Category Archives: Manage to Lead

Managed to Lead posts are organized into the categories below and are about what can be managed in order to be a better leader. There is a category for each of seven actions motivated by seven simple truths about leaders and organizations which, if followed, can help you change the world.

Do & Review, Executive Reviews, Governance

Optimizing Your Board of Directors: A Guide for Fast-Growing Private Companies

July 12, 2023 David Halwig Leave a comment

Growing private companies often encounter challenges in establishing an effective board of directors. Typically, boards comprise well-meaning individuals who meet periodically, usually for a few hours up to a couple of days. However, these meetings frequently become sessions to celebrate company successes rather than critically examining company performance against its board-approved plans and strategic initiatives for the year.

For these companies, it’s vital to have a diverse board, including external directors who offer unbiased insights and prevent family / founder / owner dominance. Establishing clear governance policies and procedures is essential, as they define the roles and responsibilities of each board member. Moreover, regular board meetings focused on progress towards strategic goals, rather than on operating details, are crucial.

This post outlines best practices for efficient private company board meetings, ensuring that your time together is well-spent. We also provide a template for an effective board meeting agenda.

The Board Agenda – Your Roadmap to Efficiency

Preparation is Key

The board chair should distribute a draft agenda 4-5 days before the meeting, soliciting upgrades and additional topics.
Agendas must be clear, concise, and focused on performance metrics, strategic goals, and pressing issues.

Best Practices for Productive Meetings

Limit meetings to three hours to maintain focus and energy.
Introduce new items for information only, with decisions deferred to subsequent meetings after thoughtful review.
Distribute materials a day or two in advance, allowing members to come prepared.
Allocate time for informal interaction before and after the meeting to foster trust and collaboration.
Record and distribute key action items, decisions, and insights promptly after the meeting.

Agenda Template

10-min: Administrative matters (e.g., by-law updates, approve minutes from prior meeting, etc.)
15-min: CEO’s overview of the business state
20-min: Financial performance review of actual results vs. plan and projections
20–40-min/ea: Updates and discussion of strategic initiatives (up to three) and / or committee (e.g., compensation committee, governance committee, audit committee) reports
10-20-min: New or walk-on items
5-20-min: Future meeting topics
5-min: Adjournment and reminders of meeting Action Items, Decisions, and Insights

This template is flexible and can be adjusted to fit the unique needs of your board.

Conclusion

Setting up and managing an efficient board for fast-growing private companies is both challenging and rewarding. By adopting these best practices and using a structured agenda, boards can offer valuable guidance and oversight, enhancing their collaboration with the management team.

About The Author

David Halwig, IntelliVen Co-Founder and President of Mid-Atlantic Region, provides strategic management consulting and advisory services to leaders whose organizations are at critical inflection points. David helps improve governance, leader development, strategic planning, and risk management. He also has substantial experience with merger and acquisition strategies, valuation, and transition approaches.

Connect with David on LinkedIn

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.

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 in 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 you. 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.

How to drive sales in a services business.

How to turn a prospect into a customer.

Five steps to turn a prospect into a sale.

Three steps to selling a services work plan.

How emerging executives can achieve high-impact with key players more senior than themselves.

May 4, 2023 Peter DiGiammarino Leave a comment

An up-and-coming executive engages with an important sales prospect, client, supplier, partner, or colleague on par with their degree of comfort and security with the other party. The more seniority the other is perceived to have relative to their own, the more anxiety and insecurity is induced, the less is said, and the less impact results from the interaction.

Pushing to engage at the highest possible level drives the best results and accelerates career progression. It helps to think of it as climbing a six-level staircase.

Take One Step at a Time

The first step is the most basic level of engagement, is easy enough to do, but adds little-to-no value. Each step is easier than otherwise when it builds off of the last, but is progressively more difficult and riskier to take.

The top step generates extraordinary value and takes the most effort and nerve to do, especially for the first time.

Take the Steps in Order

Take the steps in order, go as high as possible in an interaction, and then strive to achieve a higher level next time. With each experience and successful interaction, the executive matures, gains perspective, and gets on track to providing maximum value and career growth.

The steps are easier to climb if the emerging executive is more senior in terms of age or position than the other party. Less-experienced executives need to muster the courage and determination, early in their career, to move up the steps of engagement when given the opportunity.

Their instinct may be to demur and leave things to more senior players in their chain of command. Managers tend to jump in, thinking it is safer to take over rather than encouraging up-and-comers to interact with prospects, customers, suppliers, partners, and colleagues who are more senior. They are wrong … and should do just the opposite to create the opporutinity for learning and growth.

You Don’t Have to Wait or Take the Steps Alone

Not pushing to the next step may seem like the safer course but the limit of that strategy means hitting the top step only after many years of experience. There is no reason even for the earliest-stage executive to wait until their gray hair comes naturally to realize their full potential to generate great value. Anyone can climb the stairs at any point in their career. Sooner is better.

In the quest to provide top value, up-and-coming executives may wonder how they could possibly add insights, challenge points, and provide useful coaching, instruction, and advice (that is, climbing steps four, five, and six) with only a few years of knowledge and experience.

The good news is that no one, even the most junior professional, has to do it alone. The full breadth and weight of the organization’s experience and wisdom can and should be drawn on and put to work preparing for every high-stakes executive interaction.

Strive to Do the Most Good

Those who most effectively draw upon, internalize, use, and add to the broader capacity and competence of their organization’s collective knowledge and experience with each executive engagement will do the most good and earn the right to do even more the soonest.

Strive to operate in every situation as the best and most informed in the organization would if they could. Doing so is a highly coveted form of leverage that allows a person to perform at a far higher level than one would expect and serves their, and their organization, well.

More for Up-and-Coming Executives:

IntelliVen Manage to Lead Immersion Program

Seven Truths to Help You Change the World

Describe, launch, drive, and govern Strategic Initiatives.
Foster and achieve the change you want.
Become a better and more confident strategic thinker and leader.

Learn More

Editors Note: This post was originally published on October 8, 2012, and updated in 2020 and again in 2023.

Get Aligned, Manage to Lead, Sales Matters

Five Steps to Turn a Prospect into a Sale

April 15, 2023 Peter DiGiammarino 1 Comment

Developing a systematic approach to cultivating demand for its products and services is a key step in the evolution of every successful organization. Many early-stage leaders long for a silver-bullet solution; that is, they look to hire someone with a lot of contacts and an extroverted personality to hit the market and drum-up demand. Such efforts usually fail.

Leaders cannot count on building a scalable demand creation system by hiring one super-salesman after another. There are simply not enough to go around. A better strategy is to figure out for themselves how to create demand for their offerings and then hire and train others to follow their lead.

What follows is a sure-fire method to systematically turn prospects into customers that every executive, client manager, product manager, and sales professional can and should add to their tool set. It takes a lot of work to prepare properly and to execute well in a teaching-mindset, instead of a selling one, but those who are up to the task will be well-rewarded.

Step-1: Describe what you think your prospect is trying to accomplish.

Use all the data about a top prospect you can get your hands on to describe what problem they seeks to solve that your organization can help with.

Arrange a face-to-face meeting with the person in charge of solving the problem, for whom solving it is strategic, and who has the budget and business case to do so. After opening pleasantries, ask the following question in a nice way: “Would you like to know what I think you think is the most important thing you are trying to do right now?”.

You can be sure of a positive response. It is human nature to want to know what someone else thinks you think. At the same time, no one expects what gets said to be 100% correct. They might even chuckle at that thought that you could come close knowing what they think. As a result, your prospect is sure to be interested in hearing what you have to say, even if just for the entertainment value!

This gives you a safe opening to lay out your best articulation of what you think they are trying to do. The beauty of this approach is that to the extent you get it right you gain credibility and, if you get it wrong, you get credit for trying and you will almost always get helpful input to get it right! If you are right, or reasonably close, continue on to Step-2.

Step-2: Describe what others who have done the same found difficult.

Resist the temptation to sell at this point. Do not talk about how hard or important it is for the prospect to do what they are trying to do. Doing so will invite resistance and cause the conversation to come to a grinding halt. Instead, talk about others to keep the conversation in a safe space and to invite the prospect to fully engage. Odds are they will lean forward and listen intently because you just might know what you are talking about and say something important.

Now is the time for you to make a good impression with a clear and articulate summary of what you know about the subject. Do not talk about your own organization or your products and services (i.e., resist the urge to start selling) and do not talk about the prospect’s organization or problems. Focus the conversation only on other organizations and what they have struggled with in a way that brings home just how hard it is to do this important thing well and to reveal that you know a great deal about how to do what needs to be done.

Sprinkle specific details about others with whom your prospect is likely to be familiar. Even better is if the examples relate to feared or hated competitors or to organizations the prospect admires and would like to emulate. While it does not matter in general if what you share comes from first-hand experience, from others you know or have worked with, or even from case literature, it is more genuine and adds more to your credibility if it is clear that you have had personal involvement.

In addition to building credibility, the objective of this step is to confirm that your prospect does indeed have the problem you are prepared to solve. If you start by saying:

“Do you have problem X?”

You run the risk that the prospect is reluctant to share the truth. Instead, say:

“Organization A had problem X”

Thereby creating the opportunity for your prospect to volunteer:

“That’s amazing … we have the same issue!”

The net effect is to build your credibility while drawing out important information for you to use later.

Step-3: Describe how the best have succeeded.

Lay out the approach that the best use to accomplish what the prospect is trying to do. Odds are thatthey will be all ears as you help them see what important things they do not already know, but that they could know if you were on the team. On the other hand, if it turns out that they already know, and are already doing, what the best do then they may not be a good prospect after all.

Here, too, mention how you have personally been involved in some of the “best” cases. Remember that you always have three things to possibly sell:

Your company.
Your service or product offering.
Yourself.

Selling yourself is the easiest and most important of the three and this is your chance to sell yourself and make the sale. Your competence, engaging approach, and evidence of your experience make or break the sale at this point.

Step-4: Describe alternative courses of action.

Given what you know now about your prospect and what others have done, you are now in position to share alternative courses of action that could be followed. There are almost always at least three choices:

Continue as if you had never appeared.
Try to follow the best practices you have presented without outside help.
Work with a knowledgeable third party to navigate the course you have outlined.

If what the prospect seeks to accomplish is truly important and the stakes are high, it would be foolish to continue as if you had never appeared. If it is hard to go it alone, then the obvious decision should be to get outside help assuming outside help is available and at a price that makes sense relative to the value of accomplishing the objective and the cost of failure.

The prospect could search for others to work with or they could work with you because you are:

Present in-person at that very moment.
The one who revealed the best path.
Brimming with credibility due to the way you made the case.

At this point, you have masterfully created the right time and place to share your approach to addressing the problem with high odds of landing a new customer in the following final step.

Step-5: Recommend next steps.

Use your best judgment to recommend which of the alternatives they should follow. Lay out what the prospect should do, what the prospect should have you do or provide, and what value that leads to for their organization. Make clear that what you would do is an important part of what your organization does and that it would be an honor to turn them from a prospect into a customer and under what terms.

If the prospect says: “no”, to retaining you then it is time to start selling. As they say: “selling begins when you hear the word ‘no’!” While so doing, be sure to learn the basis for resistance so you can factor it into your approach for next time.

On the other hand, if you hear: “yes”, then you have made a sale by teaching and not by selling. Celebrate briefly and then proceed to package what you have done for future use and train others to so the same.

Example

The graphic below presents key points related to each of the five steps in a real example used by a firm that sold program management and governance services to top government agencies.

Will you make sure you and your team accomplish the most important thing in the coming year?

November 29, 2022 Peter DiGiammarino Leave a comment

Leadership Offsites focus the top team for growth and performance as the current year closes and the next one starts. Offsites are typically of two types:

Plan Change – Identify what needs to be done differently to perform better and / or grow faster.
Initiative-to-Action – Launch the most important initiative(s).

Kurt Lewin, the father of Organization Dynamics, taught that change happens in three stages: Unfreeze, Change, Refreeze.

John Kotter studied over one thousand initiatives to identify eight reasons change fails to happen as intended.

IntelliVen Manage to Lead System Modules integrate Lewin and Kotter insights to help leaders conceive and implement Planned Change as suggested in the figure below.

1. Collect Insights

IntelliVen Offsites (circled in the figure) start with an electronic survey and one-on-one interviews with top team members to gain insight into how the organization functions as a whole, and / or in the context of the single, most important initiative, with these questions:

How are things today?
What good things happen if we change and what bad things happen if we do not?
How would things be if the ideal change were successfully implemented?
What needs to be done to go from where we are today to where things would ideally be next?
What will make it hard to do what needs to be done?

2. Share Insights with Leader

We organize collected data for the Leader and:

Highlight important and surprising findings.
Prepare to share it with the full team.
Help the leader prepare to articulate Where the Organization has Been, Where it is Now, and Where it is Headed to capitalize on the opportunity afforded by the offsite for the Leader to Set Direction, Align Resources, and Motivate Action.

3. Facilitate Team Offsite

At the offsite, IntelliVen Senior Operating Partners guide the Leader and Team to review insights, align to reach consensus on each of the five topics, and to decide what needs to be done using the workplans and facilitation approaches described here:

Plan Change

Initiative-to-Action

Next Step

Schedule a Zoom session with PeterD to explore how IntelliVen Senior Operating Partners can help you and your team wrap up this year and get ready for the next as we have so successfully with many others over the years.

IntelliVen