Filling the Glass
The Skeptic's Guide to Positive Thinking in Business
By Barry Maher
Ron Campbell tested high in intelligence and even higher in sales skills.
His positive, high-energy outlook impressed the interviewers at Industrial
Solutions, and both his former employers raved about his ambition and
his honesty. Bright, talented, upbeat, ambitious and ethical: those were
the qualities that won Ron his dream job. And those were the qualities
that caused him to quit in disgust less than a year later.
I met Ron while I was consulting with Industrial Solutions, immediately
after he’d been hired. Twenty-eight years old, he’d moved from
a $33,000 per year sales rep position with a mom and pop operation to
a “Professional Sales Career” with a Fortune 500 giant, where
the average first year earnings were $67,000, and someone with Ron’s
potential could make well over $100,000. Then there was the company car,
expenses, and a benefit package tempting enough to make me or anyone else
question the joys of self-employment. As a result, Ron’s infectious
grin became a near-permanent fixture on his face.
When I arrived each morning at 7:30 AM, he was already in the training
room, studying hard. When I left, sometimes as late as 7:30 or 8:00 in
the evening, he’d still be around, usually picking the brain of anyone
who had anything to teach him. In his second month on the job, the division
manager asked him to deliver a motivational presentation at a key sales
meeting. Even the veterans were impressed.
I figured he’d be a memory in 18 months. Cynicism was practically
a job requirement at Industrial Solutions. I’d seen too many of those
who should have become the best and the brightest crushed by the realities
of selling for such a demanding company. Ron seemed particularly vulnerable.
The day I finished my contract with the company, Ron volunteered to drive
me to the airport; he wanted a chance to pick my brain. I gave him my
card.
“Everyone around here has been raving about your potential,”
I said. “But if things ever get too rough, please give me a call
before you do anything that can’t be undone.”
He thanked me, but assured me that he considered this job the chance
of a lifetime. “I’m lashing myself to the saddle on this bronco,”
he said, reminding me that while Ron was from New Jersey, his sales
manager was from Texas. “It can buck, it can even bite, but there’s
no way it’s going to throw me.”
The call came eight months later. He told me he was quitting the next
day.
“Their prices are just too high,” he explained. “I just
can’t sell their machines.”
“Ron, you can sell anything you choose to sell.”
“I can’t sell this stuff. Not in amounts large enough to
meet their ridiculous quotas.”
“How many of the others are making their quotas?”
“Some of them. Most of them, I suppose. But the company puts so
much pressure on the reps to make their numbers, who knows what they’re
telling the customers? I sell clean, and I don’t sell enough. And
I don’t feel good about what I do sell. I get prospects to trust
me, then use that trust to talk them into buying something they wouldn’t
have bought on their own. That’s what selling is all about—and
that may be fine if you’ve got the best product in the marketplace...”
His voice trailed off.
“But,” I said, finishing the thought, “not everybody
can have the best product in the marketplace.”
“That’s the problem.”
“That is a problem, Ron. But aren’t you the guy that told
a division meeting that in Chinese the word for problem is the same
as the word for opportunity?”
“Crisis. The word for crisis is the same as the word for opportunity.”
“You’re quitting your job tomorrow, Ron. The job you told
me was your chance of a lifetime. If this isn’t a crisis, it will
certainly do until one arrives.”
“Which means?”
“Let me tell you about filling the glass...”
Norma Landry was on the side of the angels, an administrator in a small
religious denomination, and anything but a salesperson.
“I couldn’t sell ice water in Hell,” Norma told me when
she called my office. “Neither could most of our ministers. That’s
why the bishop wanted to book you for our yearly colloquium—to
edify them with your sales workshop.” Her tone made it clear that
she did not approve of this particular brand of edification.
“I’ve heard it said that Jesus was a master salesman,”
I tried, filching from some televangelist I’d stumbled across while
channel surfing. I always check out the televangelists. As a professional
speaker, I’m impressed by their fervor. As a bald guy, I’m
amazed by their hair.
“So’s Satan.”
“Salespeople do cover a broad spectrum,” I admitted.
But Norma’s problem wasn’t really with salespeople or even
balding consultants. Her problem was with her new bishop.
“Suddenly, everything is measured in money,” she confided
to me when I arrived on the day before my workshop. “And I’m
the one who’s supposed to do the measuring. I’m constantly
dunning the ministers to improve their collections. And then improve
upon the improvement. That’s hardly what I took this job to do.
The old bishop measured our success in souls.”
She handed me a sheet of paper.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“I’m thinking of inserting it into the bishop’s speech
welcoming the ministers tonight.”
I read: “Please inform your parishioners that—while our churches
have minimal financial needs that must be met—Jesus, himself, does
not need their money. I spoke to him this morning, and he says that
one of the best parts about being God is that you don’t have to
rely on contributions to do whatever it is you want done. He mentioned
the creation of the Universe with virtually no capital expenditure.
And he asked me to tell all those who’ve been so nice as to be
collecting money for him for so long that it might be more fitting for
them to be giving money to those they keep saying they’re trying
to help, rather than taking money from them. He’d like this to
start immediately. Otherwise he’s coming for his money. And it
better be all there.”
I looked up smiling, but Norma didn’t smile back. Rather than serving
as a release, sharing the joke seemed to make her angrier.
“Norma,” I said, “why don’t you come to my workshop
tomorrow.”
“Why?”
Why indeed? Ron Campbell was a salesperson so it’s probably not
surprising that a person like myself, who started out as a sales consultant,
could help him deal with his crisis. I don’t know if the word for
crisis really is the same as the word for opportunity in Chinese. People
keep telling me it is. They also keep telling me that in Chinese Coca
Cola means, “bite the wax tadpole.” I'll give you the details
in a moment, but for right now let me just say that we managed to work
through Ron’s near terminal opportunity. Today, he's one of Industrial
Solutions’ most successful salespeople. And, though he’s “grayer
and wiser, and a touch rounder,” he’s still one of their least
cynical.
But what could a workshop by someone who made his mark as a sales consultant
offer a Norma Landry?
"It’s made all the difference in the world,” she says
“it showed me how to turn the job I had into the job I wanted.
It gave me an honest, openhearted enthusiasm for everything I do.”
Her bishop says, “Nowadays, Norma is so good she makes me a better
boss.”
It's all about filling the glass.
And just what is filling the glass all about? It's about succeeding not
selling, and it's aimed at anyone anywhere in the business world, not
just salespeople.
We keep hearing that there are two types of people, those who can look
at a glass and see it as half full, and those who look at the same glass
and see it as half empty. I would like to suggest that it's time for a
new metaphor. The person I want to be, the person I want to hire and the
person who will ultimately be more successful and more valuable to his
business, his family, his society and himself is the one who takes a look
at that glass and is concerned, not with whether it’s half empty
or half full, but with figuring out how to fill it up.
Positive thinking is, of course, a wonderful thing. But sometimes in
business we all feel a bit two faced. We want to be incredibly positive
and enthusiastic about our businesses and our products and our careers
but we can’t help seeing the negatives that exist in every product
and for that matter in every business and every career.
We feel dissonance and we feel stress. Sometimes we get cynical.
Positive thinking strategies—much as we all love them—sometimes
make the problem worse. You want to be positive so you try to block out
the negatives. Everything is wonderful, let’s think happy thoughts,
the glass is half full not half empty and anybody who even hints that
anything is wrong anywhere in the known universe is suffering from a negative
attitude and ought to stop bringing himself and everybody else down.
You can refuse to acknowledge negatives, you can ignore them. Unfortunately,
reality has a nasty way of refusing to stay ignored.
In order to be truly successful—on your own terms—you have
to find a way to make peace with the aspects of your job, your product,
your shop or yourself that you consider to be negatives. That means first
of all you need to know that it’s okay to acknowledge these negatives.
It is not only okay, it is vital for your sanity, for your sense of honesty,
for your integrity. Integrity meaning wholeness, oneness, as opposed to
two faced.
Only once you acknowledge those negatives can you truly begin to fill
the glass—just like Ron Campbell and Norma Landry did. How did they
do it? The prices on the machinery Ron had to sell were too high in comparison
to the competition. So—as we often teach salespeople to do—Ron
turned himself into the ultimate value-added feature, the final benefit
that lifted his products above the competition.
He's become a major resource, developing an expertise his customers no
longer feel they can do without.
"His machines may not be quite as reliable as his competition’s,”
one of them admits. “But he knows more about that type of milling
than anyone in the industry. The free information we get from him more
than offsets the cost of the occasional problem his products may encounter.
He’s indispensable. Besides, when there is a problem, Ron’s
on it—practically before the machine stops humming.”
I recently spoke with Bill Swetland, a customer service rep with Ron’s
company. “When one of Ron’s accounts has a problem,”
Bill said, “he fights for them harder than they’d ever fight
for themselves...
Sometimes I wonder who he’s working for.”
“But that’s part of what they’re buying,” Ron explains.
“They’re buying me. That’s what they are paying for and
that’s what they get. I make sure I’m worth the extra money
our products cost and then some.”
Because he’s free from doubt about the value his clients will be
receiving, Ron can sell honestly. He can tell the truth to his customers
and to himself and still close any deal. He sells to more customers and
he sells more to each customer.
Nowadays, Ron's pitch starts out, “My machines are more expensive—and
they're less reliable. And they're the best deal in the market.”
And Norma Landry, the church administrator who was so concerned about
her bishop’s constant focus on fund raising? How did Norma fill the
glass? Among other things, on her own time she created a breakdown of
how the money they raised was being used. Then she made it a matter of
church pride that they become more efficient than comparable non-profit
groups—so every penny did the most possible good. She reported the
results to the ministers to share with their congregations, and to the
press, earning the church some impressive PR. Contributions increased,
and Norma felt much better about her job. She wasn’t dunning people
for money; she was feeding the hungry, tending to the sick.
Her bishop was so impressed he made monitoring distributions a permanent
part of Norma’s job, making sure the church became even more efficient
and got even more value for every dollar spent.
What Ron and Norma have in common nowadays is integrity. All the other
strategies, tactics and tips I discuss in my presentations and in my book
Filling the Glass: The Skeptic's Guide to Positive Thinking in Business
start from there. Not integrity as some vaguely reassuring concept in
a mission statement in the company manual. Not even integrity in the sense
of honesty or ethics. I’m a big fan of honesty and ethics but that’s
not what this is about. No, by integrity I mean integrity in the sense
of wholeness, oneness, relief from the dichotomy between what they believe
we should be doing in their careers and their lives, and what they actually
find them doing.
You can never be successful—on your own terms—if, in order
to succeed, you have to become someone you don't want to be. Never settle
for half empty. Never settle for half full. Fill the glass.
This article is adapted from Barry Maher's widely acclaimed
new book, Filling the Glass: The Skeptic's Guide to Positive Thinking
in Business. Maher is a highly successful speaker and consultant on business,
management and sales.
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