Strong Leaders Are Interruptible

Many Benefits to Being Interruptible

Strong leaders are interruptible even when they're heads down doing something urgent or important.

Being interruptible [with a smile] does two things to strengthen your leadership position. 

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John Bernardi

Doing What's Important Gets You To The Next Level

It's important that a company be organized so that each person can focus on "what's important" to their level of the organization. This means that "what's urgent" is consistently addressed by daily business practices.

Until this baseline is set, the company is not prepared to move to the next level.

By John Bernardi

The Benefits Of Routine

A sales and marketing lifestyle means that you have quality time for building relationships with mavens and connectors, for content marketing, for helping team mates, and for taking the right actions to grow your business.  Routine enables your day-to-day basics to be performed well and on time so that you can allow your antenna to always be listening and your peripheral vision to always be watching.

An Effective Routine Will Enable You To Wisely Progress Towards Your Goals

Daily routines prevent knee jerk reactions and wasted time.  I produce my best results when I follow my routine in a heads down fashion.  But, I periodically look up to stay on track, adjust to new opportunities or threats, improve a process, acquire better tools and navigate unexpected surprises.

Routines Create Confidence, A Key To Success

A routine that spans goals, action plans and workdays builds self-confidence.  You become well rounded if it contains the right amount of time for work, passion, learning, and enjoyment.  You will become more friendly and interesting, and people will respect you for being consistent and dedicated.

How Much OF Your Time Is Freed Up By Routines?

Customer Facing Roles Need Powerful Routines

• CEO routines develop innovative and customer-centric cultures for achieving financial, customer and employee goals.
• Marketing routines ensure lead generation and nurturing to sales-ready status while existing segments are penetrated and new ones are developed through a well managed mix of products and services.
• Sales routines ensure that qualified opportunities are closed, while key accounts are nurtured and territories are developed.
• Call center routines enable you to delight customers and channel partners.

Routines Must Be Constantly Upgraded

As your routine becomes muscle memory, tweaking it with new ideas will enable you to rise to the next level.

By John Bernardi

Are KPIs Your Catch-22?

KPIs Can Be A Catch-22

People Will Behave

Processes Will Be Implemented

Based On What You Measure

If you are unable to measure what is important, you will communicate importance to the things that you can measure, which may be sending people and processes in the wrong direction.

Important Vs. Urgent: CEO Dilemma

What Happens When Business Owners Retire?

When Business Owners Retire 

What Enables Them To Sell, Merge Or Transition To A Legacy?

If I were looking for a company to buy or for a merger partner, I'd be searching for one whose core competencies wouldn't walk out the door with its current owner.  Ethics, integrity, design, engineering, production and customer service are baseline essentials, but the company's customer facing competencies must be atop its resume.

As a CEO, are you also responsible for business development and closing key deals?  Unless you can proudly brandish excellence in customer facing competencies as a business differentiator, you will not be optimizing your company's legacy.  This means process competency in marketing, business development, sales and CEM that is supported by the right automation tools and implemented by the right people.

The real value of a business relies on the quality of its customer and product/service portfolio assets. Market penetration, market development and new product/service development competencies will enable you to optimize the ROI of these vital assets.

It's time to make the investment - and this can't be outsourced!

By John Bernardi