Terri Norvell is the resident president over at MultiFamilyPerformance. She trains managers to think like business owners, develop leadership skills and create value for their customers. She’s also a good friend – so we don’t want her to be thrown to the “Twitter wolves” – or Twolves, as we might call them.

Twitter (you might know) is an online social networking tool that was designed originally to connect friends. Now, in a few short years, it’s become the much-touted, newest messiah of business success.

In fact, the over-hype for Twitter is just beginning. You’ll soon see a torrent of “bestselling” books streaming from the printing presses of both major and minor publishers.

Terri, like the rest of us, doesn’t want to miss out on the next technological savior, so you can now find her at @TerriNorvell.

As a beginner, Terri is, understandably, focused on “how does Twitter work?” And, jillions of people want to tell her how to “work” Twitter. They are lining up on every street corner to tell her that she can get speaking gigs with Twitter, explode her business with Twitter and tons of similar Twhype.

And, we just keep humming Henley’s tune: “The more you know, the less you understand.”

So, our advice to Terri is – Don’t worry. You’ll learn the ‘how to’ stuff. In fact, Twitter is so new that anyone who tells you “how to” is full of some sort of shirt starch, anyway.

Here’s our advice – without the starch. Follow what you already know, especially the kinds of things that Debra and Sarah teach (below):

Debra Fine – The Fine Art of Small Talk

Twitter is a tool that allows you to become part of the conversation. Effective conversation is Debra Fine’s expertise – and you must read her book (or re-read it) if you are going to learn our version of “The Fine Art of <Internet> Small Talk.”

We’ve written about her in two articles over on our HiddenSpeakerTreasures blog – which we cleverly titled, “The Fine Art of Internet Small Talk – Part 1 and Part 2.”

Take, just for instance, a few of her “Fifty Ways to Fuel a Conversation” – and see if you don’t agree that Terri will learn more about Twitter success from Debra than she will from all the marketing/PR types hanging out there.

• • Let the natural person in you come out when talking to others
  • Include everyone in the group in conversation whenever possible
  • Seek out other’s opinions
  • Make an effort to help people if you can

And that’s just a handful of the “50 Ways” – and those 50 are just a page or two of the whole book.

Sarah Michel – Perfecting Connecting

Twitter allows you to connect quickly to people around the globe. So, if Terri is going to truly connect on Twitter, she should remember what she’s already learned from Sarah Michel over at Perfecting Connecting.

The essence of Sarah Michel’s message is this phrase:

Find out what people need and then figure out a way to give it to them.

We’ve written so much about Sarah it’s hard to send you to one article (so search both blogs for her name), but here’s Sarah:

I enjoy connecting people, but I don’t give to get. That’s ‘transactional networking,’ which is not what I’m about. I practice ‘intentional connecting.’ Intentional connecting is connecting people with the intention of helping them first.

The Bottom Line

Most people on Twitter are either selling, beating their chest or just hanging out. Almost none of them are “social networking.”

Even so, Twitter, like any other place where people gather, is overflowing with abundance. There are moments of grace on Twitter just as there are wherever humans get together.

Which is why Terri will do her best job with Twitter only if we change those Henley words again to “All the things she thought she knew… she did!” You go, Terri. You’re ready for Twitter.

Note: The photo of Don Henley up top is courtesy of Alan Light over on Flickr. Thank you Creative Commons!

That’s why I’ve been reading Dave Kurlan’s Baseline Selling: How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. He uses the metaphor of baseball to help minor leaguers like me move up to the major leagues of selling. Too often, when I step up to the sales plate I feel like a grade-schooler facing Roger Clemens.

I blame Arthur Miller. Yes, I have to blame someone for my hesitations and indecisions when it comes to selling. Miller’s classic, Death of a Salesman, captured a record six Tony Awards in 1949 is still going strong in productions around the world.

It’s hard to overestimate how much of our culture – literary and otherwise – works to convince us that being a “salesman” is a questionable pursuit, at best, and a sleazy one at worst. Many of us buy into this stereotypical portrait of the selling profession and it becomes the last thing on earth we’d want to become.

Problem is, unless we’re able to write the great American novel, hit a golf ball like Tiger Woods or act like Helen Mirren, we’re often likely to end up in sales. Whether we run our own business or work for a large corporation, our success often comes down to our ability to sell.

Sales expert Don Cooper teaches the art of selling and tells his entrepreneurial audiences, “You love what you do, right? Well, you better learn to love selling, because if you don’t love selling you’ll never get the chance to do what you love most.”

Yeah, well, easy for him to say. Learning to love selling is like learning to love organic chemistry or calculus. You try hard, but the words just don’t stick, your mind wanders and you just can’t retain the concepts.

And that’s why Dave Kurlan’s Baseline Selling is such a breath of fresh air. I can still recite Willie Mays’ batting averages and Sandy Koufax’s ERA’s, but for the life of me I can’t seem to remember what the heck to do when I put on my sales uniform.

Dave Kurlan is the founder of Objective Management Group Inc. and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates Inc. He’s an expert on helping companies hire the right sales professionals, as well as assess and develop their current sales force.

But, more importantly, in this book, he’s the Miller Huggins, Tony LaRussa and Leo Durocher of selling. He will coach you through every step of the sales process with baseball analogies that work – and stick.

For instance, the psychology of selling and making sales cold calls is “Getting to First Base.” Dave describes 7 challenges that could be blocking your way to getting a hit in the world of selling. Pretty sure I face all seven!

In our selling career, Sheryl and I have been toiling away in the minors longer than most of Coach Kurlan’s other players. If you’ve got even a little bit of experience in selling, you’ll be off to second base, third base and even touching home plate very soon after picking up his book.

We can’t wait to get to up to the major leagues. That’s when we can get to the really good stuff in the book, like the “The Hidden Ball Trick,” the “Pick-off Attempt” and, who knows, I might even hit a “Grand Slam.”

Until then, we’re down here in Double AA ball. But, believe me, with the help of Dave Kurlan’s Baseline Selling, the PA announcer will soon be booming out:

“Batting third and playing shortstop, Sheryl Kay.
Batting fourth and playing left field, Michael Benidt.”

See you in the major leagues of selling soon.

For years I’ve been fortunate enough to meet annually with an international think tank of executive coaches at the Executive Coaching Summit and back in 2003 we had a realization during one of these sessions that we were just a bunch of executive coaches sitting around talking about how to improve global business leadership and yet we might as well have been sitting around contemplating our navels because we were missing key stakeholders in that conversation.

So here’s what we did about it. We dreamed up an organization that would bring together the multiple stakeholders who had an interest in the success of coaching solutions in organizations…not just executive coaches with a passion for the advancement and stewardship of our profession, but also coaching directors of organizations and organizational leaders who utilize coaching services, those who train coaches, and those who are leading the charge to research the impact of coaching and the ROI (return on investment) to organizations who deploy coaches.

Voila! We hit upon a real market need. It took us awhile to organize, incorporate and set up our first board, but now we’re moving forward like gangbusters on our mission to create opportunities for dialogue — a place to have the conversations that aren’t happening anywhere else.

To that end, we’ve created free teleforums that happen every 6-8 weeks on various topics relevant to organizations. Our goal is to focus from an organization-centric perspective, not a coach-centric world view. The main activity of ICCO is to hold multiple symposia. These are two- to three-day dialogues limited to a maximum of 40 attendees per event to ensure optimal conversation. As it says on the ICCO site: For each event, capacity is limited to 10 coaches, 10 organizational representatives, and 10 participants who are coaching researchers, educators, trainers, or associations. Participants are accepted on a first-come, first-served basis. Once each stakeholder sector is filled, we will refer you to the symposia being planned in other locations.

Now, if you’re doing the math, you’ll see that the above breakdown only accounts for 30 people. The other ten are comprised of design team members, board members and the Dean and administrator who support the event. The symposia follow a template format that includes cases presented by organizational leaders and then breakout sessions where participants take on the roles of either coach or consultant to address that organization’s challenge.

So, back to DC. We had several leaders of government agencies (of course…we’re in DC) as well as corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, a few associations represented (ASTD), and even a dairy company from Norway in attendance. We had representatives from universities both local and international, as well as coach training organizations, researchers, boutique coaching organizations and individual practitioners in the room. The diverse perspectives were united around the exploration of meaty questions about global challenges like sustainability of the planet, leadership in a global economy, politician as coach, and coaches as leaders.

We laughed, we cried, it was better than Cats! We explored ideas as “out there” as creating a set of governing laws for a global society that could be co-created in an open source online format where every global citizen can contribute to the content. We explored practical, grounded ideas around books to read and resources to share. And everything in-between, including the role of the coach and whether or not we should question the values of a client organization and what impact that might have on global sustainability. Participants reported that they were engaged, inspired, challenged, and that they valued being able to be in this caliber of dialogue utilizing both their heads and their hearts, which was out of the norm for their typical business environments.

While the number of participants at each symposia is limited by design, the number of symposia that can be held in the world is unlimited. We held the pilot in June 2006 in Sacramento, and it was so well received that we had the second one in NYC in October 2006. We had to turn people away from that one, which was the catalyst for volunteers to initiate multiple upcoming events. Watch the ICCO website for specific details, but in the plans are one in Mexico (May 2007), one in Seattle (June 2007), Toronto in October 2007 and one in Boston also in October 2007 and four more on deck thus far for 2008. These all have different topics, one is on Neurosciences, one is on Research, one is on International Coaching, one is on Cross-Cultural Coaching, etc.

So, if you hunger for meaningful professional dialogue with a stewardship component, this is the community for you to play in. This is the dialogue you’ve been looking for. Find an upcoming symposium that works for you or organize one yourself (we’ve got a template, a Dean, and an administrator to help you…you just need a date, a location and a design team) and you, too, can contribute to the dialogue that is making business and the world a better place.