the W-W-W Workshop is a good fit for your team or peer group.
Pass on to your group leader or facilitator.
Pass on to a colleague, family member, or friend to suggest they consider the W-W-W Workshop for their group or team.

For More Information

WHAT-WHO-WHY Workshop Overview

Manage to Lead System Introduction

IntelliVen

Category Archives: Get Clear