“He might have done 4, 5, 6, 7 things versus my 100, but they were the right things because he had done discovery as a lifestyle with our manager and understood clearly what it would take to actually move the needle.” – DeJuan Brown in today’s Tip 1118
What is your thought about this?
Join the conversation below and check out the links!
Sales Success Summit
DeJuan Brown on LinkedIn
Managing Up: Collaborating WITH Your Leadership – DeJuan Brown
DeJuan Brown on Sales Success Stories Interview
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today I’ve got another clip from the Sales Success Summit. I had actually planned to share this a couple of weeks ago, but I guess there was some divine intervention because in this clip DeJuan references Katie Jane Bailey’s presentation and what she shared in yesterday’s clip. So this is from DeJuan’s talk on Managing Up: Collaborating WITH Your Leadership. Here he is:
DeJuan Brown: Let me give you a quick story about what I actually mean. And I actually take from this quote. So there’s a gentleman who, I won’t name him. He knows who he is. We’re still friends to this day, like really good friends. But we’ve been working together since 2002-ish, right? And we worked together from 2002 all the way to 2014. And there was a point in my career when I was really vying for a leadership role. And here’s my basis. I don’t think I had finished under 225-250% for several years in a row.
And I’ve told this story on various places in various places and I had done a lot of extra work. Right. I had actually gone out and created content. I had delivered trainings that I thought impacted the org really well. I was an open book as it related to best practices. How was I getting this stuff done? I never heard a thing and so I just felt like I was a shoo-in for the role. And then here comes my friend who was not really he was never top of the pile as it relates to stack ranking on the sales side. Definitely share best practices, etc., etc. But there was this mismatch I thought, but I didn’t understand a key principle.
And that key principle, I think it’s called out here. Don’t perform more than it’s ordered. Right. That doesn’t mean just wait until like John like, “Hey, here are the instructions. Go do that. Yes, done. Did it.” But it’s something different, right. This is the confusion and then sometimes the conflation of activity with impact. Right. Where I thought that, man, all of this stuff that I’m doing, I’m doing 100 things. My friend and colleague is doing seven.
Guess what, though?
The seven that my friend and colleague was doing came from an understanding of the top seven priorities of leadership and what needed to get done in order to help them do their job more effectively. So in a lot of cases, the work that I was doing actually was putting work on the plates of my manager. I didn’t realize that because they were almost self-projects. Right. These are projects I’m like, “I can help here and I can do this, and I can do that.” And in order for that to be facilitated, then my manager had to do some things to make it happen. So I was actually putting work on the plate of my manager. And one great sage manager says, “Hey, as an individual contributor, you’re either putting work on my desk or you’re taking work off my desk.”
And so what I was doing and all of my activity and all of the work that I was doing was putting a lot of work on the desk of my manager. I was making a lot of impact in places that didn’t align with the priorities of my manager and I mistook that for impact, the right type of impact that would actually move the needle and make my manager either more effective or remove things from the plate of my manager. But the things that I was doing was all secondary and tertiary to the work that my manager thought was paramount to our organization.
Whereas my colleague discovery as a lifestyle. He knew exactly what our manager needed. He knew exactly how our manager wanted it delivered. He had asked the right questions to understand, “Hey, here are the things that I want out of my career. What might I do in this organization, in your eyes, to actually move the needle toward that? What are the things that I can do to help you as I understand what it is that you’re going for and your objectives as a leader? What are the things that our organization needs? What part of that are you held responsible for? And where can I be helpful?”
And so he might have done 4, 5, 6, 7 things versus my 100, but they were the right things because he had done discovery as a lifestyle with our manager and understood clearly what it would take to actually move the needle.
Now, was this gentleman a suck-up? No. He managed that really effectively and I did not. And so he got the role and I did not.
Scott Ingram: Once again I shared the full audio from this presentation a couple of weeks ago on the Sales Success Stories Podcast, but you’ll be even better served by going to Top1Summit.com and if you fill out the form at the top of that page you can get access to both presentation videos, the presentation decks, and everything.
In fact, you’ll get access to all of the presentations from last year’s Summit. Did I mention it’s free? Top1Summit.com OR click over to DailySales.Tips/1118 and we’ll have links to everything including DeJuan’s LinkedIn Profile, his original interview on Sales Success Stories, and more. TONS of good stuff.
So make sure you do that, and once you have. Be sure to come back here for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!