Most of my experience with cold calling is following my intuition. However, in the spirit of cooperative intelligence I will share some of the practices that I have developed over the years as a researcher. Like anything else, practice makes you a lot better. I am always thinking about ways to empathize and be more sensitive to the other person and am most effective when I forget about myself while keeping an eye on the clock to respect their time.
The devil is in the details: do you know your audience or clients well enough to know how to connect with them emotionally when you communicate? This is often a weakness in competitive intelligence professionals as we are far too hung up with our world of competitive analysis lingo and perspective. Whether it’s a speech, a project or a simple e-mail communication, you have the opportunity to emotionally connect through cooperative communication if you truly empathize with your customer’s position and care to take note of how they learn and how they like to be communicated with.
Last week I attended a webinar to improve my selling skills led by Colleen Stanley, Founder and Chief Sales Officer of SalesLeadership. Effective selling will help competitive intelligence professionals, product managers and researchers gain respect, cooperation and appreciation from internal peers. Combine emotional intelligence practices and selling with the collection skill of elicitation and watch your effectiveness soar!
In competitive intelligence and research, many of us don’t have any reporting people and report into another functional area of the company. Thus cooperative and purposeful leadership skills are all the more crucial when you rely on other people to give you great information or intelligence who don’t report to you, and your boss perhaps views you as an outlier since competitive intelligence doesn’t quite fit into anyone’s area. My most purposeful leadership was with Sales while I was at Verizon. I knew I needed to be cooperative in order to gain sales intelligence and customer’s input to be successful in competitive intelligence.
I have found that the ability to communicate cooperatively is invaluable in research, sales and competitive intelligence. Dedicated listening engages me to think of creative questions and comments to keep the conversation flowing, which often uncovers valuable information I would have never expected to learn. It’s also a lot of fun to listen and learn from others.
I think the phenomenon of being quiet is valuable in business as part of cooperative communication, one of the arms of cooperative intelligence. In my fields of research and competitive intelligence, knowing when to be silent is a great gift, since there aren’t enough listening ears, especially these days with all the downsizing in America. Sometimes, people just need us to listen to them, and not offer any advice. This practice also builds incredible trust and connection between two people since you think enough of the other person to stay quiet and listen.
With all the buzz around connecting through social networks, cold calling is often forgotten. While cold calling is a nervy way to conduct research, if you’ve done your homework ahead of time, you can be successful in gathering information quite expeditiously.
What is ‘social’? I find that the connections I make and the blogs that I read through social networking are shallow in comparison to the connections and knowledge I gain and exchange in conversation. Social networks provide snippets and tidbits of information. As a society are we losing our ability and culture of conversation?
This post focuses association chapters, the grass roots of associations, which are often the step-children in the association world since they don’t product revenue, and many don’t even break even. We are adapting our chapter meeting venue to the reality of today’s dispersed and busy workforce. We are co-hosting a meeting with the Denver APMP chapter on Sept. 25 at 3 p.m. where people will have 3 choices for connection. http://www.scip.org/Training/EventsDetail.cfm?itemnumber=8540 for details.
Here are my takeaways from this leadership session sponsored by Sustainable Business Group. We all have a tendency towards a particular leadership style. A good manager is flexible and uses the right style to be effective at the appropriate time. It’s also good to employ people whose styles you lack to keep balance in the workplace. Empathy is the foundation of emotional intelligence regardless of your culture. “Nobody cares what you know until they know you care.”