The New Power Base Selling: Master The Politics, Create Unexpected Value and Higher Margins, and Outsmart the Competition

Uncovering and Advancing Personal Motivators

The ability to uncover and advance Foxes’ and Power Base members’ Personal Motivators is a powerful source of Political Advantage. Of course, you can’t possibly do this unless you’re providing strong business value to their organization that is linked to a Personal Motivator, as previously explained. What we are talking about is the ability to provide political and cultural value in addition to and not in place of product and business value. We address this Unexpected Value in more detail in the next section of the book; for now, let’s discuss how to uncover and advance Personal Motivators.

We use a scenario that illustrates the three steps summarized in Figure 7.4.

Figure 7.4: Uncovering Personal Motivators

Let’s touch on an example that is close to home for sellers—one that concerns an up-and-coming telecommunications provider that wanted to increase its share of large enterprise business, which largely meant taking it from their competition. This company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) realized that his sales organization needed new thinking and new leadership in order to live up to its potential. Before long, he made an announcement identifying a new Vice President (VP) of Sales—a man named Jeff Gahagan, who had a reputation for building world-class sales organizations that outperformed competitors and who could hit the street running. ...