This is an excerpt of the new book “Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative to Ignite Change” published in September 2018 by my dear friend Dr. Ed Brenegar.

Why Personal Initiative Matters

To make a difference that matters does not have to be a big project or the creation of a business. All that is required is for a person to act upon the values that are important to them.

It can be a simple comment while standing on a street corner. It can be an act of kindness, an expression of gratitude, or a display of courage. It can be a word of honesty in a meeting or an act of sacrifice to help a friend in need.

It just has to be an act of personal initiative that creates a beneficial change.

Leadership begins with personal initiative because, increasingly, companies depend upon their people taking steps to do the right thing in the moment of need.

In the past, when we defined leadership as a title or a role, we were saying that organizational structure was the defining characteristic of leadership. The result was that anyone below the level of CEO could essentially say, “That’s not my job!” and pass it up to their supervisor or manager.

Small problems became large issues because initiative was squeezed out of the system. Maintaining order and integrity in the system of operation became the purpose of the company. The result was the spread of organizational silos that compartmentalized the legacy structures of the past.

The speed of change that impacts us today requires organizations to be agile and adaptive in responding to changing circumstances. It isn’t just that organizations need leaders who are equipped to take personal action within the parameters of the values and purpose of the organization. We need it through all kinds of institutional settings in society.

Everyone - regardless of who they are, where they are from, or what their educational and occupational credentials – needs to be practicing leadership initiative.

When leadership is understood as a function of human initiative, then the motivation to take initiative is a personal one. The supervision of employees cannot simply be based upon an employment contract. Rather, the leadership initiative of employees needs to be encouraged as essential to the health and vitality of the company.

To say that we want people to take personal initiative is not to say that any initiative is okay. Rather, we need people to operate within a culture of shared values that guide the company and therefore guide the decisions and actions of every individual.

Simply advocating for great employees to have greater responsibility will not work without an alignment of the three dimensions of Ideas, Relationships and Organizational Structure. I call these three aspects the Three Dimensions of Leadership.

Personal initiative becomes leadership impact when our actions influence others to act with us in a shared, coordinated fashion.

This is the key to understanding leadership in the 21st century. It is both personal and social.

Our potential is not a defined amount of good that we can produce in our jobs or lives. There is no box out of which we draw our defined amount of life potential. Rather, potential is the opportunity that comes from an environment of openness to create impact, which is released through personal initiative.

Many of us seek to live quiet, respectable lives of meaning and service to people and places we care about. Too often, we find that we are bound by the obstacles that society and organizational structure place before us that keep us from realizing our potential. Most of us never even think that we have potential.

Do you want to know your potential?

State what you care about, and how things would be different if you could give your whole self to its betterment. Remove the obstacles and watch what happens.

These obstacles to fulfilling our potential occur because we allow ourselves to be defined by social and organizational situations that have no clear purpose or outlet for creating impact.

Down deep within us are desires that constantly suggest to us that we are made for more than what we are doing. People join projects of participatory philanthropy, like breast cancer walks, or work at a soup kitchen for the poor and homeless, because they desire to live lives that matter beyond the mundane exercise of their daily duties.

They spend their days sitting in offices looking forward to taking personal initiative outside of work. As a result, the potential for people to make a difference that matters at work is not even considered.

The path from personal initiative to leadership impact is achieved by removing obstacles of the mind, body, and spirit where our desires find their expression. Obstacles of small ambition. Obstacles of poor discipline in how we live. Obstacles of relationships that we allow to hold us back from believing that if we give ourselves to some desire to make a difference, then we can achieve our goal. These are personal obstacles that we can change.

There are also the organizational obstacles of structure and institutional purpose, which treat people as cogs in a production machine. As long as a company functions this way, the people with a desire to make a difference that matters will decide to go someplace else.

Retention of good people is achieved by creating a culture of values that support personal initiative. Our desire to make a difference that matters erupts from time to time in a moment of opportunity.

These feelings are a signal to us about our potential legacy. Think of your life as a story that will be told by the generations that follow you.

Your story is not about the results, but about the character of your life.

At this point, all this may sound absurd. If it does, you have then identified one of the obstacles that stands in the way of reaching your life’s potential.

There is no limit to our potential. But it does not mean that we can just go do anything. It means that our potential for impact is greater than our imagination can visualize.

It is true today. It will be true on the last day of our time on this earth.

 

• Check it out now: Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative to Ignite Change (↑)

About Circle of Impact

All leadership begins with personal initiative that creates impact that makes a difference that matters.

In Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative to Ignite Change, Dr. Ed Brenegar offers a new perspective on leadership and a model for tapping unrealized potential in people through leadership initiative. Rather than job titles or appointed roles, he focuses on the impact individuals can make in their lives, workplaces and communities to create a better world.

In Circle of Impact, readers will learn:

• The Circle of Impact model of leadership, as well as explores personal and organizational leadership.
  
  
• A perspective on change that brings insight into not only why things are as they are in the world, but also how we can deal with change both personally and organizationally.
  
  
• How the components of the Circle of Impact model can bring wholeness and order to organizations, aligning the whole of our organizations for impact and creating the conditions for fostering a high-trust, agile culture.
  
  
• How the Circle of Impact applies to organizations amid a global transition.

About the Author

A leader for leaders, Dr. Ed Brenegar (↑) is a speaker, author, consultant, and a recognized authority on leadership and transformation. This post is an excerpt from his newly released book “Circle of Impact: Taking Personal Initiative to Ignite Change.” For more information on the book, purchase a copy and read some of the endorsements, visit his website.



Enjoy the book.


Yours

John

Many people know about SMS advertisement today however far from every businessperson understands its great importance. This is important enough and very effective way to attract clients, which is significant for the development of every business company. This sales pitch allows to legally and with little effort to expand consumer audience of your goods or services to unusual limits.

Mass texting of advertisement gives an opportunity to achieve more profit at fewer expenses. It is an excellent way to show your regular clients how much you care, keep their interest. Such services as informing about new goods, actions and discounts, greetings with official and personal holidays through messages will help you make partner relations stronger. A special “planner” service may be enabled. With its help, messages are going to be sent on a certain day, for example, on birthday or Women`s Day.

Recipients will know whom they got a message from due to user contact information and name of the organization. At that personal information about your clients are guaranteed to stay within the company. It means that there is no chance they could possibly be found and used by competitors.

Advantage of the Service

SMS of advertising nature is in demand and comfortable. It is due to notable advantages this kind of services has:

• the service is legal and valid;
• at fewer financial placements advertisement through SMS gives a big percent of effectiveness, which means it to be profitable economically;
• provides with the vast reach of the targeted audience of realization of goods and services;
• gives an opportunity to send SMS to numbers, chosen on certain criteria;
• is not considered as spam because rendered to those recipients only who subscribed to this.

Tariffs for connection of this kind of services is attractive enough. There is a possibility of ordering at factory prices when the number of messages is all-inclusive. At that, delivered only are going to be charged.

Big Opportunities

Along with SMS advertisement, when the agreement on this kind of service is signed, messages can be sent to absolutely certain numbers a list of which a customer provides with. Apart from that, if a customer wishes, a new base of telephone customers for mailout can be created. One should indicate the necessary parameters of the targeted audience.

Mailout of SMS advertisement a customer`s company may be performed independently – by the employees themselves. There is no charge for that being done by the company. A special program is responsible for it through the Internet.

There are no worries that messages with SMS advertisement will be filed as a history. Each of them can be followed to know whether it was delivered to a recipient. Date and time of dispatch and receipt are saved automatically – they are available for viewing anytime. And even if the delivery is going to be put off, a message will be repeating until it is delivered.


About the author: Melisa Marzett feels joy writing, which is probably why what comes out is so easily read. Working for puressay.com (↑) at the time, she provides with wonderful pieces and it takes her little efforts as long as she has a talent.

 

HOW TO DEVELOP AN EFFECTIVE B2B SALES STRATEGY FOR TODAY'S DIGITAL WORLD

For today's sales force, B2B buyers are increasingly difficult to reach and engage, and cold calling response rates decrease every year. In fact, a 2011 study from the Kelly Research Center states that only 1% of cold calls ultimately convert into appointments.

Cold calling is no longer an effective method to reach B2B executives today, but it is still all too common. Why?

Because many sales organizations are stuck practicing the "proven" methodologies of the past instead of developing a sales strategy for today's digital world.

COLD CALLS IN THE AGE OF THE CUSTOMER

Many sales best practices still taught today are a part of The Solution Selling® methodology, which focuses on determining customer pains and needs to collaboratively build a solution to address them. While this proven methodology has brought companies tremendous success since it was founded in 1988, there are several components that aren't as effective in today's customer-centric digital marketplace.

According to Solution Selling®, a discovery call, or cold call, should be your first touchpoint with a prospect, but in today's digital world your customer has already completed 57% of the buyer journey before reaching out to sales.

Prospects no longer need a sales rep to educate them on your solution. They can instead perform a quick Google search, and check out your competition in the process.

B2B SALES STRATEGIES THAT DELIVER RESULTS

To succeed in today's B2B sales environment, sales strategy needs to go beyond solution selling and truly demonstrate unique value. It's critical that sales reps show the customer that they can teach them something new about how to address the challenges they are facing.


Focus on Marketing and Sales Alignment:

Since prospects are going online to do research before engaging with sales, developing a sales strategy that focuses on marketing and sales alignment is now more important than ever before. To improve your chances of reaching B2B executives today, sales and marketing must be tightly aligned on:

• Messaging - During the awareness phase, sales messaging needs to closely reflect the marketing messaging the prospect has already seen or read online.
  
  
• Timing - Just because a prospect has clicked a link in an email does not mean that they are ready for a sales cold call. It typically takes somewhere between 7-13+ touchpoints (↑) before a lead is sales ready. Your sales and marketing teams need to partner together to determine what those touchpoints are and decide what actions qualify your prospect as sales ready.
  
  
• Expectations - What does sales follow-up look like? Is it an email, a LinkedIn message, or a cold call? And when does the sales follow-up need to happen? As soon as a prospect is marked as a marketing qualified lead or within 48 hours? A service level agreement (SLA) (↑) is a great way to set and manage expectations between marketing and sales, and ensure that both teams are working toward the same goal.

Define “What's in It for Them”
B2B buyers have more information, choices and power than ever before. Prospects don't have time to take a cold call and talk about their pain points. They already know what their pain points are. They want to know:

• “What's in it for them?”


• “Why should they pay attention?”


• “Why does your product or solution matter to them?”


• “How can your product or solution help them do their job better?”


• “How is your product or service different than your competitors?”


• “How can your solution impact their bottom line?”

By developing a sales strategy that addresses the value that you can bring to the prospect upfront, you increase your chances of engagement.

To learn more about how to develop an effective B2B sales strategy that will help you improve engagement, drive new business opportunities, and increase revenue, check out our e-Book: Bridge The Gap Between Sales & Marketing to Increase Revenue (↑)


Article Source: EzineArticles.com (↑)
Written by Eric Dudley

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Image Credit: TheDigitalArtist (↑)