6 Leadership Styles, And When You Should Use Them

www.fastcompany.com 05-29-2012

Taking a team from ordinary to extraordinary means understanding and embracing the difference between management and leadership. According to writer and consultant Peter Drucker, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."

Manager and leader are two completely different roles, although we often use the terms interchangeably. Managers are facilitators of their team members’ success. They ensure that their people have everything they need to be productive and successful; that they’re well trained, happy and have minimal roadblocks in their path; that they’re being groomed for the next level; that they are recognized for great performance and coached through their challenges.

Conversely, a leader can be anyone on the team who has a particular talent, who is creatively thinking out of the box and has a great idea, who has experience in a certain aspect of the business or project that can prove useful to the manager and the team. A leader leads based on strengths, not titles.
The best managers consistently allow different leaders to emerge and inspire their teammates (and themselves!) to the next level.

When you’re dealing with ongoing challenges and changes, and you’re in uncharted territory with no means of knowing what comes next, no one can be expected to have all the answers or rule the team with an iron fist based solely on the title on their business card. It just doesn’t work for day-to-day operations. Sometimes a project is a long series of obstacles and opportunities coming at you at high speed, and you need every ounce of your collective hearts and minds and skill sets to get through it.
This is why the military style of top-down leadership is never effective in the fast-paced world of adventure racing or, for that matter, our daily lives (which is really one big, long adventure, hopefully!). I truly believe in Tom Peters’s observation that the best leaders don’t create followers; they create more leaders. When we share leadership, we’re all a heck of a lot smarter, more nimble and more capable in the long run, especially when that long run is fraught with unknown and unforeseen challenges.

Change leadership styles
Not only do the greatest teammates allow different leaders to consistently emerge based on their strengths, but also they realize that leadership can and should be situational, depending on the needs of the team. Sometimes a teammate needs a warm hug. Sometimes the team needs a visionary, a new style of coaching, someone to lead the way or even, on occasion, a kick in the bike shorts. For that reason, great leaders choose their leadership style like a golfer chooses his or her club, with a calculated analysis of the matter at hand, the end goal and the best tool for the job.
My favorite study on the subject of kinetic leadership is Daniel Goleman’s Leadership That Gets Results, a landmark 2000 Harvard Business Review study. Goleman and his team completed a three-year study with over 3,000 middle-level managers. Their goal was to uncover specific leadership behaviors and determine their effect on the corporate climate and each leadership style’s effect on bottom-line profitability.
The research discovered that a manager’s leadership style was responsible for 30% of the company’s bottom-line profitability! That’s far too much to ignore. Imagine how much money and effort a company spends on new processes, efficiencies, and cost-cutting methods in an effort to add even one percent to bottom-line profitability, and compare that to simply inspiring managers to be more kinetic with their leadership styles. It’s a no-brainer.

Here are the six leadership styles Goleman uncovered among the managers he studied, as well as a brief analysis of the effects of each style on the corporate climate:

1. The pacesetting leader expects and models excellence and self-direction. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be “Do as I do, now.” The pacesetting style works best when the team is already motivated and skilled, and the leader needs quick results. Used extensively, however, this style can overwhelm team members and squelch innovation.
   
2. The authoritative leader mobilizes the team toward a common vision and focuses on end goals, leaving the means up to each individual. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be “Come with me.” The authoritative style works best when the team needs a new vision because circumstances have changed, or when explicit guidance is not required. Authoritative leaders inspire an entrepreneurial spirit and vibrant enthusiasm for the mission. It is not the best fit when the leader is working with a team of experts who know more than him or her.
   
3. The affiliative leader works to create emotional bonds that bring a feeling of bonding and belonging to the organization. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be “People come first.” The affiliative style works best in times of stress, when teammates need to heal from a trauma, or when the team needs to rebuild trust. This style should not be used exclusively, because a sole reliance on praise and nurturing can foster mediocre performance and a lack of direction.
   
4. The coaching leader develops people for the future. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be “Try this.” The coaching style works best when the leader wants to help teammates build lasting personal strengths that make them more successful overall. It is least effective when teammates are defiant and unwilling to change or learn, or if the leader lacks proficiency.
   
5. The coercive leader demands immediate compliance. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be “Do what I tell you.” The coercive style is most effective in times of crisis, such as in a company turnaround or a takeover attempt, or during an actual emergency like a tornado or a fire. This style can also help control a problem teammate when everything else has failed. However, it should be avoided in almost every other case because it can alienate people and stifle flexibility and inventiveness.
   
6. The democratic leader builds consensus through participation. If this style were summed up in one phrase, it would be “What do you think?” The democratic style is most effective when the leader needs the team to buy into or have ownership of a decision, plan, or goal, or if he or she is uncertain and needs fresh ideas from qualified teammates. It is not the best choice in an emergency situation, when time is of the essence for another reason or when teammates are not informed enough to offer sufficient guidance to the leader.

Bottom line? If you take two cups of authoritative leadership, one cup of democratic, coaching, and affiliative leadership, and a dash of pacesetting and coercive leadership “to taste,” and you lead based on need in a way that elevates and inspires your team, you’ve got an excellent recipe for long-term leadership success with every team in your life.



Robyn Benincasa is a two-time Adventure Racing World Champion, two-time Guinness World Record distance kayaker, a full-time firefighter, and author of the new book, HOW WINNING WORKS: 8 Essential Leadership Lessons from the Toughest Teams on Earth, from which this article is excerpted. (Harlequin Nonfiction, June 2012)

Seven "Non-Negotiables" to Prevent a Bad Hire

by David K. Williams and Mary Michelle Scott   May 31, 2012 www.blogs.hbr.org

The costs of a bad hire are staggering. A recent survey by Career Builder reports more than two-thirds of employers were affected by a bad hire last year, according to AOL Jobs. Of nearly 2,700 employers surveyed, 41% estimate a single bad hire cost $25,000; a quarter estimate a bad choice cost $50,000 or more — not to mention the demoralizing effect of the issue on other employees and on the new hire. Losing a job is one of the most stressful events a human can experience.

To avoid that, when we make hires, we screen candidates using a list of personal characteristics we call the Non-Negotiables. First there were four. Ultimately, we've expanded the list to seven. These are the characteristics that have become the primary criteria for hiring decisions — things we value even more than skills and background. When we add people to our nearly 100-person company, these criteria are non-negotiable.

The seven Non-Negotiables are Respect, Belief, Loyalty, Commitment, Trust, Courage and Gratitude.

Ideal hires bring traditional and job-specific capabilities and high proficiencies in these seven core traits. However, in many cases, the Non-Negotiables have led us to make what others would consider "unusual hires." The result, for our company, has been near-zero turnover — and many employees express the desire and willingness to stay with us for life.

It took us a few years before we fully embraced the concept of the Non-Negotiables as an explicit hiring goal. We always sought individuals with high character strengths and strong work ethics. In HR parlance, we looked for "athletes," and we talked about assessing the right fit through a strong "gut feeling." Since January 2011, we've gone further: We've now articulated these traits as full and formal requirements for the people we hire. Granted, it is more difficult to identify and assess character traits than concrete skills — however, the strategy we are using thus far seems to be meeting success. We ask potential candidates to tell us about situations where they have exemplified each of the non-negotiable traits. Because each candidate is interviewed by multiple leaders, we compare assessments on each of the traits. Later on, we may also move to an actual scoring system as well.

We also ask the same questions of the individual's references — not the references they list on their resume, but of their former co-workers, associates and bosses that we identify independently, and who are in a position to speak open and candidly about the candidate's strengths (or weaknesses) in exhibiting these traits. Clearly, it's not an exact science — but we are finding the ways to become more precise as we grow.

At times focusing on this non-traditional hiring criteria leads us to hire people with unusual backgrounds. When Kevin Batchelor — now one of our two VP's of Engineering — came to work here, he was not a programmer at all; his degrees were in theater and anthropology. Now, eight years later, his software designs are winning awards. John David King — now our EVP of Sales and Marketing — had no prior background in leading a sales organization. He had heart, spirit, and character, coupled with a law degree and a bachelor's degree in communications.

We've filled our developer ranks largely through a partnership with Utah Valley University. We started by looking for interns — the right people with the right characteristics who wanted to learn how to code. One of them was a firefighter, one an electrician, and one was in the culinary program. Some were programmers by training, but only interested (or so they thought) in programming Internet games.

We have a strong community focus — of our near 100 employees, 40 are or have been interns working on flexible schedules to allow them to finish their degrees.
Our approach is contradictory to most conventional management wisdom, which suggests that hiring managers focus on relevant skills and experience. But it is working for us.

Our company has no shortage of talent because we've trained the people we bring in with care. Our employees are respectful of each other, and as a company we strive to be respectful of others as well. In a competitive $1 billion software market we are collegial — we list our competitors' offerings along with our own products on our Facebook page, and we applaud their successes along with our own.

Our hiring strategy has built a loyal base of employees during a time when the typical career path is to "keep the options open" and to be at least periodically shopping around. Our strategy will continue to be the right one for us. Perhaps it could work for other organizations as well. We look forward to your opinions and thoughts

Stop Guesstimating Your Sales Forecasts

Matthew Bellows  May 17, 2012 www.blogs.hbr.org

For anyone running a sales organization, the 48 hours before a pipeline presentation are the worst days of the month. The pipeline meeting is where you tell management your team's sales forecast for the next month, and no matter how good your numbers were last month, your work life is a mess.

In the days and weeks leading up to this point, you've had everyone send you their individual and team projections. You've told them, "Update me on the deals you've been working on, tell me about the new ones, estimate when they are going to close, and give me a percentage chance for each one."

You have been diligent in managing your people and in creating compensation plans that reward consistency and predictability. You have stayed on top of the major deals. You have put in place sales training and a market-leading, cloud-based CRM system. Everyone on your teams spends hours each week typing updates, but for those 48 hours, none of it seems to help much.

Basically, you're going into the pipeline meeting and giving your bosses your best guess, because you lack the tools to offer something more precise.

But how can forecasting sales data be such of a problem? The performance of the sales team has always been the most measurable in a company. At the end of every week, month, quarter and year, the result of sales activity is shown on the top line for all to see.

There are two reasons. First, the obvious: the higher you go in the organization, the less connected you are to the deals happening beneath you — and the more vulnerable you are to individual reps or teams, either purposely or subconsciously, altering their pipeline projections to suit their needs. This is no different from how people in non-sales functions push to create budgets and targets they know they can beat.

The second reason for the sales manager's pain is that when it comes to gathering data about upcoming sales possibilities, companies and CRM systems rarely measure anything real. For most kinds of business-to-business selling, your CRM database is an outdated collection of anecdotes and guesses. The fewer the deals, and the longer the sales cycle, the less your "data" matches reality. The stuff that does get accumulated in spreadsheets and CRM systems looks like data — there are dollar signs and probabilities next to prospect names — but it's not. It's really just the opinions, guesses, estimates and suppositions of your sales team.

Thus, the terrible two days. The number you present to your bosses will look definitive, and your reputation will be staked to it. You will have padded it, of course, and your boss will push back and demand that you raise it. You'll settle on a compromise, but you'll leave the room anxious, because you know that there's nothing firm and reliable to back it up.

Why is this the best we, as sales leaders, can do? Because for the most part we are collecting and summing opinions instead of data.

Some innovative sales organizations are starting to move away from the old ways. The growth of inside sales teams and the increasing emphasis on more-measurable sales channels like phone calls and emails is a start. And while CRM systems have their shortcomings, the central repository of information and leads at least gives the harried manager a single pile through which to dig.

But there will be no end to the stress, the chaos and the cognitive dissonance of the 48 hours before the pipeline meeting unless we change. We have to start caring more about sales activities, the specific actions that salespeople and sales teams perform to close more business. We need to know how many phone calls, emails, demos and visits it takes for our teams to close a deal. Then we need to measure the underlying data for each team member without requiring them to report on themselves.

(Full disclosure: Although my company does make an email product to support the sales function, it doesn't help with the problem of tracking sales activities.)

So this is a call to innovative sales leaders, sales operations people, technology and service providers, and the top companies of the CRM industry. Let's build the processes, the services and the tools we need to collect data instead of opinions. Let's learn to build forecasts based on what we do instead of what we say. And most importantly, let's help our salespeople succeed instead of weighing them down with processes that waste valuable time and money.

It's the only way to improve those awful 48 hours. And along the way, we'll find ways to make a whole lot more money.

Matthew Bellows is founder and CEO of Yesware.

People Want Jobs That Make A Difference, Even If It Means A Pay Cut

 Ariel Schwartz www.fastcoexist.com

A new survey comparing college students soon to enter the work force with current workers found that everyone wants an "impact job," and would do a lot to get one.
The job market may be bleak, but college graduates of all ages still have high hopes that they will eventually land "impact jobs" that make a difference socially or environmentally. So says Talent Report: What Workers Want in 2012 from Net Impact, which surveyed 1,726 college students about to enter the workforce as well as employed four-year college graduates (including Millennials, Generation X, and Baby Boomers) on their life goals, job satisfaction, and desire to have an "impact job."
Here’s what the survey found.

• Somewhat surprisingly, current workers said that having an impact job was more important than having children, a prestigious career, wealth, and community leadership. The top two most important things to have for happiness: financial security and marriage. Financial security still matters more than making a difference, but wealth isn’t important for people if they can do some good.
• That’s especially true for students: 58% of student respondents say they would take a 15% pay cut to “work for an organization whose values are like my own."
• Almost 60% of students also expect to have multiple job offers to choose from (that may be a little overly idealistic); 37% believe they can make a positive social or environmental impact within five years.

 Half of current workers care if their job helps make a better world, but 65% of students care.

Among current workers, work/life balance is the most important aspect of an ideal job. A positive environment is the second most important piece (it’s most important overall for students), and interesting work is third. Having a prestigious employer is the least important piece.

There are a few big differences between students and workers: 50% of students say it’s important to have an employer that prioritizes CSR, while only 38% of current workers care. Half of current workers care if their job helps make a better world, but 65% of students care.

Overall, women care more about impact jobs than men: 30% of women say they would take a pay cut for an impact job, while 19% of men say the same thing. And 60% of employed women believe that working for a socially and environmentally conscious employer is important, compared to 38% of men.

In spite of the student population’s idealism, Boomers are most likely to vote (73% compared to 43% of students in the last year), boycott a product or company, or volunteer outside of work.

What does it all mean? Employers had better start taking action now to accommodate the burgeoning socially conscious generation of college grads (which paradoxically does not seem to be civically minded at all). And those new grads, in turn, might want to check out some of the new impact job resources that have started popping up.

Ariel Schwartz is a Senior Editor at Co.Exist.

How to Engage Your Customers and Employees

R "Ray" Wang www.blogs.hbr.org May 9, 2012

Most customers now ignore targeted marketing campaigns, avoid responding to offers, and provide minimal feedback when asked. Instead, potential customers interact with each other, bypassing sanitized corporate messages devoid of meaning or value.
Meanwhile, employees increasingly look beyond compensation to non-monetary factors such as advancement, recognition, and corporate social responsibility in choosing where to work. And with the retirement of the Baby Boomers looming, attracting, retaining, and growing the next generation of leaders is an essential task for any organization.
As a result, organizations around the world are rushing to engage with their customers and employees. It's easy to see why. Without engagement, the influence of brands will continue to decline and big organizations will lose out on the best workers. Our studies at Constellation Research have found that engaged workers — those who participated in a forum, helped out a colleague in a chat, or provided feedback on an enterprise initiative — are 37% more likely to stay with their employers. Meanwhile, engaged customers are three times more likely to recommend or advocate a product or service to a friend. Improved engagement creates business value and strategic differentiation, and technology is enabling a shift from transactions to engagement.
Haphazard approaches to engagement negate good intentions
Unfortunately in the rush to engage, many organizations have taken a haphazard and siloed approach. Based on hundreds of conversations, a common theme emerges of failing to learn from the last Web and ecommerce boom. For example, many organizations have created separate social divisions in the same manner that ecommerce divisions were established a decade back. The result — haphazardly designed customer engagement paradigms doomed to fail. Why? These design points optimize for the company and not for a frictionless and seamless customer experience.
Meanwhile other organizations have built their social strategy using Facebook as the keystone in the same way AOL and Yahoo! central to many companies' plans last century. The result is overdependence on (and enrichment of) Facebook at the expense of driving traffic and activity onto one's own platforms. When customers wake up and decide they are the product, they will stop trading privacy for convenience. The result — brands built on Facebook will face a backlash.
On an internal basis, the rush to deploy social business tools matches the hype of the past decade in installing collaboration tools and assuming one's employees would easily adapt if only the right tool was deployed. The recurring problem — culture always trumps technology in adoption of new tools.
Successful engagement requires nine key components
How do we ensure engagement and avoid the fatal fatigue engendered by every wave of new media adoption? How can an organization and their leaders make the shift? The first step is to think systematically about it, and understand that engagement requires a set of building blocks. I divide them into three categories: people-centric values, delivery and communication styles, and the right time drivers.
People-centric values are the starting point. An organization needs to genuinely understand and relate to its customers and its employees before it can engage them. The key elements here are culture, community and credibility. Culture is about societal norms, communication preferences, and global outlook. At the organizational level, this includes which leadership styles are most effective, and how workers interact with each other. In dealing with customers, it's about understanding customer segmentation, digital readiness, and inclination to participate. Community focuses on internal and external stakeholders. Each stakeholder may have different needs. For example how you share information with a supplier may be different than what you can tell an internal employee. The last component, credibility, involves earning trust through actions. Credibility is built through influence, reputation, track records, and accumulated expertise.
Values alone are not enough. To engage successfully, organizations also need an understanding of delivery and communication styles. These styles incorporate channel, content, and cadence. Channel refers to the means of engagement: face-to-face, retail, mobile, social, web, kiosk, virtual, and video. Content can be internal, user-generated, re-purposed, paid, news-driven, or analytic. Finally, cadence describes the frequency of engagement — whether it's ad hoc, scheduled, or continuous.

The last piece is choosing the right time drivers to provide a why, when, and where in engagement. The goal is to inspire action through context, catalysts, and currencies. Context means location, business process, role, relationships, and sentiment, all of which need to be considered to deliver the right offer to the right person at the right time. Catalysts are what inspire action and response: campaigns, offers, advertisements, direct rewards, indirect rewards, and loyalty programs. Finally, currencies influence behavior through an exchange of value. Monetary models include traditional cash, bonuses, rewards, and rebates, but non-monetary currencies such as virtual goods, recognition, access, and influence can often be more powerful.
The nine critical components of stakeholder engagement




















New models of engagement herald the death of B2B and B2C
The emergence of extremely viral people-to-people (P2P) networks has changed the notion of the customer and employee forever. Social media, social networks, and mobility also herald the death of B2B and B2C as we know them. A bad experience at work with a particular brand of laptop bleeds over into consumer choices. Great experiences with consumer products have driven the rise of bring-your-own-device-to-work — a key to Apple's new success in the enterprise.
As organizations master engagement, early adopters will shift to building experiences by filtering massive streams of information through context. Context — in the form of roles, relationships, location, business process, time, and other factors — will transform engagement to experience. Early adopters of augmented reality and gamification already apply these nine Cs of engagement to craft intuitive and natural customer experiences. The drive towards engagement will impact both the future of work and next generation customer experiences. The move to engagement lays out the first step to a P2P world.

R "Ray" Wang is Principal Analyst and CEO at Constellation Research.

10 big mistakes successful leaders make

Steve Tobak May 9, 2012 www.cbsnew.com

Executives and business leaders don't just peak and lose their potency over time, like wine. They change. Oftentimes, success is the culprit. Success affects everyone differently and not necessarily in a good way.
I've seen it happen to loads of successful CEOs, entrepreneurs and business owners I've worked with over the years. It's not a result of the Peter Principle, since their responsibilities didn't change. It's not necessarily a question of the business outgrowing their capabilities, either.
And they don't just "lose it." Rather, they change. Success changes them.

If you know a little about human psychology, that shouldn't surprise you. You've got to really know yourself, possess unusual self-confidence, and be pretty well grounded in reality to withstand the ego-inflating onslaught of winning big in business.

Since we're all human, we're all susceptible to the unusual pressures and pitfalls that come from achieving what we've always dreamed of. In my experience, these are the ten most common traps successful leaders fall into.

Becoming the status quo. Startups often break into the market by challenging the status quo. The problem is when success makes them the status quo, yet they don't realize it. That was evident when Apple and Google challenged the BlackBerry with the iPhone and Android platform. It's ironic that RIM's co-founders forgot that they were once the challengers. Their failure to be proactive or even to react in time was RIM's downfall.

Tunnel vision. They lose perspective and become rigid, sticking to their myopic vision like glue. Since competitors are unpredictable and markets are always evolving, it can be deadly to a business. If their vision fails to gain traction, they often double down and become even more grandiose. We saw that with former Sony CEO Howard Stringer's concept of product synergy. The only problem is it didn't exist.

Losing their fear. Fear is a key emotion that warns you when to be alert and when you need to act. When you start to think that success is inevitable and believe you can't fail, you act irrationally, become reckless and take risks you shouldn't or without due consideration. Reminds me of lots of megamergers and LBOs, that's for sure.

Fear of losing. The opposite of becoming fearless to the extreme is becoming too risk averse because you're afraid of losing what you've won. Unfortunately, that simply doesn't work in an ever-changing business world. Once that fear of taking chances sets in, you're business is doomed.

All knowing. They stop asking questions and don't really listen when key stakeholders -- customers, executives, directors, investors -- tell them something they need to hear. They think they have all the answers, that they're the smartest guys in the room. They miss critical warning signs.

Isolated. I've seen far too many successful people develop an elitist or ivory tower mentality. They become insular in their thinking and cut themselves off from others with layers of bureaucracy and hierarchy. There are also usually physical manifestations like executive offices, suites, buildings, and assistants to keep the masses out.

Controlling. In the name of maintaining a culture of entrepreneurship, they become obsessed with keeping things the way they are. That often translates to micromanaging and controlling every little thing. They fail to let go by adding processes and infrastructure that growing businesses need to effectively scale. I see this over and over, especially in the high-tech industry.

Surrounded by yes-men. There will always be weak-minded lackeys that tell leaders what they want to hear and sugarcoat negative news to gain favor. But their power only comes from weak leaders with low self-esteem that need their egos to be constantly pumped up.

Lost the magic. Business success is nearly always the result of a number of factors. Sure, there's a product or service that customers are excited about, but there's also pricing, timing, partners, even luck. Whatever the combination, it's tempting for successful entrepreneurs to think it's all about them, not the "magic formula" that got them there.

If I build it, they will come. Entrepreneurship works in America because anyone with an idea can get funding and, if the stars are aligned, develop a hit product or service. To get out of the "one hit wonder" phase and develop a second and third successful product, however, requires a willingness to embrace marketing, sales, operations, customer service and other business functions.

Key Account Selling: The Unwritten Rules

Tom Searcy May 16, 2012 www.cbsnews.com

Selling key accounts is like baseball: Both have their codes of unwritten rules.
Baseball fans and players know the game has an informal code of conduct worthy of a samurai. One former player said it is a game played by human beings and governed by unwritten laws of survival and self-preservation.
These rules are largely unofficial and aren't written down on clubhouse walls. But they are well-known. For instance:

• Don't slide into second with your spikes high and try to injure the infielder (that went out with Ty Cobb)
• With runners in scoring position and first base open, walk the number eight hitter to get to the pitcher (don't get me started on the designated hitter rule)
• Don't bunt with a home run hitter at the plate
• If there is a fight, everyone must leave the bench, and the bullpen has to join in (but no bats -- just fists)
• In cities that have two baseball teams, any given fan can only root for one of them (President Obama roots for the Chicago White Sox, for instance, not the Cubs)

Selling key accounts is similar to baseball. There are unwritten rules you are expected to learn if you want to pursue these major pieces of business, which have the highest profit potential. The competition to land these large corporate accounts is fierce. These unwritten sales laws are also a matter of survival and self-preservation.
One such rule is that when you're trying to land a key account, your prospects are listening for certain things. They want to know if you respect their money, if you respect their time, and if you understand the risks they face. For them, it doesn't matter what you are selling; they will judge your selling tools to see if you respect and understand the unwritten rules about money, time, and risk.

Salespeople have a bad habit of ignoring these unwritten rules and selling what they think prospects want to hear: quality, service, capacity, innovation, on-time delivery, guarantees, and all the other usual buzzwords. But the fact is, these are not the reasons why big companies buy. When you speak an entirely different language it shows, at best, ignorance of the rules, and at worst a lack of respect.

When you use those typical words, you are asking the big company to translate what you believe is valuable to what they believe is valuable. For example, to a big company the meaning is different.

Quality means time -- production lines not going down because of faulty parts, customer service calls not received because products work, and so on.

Quality Also Means Money -- repeat purchases, reduced waste in production, etc.
Quality Means Less Risk -- fewer product returns, investment confidence, etc.
The more complex your offering, the more difficult it is for a big organization to hear the three things it needs to hear make a decision to buy. To play the game right, we need to talk to a big company in its own language. We have to translate value based on the result of what we deliver.

Remember rule No 1: What matters most to a larger organization is time, money, and risk. For salespeople, that means following the unwritten rules of doing the translation in real-time, when you are presenting the benefits of what you sell. Every benefit needs to be accompanied with an impact statement that translates to time/money/risk in the big organization's business. To be successful, those are the (unwritten) rules.