AmyK Hutchens - What One Question Should Your Entire Organization Be Able To Answer?

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Welcome to the Exit Coach radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for. Their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And don't miss our one minute exit coach tip of the day on exitcoachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach, Bill Black. Welcome everyone. Thanks for listening today. We have a great lineup here today, and my next guest, uh, let me ask you a question before we get into that. How would you rank yourself as a leader? Are you, are you a good leader? Are you a great leader, or are you a brilliant leader? Well, our next guest is going to talk about igniting brilliance in your leadership, and her name is Amy Kay Hutchins. She's with Amy Kay International Inc. from San Diego, California, and they specialize in teaching critical thinking for better performance, productivity, and profitability. And they work with executives around the globe globe, and fundamental questions Amy Kaye often asks her what would be your ROI if everyone in your organization was thinking just a little bit better tomorrow. So Amy Kaye, welcome to the show and thanks for joining us. Well, hello, Bill. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Thanks very much. Uh, it's very interesting. Uh, we talk about leadership issues all the time and you know there's sometimes certain key questions can really make the difference. Uh, before we get into that, tell us a little bit about yourself and, and, uh, what you've done over the years and when you started Amy Kay International. Well, my motto, Bill is brilliant in business, happy in life, and that is our promise to our leaders around the globe. And so one of the things that I talk about is if we change our thinking, then we can change our behavior, and if we change our behavior then we change our results, and that was the added. Founded my company beginning in December of 2000 back in Atlanta. So after having spent years around the globe working as an executive in corporate, um, I came and started my own business, became that roller coaster entrepreneur, and here I am today with the fabulous client of Visits now going on almost 15 years. Well, we love Visage, and uh you know Visage, if you don't know listeners, it's, it's Visage International is the foremost group of business owners that get together with a Visage with a chairperson, and they have open forums and they have dedicated dedicated sessions with the. persons great group, Mr International, but, uh, Amy, Kay, when you, when you get involved with, when you started getting involved with business owners on this basis, what was missing? What did you see was where you said, Aha, here's something that where I can really add and shine here. We were missing what it meant behind the critical buzzwords. So when you hear things such as, you know, my management team needs to be more effective around alignment or I need greater communication or my sales team needs more sales or I need more ownership and accountability in culture or I need stronger strategic planning a lot. Times what I found is that the conversation was very shallow and everybody was nodding, but nobody really meant, well, how do you create momentum? How do you get alignment, you know, how do you get people to be more creative and more innovative? And so what I found was the gap that I wanted to close was what is our goal and how do we get there. OK, very good. So you, you found that people identified that yeah there were problems, but there weren't many people offering up solutions that made sense and and creating action out of those. So you know you say that there's one question that that everyone in the organization should be able to answer when you go into a company. What's that one question? How do we define our ideal client, and this can be a fundamental game changer. One of the things that I believe that leaders and even people inside a sales organization make a huge mistake is they focus on the chase or the hunt before they clearly define what it is that they're hunting. And so one of the things that I'll often point out is that, you know, some of us have worked really hard to win business and then 0 90 to 120 days after we've won it, we're really sorry that we did. And so one of the things that I believe is that we, you know, we say to our sales teams, go out and hunt the wooly mammoth, but we never define what the wooly mammoth looks like, sounds like, and feels like. So our wooly mammoth hunters and killers bring back the saber-toothed tiger and the saber-toothed tiger eats everybody in the cave. You know this tiger takes too much of our time, energy, and resources for too little ROI. So when leaders say, hey, how might we define an ideal client and everybody gets clear and knows exactly what the ideal is that we're chasing, then, well, you know what, we can then discern best behaviors for tracking and trapping it. And by no means Bill am I hinting that we don't do, you know, business with anything less than ideal. I'm just saying that it focuses and clarifies our behaviors. So starting with the end in mind and having that that clear visualization, is it, is it, uh, right down to the nitty gritty details is, I mean, how important is it to get very, very clear how many, how many characterizing factors go into this? I usually recommend 10. I say to a group of people, you know, find the 10 characteristics, and then instead of saying, oh, you know, who should we be going after, and you know, you go to your sales guy or your sales gal, and they'll say, oh, you know, February or March or April's coming up, this is gonna be my best month ever. I look at them and I say, why is it gonna be your best month? And they're like, oh, I got 9 rounds of golf and drinks and dinner on the calendar. I'm like, OK, wait, stop. What are you chasing? And then let's find out what those ideal characteristics are, and then I say now go rate your prospects. Go rate your existing customers. Now tell me, you know, XYZ company or Acme company gets a 7.5 based on those 10 characteristics. Well, what are you going to do to get them to an 8? What are you going to do to get them to an 8.5? This prospect that you're chasing only has 3 out of the 10. Is it even worth your time and talent to go after them? So you change the focus, you change the behaviors, you get more sales results. That's great. So, and I really like that to have a definitive number of characteristics to go after that gives people something they can really sink their teeth into. What are the three questions that everybody on the sales team should be able to answer about a customer? There are 3 questions that I believe every single person should be able to ask and answer about both prospects and existing clients, and that is what is this person resisting, what are they judging, and what are they attached to? And I'll give you the best way to really explain that is to give you a story. A few years ago I had a provocative conversation with a struggling business owner. He owned two consignment stores that carried slightly used clothing and household items. His first store was doing really, really well. He had over a million dollars in annual sales, but it was his second store that was fighting to survive. So first I asked him that who is your ideal customer question, and he replied, You know, a suburban middle class soccer mom who has been spending money in this tight economy, but she's looking for a deal. I said, Great. And then I asked them these three questions about the customers to better understand their thinking and their behaviors. So I asked them, what are your soccer moms resisting? What are they judging, and what are they attached to? On the what are they resisting question, he came back and he said, Well, they're resisting walking into my consignment store. It doesn't look like Nordstrom from the street. I said, OK, good. What are they judging? He said, Well, they're kind of judging the quality or lack thereof of my merchandise. They presume they will not find the brands that they prefer. And I said, OK, great. What are they attached to? There's a budget. At that time, still, the economy was a mess and people were in need of sales and deals, so he was right. They were still on a budget. But with this information we could play differently. So I asked him, Are you street front? Do you have a window that looks like Nordstrom? And he was like, What do you mean? And I was like, OK, I'm gonna take that as a no. So. and we placed mannequins in the window. They were judging the quality of his brand, so we put up signs noting the high-end labels that he was carrying, you know, the classic Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, and because they were attached to a budget, we put up signs that said 50 to 60% off designer brand. And then I just asked him, Do you have a lot of merchandise? And he was like, Yeah. And I said, you're gonna have it, half of it. Don't throw it away. Just put it in the back. So instead of walking in and seeing all these jammed racks, I walked in. It feels like a boutique. So now I'm starting to again appeal to my environment. And then last but not least, I asked him, Do you have any of those bright neon orange shoplifters will be prosecuted signs? And he was like, everywhere. I was like, take those down. One of the things that was great is that I stayed in touch with him, and 6 months later, not only had his traffic skyrocketed, but his sales had as well. And so I really do believe that when you sit down, whether as an individual leader or as a sales entity and you say, what are our customers going to resist, judge, and be attached to, you can change the way that you play and meet them where they're at. I love that. So instead of thinking of the store as he thought it should look and wondering why people didn't come in by clearly taking those steps, and it's hard to identify 10 traits of your customer, but by doing that exercise and then looking at it from their perspective with your 33 questions why what are they resisting? What are they judging and what are they attached to, he was able to then have empathy and redesign the whole thing so that That he was looking at it from this customer's perspective and I think that's so important these days. The great tips. It will, you know, one of the things that I think that happens is that we get too close to our own product or service and then we come by, we become myopic. And so by asking these questions, we shift our perspective. Mhm, yeah, yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's the process of evolution. It's sometimes a small change can make a big difference, but if you don't take the, the time to recognize when a small change is needed, then you're going to get what you've always got. So, you know, one of the things that that we hear from business owners a lot is, you know, I'm always stuck in meetings. I have too many meetings and they're not, I, I feel like all my time is stuck in meetings. But meetings are important. They can be more productive. What's the secret to a more productive meeting, Amy Kaye? I have 3 tips that will absolutely transform your meetings, and the first thing that I always encourage people to do is to turn their goals into questions, brain triggers on questions, not statements. So if you really want to increase the dialogue and increase the thinking in a meeting, take any goal that you're focused on and flip it into a question. So for example, instead of saying, hey, we're gonna meet Tuesday at 4 o'clock because we need more sales. Ask the group how do we ensure more sales or what are we going to do to meet and exceed our sales goals. So by just taking the overarching agenda and starting with the question, you're going to change the way that people play. But I don't actually want you to answer that question. So there's my jujitsu. So the first tip is take your goal, turn it into a question, but then don't answer it. Instead, generate more questions. It's important. To expand your perspective as well as dig deeper, so I love it when leaders and managers send out the original question and then they ask participants what else should we be asking and answering in order to answer this big question. Receiving our additional questions, you'll get disparate perspectives. It will also improve, it improves everybody's ability to solve problems. And you're going to increase buying and ownership when you go to make an actual decision or go to make new initiatives or outcomes, you've got everybody's buying because it was their question. The first step to really change a meeting is to create a question-based agenda, to then use those questions after collecting everyone's input and putting that out of the agenda ahead of time. OK, so if I get this right, you're, you're changing up instead of saying here's what we're gonna talk about it's here, here's some questions we're going to talk here's a big question we want to get answered in this meeting to make it productive, but we want everybody who attends to bring a certain, you know, a couple questions of their own for other questions we should be asking so we can reach this and then have the whole thing based around not not information we're gonna disseminate to you but information we're gonna be looking. For from you. Yeah, I think we spend too much time on what I affectionately call download data dumps, you know, we'll we'll get together in the meeting and Steve gives you his update followed by Anne giving you her update and it just goes around an entire conference room table and honestly, Bill, nobody gives a flying fig. I mean, you know, it's just download data dump. And what I love is that if you're gonna bring your best and your brightest into a room, then get their maximum brainpower, get them to start thinking. So instead of doing the download data dump, I could ask you, hey Bill, send me your critical data the night before. And send me your critical data of the night before. And then my opening question isn't what's going on in your department. It's, hey, after reading all those reports, what do we need to prioritize in this conversation? You know, what's going to have the biggest impact on you and your people in the next 30 to 60 to 90 days? So when you get people to start engaging, you're going to change the quality of thinking and the problem solving. And often what happens too in a meeting is that, you know, a group will hear a good idea. And they'll either piggyback or they'll quickly run with it. When people have been processing information independently prior to a dialogue, they're better when the meeting starts at challenging ideas, refining ideas, and tweaking ideas. I mean, brainstorming research has proven over and over again that better brainstorming begins with independent thinking. It's a bit of an oxymoron, but it's true. Mhm and there's there's a certain, uh, uh, brain wave uh they've proven that that meetings disseminating information and collecting it is better at the very beginning at the very end of the of a meeting too right? that in the middle people are kind of checking, checking out a little bit and thinking about things. So they've they've proven that there's the most productive times of meetings I've heard is at the very beginning and the very ending of a meeting. Have you heard that data as well? Yes, and we go through cycles and the brain trigger on starts and stops. You're absolutely correct. So what is said at the beginning of a meeting and what is said at the end of the meeting is going to be remembered far longer than anything in between. And one of the best things that you can do, for instance, if you're in a meeting. For 40, 60 minutes is just think about 20 minute cycles. In 20 minute cycles, you should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and then start another one. And a great way to trigger that is with questions. Great idea. So reengage everybody every 20 minutes with new questions and new and and what I hear you saying is look at your meetings as idea gathering and and problem solving sessions, not as updates and data dumps. You can do that by email, you can do that by memos, right? Yes, now, obviously, you know, take it with a grain of salt. If there's a critical piece of data that everybody needs to know. Great, start or end your meeting with it. But the idea is not to get together and, you know, take your best and your brightest and go over a spreadsheet. It's to really pose some questions of now it doesn't mean that the data can't be disseminated, but then your question is what do we glean from this? How do we go forward? How is that going to change our behaviors, what decisions do we need to make based on the data, not just sharing of the data itself. So Amy Kay, tell us about your, your session that you put on for business owners and, and groups. Uh, what's it titled? What's it, uh, briefly, how long does it last? What's it about and how do people get in touch with you? We facilitate think tanks around areas such as leadership development, uh, team dynamics, changing the culture, creativity and innovation, sales, but we really break it down to the behaviors and the thinking behind it. But any of our think tanks can run from half a day to 5 full days. Obviously we don't do 5 full days in a row or your brain would be buzzing way too much, but what we love to do is to come in and customize. So we like. Meet with the company, do a couple of due diligence meetings, find out the real obstacles and challenges. Start with the strengths and what's working and build from there. OK, so these are great sessions for business owners who are saying, How do I help my sales team really define what we're doing, who we're going after, what we're chasing, how do we answer good questions about our customers and understand them so we can look at things from their point of view. And how do we have a productive leadership with with great meetings that lead to really the evolution of the business, the growth of the business? Tell us a little bit about how we can get in touch with you and and learn more. A great way to get a better idea of what I sound like at a conference or what I sound like in a think tank is to go directly to our site and. It's super easy. It's Amyk.com, so Amyk, just those four letters.com, and you'll get all kinds of preview videos. You can take a look at our innovation toolkitt resources. We have tons of free tools though. We love to share what it is that we do because we really want people to step up their game, so we're happy to share. So if they go to AmyKay.com, there's lots of information, lots of tools, lots of resources. So if you're a visage chair or just a person that wants to put on an interesting meeting or workshop out there for business owners, go to Amy Kyk verysimple.com, and Amy, I think you fulfilled your mission today, which was to talk about igniting brilliance in your leadership. Really appreciate you coming onto the show and I look forward To talking to you again soon because these are topics that we could talk about for hours. And you did a great job of giving us an overview of what you do and how you help. So thanks very much for joining us. Well, thanks, Bill, and a big hello out there to the business community. Thank you. All right, we're going to take a short break. We'll be right back with another guest, so please stay tuned. You're listening to one of many shows on Exitcoachradio.com. We're interviewing advisors, authors, and thought leaders for their best tips, ideas, and precautions so you can be well planned. If you'd like to be a guest on any of our shows, go to guest.exitcoachradio.com. Exitcoachradio.com. Come listen for a minute. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio. Some matches are temporary, but your privacy shouldn't be. With line 2, you get a second phone line just for dating. No need to share your personal number until you're ready. You can chat, text, and even block numbers, all while keeping things fun and private. It's perfect for online dating. Blind dates, or just keeping things light. When you're ready to move on, line 2 lets you cut ties without any drama. Dating should be fun and carefree. Line 2 keeps it that way. Ready to date on your terms? Visit line2.com/auudio or download line 2 in the App Store today.