Practice Areas
In Northern California we serve a diverse client base of executives, managers, teams, and entrepreneurs all united in wanting to improve their personal and business performance. To do this, we leverage the vast intellectual property resources of FocalPoint Business Coaching (powered by Brian Tracy) as well as many lessons learned in our own personal experience.
We cannot and should not expect to have deep experience in every industry. Instead, we are in the business of business, applying the important learnings as condensed in our Clarity, Effectiveness, Growth, Sales, and Leadership modules, as well as many other resources.
Nevertheless, certain areas of concentration have evolved over the last several years, subjects around which we are able to create a thematic and process focus: we call these Practice Areas.
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Sales and Marketing
Perhaps you already know that anyone in business is in sales. We certainly do, and we will help you regardless of your experience to refresh, renew, or realize the seminal aspects of being more influential in a sales context, developing more successful sales processes, and managing these processes for optimal results. Anecdotes and examples from numerous industries and individuals add life to the timeless concepts underpinning strong sales results.
Marketing is similar in that it has existed for ten millennia or more, and although it has become much more complex, its basic mechanisms in many ways have not changed. That’s why we say there are basically only three ways to improve a business. Join me, Peter Irish, and other veteran sales and marketing professionals who support this key Practice Area.
We’re all in Sales
Let’s begin with the subject of sales. As advertised, we will become extremely specific later on, however, we will begin a little philosophically.
Ever since life evolved on earth, one creature has been trying to sell something to some other creature. Daniel Goleman popularized a helpful way to think about this in his seminal book Emotional Intelligence. He suggests that there are only three basic urges that drive creatures at the subconscious level: dominance, self-preservation, and adventure.
From my experience this trichotomy also helps us understand the process of selling and buying.
We will explore this evolution in more detail later, however, keep in mind that the brain stem, which regulates basic life functions, was joined much later by the olfactory lobe by means of which creatures could distinguish food, a potential mate or a dangerous predator. From this sense of smell, our emotions gradually evolved, clearly serving a strong evolutionary purpose. This so-called limbic system seems to be the seat of the three primal drives: dominance, self-preservation, and adventure. Our rational capacity came much later.
Sales is not a human invention.
The flower sells the bee on its color and sweet nectar to preserve and multiply its species.
The whale signals to calves and prospective mates for the same reasons.
Cats are naturally curious and have a strong sense of adventure, but they also cry when they are hungry, selling us on the need to get up off the couch and feed them.
Human infants do the same using their very helplessness to sell us on the need to feed them.
Of course, there are rational processes active in sales as well, but they typically leverage a need, a feeling, or an instinct. But there’s no way around it: sales is an emotional process.
Take the insurance sales person who uses our very fears to sell us security, for example.
In our next session, we will peel back the cover and dive into the heart of the matter: communication and influencing. Join us!