Selling With Noble Purpose. Lisa Earle McLeod

that the customer does not. Exceptional sellers have insights into how customers can achieve their goals: insights customers may not have thought about.

Telling your team to simply focus on the customer could mean anything from helping the customer achieve their goals, to giving the customer a lower price. Without clarity about the impact the organization wants to have on customers, people can wind up feeling like indentured servants. Consider the difference between an organization that says, “Our goal is to meet our customer's every need,” versus an organization whose stated purpose is “We improve the way our customers do business.” Which organization feels more empowered? Trying to please the customer is nice, but it's hardly galvanizing, and it's rarely differentiated. When you have clarity about how you want to improve the customer, you create a more innovative organization.

       Selling with Noble Purpose goes beyond pleasing customers; it's about improving customers.

      When your people understand that we are here to improve our customer's lives and businesses in ways they may not have even known were possible, your team has a clear North Star. The customer is at the center of the business, but instead of merely reacting to customers, the team is proactive about helping customers get to an even better place.

      The stakes become higher, and the role of everyone on the team becomes more important.

The Two Big Human Needs: Belonging and Significance

      Once you get beyond basic needs like food and shelter, human beings have two core emotional needs: belonging and significance. We want to be connected to other people, and we want to know that what we're doing matters to someone. The need for belonging and significance transcends age, culture, sex, race, and socioeconomic status.

       Our deepest desire is to make a difference in the world, and our darkest fear is that we don't.

We don't just want to make a difference in our personal lives or through philanthropic activities. We want to make a difference at work. We spend the better part of our waking hours at work. Those hours ought to mean something. When you know that your job matters to people, you come alive. Your frontal lobes light up, and you have greater access to problem solving, language, and empathy.

      Yet for some reason, many teams seem to operate as though some bizarre memo went out years ago saying, “Please don't bring any emotions to work.” This mentality is entirely unhelpful. When was the last time you heard a CEO say, “I wish my people weren't so motivated and excited”? Any good leader knows, achieving peak performance requires emotional buy‐in. The reasons people resist addressing emotion at work is because:

       Emotions are messy and hard to understand. When you bring in the good emotions, you're also going to have to deal with negatives. This can feel like Pandora's box; people resist opening it.

       People aren't skilled at dealing with other people's emotions. Even the silent, stoic boss is generating an emotional response from his or her team. It may not be acknowledged, but it's there. It feels safer to back away from other people's emotions rather than owning the role you may play in creating them.

       We delude ourselves into believing our business decisions are logical. One look inside any merger or acquisition will tell you that emotion plays a role in every business decision. Logic makes you think; emotion makes you act.

      Ignoring the emotional element doesn't make it go away; it simply prevents you from leveraging it. When we acknowledge the role emotions play, we can learn to tap into them for good. If you want to create a highly engaged team, you can start by strengthening their emotional connection to their work.

You read in the introduction about a top‐performing biotech salesperson who outsold every other rep in the entire country three years running. She achieved this because every day when she went on calls, she remembered a grandmother she had helped. Thinking about the grandmother did more than just motivate this sales rep to make extra sales calls on a rainy Friday afternoon. It ignited her frontal lobe, which made her a better problem‐solver and strategic planner, more skilled with language, and more empathetic with her customers.

      Is it any wonder that she was the number‐one rep three years running? Her peers and competitors were likely conducting sales calls with the basic parts of their brain, going through the motions mechanically without igniting any kind of purpose in themselves or their customers.

      But because the top rep was thinking about the person she had helped—the grandmother who, because of her product, could now play with her grandkids—she was leveraging both her intellect and her emotions to their fullest extent.

      A Noble Sales Purpose ignites that type of higher‐level thinking with everyone on your team. It serves as an organizing element for your sales force and keeps you focused on the big picture. It's your version of the grandmother.

      Sellers who carry a clear picture of the impact they want to have on customers in sales calls are more powerful. They're more creative, they're higher energy, and they're more resilient in the face of setbacks. Your job as a leader is to proactively help them generate that mental picture and keep it alive on a daily basis.

      An NSP answers three questions for your team:

       What impact do you and your company have on customers?

       How are you different from the competition?

       On your best day, what do you love about your job?

      An NSP is not “We're going to be the number one provider of end‐to‐end solutions.” That's your goal, but it doesn't speak to how you make a difference in clients' lives. An NSP isn't about your desired position in the market. It's about how you impact your clients today.

A 10‐Degree Shift Can Change Your Direction

      Imagine you're sitting in a jet parked on a runway. If you alter your direction 10 degrees north, you wind up at a totally different destination. This is how just a small shift at the start of the journey puts you on an entirely new trajectory.

Establishing your NSP is the seemingly small shift on the runway that takes you to a more exciting destination. You may already have a clear purpose statement, or your NSP may be found inside your existing mission and vision. Or you may be starting from scratch. Whatever the case, as you read this section, notice how these organizations use their NSP as a starting point to create competitive differentiation, ignite emotional engagement, and drive revenue growth.

      The following are examples of organizations driving exceptional results by using an NSP. Keep in mind as you read these examples that crafting your NSP is the start of the process.

      Atlantic Capital Bank: From Transactional Banking to Fueling Prosperity

      Atlantic Capital Bank (ACB) is an Atlanta‐based commercial bank founded in 2007 with approximately $3 billion in assets. CEO Doug Williams and his team founded ACB to create an exceptional bank. In an industry mired in negative press, they wanted to establish themselves as honest bankers who truly care about customers. Yet after a decade of solid growth, they found themselves becoming just like other banks.

      In the day‐to‐day drumbeat of the financial industry, it's challenging to keep the focus on client impact. With pressure to hit financial metrics, the numbers can often become the only story anyone