Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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Professional selling skills: a fundamental now more essential than ever

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In 16 BIE (Before Internet Era), business purchases were made by decision-makers who needed to buy stuff for their operations, and they almost always needed help with technical questions, innovations, pricing, availability, delivery, etc.

That year, a/k/a, 1977, every business buyer went to work expecting salespeople to call on them, unscheduled. To a prospect, a “cold call” was not optimum, but usually was tolerated. Yes, in those days, you could walk into a business where you were previously unknown and leave with a sale. For current customers, dropping in was expected as good service. Remember, this was BIE, when a salesperson was the equivalent of a website.

As beautifully as this dance by motivated parties worked – one needed information and the other provided it – salespeople were still trained to conduct business with what Xerox (where I worked in 1977) called Professional Selling Skills (PSS). There were three key components to PSS: overcoming objections, closing skills and probing.

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And on the 2nd day, the Genius Cluster invented email

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Internet Genesis (1961-1974): Chapter 1, verse 1: On the first day, The Genius Cluster said, “Let there be a network of networks.” And they saw that it was good and named it “The Internet.”

Verse 2: On the second day, The Cluster said, “Let there be structure.” And, so it was that the three building blocks – now known as the World Wide Web – were formed and mounted on The Internet: a special computer language that makes handy webpages possible; direct messaging; and email.

Verse 3: On the third day, seeing that their creations were good, The Cluster rested.

For many generations – okay, about two – the Internet and the WWW flourished with few changes until one day a heretic said, “Let’s connect on Twitter.”

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Revealing the success secrets of highly effective people

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Ever wonder why some people are more effective than others? Life just seems to be easier for them, right? The answer to this mystery is likely found in one of the most obvious traits that separates humans from other members of kingdom Animalia: Self-awareness.

Essentially by definition, we’re all self-aware, demonstrating modesty, shame, joy and greed, just to name a few traits from our awareness inventory. But the most self-aware among us are informed by a bigger picture perspective, regarding the impact of their behavior and actions on the world around them, especially interactions with people. As students of Newton’s 3rd Law – for every action, there’s an equal and opposite reaction – highly effective people are not surprised at how the world reacts to their actions, because they’ve already played at least some level of that response in their minds, like a role play.

Highly effective people have acquired one more skill. They’ve converted self-awareness into a useful tool: self-analysis. This intuitively named practice helps regulate behavior for maximum effectiveness. More on that later.

In 1970, Noel Burch identified a handy four-level explanation of self-awareness, but he used a completely appropriate alternative word: consciousness. Prepare to see yourself and others as you discover these levels.

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The Concorde Fallacy and the Concorde Question

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What do some businesses have in common with supersonic transportation? Let me tell you a story.

In 1956, the Supersonic Transport Aircraft Committee met in England to discuss building a supersonic airliner in a partnership between British aircraft and engine manufacturers, and the government. Planning and development for the project – named Concorde – moved forward, and in 1962 France joined the group.

When the wheels came up on the first Concorde commercial flight in January 1976, the enterprise was already plagued by prohibitive cost overruns. By the last Concorde flight in 2003, the Anglo/French financial misadventure had become legendary.

The good news is this story produced a handy term that covers valuable business lessons. Evolutionary biologists coined the term, “Concorde Fallacy” as a metaphor for when animals or humans defend an investment of time and resources – a policy, product, business, or nest – when that defense costs more than abandonment and starting over in another direction. Four centuries before Concorde, in Part One of “Henry IV,” it turns out that Shakespeare’s Falstaff proposed a handy bit of wisdom for when we find ourselves with a rude decision about something in which we’re heavily invested financially and/or emotionally: “The better part of valor is discretion.”

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Jim Blasingame’s 2019 crystal ball predictions

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Here are my 2019 Predictions — my 20th set — by major category. Through 19 years, my record is 73.6% accuracy.

Small Business
 
Prediction: Small business confidence will wane slightly, but still maintain record levels above the NFIB’s 45-year average.
 
Prediction: With research showing younger generations less entrepreneurial than Baby Boomers (Kauffman), millions of divesting business owners will have to be more creative than ever to maximize the value of their business.
 
Prediction: Stronger balance sheets and better financial management than any time in a half-century will help the small business sector weather a maturing expansion and contribute to a quicker recovery.
 
Prediction: For the 12th straight year, small businesses will continue to limit borrowed capital to fund growth. This is why higher interest rates, the kryptonite of Wall Street, is less of a Main Street threat.
 
Prediction: Unlike corporate America, small business appraisal of the TCJA tax bill of 2017 will fall in the tepid category of “a mixed bag.”
 
Prediction: First under assault from Obama’s NLRB, and now Democrats and the courts, the U.S. franchise industry will face its greatest challenge over the attempt to create a labor organizing nexus between the mothership franchisor and employees of the separately owned small business franchise. This is the sleeper issue for Main Street in 2019.
 
Prediction: Trump’s beneficial regulatory abatement of the past two years will succumb to the reality of having to negotiate deals with Congressional Democrats.
 
Prediction: Artificial intelligence (AI) leverage will become increasingly available from granular applications for small businesses, but they will be slow to adopt.
 
Economy
 
Prediction: The greatest fundamental economic growth headwind will continue to be a lack of qualified employees to help businesses seize new opportunities.
 
Prediction: The Federal Reserve will raise rates at least once, a sign of strong economic fundamentals and inflation concerns.
 
Prediction: For the first time in decades, wage increases — both organic and by government edict — will put pressure on inflation, causing the Fed to respond (see above, and Dec jobs report).
 
Prediction: The U.S. economy will average above 2.5% GDP in 2019. Perspective alert: We were proud of 3% when the economy was at $6 Trillion; 2019 GDP will be $21 Trillion.
 
Prediction: If there is a recession in 2019, it will be due more to a cascading of Wall Street’s toxic hysteria about the Fed, Brexit, trade wars, if Apple’s Tim Cook suffers a kidney stone, or a possible attack by the planet Rhordan from the Andromeda Galaxy than from the underlying economic condition.
 
Prediction: U.S. stock markets achieved record levels, irrespective of economic fundamentals, and Mr. Gravity will lower them by the same metrics — whatever those are.
 
Prediction: The global safe-harbor of investing in U.S. assets will contribute to preventing a major stock market collapse, even if indexes descend into “bear” territory.
 
Prediction: Good news/bad news — A slowing global economy will hold crude oil in its deflationary trend, averaging under $55/bbl during 2019.
 
Prediction: China’s considerable internal challenges will help Trump accomplish significant trade deal progress if not completion.
 
Prediction: The U.S. will accrue unprecedented, multi-faceted benefits by becoming a net-exporter of energy products, from economic to monetary to trade to geopolitics.

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The real price of free information

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Standing here on the threshold of the third decade of the 21st century, we’ve watched the Digital Age transmogrify into the Information Age. Now awash with a digital record of everything that’s ever been said, written or happened, from area news to Aristotle’s ethical teachings, the barrier to whatever else we need or want to know is literally no higher than the tap of a finger. And if being up-to-the-minute isn’t fast enough, we now have the world, and parts of the cosmos, available in real-time.
 
And all of this information is a good thing — until it isn’t. In his song, “Against the Wind,” Bob Seger lamented that deadlines and commitments made him have to decide, “What to leave in, what to leave out.” As digitally driven information morphs from handy to firehose overload, we have to learn how to consume it with increasing discernment – what to leave in, what to leave out.
 
As the children of the Information Age, we’re constantly and increasingly at risk of becoming victims and/or purveyors of a potentially dangerous phenomenon: Availability Cascade. It occurs when we’re exposed to something so much — a maxim, a meme, misinformation or disinformation — that we begin to accept it as truth and reality, and worse, act on it without confirming accuracy or relevance. Here’s an old story from the Analog Age that demonstrates the power of Availability Cascade.
 

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