Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 287

The 27 Challenges Managers Face

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In the process of creating content for my classes, I make it a habit to reach out and interview managers and directors of efficiency sales teams. These leaders have a wealth of success (and horror) stories to share from their time as managers in the efficiency industry, and students learn a lot about how successful sales professionals are also reliant on effective management. While the leaders I interview each have unique stories and perspectives, they all have one thing in common: they work hard andsmart to help their team succeed.

Achieving success and becoming a great leader for one’s team takes more than a simple desire to be successful. If you are a new manager or if you hope to better your own management style for your employees, I highly recommend looking into The 27 Challenges Managers Face: Step-by-Step Solutions to (Nearly) All of Your Management Problems by Bruce Tulgan. This book delves into common issues leaders come across, such as employee interdependency, resource constraints, and undermanaging, while demonstrating various solutions to assist. Furthermore, the book emphasizes that excellent management requires time, focus, follow-up and overall effort.

Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:
"For more than twenty years, management expert Bruce Tulgan has been asking, 'What are the most difficult challenges you face when it comes to managing people?'

"Regardless of industry or job title, managers cite the same core issues—27 recurring challenges: the superstar whom the manager is afraid of losing, the slacker whom the manager cannot figure out how to motivate, the one with an attitude problem, and the two who cannot get along, to name just a few. It turns out that when things are going wrong in a management relationship, the common denominator is almost always unstructured, low-substance, hit-or-miss communication. The real problem is that most managers are “managing on autopilot” without even realizing it—until something goes wrong. And if you are managing on autopilot, then something almost always does.

"The 27 Challenges Managers Face shows exactly how to break the vicious cycle and gain control of management relationships. No matter what the issue, Tulgan shows that the fundamentals are all you need. The very best managers hold ongoing one-on-one conversations that make expectations clear, track performance, offer feedback, and hold people accountable."

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Weekly Recap, January 10, 2016

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Monday: Beyond saving energy and money, here are numerous other reasons why someone might want to pursue energy efficiency. 




Tuesday: Continue Part 2 of "Pursuing Energy Efficiency" to learn more about other drivers for efficiency improvevments.




Wednesday: How discovering the benefits your customers experienced can help you make your next sale.




Thursday: Follow this ultimate guideline by marketing expert, Jill Konrath, to improve the success of your email campaigns. 
 

Friday: Take Matt Cutt's advice and challenge yourself to trying something new for 30 days. Watch his TED talk here. 




Saturday: Read this article by productivity writer, Chris Bailey, on how scheduling a Think Break can add value to your professional life.  

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Schedule a Think Break

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For many of us, the holidays offered time to be with loved ones and to enjoy the season’s festivities. However, it may not necessarily have been the most restful period, especially with all the end-of-the-year obligations. In this Saturday’s productivity post, we highly recommend the idea of carving out time for a Think Break.

According to productivity writer, Chris Bailey, a Think Break offers extraordinary value to one’s professional life. During a Think Break, individuals take a step back to reflect deeply on their work, while also further investing in their skills. Bailey notes that some of the most successful individuals of our time, from Bill Gates to Warren Buffet, take advantage of the idea behind the Think Break.

Read the full article here:
http://alifeofproductivity.com/schedule-a-think-break/

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Try Something New for 30 Days

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Whether or not you decided to start the year with particular resolutions in mind, challenging yourself to new goals can help bring about confidence in different areas of your life. If keeping resolutions for 365 days sounds unappealing, we recommend considering a shorter period of time – 30 days!

A few years ago Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer, shared his experience with 30-day challenges. From writing a novel to climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro, Matt not only found his self-confidence growing, but also became more aware and intentional of how he spent his time.

If you’re interested in learning more about the 30-day practice, watch his quick, three minute TED talk:

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Here’s a summary from TED:
Is there something you've always meant to do, wanted to do, but just ... haven't? Matt Cutts suggests: Try it for 30 days. This short, lighthearted talk offers a neat way to think about setting and achieving goals.

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Email Prospecting and Marketing

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Email is one of the most powerful marketing tools we have at our disposal. It’s also one of the most difficult to use effectively. Consumers have become increasingly adept at determining when they’re being “sold” to, and according to a study done by ExactTarget, people take an average of only 2.7 seconds to decide whether they’re going to read, forward, or delete an email.

So how do you craft an email that will actually elicit a response or action from the reader? According to marketing expert Jill Konrath, it all comes down to the four “SNAP” questions:

How simple is it?
Does this person bring value?
Is this aligned with my objectives?
How big a priority is it?

If you can create a compelling email that prompts the correct answers to these four SNAP questions, you’ll witness far higher returns on your email marketing efforts.

Konrath published a comprehensive paper on the subject called “The Ultimate Guide to Email Prospecting.” I highly recommend reading it if you are interested in improving the success of your email campaigns.

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Quantify and Monetize Energy Efficiency

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If you read my last two blog posts, you know that people are motivated by a wide range of efficiency drivers. The ones I discussed are only the tip of the iceberg, and as an efficiency sales professional, it’s your job to determine all of the possible drivers for your product or service in your target market. One of the best ways to do this is to talk to your previous customers and find out what benefits they experienced in the wake of the project. You may discover that your customers are enjoying benefits they didn’t originally expect to enjoy, and you can leverage this information when convincing a new prospect to buy. If you’re going to take this route, you need to know which benefits can be quantified, and which benefits can be monetized. 

A few years ago, I was privileged to be a speaker at a utility awards ceremony. The utility was recognizing folks who had received the largest rebates in the preceding year. In this case, the top award went to the president of a large gourmet vegetable farm. In his acceptance speech, the president graciously thanked the utility for giving his company $2.7 million in the preceding year to make his brand new greenhouse more efficient from a gas perspective. He was quick to note that the biggest savings came not from the reduced gas bill, but rather from the increase in crop yield. It turns out that the demand control ventilation system they installed in the greenhouse to accomplish the gas savings actually allowed him to more accurately control the CO2 levels in the greenhouse. This resulted in a 15% higher yield of the vegetables that were being grown in that greenhouse.

As you might imagine, the 15% increase in crop production was incredibly valuable for his business (as it would be for any other similar business). If one of your existing customers tells you about a great side benefit like this one, you would be crazy not to make use of it. Quantify and monetize the benefit so that you can leverage it to not only capture the attention of similar prospects, but also improve the financials of similar projects before requesting capital.

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Pursuing Energy Efficiency, Part Two

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Today, we’ll continue with more drivers for energy efficiency improvements beyond the most obvious “saving energy” or “saving money.”

-Upgrading the user interface: If you can determine that your prospect is interested in having a better understanding of what's happening in the building, this would be a great “felt need” to leverage.

-Earning the ENERGY STAR® label or LEED® certification: There are a lot of people out there who want to save energy. Some just want the label (which is fine). If you're an income-property business, the ENERGY STAR® label might just be your ticket to higher occupancy rate, base rent per square foot, and sales price per square foot.  In fact, there are about a half-dozen studies done in the last several years that have data to prove it.

-Avoiding an embarrassing energy performance score: If you’re a building owner, there’s a tremendous opportunity for praise or embarrassment based on your energy performance score. Let’s say you're going to sell, lease, finance, or refinance a building and you have to disclose to the counterparty in that real estate transaction what the energy performance of the building is. Imagine you're getting ready to close escrow. Right before the transaction closes, you have to slide a piece of paper across the table that says your building scores 16 on a scale of one to 100. Ouch. You’ll likely be embarrassed to do so – and what if the buyer makes a “set-aside” of dollars for efficiency and/or upgrades a new prerequisite for closing the transaction?  Double ouch! And from the broker’s standpoint, if you're a leasing, mortgage, or sales broker, the last thing you need is a controversial piece of paper with a provocatively low score on it to stand between you and your commission.

-Avoiding budget cuts: Municipalities are always trying to keep firemen, police officers, teachers, and other government workers employed. Energy efficiency is a great way to do so in a responsible fashion.

-Saving a project manager's job: One of our Sales Ninjas told me a story about a project that he sold to a municipality. He asked them why they decided to do the project. It turned out that it wasn't to save energy. It wasn't to demonstrate good governance. It wasn't to save money. It wasn't any of those reasons. It was simply because they had a project manager that didn't have any projects to work on, and had they not embraced an environmental agenda and had this guy plan and oversee a lighting retrofit, he would have had nothing to do and they would have had to lay him off.

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Pursuing Energy Efficiency, Part One

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Many people invest in efficiency measures to save energy and/or money. While these are both great reasons in and of themselves, believe it or not there are plenty of people out there who are not motivated by either one of these drivers. 

Fortunately, there are plenty of other reasons that one might want to pursue energy efficiency. Here are some of the more common ones. Keep them in your back pocket so that you’ll have something interesting to say the next time you sense that energy savings or money savings aren’t going to carry the day:

-Reducing carbon emissions: If you're talking to a director of sustainability, for example, you may find that he or she is more interested in reducing metric tons of CO2 equivalent than in utility bill savings.

-Addressing tenant comfort complaints: I’ve worked in commercial real estate and energy efficiency for the last thirty years. As far back as I can remember, tenant satisfaction surveys have listed “too hot/too cold” at or near the top of the list of tenant complaints. Many of the “fixes” that are normally associated with saving energy also have the concomitant benefit of improving thermal comfort for occupants.

-Improving safety: Many of the direct digital controls and dashboards that are proposed to boost energy efficiency also improve the safety of the building by enabling new levels of visibility into the quality of the airstream – the concentration of CO2, carbon monoxide, and in some cases volatile organic compounds.  On a similar note, hospitals that adopt highly accurate valve solutions enjoy not only energy savings, but also a refined ability to control the spread of airborne pathogens.

-Ensuring regulatory compliance (and eliminating the potential for embarrassment): Lots of jurisdictions around the country are now mandating equipment efficiency standards. Some are even requiring buildings to benchmark their water performance and disclose it to the government on a regular basis.

-Emulating best practice facilities: Some people just want to have a great facility that they can admire – and for which they can be admired. Levels of efficiency that are outside the norm are often newsworthy, which provides the fodder for the host facility’s public relations machine to spring into action.

-Avoiding obsolescence: It’s eye-opening to think that much of the energy efficiency software that is out there was originally installed in buildings using a floppy disk! In many cases, the owner’s manual has been long lost, and the manufacturer no longer supports the software. In all too many cases, the building engineers attempting to run these facilities are on their own. As a result, many of these buildings are essentially running out of control.

Stay tuned for more on this topic in tomorrow’s blog…

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Weekly Recap, January 3, 2016

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Happy New Year! 

 

Monday: Read Tom Newberry's book,  Success Is Not An Accident  on how to achieve success by planning for it. 




Tuesday: Avoid the common mistake of using industry jargon when speaking with a prospect. 




Wednesday: How using certain phrases can redirect your prospect's focus to help better frame your value proposition.




Thursday: Follow these four guidelines to approaching your next independent project. 
 

Friday: To exude more confidence in speech and presentation, avoid these common words. 




Saturday: Read this article from Inc. on 5 Things Smart Leaders Do to Empower Employees. 

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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Productivity Through Empowerment

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When we think about ways to improve productivity, we usually think of software programs, smartphone apps, time-management systems, to-do lists, ergonomics, and so forth. While these tools and life hacks have the potential to improve productivity greatly, we often overlook a key factor in our ability to perform at our highest potential: self-motivation.

A self-motivated employee is empowered with the desire to improve the success of his or her company. This empowerment makes the employee want to produce high-quality work. Since productivity is necessary to produce high-quality work in a timely fashion, the employee ends up working productively.

So how does one become self-motivated? According to an article published in Inc, the way in which a leader hires and manages his or her employees has a significant effect on those employees’ level of motivation. The article argues that an “engaged, empowered, enthusiastic” employee works harder and is easier to manage. If you are a leader in your organization, I highly recommend reading this short piece and considering how you might create a team of empowered employees: 
http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/5-things-smart-leaders-do-to-empower-employees.html

Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”

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