Friday, May 31, 2013

Where Does Leadership Begin?


For the last 35+ years I have listened to people in both the military and in the corporate world complain about how screwed up their leaders (upper management) are. 

And often times, they are exactly right in their views too. In truth, I have been guilty of it myself. 

But where does leadership begin? 

Does it begin with the CEOs? With the company Presidents? With the Vice Presidents? With the Directors or Program Managers? 

The answer is – NO! 


Leadership begins with each of us, from the entry level person to the highest ranking person in the company. 

We exhibit leadership when we take care of our own responsibilities and help others when we are able. If we all did that, how much better off do you think we’d be? 

But, nonetheless, it is common place to criticize those in leadership roles over us. Sometimes the criticism is warranted and sometimes it is a placebo to make us feel better about the things at which we are lacking or failing. 



When I got to my first operational squadron in the Navy I started a log entitled If I Become King

I would write down the things that I liked and didn’t like about a variety of things I saw, including my leaders and the things they did that made me shake my head in amazement. It's a good thing I had all the answers back then.

I kept that log until I became a Lieutenant Commander (O-4). Then one day when I was a department head I went back and reread that book. 

Actually, that was why I kept the book. I wanted to remember the things I liked and didn't like, and would do and wouldn't do when I Was King.

Wow! Over 75% of the things I criticized about leadership turned out to be more about my own misgivings than the leaders I was commenting about. 



That was when I started getting the idea (even after all of the formal leadership training I had received in the Navy) that leadership starts with me, not my leaders. Self Leadership!

It was up to me to do my part in the big picture. If I couldn’t lead effectively there, how could I expect to effectively lead when I got a bigger piece of the pie? 



Leadership starts from the bottom up! It starts with SELF!


For more information about how The Cobalt Group can help you with any business or leadership challenges you are facing, Contact us.

We want to hear what you think. Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Copyright © 2013 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.


Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Leadership vs Management

Maybe it’s time to take a look at the titles we give people in their jobs. 

Too often I see the word ‘Manager’ as part of someone’s title in the corporate world. I cannot speak for the other services but in the Navy I do not recall seeing the word ‘Manager’ as part of anyone’s title.

So why does it matter? I believe it is misleading to call a person a manager when their job is to lead other people. 

There is a difference between leadership and management.

To me, my simple definition of leadership is the ability to get a diverse group of people to work together to achieve a common goal. 

This can apply to any aspect of your life but for this discussion I am speaking of the business world.

On the other hand, my simple definition of management is the organization and coordination of the activities in order to achieve defined goals and objectives.

We lead people and we manage processes. 

I am to lead the people that work for me. My job is to get them to work together to achieve whatever our goals are. 

The processes activities that go into achieving those goals are managed. 

The problem I see is that too many people placed in positions of leadership are called ‘Managers’ and not a title that is indicative of what they are really there to do – lead people. 

Compound that with the lack of leadership training that is offered by the vast majority of companies out there and the result is, way more often than not, that we have someone in a role of responsibility that tries to manage the people they are supposed to lead.

Since I am unlikely to create the swell needed to effect the titles we use as for our people, perhaps I can challenge you to invest in something more important for your people and your businesses – leadership training and mentoring. 

I’ve seen too many people promoted to a ‘management’ role and very seldom, in my corporate experience, given the tools (leadership training and mentoring) to lead their people. 

And without those tools, the people you entrust to lead a part of your organization are potentially being set up for failure. It’s not that they are not smart or good at their job, but without being taught any differently most will try to manage what they should be leading.

The organizations I saw as most effective were the ones where an investment was made to train its leaders properly and, as result, those people knew the difference between leadership and management.

For more information about how The Cobalt Group can help you with any business or leadership challenges you are facing, Contact us.

We want to hear what you think. Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Copyright © 2013 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Chasing Light



It doesn’t matter if you are a sales rep, a business developer, an operations line manager, senior business executive, or entrepreneur, one of the measures of the health of your business is your pipeline. 

Having a robust, qualified pipeline is the goal of any business that wants to stay in business. 

A weak pipeline may be due to many things. 

But it seems the common knee-jerk mindset is that to increase your pipeline you just need more activity. 

And everyone knows that more ‘activity’ always leads to opportunities that fill a pipeline.

Remember back in elementary school when the teacher would take a box and cover the opening with black construction paper? Some light source would be put in the box and the classroom lights would be turned off. 

The teacher would take a pin and begin to poke holes in the construction paper. Out of these holes came little rays of light, usually intending to simulate the constellations. 

It was cool. And the more light beams that emanated, the cooler it seemed.

In business it’s sometimes like being back in that elementary school classroom with the lights off. 

When it’s dark in the room every little ray of light catches your eye. The tendency is to grasp for that ray of light. 

Then, the next beam catches your attention and you reach for it too. And then the next, and the next and the next. 

And when you are in the dark (struggling to build your pipeline or show progress toward your goals) reaching for every ray of light (i.e. activity) seems the quickest way to get out of the dark.

The problem with this is that not every activity or new opportunity are beneficial. 

Activity, for activity’s sake, usually does little for the bottom line. It may make you and upper management look and feel like you are being productive, but it seldom does anything else. 

For it to be productive, that ‘activity’ needs to lead to actual ‘opportunities’ which must be then qualified as real or not. And usually, very few opportunities are added to a pipeline by just having ‘activity’. 

What I mean here are meaningless marketing and customer activities and management ‘directed’ activities that historically produce no results; and/or filling a pipeline with deals that may turn your activity dashboard green but that you know won’t lead to no new revenue.

Regardless of the pressure you are under, real or perceived, your resources (time, people, money, etc.) can only be spread so thin before they become ineffective for any of your opportunities, especially the ones that are winnable. 

So the discipline that is needed is to not reach for every ray of light but to determine which ones are the right for your business. 

The sales and BD reps should know their waterfront well enough to know what activities interest and benefit their customers. 

They should also know which activities don’t lead to better market awareness of what you’re selling, gain more customer intimacy or increase in the size of the pipeline. 

Management, as well, needs to trust that their front line reps know their market well enough to understand what works and doesn’t work to fill a pipeline with opportunities to pursue.

So then, when you have chosen which rays of light to reach for, a disciplined qualification and prioritization process, if followed, will help you stay focused on what actually works and help prevent you from just Chasing Light!

For more information about how The Cobalt Group can help you and your sales or business development force, or with any business or leadership challenges you are facing, Contact us.

We want to hear what you think. Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Copyright © 2013 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Thursday, May 16, 2013

The One That Got Away



In the second year of my first sales job with a major IT company I was working the biggest deal I had in my pipeline to that date. 

It was going to be $8.5M over a five year period. The math was easy and even back then it would have been half of my annual quota for the next five years (assuming no yearly increases – yeah, right!). And with a deal that size I had a lot of help from upper management.

I was in tight with the customer. It was a small group and they were all of the decision makers. 

Fairly fresh out of many sales training courses, I applied all of that knowledge to every aspect of my capture plan for that deal. I met with the customer often, and a lot of those were at his request. 

I knew the requirements inside and out and we had a solution that answered it, and then some. The customer verified that our solution was a great fit, too.

Then, as often happens in government sales, the program was put on hold. The customer didn’t know for how long but felt that it was most likely till the end of the government fiscal year. 

I wasn’t too worried. That was 6 months away and I had two things in my favor – the first month of the next government fiscal year was also the last month of my company’s fiscal year so I thought it would be a great close out for that year and, secondly, I had a great pipeline that would take me over my quota if that deal happened to slip even further.

I told that customer that I would check in periodically and asked that if things changed to please let me know as well. 

I called about 3 months later and discovered that only weeks prior they had gotten their money and went with a competitor. I asked why they chose the competition and, in so many words, he told me that my competitor stayed engaged and sold them on their solution. 

I was mad at myself (and so was my management) for making such a rookie mistake – I quit selling!

From then on, I made sure that I never quit selling to any customer, even if a program was cancelled. 

That discipline paid off two years later when I closed the biggest software sale of my career, and the biggest one that company had that year – all because I stayed engaged with a customer that had another competitor’s solution selected and their customer didn’t like it. 

Because I was in contact on a frequent basis even after we weren't selected, they called me back and 19 months later I closed the deal.

As I learned more about the trade of selling I have made many other mistakes since ‘the one that got away’. I learned the hard way that in the field of sales 

Never Quit Selling!

For more information about how The Cobalt Group can help you with your sales force, or with any business or leadership challenges you are facing, Contact us.

We want to hear what you think. Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Copyright © 2013 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Monday, May 13, 2013

The Carpenter's Tool Belt


The Carpenter’s Tool Belt

We've all seen the construction guys on building sites (and even some of our neighbors--us included—on some weekends) with their big belts on with their tools of the trade. 

Those tool belts hold the items that they come to use on a daily basis. It doesn't contain all of their tools, just the ones that they tend to use more frequently than others. 

The other tools are, perhaps, sitting in a box in their truck or somewhere else on the site. Those are the tools that they use less often so they don’t put them in their belt daily.

A few years ago I was scheduled for some more sales training. I have probably been to about 15 sales training courses and the last thing I wanted to do was take 3 days out of my schedule to attend yet another ‘mandatory’ training course. 

I went, and something happened. 

It was nothing earth shattering but I relearned something again…I wasn't using all of my tools!

As a sales and business development professional I had a tool box that I had built up over the years. I had tools in there that had I came to use most frequently based on experience and personal preference. 

Those tools were the ones I kept in my tool belt. The exercises we did in those three days made me reach back into my tool box and look at things I had not used in a long time, and had likely forgotten were even there. 

Sure, some were tools designed for use in specific circumstances but most were tools that I had just quit using for one reason or another.

At the end of those three days I went from begrudgingly going to a ‘mandatory’ sales training event to happily realizing that I had learned something from a course that was not really any different than most of the other Sales 101 courses I had taken. 

I realized that I, like many of us, went to work each day and over time kept using the same tools. 

A good friend asks me at the end of each time we get together what was the best thing I got out of our meeting. 

The best thing I got out of this course was that I have more tools than I carry in my tool belt and that I need to keep evaluating which ones I put in my belt every day.

What’s in your tool belt?

For more information about how The Cobalt Group can help you with any business or leadership challenges you are facing, Contact us.

We want to hear what you think. Leave a comment and let’s start a discussion.

Copyright © 2013 The Cobalt Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Thursday, May 9, 2013


Welcome to The Cobalt Group Blog

Thank you for stopping by to read The Cobalt Group’s blogs. The intent here is to post about two blogs per week that can be read in 3-5 minutes. Then, I hope that ideas and thoughts may be shared and a discussion may occur.

I will blog on topics across the spectrum including, but not limited to, leadership, market analysis and penetration, strategic account planning, sales and business development, and the opportunity life cycle. Some of the things posted will a good refresher and some will be opinions. Whether or not you agree or disagree with what is posted, the real goal is to generate some thought and discussion among professionals.

Here’s to the start of some good discussions and many new friendships.

Steve McCaslin
smccaslin@thecobaltgroup.net