Who Are You? (Building a character)
In this ebook, Nikolaus Kimla discusses the two pillars of the future are technology, and human beings and how you have to have the perfect technology, and then the perfect human being in application, performance and presentation.
He argues that today and into the future, it’s a 50-50 balance. In the past it was perhaps 90-10 (90 percent human and 10 percent technology). It moved up to 80-20. Today, though, it’s definitely 50-50, and without technology, you’re lost. Today, technology is an equal partner. For that reason, character—the subject of his ebook—is even more important, for humanity has to be as good as the technology. This is especially true in sales.
How can we raise the perfection of the human being? And more to the point for us, of salespeople? The answer is character
Expecting Perfection
Here’s something interesting to think about: how many bugs do you have on your smartphone? How many bugs does your car have (assuming it’s in good running order)? Your computer? You’ll realize they all have relatively few. But when you work with people, there are many! We expect the technology to be perfect, and today we absolutely need it. If we didn’t have that expectation—if we actually expected technology to be faulty—can you imagine what it would feel like to board an aircraft? Or get into your car to drive? With faulty technology, what would be the expectations of people about to go to Mars? If we’re working from home (which many of us are today), what if the technical infrastructure (the internet) only supported us part of the time? Or for Nikolaus’s own company—an SaaSSaaS SaaS is an acronym for Software as a Service. business that operates in the Cloud—what would it be like if our Cloud provider didn’t work 99.99 percent of the time? We even have Service Level Agreements in place to guarantee it. So the expectation for perfect technology is definitely always there.
The same expectations will be applied to humans as regards manners, education, and social intelligence, more and more as time goes by. If we have a 50-50 balance of technology with humanity, and the technology is near-perfect, then the only failing can be humans. If you don’t meet the standard, you’re not considered functional in society. Humans will probably never be perfect—there will always be some problems. But we must work to eliminate the basic errors that cause so many troubles. While exact prediction is impossible, we should have a precise goal that a 9-month trip to Mars with total strangers won’t be a disaster before they even arrive.
How can we raise the perfection of the human being? And more to the point for us, of salespeople? The answer, Nikolaus offers, is character.
Additional Resources
This ebook is on the subject of “Win Together.” It falls under the same context as“win-to-win” described in my book Network Selling: Guarantee Success for the Digital Age. Today, this aspect of sales is more important than ever, and must also be part and parcel of CRM solutions.
“For some years I’ve been saying that, as a society, we’re in the midst of a transformation. Given what’s happened in the last couple of years, there’s no one left who is disagreeing with me! It’s become very obvious.”
A common term in sales today is EQ, which stands for “emotional I.Q.” It means the skill a salesperson has in reading emotions and utilizing them in sales. It means empathy and a number of other abilities. The short version is, it’s an I.Q. when it comes to emotions. But just as with our Network Selling model, E.Q. isn’t just for sales, either. It’s actually the missing factor in human interactions, for confrontation—a common “tool” in human interactions—doesn’t actually handle anything.
“You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”