If you truly have a game-changing disruptive elegant innovation, your enterprise is going to get some people really excited. And it’s going to make some people mighty uncomfortable. Including, perhaps, some of the very followers you need to mobilize so they support, approve or champion your innovation. And pay for what it’s worth, so you keep the promises you made to your investors.
Your prospects’ discomfort brings us face-to-face with your leadership. If you’re an ennobling uplifting leader, you’ll see when your followers are uncomfortable or fearful – and will help them get through the discomfort or fear, not trivialize it or find ways around it. If you’re a trusted advisor, you’ll show a fearful or skeptical follower why it’s worthwhile to engage in further dialogue with you – or advance to a deeper due diligence, a trial use, or a group meeting so you can engage other high-level decision-makers and their key opinion leaders (KOLs). You’ll come out with win-win-win solutions, not just win-lose positions.
Studies on salespersonship differentiate between challenger-salespeople and people-pleasing order-takers. Challengers probe and advise to give customers new and better ways of defining what they need. People-pleasing order-takers simply listen and give customers what they want. Challenger sales reps may be a bit more abrasive. But in hundreds of customer surveys, they get much higher grades on credibility, engagement and net promoter scores. They close sales at higher prices and higher margins, since they win business based on value rather than compromises and concessions.
Which again brings us to your leadership. Do you give prospective followers a gracious order-taking “people-pleasing” path-of-least-resistance compromise that doesn’t make waves (and may not make sense)? Or do you challenge and lifting their view of what’s possible? Do you let them stay comfortable where they are? Or ennoble them to fly higher, and achieve a higher level of caregiving, stewardship, ROI? Do they trust you and your team to deliver on bolder, better promises – with a bit of fear that says, “You better have my back; this better work!” Do you rely on KOLs merely for endorsements? Or do you equip KOLs to learn more and co-create alongside you – so they thank you for helping them be even better smarter KOLs?
Why Courage? And why Make Courage Contagious? Because, quite simply, no matter how good a leader (or salesperson) you are, you have a very limited number of touchpoints with the followers whom you hope to ennoble, uplift and embrace value propositions that are out of sync with mainstream, majority-adopter thinking. We tell our clients: You can’t sell. The best you can do is equip champions, spokespeople, orchestrators and influencers to sell for you. At some point, your success is in their hands. Unless your champions have the courage to step into a room with skeptical fearful uncomfortable naysayers and change the momentum, your best proposals are going to be delayed, watered down or put out for price-shopping comparison. And that means your courage has to be contagious – and become their courage. And their courage also needs to be contagious. So it carries over to the meeting after the meeting, when one employee turns to another and asks, “What do you think?”
It takes a village, not just a lone-wolf sales rep or hair-on-fire CBO, to engineer a value proposition that will work for the caregivers, users, payers, licensees and partners who are keys to your success. And to deliver on the results of a test case, trial use, IND, clinical study – so your best champions come back for more after they’ve put your promises and value propositions to the test. Which means that your entire team needs courage to be challengers, not just people-pleasers or order-takers.
The courage to disagree, argue, challenge and use creative abrasion to sharpen your value proposition has to include more than your small inner circle of co-founders, more than your board and core team. It also needs to include your contractors and suppliers – if you hired them to be challenger-value-multipliers and playmakers, not just extra pairs of hands. And that means everyone has to know how to build a culture that Makes Courage Contagious. So look inside. If you’re working with a co-founder, CSO or visionary CEO who acts like being the smartest person in the room or the final authority is more important than earning a diversity dividend from the collective wisdom of the team, you’ve got a leadership problem that eventually will derail your business. If you’ve got leaders who insist on hiring people who fit in, you’ll miss opportunities that diverse engaged challengers will catch.
If you’re an authority figure, with unbounded personal courage, the skills that got you here, while impressive, won’t take you to the next value inflection point or the ones after that. That’s where we come in. With an assessment of what you’re already doing well, so you build on the superpowers that got you here. And develop additional skills to take you there – so you scale with strength and Make Courage Contagious. Because you need fear to be surfaced, not driven underground. And you need fear to start a dialogue, that evenually becomes ennobling and uplifting, so your the power of your innovation can be actualized, rather than dummied down so everyone in the loop stays comfortable.
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Keiretsu Leadership Forum Co-Founders Dr Merom Klein + Dr Louise Yochee Klein say that an entrepreneurial leader’s most important competency is Making Courage Contagious – so development partners reimagine what is possible and so users and buyers embrace new standards of care based on solid proof and logic, not just precedent and herd mentalities. They offer entrepreneurial leaders a researched validated 5-step formula (the 5As) to Make Courage Contagious so fear multiplies, rather than diminishes, value-creation.
