At this client we are working very hard in an entrepreneurial environment.  We are creating a new business model, we are aggressively in the marketplace, we are on-boarding customers, having success & failure and everyone is working very hard to meet our targets and goals.   We have thrown a global team of people together with loosely defined roles and asked them to do things that they might not be able to do, don’t want to do or simply can’t do, but everyone is giving it  their best shot.

This brings me to the point…  It is my responsibility to build the organization out as one of the founders and a key contributor to strategy and the overall business model.   Everyone involved has great passion for the company, the industry and making an impact.   So the other day as I listened in on our team trying to solve a very complex challenge around how to figure out what to do when and who should do what, I got my normal urge to walk in and try to start persuading them to do it “my way”.  I stopped myself and sat back down in my chair.

Even though we are at a critical stage in the business and we are building toward specific revenue goals and solving this problem will help us accelerate progress quickly,  I chose to do nothing!  Why?  Because we can not build a scalable business on the backs of a couple of people dictating what everyone should be doing and when.  If  we have the right people doing the right things they should be able to figure it out or get pretty close on their own.

The meetings got heated, the tension was building as I listened and the urge to jump in and provide a “solution” was insatiable.  I let it go and spoke to some team members afterward and they looked like they had just completed the climb to the summit of Mt. Everest.  I advised and mentored them and suggested that they re-group the next day and that we meet to discuss their solution the following day in detail.

The solution that was proposed was very close to what I was thinking might be the best approach to try.  The difference is they came up with it on their own in the heat of battle.  They are bought-in to the solution and dedicated to making sure that the execution of the solution is on target.  It cost us one day of time in progress but we gained an invaluable amount of learning in the area of Teamwork and Communication.

It remains to be seen if the solution will work but I know that this team will continue to fight, think, create and execute with passion because they are empowered to do so in our environment and the rewards come back in customer satisfaction and progress toward our goals.  This was a great light bulb moment for me.

The next time you think you have the answer… Stop! and do nothing.

This ties-in to the last discussion about “design thinking”.  When you approach your selling effort as a product development process you can learn much more about what is happening.  If you elicit feedback from your market & employees and understand your competition there is a much higher succes rate in building something that is sustainable and repeatable other than a continuous cycle of hiring and firing salespeople.  If you were to step back from the day-to-day and really examine what you are doing, you might find things are very different than they seem. 

Here are a list of things to look for:

1.  Do you know who you are selling too?  Do you have clean data for them?  Do you have a process to manage data collection, cleaning and communication?  Do you have a collaborative technology platform for the data?  

2.  Do you know how to be “useful” in the selling process?  Do you know what “job” you do for your clients?

3.  Do you have a big idea?  (For instance if you sell services you probably say something like this… “We have a methodology, we hire the best people, we have lots of customer references, etc…)  WHO CARES?  Everybody says this.  Come up with a big idea!

4.  Does everyone on your sales team operate at 100% of quota or more?

5.  Have you tried to buy “appointments” or “leads” with little or no success?

6.  Do you print a lot of “brochures” and create lots of PPT’s?

7.  Do you ask your sales team members to do too many jobs?   Prospect, Help Marketing, Find Data, Cold Call, Trade-Shows, Write Proposals, Manage Partnerships, Close Deals, Support Delivery, Account Manage, Grow the Account, Pick-Up Donuts for the office, etc…

8.  Do you execute “something” every month or better yet every week as part of your demand generation process?

9.  Do you use the web as part of your demand generation process?  Not just a request form but strategically using your site, social media, SEO, useful content, video and other things to drive the demand generation engine.

10.  Is finding more customers and more revenue really important to you?  What if you stayed flat?  What would happen then?  What if you hire and fire in a six month cycle again?

IF you can ask and begin to answer these questions you can start designing an efficient, scalable and repeatable sales process.  You can also begin to understand the roles of the people in the process and start hiring the right people for the right job with the highest likelihood of success.

Don’t hire this guy if you can help it!  Even if he is family…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bECV_yF_I0w

Yes, I said opportunity to reinvent the way you engage with your suspects, prospects and current customers. Design Thinking is a great framework for this.

After an Innovation Strategy class at Northwestern University, I started thinking about improving the B2B sales process using innovation theory. My ideas are still in early beta but they feel solid enough to share.

In a June, 2008 HBR article (http://bit.ly/71NEtr) Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO defined design thinking as the following:

спални комплекти“a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

This idea translates nicely to the B2B selling process. Think of it this way…

“use rapid customer feedback to evolve the solution that adds the most value to the customer and can be feasibly delivered quickly to the market.”

As an example, I have recently been working with a Technology Services firm that fixes broken IT recruiting processes. The company sells to anyone that hires contingent, permanent or project based human capital. They had problems hiring themselves and also saw the problems that existed within their own clients’ process.  So they fixed the process for internal use. When they were done, what they had built was intriguing enough to take to a few open minded customers to see if it fixed their problem. It did.

These early customers are helping the Company iterate and get the service ready for prime time. The process has been very rewarding and successful.

This company didn’t build first then try to sell. They built something that did “just enough” then validated assumptions by engaging customers in a true process of value creation. They achieved buy-in and input into the solution and have confirmed that there is real value. This will create a new market position, a new service and maybe even a brand new business.

It sure beats a cold call, a brochure with features and benefits or a slick “sales system” that is focused on what you think the market wants to buy and “selling” it to them.  This buyer/seller engagement is transparent, problem solving and high value. It is NOT a buyer seller “transaction”!

Rob Wolcott and Mike Lippitz are former professors from Grad School at Northwestern University. I credit them both with having great impact on my professional and personal life through the time that I spent with them in the classroom and outside of that as friends, advisors and business luminaries. Their teachings on innovation have shaped me for the future and the next chapter in my business life.

If you are thinking about how to stay competitive in the “new normal” and are focused on driving innovation, opportunity, new business model creation and REAL VALUE for your organization this book is a must read…

“Grow from Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation” is the book I am recommending. You can buy it from Amazon who has the best deal I have seen by using this URL – http://bit.ly/GFW_Amazon

The book is great from my perspective as it pulls together a lot of the things I learned during my time in the classroom and it also puts it in a context that is great for anyone in business.

Special Idea… If you buy the book and want to see if Rob and/or Mike will sign your copy I would be happy to try and make that happen for you. I think I could get them to do it. 

Leave a comment on this post  if you get a copy and would like to have it signed. I am happy to help you make this happen.

Happy Reading!

Coley

P.S. – In closing here is a note that Rob Wolcott sent to me after a recent meeting when I asked him some questions about the book. It may help you get a better feel for it… Search “Rob Wolcott Northwestern University” to learn more about Rob and his work.

ROB’S NOTE:

Coley,

Great seeing you last week and discussing your current endeavors. You asked for more about the book, Grow From Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation, so ‘voila!’

Grow From Within (GFW) examines how established companies can build new businesses… not just new products or services, but truly new businesses. By researching these ‘extreme users’… someone we refer to as the corporate entrepreneur… we uncover critical insights regarding how to make more traditional innovation (e.g.—new product development, R&D-led innovation) more effective, how to enhance the success rate of everything from corporate lab research and new market entry to changing the way established business units operate or how companies pursue open innovation.

Your question about the audience… GFW will be great for senior executives and CEOs at established companies, as well as mid-level managers tackling the innovation challenges, or aspiring to be a successful corporate entrepreneur. Really, anyone concerned with driving growth, especially organic growth.

You’ll remember the fundamental frameworks from class: The Innovation Radar and the Four Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship, both subjects of our MIT Sloan Management Review articles from 2006 and 2007. Additionally, as you will recall, my co-author, Professor Lippitz, has extensive experience with the Department of Defense, so we have some unique perspectives from government, especially a detailed case regarding bringing Stealth to market and changing the paradigm of defense and offense. Bill Perry, former US Secretary of Defense, is in fact one of the endorsers on the cover of the book.

Let me know if you have any more questions. I’d be happy to discuss this further. It is, after all, my life’s work and passion. Please feel free to send this on to others or mention any aspect of it in your blog. Thanks again for your ongoing interest. Let me know how I can help with your endeavors.

To the Future, W

During a recent unloading of the DW, as we call it at home, I realized that Sales & Marketing is the dishwasher of many organizations.  It is kind of there in the corner waiting to be unloaded.  Yes, sometimes you want to get right in there and unload that bad boy and it can be an easy job.  But usually, when that weird platter is in there and you have no idea where it goes and it sits on the counter for two days waiting to be put away, it becomes a crappy job that is left unfinished.  It gets done in the end but only because you know it should get done so you can cook another meal and serve dinner.  Very rarely do you want to dive right in and do it. 

This is very common in companies that do not have Sales & Marketing as a core competency or consider themselves Sales & Marketing focused.  They end up struggling, hiring the wrong people for the wrong job and not understanding the process.  Revenue goes up and down and there is no sustained growth.  Sales & Marketing feels like unloading the dishwasher.  If you are not a Sales & Marketing focused organization do you think you can hire good Sales & Marketing people?  Who wants to go to work and unload the dishwasher?

How can you begin to transform your organization into a Sales & Marketing focused organization? 

At my house we approach it with these 5 steps as a framework…

1.  Cross -Functional Team (Me – VP of Sales & Marketing, My Wife - President, COO, CFO, VP of Supply Chain,etc…)

2.  Good Strategy and Communication (“I will do silverware, you take the platter that I have never seen before.”  We work on opposite ends of the kitchen, we won’t be in each others way.  It’s efficient, goals and tasks are defined and we measure it by how long it takes to unload and whether or not everything is put away.)

3.  Feedback Loop and Adjustment (“Next time can you take silverware and the dishes for the china cabinet in the dinning room?  It is closer to the silverware drawer.”)

4.  Right People, Right Role (My wife puts away the platter because I have never seen it and I do silverware because my mild OCD wants me to make sure it is all stacked and lined up nice in the silverware drawer insert thingy.  This works great.  We may even be excited about our roles but not quite the idea of unloading the DW.)

5.  An Eye Toward Innovation (“Maybe I can strap the dishes to the dogs back and she can carry them to the dining room while I am putting away the silverware?” – The President did not fund this initiative.  Too much risk for our portfolio.  I am safe enough within my working environment to share this kind of idea without fear of being fired!  This is a pretty important point…)

Good luck and if you need help getting your dishwasher unloaded let me know.  I can bring my OCD and my Rottweiler to help you out.  The President is my competitive advantage and is not available for engagements!

Unloading the dishwasher

“True Marketing Doesn’t Just Sell The Story”…

http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=138760

These are the descriptions given to the people that may be the most valuable to your organization. These folks ask the stupid questions. They also ask why? They are willing to get on board with ideas and change, they offer lots of ideas themselves. They are usually very persuasive (ever think someone was trying to submarine you and your agenda by ganging up on you?) and people seem to magically gravitate to them and want to be around them and work with them.

So why is it that these people get moved around or out of an organization?

This happens because of poor leadership, poor strategy or a myriad of other reasons.  The list is long.   If I break it down in one of my personal terms… I think it simply means there is no “Change” process.  Without good leadership you will probably not have this anyway but even with a good leadership team often the communication process gets in the way and there is a break down. It does not matter if we are talking about a Fortune 100 organization or 3 guys in a garage, the philosophy and approach remain the same. 

There are things that can be done to understand and use a “change” process as an advantage.  It does not mean things change every 3 days,  it means you understand how to manage your organization in a way that makes it possible to uncover opportunity, risk, ideas, new business models, etc…  Here it is the word of the year…  INNOVATION…

So, if you want to “Stay Ready, so you don’t have to Get Ready” when your market shifts or competition is kicking your tail all over town you better think about the “Loose Cannon”.  Maybe they should not be fired.  Maybe they should be used the way they want to be used.  We will save the psychology of it for another post.  

The “Loose Cannon” may be able to help you find growth, innovation, more customers, more employees like them, etc, etc…

The current stock market rally will surely level off or retract soon as everyone realizes that profits have been inflated by cost cutting measures and MBA stuff. When the company results begin to show decline because of no increase in revenue then what will everyone do?

Maybe that is when all of the magical “Innovation” will start? It is frustrating to hear this term thrown about in all of the media outlets, industry rags, etc… I am waiting for someone to start the discussion of Anti-Complacency. Other than GM I have not heard much about it. It seems to me that maybe if you can run your scaled down business in its current state you should understand what mistakes you made (other than blaming tough economic conditions) and try to avoid them when you scale up again (if you do not go Out of Business, or maybe you should?).

Don’t get me wrong there are some innovative things happening but most of it is in the usual places. The companies and industries that traditionally drive innovation. I would like to see some shake up in broken places. Like the Car Dealer model mentioned above for example. If U.S. Automakers were closely tied to their consumers and their industry they would understand the change impacting what cars people want to buy and how people want to buy cars. Instead they ran into the second ice berg and now are scrambling to “re-invent”.

The reaction of “we need to do something now because the economy turned” is pretty weak. I propose that companies should focus on “Staying Ready, So they don’t have to Get Ready” when things change.

More on that later…