Learn to Get the Business
I well remember attending my first seminar about selling. It was taught by the legendary Tom Hopkins, author of "How to Master the Art of Selling." He grabbed my attention by observing: "While you can earn a degree in business administration almost anywhere, you won't find any university that teaches or provides degrees in selling. Yet without selling, most businesses wouldn't last very long."
Since then, I've continually been struck that few of the people I know who have advanced business training could sell anybody anything, even something that someone badly needs. Such lack of skill isn't based on any lack of intelligence or willingness to make an effort, but rather on something more intangible that I will call "the common touch."
Believing that there must be some ways for those who lack the common touch to capture this "art," I have since attended many sales-training programs and seminars. Most of the better sessions emphasized skills for developing rapport more easily with people who have just been met.
On such learning occasions, it felt to me as if "getting the business" meant first becoming a more attentive, caring person, rather than mastering subject-specific matters such as those who work in accounting, information technology, law, operations, planning, and research and development do.
In fact, when I meet many people who work in such "academic" business activities, I am often struck by their deep subject-matter knowledge . . . but their limited ability to touch the hearts of their hearers.
Could it be, I wondered, that there are business activities that you mostly learn by doing them and seeking to improve? There are certainly plenty of activities outside the business world like that, such as hitting a baseball pitcher's curve. Since even great hitters have batting coaches, I began to see that one way of learning such intangible arts is by receiving objective feedback from experienced people while you performing the activities.
I was reminded of such learning experiences and ruminations by Mr. Shpetim Arifi, an MBA graduate of Rushmore University who is a native of Kosovo. As a youngster, life seemed normal enough for him . . . except for attending classes with youngsters who were a year older than he was.
When the war in Kosovo expanded, he was prospering in his studies despite the age disadvantage, and was just a few examinations from completing an undergraduate degree in economics with a management specialty from the University of Pristina. Due to the war, however, it took another four years before he finished those exams.
In the meantime, Mr. Arifi was drawn into unexpected activities. As one of the relatively few young people who spoke English and had good personal computer skills, he was soon helping foreign journalists cover stories.
After a year of such informal work, he began a series of jobs that included positions with the U.S. State Department mission and later the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). With the latter organization, his learning took on many interesting new directions that allowed him to rise from being an administrative assistant to an OSCE officer.
To qualify as an officer, Mr. Arifi completed a ten-month training program, designed to deal with a wide range of issues by helping him develop a core set of analytical and practical skills. As one application of his training, he started from scratch and managed the largest hypermarket in Kosovo, supervising a team of 87 employees. Talk about learning on the job!
Because of the hypermarket's success, Mr. Arifi was invited to rejoin OSCE in a higher level position with more responsibility. His next assignment there was to lead the administration and support office for the department of democratization, a critical national task.
His rapidly developing business acumen enabled him to serve as an informal advisor to several Kosovo-based businesses.
Seeing that political progress could mean increased opportunities to work with foreign investors, he sought to learn the newcomers' languages, especially the language of business. As one aspect of such learning, he studied part time for an MBA degree while performing his important democratization responsibilities.
In these business studies, Mr. Arifi was inspired by John Dewey's observation, "Education is not a preparation for life; education is life itself." As a result, he sought to focus each course on some activity that he was doing for OSCE, upgrading both his theoretical knowledge and his on-the-job experience to increase his ability to work with foreign investors. In this way, as his business education progressed so did the quality of his work.
Through such learning he found that understanding theory, identifying and applying the best practices from other developing countries and taking into account local characteristics, provided good ways to tackle the challenges facing Kosovo's for-profit and non-profit organizations. He was relieved to learn by working on such practical tasks after being frustrated by spending much of his undergraduate time learning things that he would never apply.
Mr. Arifi observed that "while no university will be able to teach you to do your job, a university can, among other things, enable you to ask the right questions. In the process, your ways of thinking for tackling day-to-day challenges grow stronger as you follow the right path to the answers."
"Consequently, you find yourself more prepared in meetings, your vocabulary improves, and your ability also grows to present arguments and to draft communications. When I was invited for a job interview with another organization it was much easier to prepare, to be successful in the interview, and to win the job. As a result, I advanced in my career."
Mr. Arifi also observed that character counts in career success, something that life teaches: "Employers are looking for people of integrity who will continually display honest, unreserved effort to attain the organization's goals. In these days when senior managers so often engage in misconduct, integrity is becoming harder to find and more important."
There can be no doubt that he has learned a lot about how to sell himself, his ideas, and his organization to those he needs to influence in order to get the business. I wonder what Tom Hopkins would say about these learning experiences?
Are you as able as you would like to be to sell yourself and your ideas so that you, too, can get the business? If not, why not start learning?
About the Author:
Donald W. Mitchell is a professor at Rushmore University, an online school, who often teaches people who want to improve their business effectiveness in order to accomplish career breakthroughs through earning advanced degrees. For more information about ways to engage in fruitful lifelong learning at Rushmore University to increase your effectiveness, I invite you to visit http://www.rushmore.edu
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