Future Proof Your Post-COVID Career

Hey everybody. Glad to be here with you today. I'm Mark dinolo, Managing partner of Sales Globe. We're going to talk about a really fun topic today which is how to future proof your post Covid career. And there's one skill that we can't outsource, we can't offshore, we can't AI. And that skill is the ability to creatively solve problems not in an ethereal way, but in a logic based way. So we're going to give you some skills today that you can take away, some tools that you can use on how to become a better problem solver. Little bit of background on U.S. salesGlobe. We're a data driven creative problem solving firm for sales. So we do a lot of work around organization, design, compensation, quota setting, talent, a whole range of things. But the common factor is that we're always solving problems and we're trying to come up with ideas that the company may have not considered before. Written a few books from the innovative sale to what your CEO needs to know about sales compensation. So we love to get our ideas out on paper. In terms of my personal background, I am what you might call a closet art school mba. And before you get the wrong idea, what that means is basically what I did is I was a designer years ago I went to art school and was a designer in New York. And after being a designer for a few years, I watched some of my roommates who were stockbrokers, they went off to business school and I took a look at that and I thought this looks really cool. So I went off and I actually got into business school. I was what they called a dance student. And a dance student really means that you're a person from the arts and business. So I went off to business school and I really enjoyed that until I had to interview for a job. And as I'm interviewing for a job, what I realized is that I wasn't getting any offers and no serious company wanted to hire the art guy, except maybe Hallmark. That one job that I didn't get was probably the best job I never got. Nobody wanted to hire the archive because they couldn't see the connection between the design side, the creative side and the business side. So I had to put all that in the closet and I became the business guy. So a few years later I realized that a lot of the problem solving that I was doing involved putting together creative principles with analytical information. So it was putting left brain and right brain together and, and so brought that together. And that's what we're all about at sales globe is that creative problem solving based on analytics, based on logic, or think of it as the science of creative problem solving. So we're going to share some of that with you today. You'll see some of those ideas as we go along here. So what I want to do is start off with our first big area, which is the challenge. What are we running into? Why does this even matter? Well, we know that the world is changing. So production 2020 and before was a lot different than it is now. Right. So we had a booming economy, we had a lot of offshoring and outsourcing. A lot of things were happening, but it was a different environment than it is now. So now we're working virtually. We have fear and financials and expectations that are driving behaviors. And so what's happening is that the whole playing field has changed. So working virtually as an example, we're losing connection. We're not working together the same way that we used to in terms of collaborating and connecting and building ideas. I think that's going to be okay for productivity for the short term, but in the long term, I think we're going to start to see productivity in terms of creative problem solving starting to wane. And relationships are a little tougher to have right now. And so how do you build relationships with your coworkers, with customers, with partners if you're not able to connect with them? So we're less dependent on relationship, but we're more dependent on our ability to solve problems. Right. That's going to become a big differentiator. So changing the way or helping to develop the way that you think about solving problems can help you in terms of how you're going to become more valuable in the market, no matter what stage of your career that you're in, because those foundations for your career have eroded. So we want to build this skill, so we're going to give you some of those today. So this is the last frontier, your ability to creatively solve problems, not like I said, in an ethereal way, but in a data driven way. And you want to do something that's going to get impact and it's going to benefit you for your organization, it's going to benefit you in your career. So think about the logic that goes behind this. So I want to ask you a question. Where were you when you thought of your last great idea? This has two assumptions built into it. First of all, you had a great idea. Second, you were somewhere, okay, we could probably fill out that second one. But where were you when you Thought of your last great idea. Okay, I can hear some of you. I was in the garden, I was biking, right. I was at the bar. Okay, you were doing something different. Maybe you were in the shower, right? What you weren't doing is you weren't sitting in the conference room and you weren't grinding away trying to solve the problem. What you were doing is you were doing something else. So this is an illustration of a creative principle called walking away from the problem. So what you do is you work on a problem and I do this all the time. You work on a problem, you're working away on it and then you stop and you say, I'm going to put this aside, I'm going to go do something else. And what the mind does is the brain goes into a look, seek, function and it starts putting together random combinations, right? And a lot of them don't make any sense until all of a sudden, bam. That one idea comes in the shower and you go, that's what I have to do. And you wonder why that happened. Because you're inherently a creative problem solver. Your mind's already doing it. It's a question of how you harness it. So we'll talk about some principles for creative problem solving later, but this is one of them, which is walking away from the problem. Just try this this week and see how that goes for you, because it will actually work. Ok, so our goal. What is our goal for you as a creative problem solver? What I want to do is I want to help you get into the top 10th percentile of problem solvers so you can differentiate yourself in your company, on your team, with whoever you're working with. So we want to get you in that top 10th percentile so you can actually come up with new ideas. And that's going to make your life better, it's going to make your career better. But you're going to have to ask yourself a few things, right? You're going to ask, you have to ask yourself, where is it you want to be? What is it you want to do? And so if you think about where you are right now and you think about your goals, a lot of times our goals are short term, right? That is not good enough. What we have to do is we have to get aspirational in order to make a change like this, in order to change how you think and how you start to practice, you have to think about where you want to be. And aspirational is thinking out three years, it is thinking about five years. And what is it you want to do for your life, for your family, for your career. Think about what things you're tolerating now in your career, in life that you shouldn't be tolerating? What are you putting up with that you're just kind of going along from day to day? How exciting is that for you? Not very exciting. Right? So you've got to think about something that really motivates you and you've got to visualize where you want to be. This one executive talked about this a couple of years ago to me. He said you got to go out into the meadow of the future about where you want to be. And then you have to turn around, you have to look back and you have to go, how did I get there? Right. And so you got to think about what is it that motivates you and when is that going to happen. So two things. What's the big thing that you're really, really interested in doing? And when, when you put that big goal, that big audacious aspiration together with time, you create this thing called trajectory. And trajectory is basically that path that you're going to use to get there. Right. And how are you going to get there? By thinking creatively about your process for going there. Right. And this last point I want to make is that your goal, the way to test your goal is you have to have a little bit of fear and a little bit of healthy frustration about where you want to go. Because if you go, yeah, that's easy, I can get there. Or it's something that seems achievable, it's not big enough. You have to do something that scares you and you have to feel this healthy frustration every day, every week about, I'm not getting there, how am I going to get there faster? Right? So first thing you got to do, get your aspiration right. Get your head right around where you want to go in terms of your big goals, because that is what is going to start to take you there. Ok? So you have got a lot of thinking to do there. I will let you guys go offline later and do some of that thinking yourself. So I want to give you a few tools here. I want to give you three methods to, to differentiate your thinking, okay? And these are going to be logic based and these are kind of fun, actually. And you'll start to be able to practice these. But it's all got to start with a problem. And I want to share a problem with you. I have a daughter, Isabel, she's in college in North Carolina. I won't Tell you what, college. So you don't have any biases, but she's not the problem. It's a problem that she ran into. I got a call from her a couple years ago, and she sounded kind of stressed out. She was on the side of the road, and I could hear a lot of traffic in the background. And she said, dad, dad, I'm having a problem. Like, what's the matter? She goes, well, my car, my Jeep had just stopped on the side of I40. And I'm like, really? What happened? She goes, well, it just stopped and I had to pull over. I barely got it off to the side of the road, and I don't know what to do. And I'm like, okay, well, just get clear of traffic and. And hold on, let me think about what to do. And she goes, well, you know, my boyfriend's here as well. And I'm like, oh, that guy? And she said, yeah, he's starting to cry a little bit. He's really nervous. And I'm like, you know, I knew this wasn't the right guy in the first place. Okay, get off of that topic. Okay, so what's going on with the car? So I call AAA and I go into boy Scout mode, and they tow the car and they bring it off to the shop. And so then I talked to the shop a little while later, and they call me and I said, so, what's the prognosis? And they said, well, sir, you know, your daughter hasn't put oil in the engine in some time. You know, that's strange. They say, yeah, the engine, it froze up. What do you mean it froze up? Well, it just stopped running. The engine just froze up. And I'm like, okay, that sounds kind of strange. I thought, I know we put oil in it back in Atlanta. We had an oil change. And I said, okay, well, what do we need to do to fix it? And they go, well, no, you don't understand. You can't fix. It's like a geological formation. It's solid, right? It's a block. You're going to have to actually replace the engine. Replace the engine. I was just on the phone with her a few minutes ago, and the car just pulled to the side of the road. Now I have to replace an engine. And they said, well, yeah, we're sorry. I said, well, okay. Well, what's that going to cost? It's going to cost about $5,000. $5,000. That's a lot of money. So all of a sudden, I go into dad mode, into freak mode. And I go on the Internet and I start looking for places to get engines. And I said, I need to do some research. And they said, well, that's fine, you can leave the car here, but if you leave it on the lot more than two days, you're going to have to start charging you $50 a day. And I'm like, okay, so the clock is ticking. So I'm making calls and talking to one mechanic, talking to another, and sure enough, it's 5,000, $6,000. You might get a little cheaper if you can get a reconditioned engine. And I found this one option where you can buy an engine and you have it delivered to any shop of your choice and they'll put it in. I'm thinking, okay, well, that's going to work well when the engine doesn't fit the car. And then I'm between this Internet engine and the repair shop, so I'm about the end of my rope. And then I make this call to this one place that had a bunch of reviews. And this guy answers the phone and I told him what I needed. And he goes, mark, Mark. And I hear this New York voice on the other side of the phone in Raleigh, North Carolina. He goes, tell me the story of the car. Tell you the story? Yeah, tell me the story. When did you buy it? How do you like it? How's it operated for you? And I'm like this, what do you mean, the story? When did you buy? And I'm like, well, I bought it at the Jeep dealer and I really didn't want to buy it. And the mechanic, Jimmy says to me, well, so why did you buy it? I said, well, I went in and I looked at it. My daughter and my wife were there. They wanted me to see the car. And then the car dealer wanted too much for the car, of course. So I did this thing, Jimmy, where I just walked out. I said, it's too high. And I left and I walked out to get a better price. And then my daughter started crying, and then I had to come back in. I had to buy it. And he goes, yeah, daughters, daughters, they do it to you every time. And I go, yeah, well, so I bought the car. It's been a decent car. Any accidents, any incidents? And I'm like, well, yeah, she did have kind of a bumper rear end collision where a fender bender at an intersection. She was looking at something else and she ran into a back of a car. It wasn't real serious. Oh, any body work? And I'm like, well, yeah, she did A little work on. Done it. Any engine work. And I'm like, well, yeah, we did have some engine. And he's oohing and ahhing for a couple of minutes. And he goes, look, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. You bring it in, I'm going to take a look at it. At that point, I'm half sold. So I bring the car in. And so the next day I'm in the office and it's quiet. It's early morning. And the phone rings. And on the other end of the phone, I hear mark. Mark, you're sitting down. I'm like, oh, hey, Jimmy, how you doing? You sitting down, Mark? I'm like, yeah, I'm sitting down. Jimmy, you're not going to believe what we found. We opened up an engine, the engine. We found a rag in the oil pan. I'm like, a rag in the oil pan. He goes, yeah, the boys are laughing so hard. They're rolling all over the floor. They can't even get off the floor, they're laughing so hard. And I'm like, okay, this doesn't sound right. And he goes, look, I tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to pull it off to the side of the shop and I'm going to put a shroud over it until the investigation is over. I'm like, investigation? What is this, some kind of setup? And he goes, no, he said, I think I got something that happened here. And so he calls the insurance claims adjuster, of course, who he knew for shop owner's insurance. And they come in and what they determined was that when the engine work was done in the prior accident, they had actually left the rag in the oil pan, and that's what soaked up all the oil in the engine. It wasn't that we hadn't changed the oil. So what we found out was, was that it actually wasn't the problem that they initially thought it was. And so in the end, we ended up getting a free engine and Jimmy got another great review. So what did Jimmy do there? What Jimmy did is he understood the story. He asked questions. He asked about what happened, how and when it happened, who it happened to, where it was, why it happened, and he diagnosed what had happened as he was going along. Here's a mechanic in Raleigh, North Carolina, and he's using a creative solution development technique, which I found quite fascinating. So what you have to do as a first step is you have to understand the story. And I'm going to go into this first tool here, which is redefining your challenge question. We've got a little process here that you can see. It's called sales design thinking, and it basically is how to do design thinking. We if you look up design thinking on the Internet, you see all this information, and the problem with it is there's all sorts of methods and nobody really knows what to do. So we put together a very practical process that you can use with your organization. And it starts out with understanding the problem statement, which everybody has a problem statement. But then you don't just start with your problem statement and try to solve that problem statement. What you want to do is you want to redefine the challenge. Because the problem with the problem statement is this like, kind of like this inanimate object, kind of like that engine, right? It just sits there and it doesn't inspire thinking. Although a challenge question inspires thinking, a question by its nature is more provocative than just a statement. So you want to redefine your challenge question. So I'm going to use that as a first step to share with you here, and I'm going to give you an example of how you can do that. Okay, so here's a car, a company, speaking of cars, this is a company in the automotive electronics industry. And this is a conversation we had a little while ago. And I want to share this conversation with you because I think it was a good example of how you redefine the challenge and how it's not that complicated. So they called us and they said, look, we've got an organization, a professional services team, and we've got our core organization, our core sales organization. We've got a professional services team. And what they sell is they sell a set of services that increase the stickiness of what we offer to our car manufacturers and the companies that buy the antennas and the electronics that we make. And it's a very valuable service because it increases our customer retention, it helps us to increase customer penetration. But the problem is the performance of the sales team is lagging in terms of selling these professional services. And you can see the attainment of quota here. Okay, so let me ask you a quick question. In a best practice situation, what percentage of the organization should be at or above quota? Listening for your answers, right, 50 to 70% should be at or above quota. What you see here is only about 20% at or above quota. This constitutes a problem, right? And you see some other problems here, like the huge spike of people between 90 and 100%, like they just couldn't get to 100%. Well, there's probably some other reason behind that. So what happened? Well, they said we need to spiff the primary sales team to create leads. Professional services, because that's where professional services gets all its leads from the primary sales team. And that's what they wanted to do. They said, well, maybe what we can do is we can pay each person in the core sales organization $500, spiff them for each lead, whether or not it closes. And that's going to be our solution. We just need to know if that makes sense. And they were ready to do this. Well, that wasn't solving the problem. That was taking the problem statement and just jumping to an answer. So let's talk about what we did. What we did is we took a cue from Jimmy, right. And we started to understand the story. So we asked these questions about what the situation was, what the story was, and what I'm going to share with you. This was in our first meeting that we asked these questions. Ok, so what, how and when? Who, where and why? Well, what professional services, like I said, they create stickiness and expansion for the core products. And it's sold by the primary sales team. Right, the core products. So primary sales team is basically generating leads for professional services. But too many of the professional services reps were below quota. We knew that. Okay, so they wanted to spiff them. The company itself had a history. They started with core electronics, they acquired this company that had the professional services. But the core sales organization was slow to adopt these services and that led to lagging performance. Who? Well, there were some who brought professional services in on leads and they dramatically expanded their customer business. So they were calling them the converts. These were the believers. These are the people that knew that it actually worked. And then there were some people in the core sales organization that tried to sell it themselves. And the problem was they couldn't quite pull it off because it was too technical or they held off because they thought, well, it's going to delay my sales process, so I'm going to. I'm going to wait till later. And they wouldn't sell it. Well, where was it happening? Well, it was the primary sales organization who weren't believers. And the message wasn't getting across to the entire team. So they had a lot of turnover in the sales organization. So the message wasn't getting across. And so anything that they said in terms of why this was good to sell professional services didn't stick. Why? Well, the primary sales organization thought it created risks in the deals. It slowed things down. Primary sales Organization. They were also measured on short term metrics like how many closes they were getting a week in a month. Right. So that didn't fit well with professional services. But the professional services team could prove that it actually accelerated expanding their deals. Right, Accelerated closing, expanding their deals. This was one conversation that we got this information, right? So then we turned it around and we said, okay, there's all that pain and suffering, there's all that bad stuff that's happening to you. Talk about a solution vision. What would great look like? Well, they said, well, we'd raise quota performance. We'd increase lead generation revenue per customer. How annoying would it happen? Well, we'd have to communicate the upside to the core team and it would happen immediately. Who would it happen with? Well, the primary sales organization and the roles that both of those organizations should play. Those need to be defined because the problem is primary sales organization is trying to close these things and they can't do it. And so they don't know their role in the sales process. And there are a bunch of benefits, but it would be generating greater rewards for the professional services leads to the primary sales organization. So there are a number of things, number of good things that would happen in terms of a solution. So we took just those points in red and we plucked them out from what we call the solution vision, which I just showed you and we redefined the challenge question. It came down to three things that I want to point out to you. Okay? Now keep in mind, they thought it was about a spiff. $500 per lead. Here's our redefined challenge question. How can we develop a solution that communicates the benefits of generating professional services opportunities? So it communicates the benefits. It defines the roles and rules of engagement for primary and P.S. okay, so defining roles. It rewards the primary sales reps for generating professional services leads. And of course it drives increased predictable growth for the company. Okay, the three things were we're going to communicate the benefits of why you want to do this. We have to define the roles and we have to define the rules of engagement and then we can do something to reward that whole strategy. So it wasn't just about a spiff. It was about figuring out how you're going to get a communications management message across, how you're going to define roles and how to spiff. Just spiffing alone wouldn't do anything because those other things weren't aligned. At the end of the conversation they said, oh, we never thought about it that way. This is a method that you can use in a Simple conversation. And of course, you can back it up with some analytics, back it up with some fact finding, but it can change how people think about solving a particular problem. Okay, so that's number one. How do you redefine the challenge question? Very, very powerful practice that. So we're showing you some steps here, but it's not that complicated. It's basically understanding the story and redefining how you're approaching it. All right, let's look at my second one here. Thinking horizontally, we're going to take that same one. Thinking horizontally is simply divergent thinking. So how do you come up with more than one idea? Like, well, we should spiff the sales organization, or maybe we should define what kind of sales process we need. What you need to do is become an abundant idea generator. And the way you become an abundant idea generator is by doing horizontal thinking. This is a diagram I use a lot with our clients. But it's a very basic idea, which is before you start to do your vertical thinking. Vertical thinking, meaning developing the solution. Like, you pick that one idea and you develop it and you roll it out. You have to do the horizontal thinking. Right. So you've got to figure out what it is I have for a range of options. And they might be from more radical to more conservative. But then once you put them together, you're going to find that you can combine things together. I want to show you one simple technique here. So obviously you can get a room and brainstorm and say, what are the different ideas? What you can also do is you can take your redefined challenge question like I just showed you, and you could start picking pieces of that challenge question out. So here's our challenge question. I picked one piece out, which is communicating the benefits. Okay, so I'm going to take the word communicate, and I'm going to think about what does communicate mean? So let's take a look at that. What is communicating? And this is the way I like to brainstorm on problem solving in a creative way is I like to do focused brainstorming. So take the word communicating. What is communicating? What do you think of with communication? You think of audience, you think of message, you think of positioning something. Trust. You've got to believe in what somebody's telling you the truth. There's got to be maybe some proof. There's got to be clarity of message, perhaps voices that we know so people that we trust. Again, vehicles or modes of communication. So do we do it via verbal? Do we do it via written? Is it something that's social media? Frequency. How often do we do it? What kind of feedback loop do we have? How do we reinforce? What's the schedule? Meaning how do we do it over time? What's the pattern? There are many, many permutations. So if I take this one idea of communication, I can come up with a whole range of possibilities for how I might want to communicate. Part one of that problem. Right. I could take an idea like a campaign and I could say, well, I actually need a campaign to communicate to the primary sales organization the benefits of selling professional services. How would I develop a campaign? Well, I've got audiences, the primary sales organization. But it's not just the primary sales organization. I might have people who are tenured, people who are new. Right. So different audiences. I have a message that I want to get through to them. Selling professional services actually is beneficial. Right. It can accelerate your sales process. It can help you grow your accounts. Well, I can't just say it, I have to prove it. So what are my proof sources? Well, in these situations, we'll give you a bunch of proof sources. Okay. What's my method for getting the message out? Well, as the head of sales, I could say that once, or maybe I have some video material that I share with people. Maybe I do something via web. Maybe I do something one on one. Maybe I have some calculators that help them understand that. Right. So the different vehicles, you could use frequency or calendar. Well, I'm not going to do it one time because they'll forget. Maybe I need to have some kind of frequency of occurrence for this to happen. Okay. All of a sudden I took that one idea of communication and I've got an abundance of ideas that came after that. You see how that worked? Okay, Again, logic based, science based way to create ideas. So we redefined the challenge question. We start taking nodes of that challenge question and expanding that out. All right, and then I want to take the last one here of my three favorites here. And this is telling your story to make change. We have a whole session on storytelling that you can look at separately. But what I want to do is I want to hit a couple highlights on storytelling. And what's so good about storytelling? Well, you can get your idea across to the audience and you can get action. It's really important because if you just have ideas and you don't get action, it doesn't do anybody a lot of good. What's important about stories? Well, number one, they leverage our primal wiring. Right? We've been telling stories for 50,000 years. Depending on your worldview, Right. We've been telling stories before there was writing. We've been telling stories before there was analytics. That's how we passed information down. We learned through stories. So we probably learned about what to do and what not to do. When you were a kid through stories, right? Maybe you learned in your job what to do and what not to do through stories. Like, you know, Jerry, he got a little bull with the CEO and he said some things that he wasn't happy with. And where's Jerry now? He's not here anymore. Stories, right? So we learn a lot of things through stories. We engage with stories because when I tell stories, I engage people. I told you about my daughter Isabel in her car, right? You probably started to think about a similar type of situation because we're drawing on that primal wiring. You were engaged. You wanted to hear what happened. How did Jimmy solve the problem? And then you can motivate action. And one thing you have to do with your story, with your problem solving, is figure out what it is you want your audience to do. Do you want them to take some action? Do you want them to do something? Do you just want to build credibility? So there are all sorts of formulas for storytelling. One thing I think is that they're way too complicated. I don't need it all. What I want to do is I want to get down a couple of basic pieces, and I want to show you an example here. So some of the basics are there is a setting. So think about our automotive electronics manufacturer. The setting. Everything was going fine. The organization was selling the products, the electronic products. Well, we acquired this new organization that did professional services. Oh, they were good guys until something happened. That's the problem, right? Something happened is the results started to decline that people weren't selling the professional services, they weren't expanding out the accounts, right? So there was trouble in paradise. So two important pieces that you have to have, the setting and then that big event that happened, right? So your analytics, your problem solving is going to draw that out. Your problem is going to be referenced by your challenge question. So it starts to come together in the middle. You're going to need this person or this thing called a character, right? And a character could be. It could be you. It could be the sales organization. It could be a typical type of person in the sales organization who maybe is a new person that comes on that can't succeed for certain reasons. It could be a customer. It could be the executive team. But the common thing the character has to have, though, is we've got to care about the character. If we don't care what happens to the character, that doesn't matter. So you've got to find out who the character is and why you care about that person. Okay. And then building on that, you run into the problem. So we're not selling enough. You have this thing called rising action that leads to the climax. Okay. The climax is basically what's the ultimate result if we don't fix the problem? Well, we're going to become less competitive. We're going to start to have a problem with the business. Right. The climax has to motivate action. And there are only two big motivators of action. We go into this deeper in storytelling. The combination of pain, pleasure and timing. Right. So pleasure meaning, well, we're going to have a great organization or pain, we're going to go out of business or I'm not going to get a paycheck next year. Timing short term, long term, okay. You might think that gaining pleasure long term, like we're working toward the aspiration of becoming a best in class organization that will motivate people. Well, it doesn't. Avoidance of short term pain is the biggest motivator. So if you said, look, our competition is catching up on us and if we don't figure out this professional services thing real quick, going to be out of business next year. That's a big motivator. Okay. And then you've got resolution. Resolution is your creative solution. It's what you came up with. Okay. So the story can be very powerful. I'm going to take one quick example and show you. This is a survey that Sales Globe we did with World at Work. And we had 380 companies, we had 1400 employees and was about back to work. What's it going to be like going back to work? And I want to set up the story here because we had like 200 pages of data and information. And we said, well, what are we going to do with this? And somebody on the team said, well, you know, we've got an executive summary. And I'm like, well, does anybody remember the last executive summary you read? No. You don't remember anything about it? We need a story. So we started to go through and we found the storylines within all this data. 60% of people at this point, this is Q1 of 21, 60% of people were working remotely. 76% of people said they wanted to continue working, working remotely. Oh, that's nice. Okay, so we're going to keep working at home. Okay. So it's the setting. Everything's fine, everything's happy. We asked the same question of employers. Companies anticipated only 34% of people will continue working remotely. All of a sudden you see the flash, the problem. There's a big difference between 76% and 34%. There's going to be some reconciliation here. Right. And we have to be able to see this ahead of time. So we see an impending problem. Furthermore, about a third of the people said, well, if I can't work at home, I'm going to find another job. Okay? They said a little bit more than that, but that was the basic idea. So there's retention risk. Right? So now we're starting to build toward a climax. Company said, yes, we're doing all these things, we're making the remote work environment better and we're doing all this collaboration stuff in this connection stuff. But there's a future innovation deficit because they're not doing enough to help people to work together collaboratively and creatively in remote or semi remote or hybrid type of environments. So it's working toward a climax that you see here. So you've got people who will potentially quit. You see organizations that really aren't preparing for collaborative work, for creative work. Right. They're saying, oh, we're getting better productivity. Yeah, in the short run, but we're going to have a climax here at some point soon. Okay? So we're seeing this and what we see now as the resolution, the future of sales and the future of work is going to go to the data driven creative problem solvers. It's going to go to the organizations, it's going to go to the people that know how to become problem solvers in the new environment, in the new world. So what's your back to work plan for customer innovation and employee retention? Okay, so if we're just looking at what's going on right now, it all feels good, the setting feels fine. But what's really scary is what we see coming. And this applies to sales organizations, it applies to any type of organization in the company that we're going to have a climax point where we're going to start to see retention risk and the war for talent we know is on. And we're going to start to see a breakdown in connection, a breakdown in idea generation and a breakdown in connectivity. Okay, so there's a big story. So you see the story there. Let me put the storyline back on it here. So you can see we started off with the setting and the characters, which are the employees. And when we see the problem, then it goes to the rising action, the climax. And this is tracing along on the background that you can see here the potential turnover, the collaboration deficit, the innovation deficit, and then the resolution, a back to work plan of employee value proposition. Collaboration solutions being an intentional and action oriented. One of the big complaints we hear from a lot of companies right now is the C level is not clear enough and not intentional enough about what they want to do and what their plan is. One CEO we heard recently said, well, some of the people will be back some of the time and this is a Fortune 100 company. And people said, what? What does that mean? Okay, so what we're working on right now is this resolution of what's the back back to work plan? And how do we get organizations in shape to continue to become or to be creative and be great problem solvers? Okay, I want to give you a few principles to think about and think with as we head forth here. And so you saw three methods, right? Those were three techniques. Principles are how you think. Okay? So the methods are what you do, the principles are, are how you think or the practices that you use. Okay, Here are five of my favorites. Okay. I love these. You're going to love them too. Okay, Number one, protect time to think. Protect time to think means I didn't say protect time to work, protect time to do conference calls. I said protect time to think. What you need to do is you need to find your right place. And it could be at your local coffee shop or somewhere outside of the office. We don't have enough showers, but it could be in the shower. You could think of the shower, right? But you got to schedule and protect time to think. You cannot violate that time. That's number one. Number two, look at barriers as creative enablers. One thing you're going to run into when you start doing some of these things and these techniques don't have to be overt. Remember that show for people that are my age? Remember Columbo? And Columbo would just ask these questions, right? You don't have to be doing some creative technique with your team. Just ask the questions, right? But you're going to run into barriers. People are going to go, well, why are we talking like this? What are we doing this for? Can't we just get to the answer? Those are barriers. Those barriers actually are enablers. They're going to help you to become better at doing this. They're going to help you to come to get to better solutions. Some of the best ideas I've ever come up with, people said, why are you Doing that, it's not normal. It's not what we typically do. It's not what we've done in the past. That's the idea. Number three, walk away from the problem. We already talked about that. Go do something else. Go think somewhere else, because that's when the mind really works. Number four, I learned this from an art school professor years ago, and I love this. We saw this art show, and then I was commenting to him after this art show at the cocktail session about the art, and he said, mark, sometimes people just need to get comfortable being lost. And I thought he was talking about my comments. And I'm like, oh, man, I really blew it. No, what he was saying is that in problem solving, you. You're going to hit a point where you feel like you're lost. You're not quite sure what you're doing. That is an indicator that you're heading in a good direction because you're going to be moving somewhere that's going to be new for you. And on the other side of lost, remember this, on the other side of lost are your ideas or your solutions. So the reason people don't come up with new ideas is as soon as they hit that loss point, they're outside of their point of expertise, they back off and they go back. You want to keep going forward. So get comfortable being lost and engage the outsider. Let me take a second on this one. The outsider. The outsider is that person that's not part of your immediate team that you're working on this problem. Right. The outsider is your boss, or it could be somebody that you know in the office or maybe a friend that understands what you're working on. They're not deeply involved in the problem, but they know about what you're trying to do. And so the benefit of the outsider is you ask them to take a look at what you're doing, and because they understand the general situation, they can ask you questions that you've become too deeply involved to be able to see yourself. Because when you get involved in a creative endeavor, you necessarily become so deep that you lose perspective. Right? So the outsider becomes very valuable. Even though you don't want that person in there, that person can help you to shake your thinking up. Okay, so five good principles to think with. So here's your map. We know the challenge, the goal. We're going to make you in the top 10 percentile, and we gave you three methods. There are a bunch more methods, but we gave you three, and we gave you a few principles to think with. Okay? So you can start on this and go out and give it a little bit of practice. But remember this, when you do it, it's a lot like learning a golf swing. So when I learned a golf swing back when I was 10 years old, and by the way, I played golf, you wouldn't know that, but they told me. They said, keep your head down. Oh, yeah, the grip. The grip is the most important. So the grip is the most important. Interlocking or overlapping. And then you got to keep your left shoulder up, proper stance, and then keep your head down and make sure you swing the ball. When you come back, make sure you're getting enough rotation. Then come through, follow through all the way. And then when you get up to the tee, on the first tee and everybody's watching, what are you thinking? Don't screw it up. Just don't shank it into the woods. Right? So I'm thinking about maybe one or two things like keep my head down and make sure I see the ball when I hit it. I can't think about all these things. When you're doing problem solving, don't get caught up in the mechanics. Think about the principles, think about the general process and use it to be able to creatively solve problems. You're going to have to practice these things to make them natural. Okay? So feel free to reach out to us. You can go to salesglobe.com, here's our main number here. You can reach us here as well. We do lots of work in workshops, problem solving, organization, design, compensation, all these different areas. We've got some resources available as well out on the website in terms of videos and of course, our Rethink Sales podcast. So really glad you're able to join us today and happy creating and let us know how you're doing. Thanks.