Selling With Noble Purpose. Lisa Earle McLeod
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Earnings increased 36x
Franchise churn down 35%
G Adventures: Igniting Passion and Purpose in Resellers
Make no mistake, G Adventures is a sexy company (no offense, banking, basements, and IT). As the global leader in adventure travel, they take people everywhere from African safaris to cycling in Tuscany to trekking the Inca Trail. Their team is committed to changing lives through travel. The company had experienced 20% year‐over‐year sales growth for over two decades.
Yet as exciting as G Adventures is, they needed to translate their passion to their resellers: travel agents who book trips for their clients. The sales team knew their trips were life‐changing, but the travel agents often saw G Adventures as just another vendor.
To help you understand the business model, many travelers still turn to travel agents for advice about where to go and for help with complex trips. Agents direct a large number of travel decisions and dollars. Because of this, every tour company, hotel, and travel vendor on the planet wants agents to love them. The agents themselves typically join the industry because they are passionate about travel. Yet as they progress in their careers, agents often find themselves booking dream trips for others while they sit at their desks.
The sales team at G Adventures wanted to do more than sell trips: they wanted to help their agents rediscover their own sense of purpose. They landed on their NSP: We help people discover more passion, purpose, and happiness.
In this case, “people” extended to agents. This required transforming the sales process. Instead of showing agents photos and videos of trips, the team created interactive sales experiences. They used everything from inspirational card decks and music to an actual magic trick to help their agents, people sitting at their desks, reconnect to the power of changing lives through travel.
The sales team even went so far as to change their job titles from account executives to Global Purpose Specialist, or GPS for short. They wanted to make it clear that their job is to help agents discover more passion, purpose, and happiness in their jobs, so they can help people discover more passion, purpose, and happiness on trips.
G Adventures' impressive year‐over‐year 20% sales growth has now become 35% growth. Their annual event, the Change Makers Summit—held for the agents who change the most lives—has garnered international recognition as one of the most innovative events in the industry.
G Adventures
We help people discover more passion, purpose, and happiness
20% sales growth → 35% sales growth
Industry leadership
Orange County Court: Simple Elegance
Many companies tend to try to “kitchen sink” their NSP—that is, to throw in every single thing you could possibly do for customers. It's important to fight the temptation to overdescribe; a simple statement is much more powerful.
One of my favorite examples of simple elegance comes from California's Orange County Court system. Their NSP is: We unclog the wheels of justice.
You might not think of a court system as having customers, but the Orange County Court believes they do. They consider the plaintiffs, the defendants, the jurors, and the lawyers all their customers. Their NSP speaks to their desire to make a difference in people's lives during times of conflict and stress. They strive to implement the principles of our country in a just, fair, and efficient way for all parties involved.
Interestingly, Orange County's NSP didn't come down from the executive team. It came from a single person. During a leadership program, the 60 top managers, divided among 8 tables, discussed how Orange County makes a difference to customers. When the teams reported back their results, one of the in‐house attorneys stared at the lists on the flip charts and said, “You know what we do? We unclog the wheels of justice.”
You could have heard a pin drop in that room after she said it. Sixty people sat taller in their chairs, smiling because they knew their jobs mattered. I swear that I even saw some of them start to get misty‐eyed.
These words spoke to the highest aspirations of everyone in the room. That single powerful statement contained what Jim Collins refers to in his book Good to Great as “the quiet ping of truth like a single, clear, perfectly struck note hanging in the air in the hushed silence of a full auditorium at the end of a quiet movement of a Mozart piano concerto.”
An ideal NSP is not full of bravado or bluster; it's not something you hope to do. It's something you can do right now. It's fully within your grasp, and every person in the room knows it. It doesn't require explaining or defending, because it taps into what you're already doing and what you want to do more of. Your NSP names who you are on your best day as an organization.
You Don't Have to Create World Peace
You'll notice that none of the preceding examples include discovering lifesaving new drugs or creating world peace. They come from five very different organizations in industries whose products (commercial banking, foundation repair, IT support, travel, and court services) don't always scream “Noble Purpose.”
I intentionally chose these organizations to demonstrate how seemingly ordinary companies are harnessing the power of purpose. These examples demonstrate that no matter what you sell, you can always find your NSP.
If the guys at a concrete company can find their NSP, so can you.
You might also notice that when we talk about these firms, we don't use impersonal pronouns. Instead of saying “The company uses its NSP to differentiate,” we say “The company uses their NSP to differentiate.” Our words create worlds. Referring your company as an “it” is as impersonal as referring to customers as its. The best teams don't talk about the company and the customers; they talk about our company and our customers.
Why Mission and Vision Aren't Enough
Mission and vision statements can be compelling. But more often than not, they're internally focused. In Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World's Great Companies, former Procter & Gamble (P&G) CMO Jim Stengel writes, “When you strip away the platitudes from those documents, what's left typically boils down to: ‘We want our current business model to make or keep us the leader of our current pack of competitors in current and immediately foreseeable market conditions.’”
In today's more socially aware times, mission and vision have expanded to include other stakeholders. Yet many don't amount to much more than: we want to serve our customers, our employees, and our communities, make as much money as possible, and be nice people while we're doing it.
This is the blah blah blah formula for mediocrity.
Even the largest organizations benefit from a succinct purpose. I was a sales manager for P&G early in my career. During my tenure, I saw our stock rise and split, delivering a 199% return. But by 2000, P&G was in trouble. The company lost $85 billion in market capitalization in only six months. Jim Stengel says, “P&G's core businesses were stagnating and its people were demoralized.”
Great brands weren't enough. P&G's people needed a purpose.
A.G. Lafley, then the CEO, asked Stengel to take on the role of global marketing officer to help transform the culture of the company to one wherein “the consumer is boss.”
Stengel says, “To hit these big targets, we needed an even bigger goal: identifying and activating a distinctive ideal, a purpose. Improving people's lives would be the explicit goal of every business in the P&G portfolio.”
Stengel writes, “A.G. Lafley and I—along with