Michael's Method — the research map

Research synthesis, §8 — Korn Ferry · Blanchard LeaderChat

Revenue Grid · Training Industry · Korn Ferry (verified live)

The three books

Each book is the book-length statement of a training programme of the same name. Later "New" editions add co-authors Diane Sanchez and/or Tad Tuleja, Miller Heiman's staff writer.

Alore · Strategic Elevation · Bookshop.org (publisher copy) · Kim Tasso (review)

The four Buying Influences — roles, not titles

A job title does not reliably reveal the role. One person can hold more than one role, and the seller must identify the role each person plays in this sale. For every influence, the Blue Sheet records: name, title, location, role, degree of influence (High / Medium / Low), response mode, a rating from +5 (enthusiastic advocate) to −5 (antagonistic), and their Win-Result. An influence you haven't covered is automatically a Red Flag.

Alore · Prospeo — Blue Sheet guide · Umbrex

Red Flags and Strengths — the honest part of the sheet

A Red Flag is any gap, uncertainty, or weakness in your position — not just an objection. The discipline is deliberately self-critical: top performers "find the most Red Flags in their accounts." Some Red Flags are automatic — flag them without debate:

• Critical information is missing, or information you hold is uncertain or unclear
• Any Buying Influence not yet contacted — an "uncovered base"
• Any Buying Influence new to the job
• Anyone involved in a recent or current reorganisation
• No access to the Economic Buyer
• A new player entering the sale

A Strength is narrower than a compliment. It must pass three tests: it is (1) an area of differentiation, (2) it improves your position, and (3) it is relevant to your current Single Sales Objective. Goodwill or a generic product advantage that fails a test is not a Strength in this sense.

Leverage from Strength is the paired technique, in three steps: (1) locate the Red Flags, (2) locate the Strengths, (3) use a Strength to remove or reduce a Red Flag. The book's example: don't hammer at an insulated Economic Buyer, and don't ignore them and present only to a friendly User Buyer — ask the User Buyer (a Strength) to help you get the Economic Buyer covered.

Principus — summary of The New Strategic Selling · SlideShare — Six Key Elements deck · Korn Ferry (programme objectives)

Response Modes — is this person ready to change?

Each influence's receptivity is set by the gap they perceive between where they are and where they want to be — and whether your proposal closes that gap. Growth and Trouble are the two modes that can buy. Even Keel and Overconfident must be moved first. Korn Ferry phrases the skill as: "Analyse each decision maker's receptivity to change to determine whether a sale is possible."

Umbrex · Blue Sheet example (PDF)

Win-Results and the four outcomes

A Win-Result — one per Buying Influence — joins a measurable business Result for the organisation to a personal Win for that individual. The book's rule, as the summaries preserve it:

"Companies get Results; only people Win."

Every sale ends in one of four outcomes. Only one is acceptable: Win-Win — both seller and each buyer win; it produces satisfied buyers, repeat sales, and referrals. Win-Lose, Lose-Win, and Lose-Lose are failures even if an order is signed: a customer sold something they do not benefit from will not buy again. Strategic Selling explicitly warns against "closing business that you'll later regret."

SlideShare — Six Key Elements deck · Alore · Close

The Ideal Customer Profile — disqualification as a skill

Build the profile from the demographics and psychographics of your current and past good customers, then test every prospect against it and score the fit (modern Blue Sheet practice: Strong Match / Acceptable Match / Gap, criterion by criterion). The book's warning, quoted in the six-elements deck: even successful reps carry up to ~35% poor prospects at any moment — prospects that "will be impossible to close, or if they're closed, will eventually become liabilities." ICP work is therefore disqualification work: it puts scarce selling time on quality prospects — a stated Korn Ferry learning objective.

SlideShare — Six Key Elements deck · Qwilr

The Sales Funnel — beating the roller coaster

The Funnel exists to stop boom-and-bust "roller coaster" selling. A seller must do all four kinds of work continuously, in balance — not only closing work when the quarter is short. On a regular cycle: closing work on the Best Few, prospecting work narrowing the Universe, qualifying work Above the Funnel, and covering work In the Funnel — so new objectives are always entering as others close.

SellingSherpa — book summary · Social Media Today

Working a complex sale, step by step

This is the process in use — the synthesis the research drew from the book's elements and Korn Ferry's current programme:

1. Set the Single Sales Objective (SSO)

   One specific objective for this sale, stated in product/service, revenue or units, and close date. Everything on the Blue Sheet is judged for relevance to it. Test the account against the Ideal Customer Profile first; if the fit is poor, do not invest.

2. Chart the Buying Influences

   Name every Economic Buyer, User Buyer, Technical Buyer and Coach; record degree of influence, response mode, and rating (+5 to −5). Any blank box gets a Red Flag.

3. Write a Win-Result for each influence

   No Win-Result means you don't know why they would say yes. That gap becomes the question plan for the next call — which is where Conceptual Selling takes over.

4. Assess your position honestly

   List Strengths (passing the three tests) and Red Flags. Analyse the competition — including the real alternatives: a direct competitor, building it internally, spending the budget elsewhere, and doing nothing.

5. Build the Best Action Plan

   Keep it short — summaries of the book say 4–5 actions. Each action must either eliminate a Red Flag or capitalise on a Strength, be doable in one or two calls, be urgent, and build on prior work. Assign an owner and a date. If no action would improve your position, the opportunity may be dead — "win fast / lose fast," in Korn Ferry's current phrasing.

6. Work the calls conceptually, and update the sheet

   After every call, update the Blue Sheet, place the objective in the Funnel, and rebalance the four kinds of funnel work to avoid the roller coaster.

7. Close only to Win-Win

   If the outcome would be Win-Lose for the customer, walk away rather than book a liability.

Oracle Siebel — Strategic Selling workflow · SellingSherpa · Korn Ferry — Strategic Selling

"Customers don't buy a product or a service — they buy their Concept of what that product or service will do for them."

Each buyer carries a mental picture — a "solution image" — of what success looks like, what the problem is, and what a remedy should do. That picture, not your feature list, is what they are actually buying against. The consequences run through everything else on this page:

• Never start with a product pitch — a "dog-and-pony" presentation — to people whose Concept you do not know. Start by listening.
• Your understanding of your benefits does not count; the prospect's understanding counts. Listening is a selling tool, not a courtesy.
• Different influences hold different Concepts — Operations sees fewer bottlenecks, Finance sees predictable cost, IT sees no integration pain — so the Concept must be uncovered per person, and your information tailored to that Concept.
• Only after the Concept is clear do you give information — and only the information that links your solution to their Concept. If the sale cannot be Win-Win on their Concept, walk away.

Prospeo — Conceptual Selling field guide (verified live) · Coevera (verified live) · SlideServe — The New Conceptual Selling deck

The three phases of a Conceptual Selling call

Three pieces of pre-call discipline frame all three phases: one Single Sales Objective for the overall sale; the near-term Action Commitment you want from this call; and a Valid Business Reason (VBR) — a reason, stated from the customer's perspective, why they should spend their time meeting you. Plan and rehearse the call on the Green Sheet; after the call, what you learned feeds the Blue Sheet.

Underneath the phases sits the stance: Joint Venture selling — selling with the customer, not to them. Customer input into the solution creates customer ownership, which creates long-term commitment: input → ownership → commitment.

Coevera (verified live) · Vida / SmartWinnr · Miller Heiman — Conceptual Selling programme flyer (PDF) · SlideServe deck

The five question types

Questions are planned in advance, by type, on the Green Sheet. Together they are how the Concept is extracted. (The illustrative forms below come from secondary guides, not book quotations.)

Two smaller tools are also named in the training materials: "Golden Silence" — deliberately pausing after a question so the customer fills the silence with more information, and so the seller can think — and attention to question signals: "How" questions from a customer tend to signal movement toward commitment, while persistent "Why" questions signal the sale is not close. Treat those as practitioner gloss from secondary sources, not core doctrine.

Why "sell to the Concept, not the features" works: a feature only becomes a reason to buy when the buyer connects it to their picture of the problem and the result. Presenting before discovery wastes the buyer's time, invites objections that are really un-surfaced Basic Issues, and forfeits the Joint Venture effect. Korn Ferry describes the method today as helping sellers "assess buyer needs carefully and avoid misalignment between what customers want and what you present," concluding "every meeting with clear actions for both sides."

LeanSummits · Gong · SlideServe deck · Korn Ferry (verified live)

Korn Ferry Sell · OneMetric (verified live) · Korn Ferry — LAMP

Wikipedia · Biblio · Blanchard LeaderChat (verified live)

How the parable works

The book is a short allegorical story, not a manual. A bright young man wants to work for — and become — an effective manager. Travelling widely, he finds only two kinds: "tough" autocratic managers (bottom-line, interested in results; their organisations seem to win while their people lose) and "nice" democratic managers (supportive, interested in people; their people seem to win while their organisation loses). He judges each "only partially effective… like being half a manager."

Then he hears of a manager nearby whose people produce great results and love working there — a man who calls himself a One Minute Manager "because it takes very little time for me to get very big results from people." The manager won't simply explain himself; he sends the young man to talk to his people, who teach the three secrets in turn. Two plaques in the office state the philosophy:

"People Who Feel Good About Themselves Produce Good Results."

"The Best Minute I Spend Is The One I Invest In People."

At the end, the young man becomes a One Minute Manager himself, writes a pocket "One Minute Manager's Game Plan" — set goals → praise or reprimand behaviours → encourage people; speak the truth; laugh, work, enjoy, and encourage others to do the same — and is charged to give the gift away: share it with others. In the 2015 version the frame is the same, with the Manager holding a single weekly meeting (Wednesday 9–11 a.m. in the story: review last week, problems, plans for next week; decisions are binding) and otherwise leaving people to self-lead.

"One minute" is symbolic: each interaction is brief because it was made clear in advance, not because it is rushed. The book's behavioural-science rationale: "Goals begin behaviours; consequences maintain behaviours" — goal clarity starts performance, and immediate consequences are what keep it going.

Runn · Ryan Delaney — book notes · SuperSummary

First Secret — One Minute Goal Setting

The foundation: "All good performance starts with clear goals." The book's image is bowling: bowling blind, with the pins hidden, is pointless — and a manager who only calls out the misses is worse. One Minute Goal Setting is simply:

1. Agree on your goals

   Manager and report together. In the 1982 original the manager more often set and handed them down; in 2015 this is explicitly a joint, collaborative process, with clear expectations and examples.

2. See what good behaviour looks like

   Show or describe good performance in behavioural terms — observable and measurable — not attitudes or feelings. The book's related definition: a problem only exists if there is a difference between what is actually happening and what you desire to be happening; if you cannot describe the desired behaviour, you are not describing a problem, you are complaining.

3. Write each goal on a single sheet of paper, in less than 250 words

   The goal and its performance standard, so it can be read in about a minute. Manager keeps a copy; the report keeps a copy.

4. Read and re-read each goal

   About a minute each time.

5. Take a minute, periodically, to look at your performance

   In the New version: daily.

6. See whether your behaviour matches your goal

   — and self-correct.

The 80/20 framing: "80% of your really important results will come from 20% of your goals," so One Minute Goal Setting is done only on that vital 20% — the key areas of responsibility, which in practice means about three to six goals per person. Deliberately few goals, each unambiguous, is the point: it is what makes the later one-minute review and one-minute feedback possible, because both sides already know exactly what "good" and "off target" mean.

Ryan Delaney — book notes · Shortform · Blanchard LeaderChat (verified live)

Second Secret — One Minute Praisings

The motto, on the plaque: "Help People Reach Their Full Potential — Catch Them Doing Something Right." Most managers do the opposite — catch people doing something wrong. The One Minute Manager deliberately observes early on, when a learner is only approximately right, and praises approximate rightness — so the person learns what "right" is, and eventually catches and praises themselves. A One Minute Praising works well when you:

1. Tell people up front that you are going to let them know how they are doing

   The no-surprises contract — feedback is announced in advance, in both directions.

2. Praise people immediately

   As soon as possible after the behaviour. Do not save it up for a review.

3. Tell people what they did right — be specific

   "Good job" alone fails this step.

4. Tell people how good you feel about what they did right

   — and how it helps the organisation and the other people who work there.

5. Stop for a moment of silence

   Let them feel how good you feel.

6. Encourage them to do more of the same
7. Shake hands, or touch people in a way that makes it clear you support their success

   in the organisation.

Note the shape of what is said: behaviour (specific) → your feeling about it → its wider value → encouragement. No sandwich, no generalities.

Ryan Delaney — book notes · Blanchard LeaderChat (verified live)

Third Secret — One Minute Reprimands (1982) become Re-Directs (2015)

The original Reprimand is used when a person knows what to do — the goal was clear, they are capable — and still does it wrong. Its power depends on two halves kept together and in order: being "tough and nice" — tough on the performance in the first half, nice to the person in the second. Never reprimand a learner for ignorance; that is a goal-clarity problem, and it sends you back to the First Secret.

The distinction underneath, stated as a slogan: "We are not just our behaviour; we are the person managing our behaviour." That separation is what makes the second half coherent — you can attack the behaviour without attacking the person's worth, and the person can change the behaviour without defending their identity.

Ryan Delaney — book notes · FreeBookSummary

What changed in 2015 — One Minute Re-Directs

In Blanchard's own explanation: reprimands fitted a command-and-control workplace. Now work changes so fast that "people are almost always in learning mode… Learners usually make mistakes because they are inexperienced or unaware… Being reprimanded could immobilise them." Leadership is now side-by-side — managers as partners, not bosses — aimed at producing self-leaders. Reprimands are not abolished, but they become rare, reserved for a person who knows what to do but won't do it. The default corrective tool is the Re-Direct:

1. First — check the goal was clear

   The new, explicit precondition. Talk through what you observed and whether the goal was clear at the time. If it was not clear, the leader accepts responsibility and clarifies the goal — no redirect. Only if the goal was clear and a performance problem exists do you proceed.

2. Redirect as soon as possible

   After the incident — "don't hoard your feelings." Delay makes feedback more emotional.

3. Confirm the facts first, and review the mistake together — be specific
4. Express how you feel about the mistake and its impact on results

   Name the concrete consequence — for the customer, for example.

5. Pause, and be quiet

   Allow the person to feel concerned, and to feel the impact.

6. Let them know they are better than their mistake

   — and that you still think well of them as a person.

7. Remind them you have confidence and trust in them

   You support their success, and you do not expect a repeat of the mistake. And understand: when the redirect is over, it's over.

Two more 2015 changes round out the picture: goal-setting becomes collaborative rather than handed down, and Praisings add encouraging people to catch themselves doing things right and share their successes — self-praising as the route to self-leadership, not boasting. The manager's stance shifts from "responsible for ensuring goals are set" to "responsive to people's needs so they can become high-performing self-leaders."

Blanchard LeaderChat (verified live) · Blanchard / Berrett-Koehler (verified live) · Chief Learning Officer · Ken Blanchard Books

The core principles

• Catch people doing something right. Develop people by accenting the positive — especially approximately right behaviour in learners — rather than policing errors.
• Clarity of goals before everything. Most performance problems are, on inspection, clarity problems. The manager's first diagnostic is always "was the goal clear, in behavioural terms?" Feedback without a pre-agreed standard is just opinion.
• Feedback speed and specificity. Praise and correction both lose power with delay and vagueness. "Feedback is the breakfast of champions" — deliver it immediately, name the exact behaviour, state your feeling and the impact, then pause so the feeling lands.
• Separate behaviour from the person, in both directions. Praise the behaviour and affirm the person; correct the behaviour and reaffirm the person. When it's over, it's over.
• The manager's time discipline. Brief, frequent, focused touches replace long supervision: because goals fit on one page and feedback takes a minute, the manager does not need to hover, hold long reviews, or save problems up — and in the story ends up with more free time. Brevity is a design constraint that forces clarity, not a claim that management takes sixty seconds.
• Everyone is a potential winner. "Everyone is a potential winner; some people are disguised as losers — don't let their appearances fool you." Hiring winners, or systematically training potential winners, are the only two respectable options the book offers.

Ryan Delaney — book notes · Blanchard LeaderChat (verified live)

Research synthesis, §8.3 — Korn Ferry · Blanchard LeaderChat