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Getting Great Customer Feedback on a New Technology

October 10, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

You’ve got very cool new technology that thousands of labs will love. The product is ready. Rev up the Introduction Machine and sell, right? Senova Systems, a company for which I am consulting, is taking a different approach. Just before the full launch they have launched an Early Access Program. I thought you would find the concept and their decisions useful.

Senova has a developed a revolutionary new technology for measuring pH that takes time, risk, aggravation and cost and out of doing this very common measurement. (For more on this see their site: SenovaSystems.com) Their first product is a handheld pH scanner called the “pHit scanner”, They have been testing the product internally all along and further testing is part of the manufacturing scale up and beta sites. But instead of launching it immediately in to the broad market, they are taking the time to do an Early Access Program (EAP).

Why an EAP?

The CEO, Lee Leonard, is a serial entrepreneur. He knows that his market comprises highly diverse applications and that there is no way for his team to test the product in all the ways that customers will use it. He also knows that as great as the technology may be, the user experience is just as important. To ensure that they launch with the kind of confidence that only comes from deep customer knowledge, he is taking the time to do the Early Access Program.

How Many Customers to Involve

I have been involved with Early Access Programs before. An Early Access Program can take various forms. It can involve a small number of customers early in the development program, getting their input at critical junctures in the process. It can simply be a way of ensuring key customers that they will have the first units. In this case, Senova’s key objectives are to understand customer use cases thoroughly and to find any unknown corner case situations that stress some aspect of the product. For these purposes, the EAP will include a large (50) but selected set of customers. By selected, I mean that they will have customers apply and will choose a set that represents the broad range of applications that use pH measurement.

Nuts and Bolts: The Terms

Here are the 2 key parts of an EAP and the example of how Senova chose to accomplish them:

Incentive: Just getting the chance to be among the first in their company or field to get their hands on a pHit is a big incentive for some customers to participate. But to ensure that the participants are real customers (not just curious technology aficionados), the Senova program is structured as a discounted Try and Buy: Each customer selected to be an Early Access Program participant, gets to purchase a pHit scanner at a 50% discount on the retail price of $1,650.00. (To give time for the “Try”, EAP customers won’t be billed until 30 days after delivery). These customers also get a money-back guarantee; if they are not fully satisfied with the scanner, they simply return it.

In addition, participating organizations will be publicly acknowledged as key influencers. (Customers can opt out of this if they prefer anonymity.)

Required Input From the Customer: You need to be very specific about what you expect from customers in an EAP. It is common for customers to be eager to participate and then get too busy to do their part ( use the product, write an app note, or whatever else you have asked of them).

In return for the above, Senova asks its EAP customers to commit to the following:

Use the product under their normal laboratory conditions for 30 days.
Provide Senova with feedback on the user experience and technical performance through structured conversations and documents.

If you want a more complete example of how to describe or document such a program, click here to see the Senova description and FAQs.

How to Choose the Customers

If you want participation during product development, you cannot afford to involve too many customers, so pick just a few from the most important target market(s). Your closest customers may not be the best participants. For example don’t involve the most demanding customers if you want a minimum viable product market entry. The intent is toto make sure you are meeting the target market’s needs solidly.

If you want to give some customers the first units either to establish key influencers or simply as reward or for their ego gratification, then your top customer list will drive the number involved.

If, like Senova, you want to experience a diversity of application areas deeply, involve enough customers to get a good sample of the full range. For example, Senova is taking applications from interested parties and will choose 50 customers that cover as broad a set of use scenarios as possible.

Bottom Line

Yes, conducting an EAP will require significant effort and attention. You may even postpone some revenue. But it is an investment in customer insight that will yield extremely high returns.

The rewards:

Additional product testing that can validate yours or find weaknesses early, when they are least costly to fix.
Develop close relationships with participating customers, leading to ongoing customer insight, potential influencing of other customers and maybe even longer term loyalty!
Usage information that can reveal additional needs, opportunities to improve design and user experience, opportunities to integrate activities or products that are upstream or downstream from your current product.
Service and self-service content.
Faster time-to-ramp based on more effective commercialization and sales efforts.
A more engaged internal team that gains the confidence and inspiration that only comes from close customer exposure.

Input Welcome

Have you done Early Access Programs? If so, what has been your positive or negative experience with them. If you want assistance with an EAP contact me by clicking here.

Speed Up Your Sales Improvement Time

July 20, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

Sales are below plan. Does the blame game begin, or do both Marketing and Sales know what to do NOW to make a difference?

I was in a business where a sales shortfall triggered a “Performance Improvement Plan”. The afflicted business unit would go off to investigate the problem and conjure up a convincing plan for fixing it. Then implementation of that plan would begin. If someone happened to get pregnant at the beginning of this process, they had their child about the same time that we were seeing the results of this process. And those sales results were not always good. There had to be a better way.

There is. Here is a way to reduce the response time and increase the confidence in the fix.

Model What You Intend to Do

Many business development/intro plans are this:

The sales goal(s)
The list of a bunch of things that everyone will do.

Basically, there is a big collective hope that the latter will produce the former. The dynamics of how that is expected to happen aren’t specified; so when the sales don’t materialize, nobody knows what failed. Not enough “things” done? Price wrong?

The better way: “The Magic Formula”. Estimate values for these three key drivers of sales performance and then track them as metrics:

Average sales price + Length of the sales cycle + Win rate

At the beginning, you may not have much to go on to set these. Not a problem. Make an educated guess (you’ll refine that over time as you get more data). Use those estimated values to model how you will get your sales goal.

Example

Here is a model for a hypothetical business projecting $500K of sales in 12 months:

Magic Formula: Average sales price $30K, 4 month sale cycle, 25% win rate

Given the average sales price, you need $500K/30K , 17 sales in 12 months
At a 25% win rate you need to engage 17 x 4 qualified leads: 68 total
Given the 4 month sales cycle, you need to have engaged seriously with those 68 qualified leads in the next 8 months.
If you know half of those already, then you need to generate 32 qualified leads. Let’s say you need 7 prospects for every qualified lead: In this case you need to generate 32 x 7 prospects – a total of 224 prospects to generate and qualify in the next 8 months.

This approach focuses Marketing and Sales on the right level and types of activities needed to meet the goal. It makes the market development or time-to-ramp commitments much more solid. It also requires the two functions to work together to set these formula value estimates and refine them. Those discussions often surface hidden concerns, alignment gaps and expectations, reducing later issues and forging good relationships.

How Using This Can Speed Your Reaction Time

Ok, back to the scenario in which the order rate is below expectations. Instead of flailing at causes and fixes, go to your data. Which Formula factors are not as you estimated?

Is the average sales price below your estimate while the other metrics are holding? Then look to either your discount level or the configurations that people are buying.
Is the win rate lower than you expected? See if the sales force needs more training and check the competitive positioning.

The relevant issues and fixes will be specific to your business of course. The point is that this approach gives you built in diagnostics. Now when sales are down you do not start with a blank slate on which people write their excuses. Instead, you have focus and this gets everyone into effective and affective action, fast. Finger-pointing and delays in turning sales back up are de-motivators; quick iterations that also add to the collective knowledge base on sales generation are big motivators.

Input Welcome

How and Why to Optimize Your Relate:Create Ratio

July 2, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

Can you think of anyone who succeeds by focusing exclusively on the subject matter of his/her work? Yes, some artists who labor alone do achieve wild posthumous success, but I have yet to meet anyone with that as his/her goal. Most of us recognize that we have to work with and through others. This post is about turning that general awareness into a actions that will help your career development and your real results.

Why do it

Here is another one of those Keys to Life (see May 28 post) that I have found exceedingly useful since I heard it sometime in the 20th century. (I would attribute it but I have no idea who was the wise spirit who originated it.) It is captured in a diagram which describes the potential states of a work relationship.

The horizontal axis is Time. It measures how long the two people have known each other and interacted.
The vertical axis is Tension. It measures the level of relationship Tension coming from two potential sources: Distrust and Transactions.

Distrust. When people first meet they don’t know what to expect from each other. Their level of trust is low. Accordingly the relationship tension is high. Over time, people get to know each other and, unless those interactions abound in deceit and treachery, the level of trust between them tends to increase: Logically, the level of distrust-driven tension goes down.

Transactions. Each time we want something from the other person or vice a versa we engage in a transaction, and each transaction creates some tension. If you have a small easy request to make of the other person, the tension created by that request will be very low. On the other hand, if you have a proposal that imposes a major cost on the other person (e.g., it conflicts with their plans, requires a lot of time or significantly inconveniences them) then the transaction-driven tension level created may be quite high.

So far so good. Now here is the key: Put these together and you will see why trying to do a major transaction with someone you barely know is so difficult. The high distrust-driven tension coupled with the high transaction-driven tension adds up to a vertigo-evoking level of overall tension. If instead, you attempt the same transaction with someone after you have established a relationship of trust, you have almost half the level of tension to deal with and the likelihood of success soars.

Ok, What To Do?

The take-away is: Get down that distrust curve as fast as possible with all the key people with whom you need to collaborate or negotiate. Important: This is not a cynical tip meant to turn you into Machiavelli! Groucho Marx said, “Sincerity is everything. If you can fake sincerity, you have it made.” No, no, no. We’re talking about effective communication and relationship building:

Seeking the person out
Listening to them
Being helpful when you can
Letting them know how you think and what drives you
Introducing them to your ideas early
Maintaining a dialogue

You get the picture.

Getting down that trust curve takes more time and effort than most of us think it does. Which brings me back to the title of this post. Most people like to — and think they are paid to — work on the Create side of that ratio; that is where their passion is and they spend as much of their time as possible on it assuming/hoping that that will win the day. So “Optimizing the Relate:Create ratio” usually requires shifting time spent on the substance behind those transactions to time spent on the relationships that will enable the real results.

You may be able to make that shift naturally just by being more aware of this. The rest of us mere mortals need to take a more structured approach, at least at first: Picking key people with whom to deepen a relationship and then setting aside time explicitly for that.

As a manager this is a huge area of additional opportunities for creating an affective action culture and a high performance organization: I will cover these in my next post.

Input Welcome

Have you changed your Relate: Create ratio profitably?
Have you found ways to help your employees do this better?

Is Your Plan Bold Enough to be Safe?

June 24, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

Careers and companies rise and fall based on being right about how much innovation to take on at any given time. Reach too far and you risk ridicule, delays in time to market, and slow market development. Not surprisingly, it often seemed safer to stick to the middle ground: Investments in product enhancements or business extension for which there is strong supporting data. But today, you shun the lunatic fringe at your own peril. A small leap may not put you on firm ground.

(The view straight down from High Bridge over Eagle Creek in the Columbia River Gorge)

A Case and Lessons Learned

I recently attended an EMBS talk on the latest scanning, parametrics, and 3-D printing developments. The speaker was Scott Summit. His company, Bespoke Innovations makes functionally and esthetically personalized prosthetic leg coverings. For the coverings to achieve their first objective – restoring visual symmetry to the wearer’s body – they need an accurate digital scan of the person’s body. What he recounted about the recent history of body scanning technology is a warning to all of us in any industry:

Approximately 3 years ago, to get a body scan he needed to take the customer to a lab that had a 1M machine and would provide scans at $800/scan.
Shortly thereafter, there were hand-held devices that cost $40,000 to $60,000 a piece and were very tricky to use.
Scott’s company developed their own scanner but it was soon overtaken in price/performance by…
A scanner that Microsoft developed. Shortly after that product became available…
Autodesk announced that anyone could download their 123D Catch software product for free. This enables anyone with a digital camera to take photos that the software then stitches together to create a 3-D model. For free.

Just hearing about this drop — from $1M to $0 in approximately 3 years — is dizzying. Can you imagine how each of those obviated product providers felt? There are Five Stages of Grief, and I have seen Four Stages of Losing this kind of competitive fight:

Denial: “It’s a much less powerful product. “ “We only see them in Germany.” “Our customers will never accept that.”
More Enhancement: “We will have better [fill in the blank: Specs? Bathrooms? You Tube videos?]”
Capitulation: “We have other more strategic businesses on which to focus”
Rationalization: “Sheila never invested enough in it.” “Joe wasn’t the right person to lead it.”

The lessons that people take away from competitive failures are not always right. Maybe there were other issues, but maybe the real lesson is this: “We lost by playing it safe. We did not target a big enough change; as a result, our investments went toward enhancements while others produced a much bigger leap in value for customers.”

There are definitely still situations that call for investments in minimally or moderately innovative projects. But my point is that there are fewer of them now than before. At the current pace of change and competition, many medium-impact projects simply do not make sense: They will be rendered irrelevant soon or even before they are out the gate.

Implications: How to Win in This Environment

Become the voice, in your head and in your company, for the “Is it bold enough to be safe?” investment criterion.
Become expert in the techniques for evaluating bold ideas. For every bold idea that is wildly successful there are 17 that turn out to be just wild. More on this in future posts.
Become expert in the techniques for implementing bold ideas in ways that manage risk. More on this in future posts.

Input Welcome

Have you changed your project selection to match a faster pace of change?

How have you mitigated the higher risk associated with bigger leaps in contribution?

The 60 Second Pitch that Will Get you 2-3 Minutes of Attention: Maybe more!

June 18, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

People decide in 30-60 seconds whether they will pay the slightest bit of attention to you. If you slay that dragon, and they decide to tune in, you get ~3 minutes (their attention span) to possibly earn an additional smidgen of their interest.

This is a “formula” for the 30-60 seconds. I will not do it justice. Its creator is communication expert, Sam Horn (http://www.intrigueagency.com/). She is extraordinary and I strongly recommend that you to try to hear her talk or buy her materials. In any case, I willshare my paraphrase of her ingenious and flexible formula for describing anything to anyone.

The power of the formula is that it engages the listener, tells your differentiation in that context, and gives the listener reasons to believe you. You are still You, just more Interesting. I think you’ll like You this way.

The Specifics and An Example

I will use the example of a startup company that I am mentoring, named salaUno. It is a Mexican eye clinic. Not excited by that description? Read on.

As Sam notes: This formula works whether you are answering the question, “What do you do?” at a cocktail party, or pitching your company at the biggest funding opportunity of your life.

What to Remember if You Don’t Remember the Formula

The formula works because it conforms to the human nature of the listener rather than the knowledge and ego of the speaker:

Our self-absorption halts briefly in response to new, surprising information.
Injecting an inspirational vision engages a different and valuable part of the brain. Factual small ideas may inform but they won’t attract or motivate.
The impact of a thing is always more interesting than the thing itself.
Dude, it’s not that you aren’t credible, but, well, bring external validation.

Input Welcome

Have you tried this with success? Send an example
Do you have suggested additions or modifications to this approach?

Ask This at the Outset of Any Initiative

June 8, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

Preparing to launch an initiative? Avoid common and costly errors by asking one question at the outset: Process Task or Talent Task? This is a simple way to make everyone more confident in the outcome. I learned this from Peter Drucker and have used it often to troubleshoot how to address a problem. I thought it would be good to share with you because it is effective and also boosts employee motivation in a subtle but important way.

The Point

Drucker described that there are some problems/opportunities that can only be addressed by putting together a small team of people with specific talents: This is a Talent Task. He noted that there are other problems /opportunities -– usually those that where the answer must be implemented through lots of people at various levels of knowledge – where you need a process: This is a Process Task.

Ok, this is logical and everyone is probably nodding or even nodding off at this point. But wait. The important insight is this:

When you try to solve a Talent Task with a process, or try to solve a Process Task with talent, you fail. Aspirin is great, but not when what you really need is penicillin.

Example 1: Strategic planning. At HP in the 90’s strategic planning was a highly structured and well-documented process. Each year, massive numbers of large meetings were held to ensure that everyone was involved and bought in to the strategy. It was the “thundering herd” approach to strategy development. Huts were leveled, large distances were covered, the process was followed, but the correctness of the end-point was, well, mixed. Strategy is a Talent Task. There is a need for information and engagement from many people and solid processes for that should exist. But the critical framing of the strategic issues, the evaluation of alternatives, and the ultimate application of informed intuition to choose a truly strategic and competitive strategy should be done by a small set of people with those skills and responsibility. Good strategies do not automatically pop out the end of a process.

Example 2: Contract Review Team. My company had decided to offer a new service: Third party maintenance. Since it would require new responsibilities in the field, management hired experienced field managers to review and approve contracts before we accepted them. Soon, there was a bottleneck of contracts pending approval. Why? The processes for delivering the new services were incomplete and there was no established way of building them, so the contract reviewers were not approving any for delivery. The Talent applied was necessary but not sufficient. The real problem was a Process Task: Establish a process for building balanced sales and delivery capabilities to serve an increasing number of attractive contracts.

Watch for It

Once you start thinking in these terms you see the mismatches around you. How many times have you seen a big, systemic problem addressed by the naming of one person who “will focus on it”? One feels of them. How many times have you seen a recurring problem tackled by successive internal task forces that clearly could use (or be replaced by) an injection of talent — someone who is a real expert on the matter? As a colleague, Tom Redder, used to say “You don’t get wisdom by pooling ignorance”.

Which gets me to the Affective Action part of this. I’ve noticed that employees intuitively understand this Talent Task vs. Process Task difference. They are demoralized when opportunities and issues are not addressed with the right approach. Their own careers or products and in the balance. For this reason, employees buy in more readily and whole-heartedly if they see the right approach being used even if it means that they are not as directly involved.

Input Welcome

Are there other examples of cases where you have seen the Talent approach is better, but Process used – or vice a versa?

What Can Philosophy Contribute to Management?

June 5, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

The management toolset is full of processes, metrics, and strategies, but rarely contains philosophy tools. Philosophy and business are usually thought to be quite separate. But innovation is the useful juxtaposition of things previously thought separate. Here is one example of how philosophy’s main benefit, helping you raise and answer important questions that cannot be answered empirically, can serve modern business.

Thougth-Provoking TED-talk

This is the link to a talk I heard at TEDx Silicon Valley 2011. It came to mind again recently when I attended a different philosophy seminar and was struck by the clear relevance to business. More on that in another post! For now, enjoy this talk by Dr. Damon Horowitz, In-House Philosopher / Director of Engineering at Google. He is also a philosophy professor and serial entrepreneur.

http://www.tedxsv.org/?page_id=1205

Everyone is aware of the toughest issues faced by their company. Being open to using philosophy to address them could have benefits on many levels. Employees may have philosophy training that they could bring to bear on those issues if they thought it would be welcome. In addition, by its nature, philosophy may cut through a lot of lower value approaches that we try to apply to big complex issues.

Input Welcome

What business questions do you think philosophy should help answer?

Are you a philosopher and business person? How does that make you more effective?

How (and Why) to Describe “Potential”

June 3, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

Who advances in the business world often depends on management’s assessment of people’s “potential”. But what constitutes potential is often not clearly described. As a result, employees can’t work on it and managers can’t be consistent in their assessment of it.

The Cost

Managers often feel embarrassed about not being able to describe this rather intangible trait, so they act as if it is not a real evaluation criterion. As a result, work is a game with rules that are posted and other rules that the judges actually use. Very capable people can end up puzzled, pointing to their 100%-met hard metrics as others sail by them into higher positions based on this unspoken evaluation factor, potential. Valuable people sometimes leave, seeking a company where the rules are clearer. Others stay, but commit less to a system that does not seem to work for them.

The Upside

Getting specific about Potential and helping people to envision and become their best, highest potential selves is inspirational. Just talking about it with employees is an affective action that is appreciated. And just talking about it with specifics puts people in an energized and more confident state of mind. People relax and outperform when the advancement criteria are real and understood.

A Tool

Here is a tool that I have refined over the years. It is a list of Indicators of Individual Potential for exceptional contribution and for continued growth.

Personally develops valuable new proposals and ideas
Inclination and ability to interact effectively with the world outside of the Company
Generative: Sees next steps. Anticipates. Makes more out of things than others.
Track record of Personal development & growth — eager to learn/grow
Proven to be able and willing to take on new roles
Demonstrated leadership of peers. Commands respect in the organization. Influential.
Able to mobilize an organization/team to effect change
Explicitly seeks out development opportunities: Actively learns from each experience
Takes initiative to perform beyond current task/job responsibilities
Willingly takes on greater responsibilities & broader assignments
Demonstrates creativity/initiative in problem solving, flexible, develops new approaches
Takes multiple perspectives. Is open. Is constructive
Sensitive to organizational dynamics required to get things done
Able to assess global, big-picture issues
Actively seeks opportunities to learn about industries, markets, technologies and trends relevant to the company
Able to work effectively across functions & organizational boundaries
Strong in many transferable skills (transferrable across roles or functions)
Clear adherence to a set of personal values
Proven track record of results
Demonstrates passion for the business.

For Employees

You do not have to exhibit all of these traits! Here is my suggestion for how to sort this list and use it practically

1. Identify which of these are most important.

I have marked the ones that I think are most universally important in green. But I am not writing your evaluations. (Too bad, because I am beginning to realize that you have unlimited potential!) Find out which ones are most important to the people who are evaluating you and are in a position to propose you for rewards and promotions. Use this list and ask them to pick their top criteria. It is a great conversation to initiate since it is a high-potential act in itself: You are showing ambition and dedication to growth, and you are contributing to the management toolset. You are giving a professional gift while getting info that is critical to fueling your meteoric rise.

2. Identify which of these require your attention.

If one of the indicators in green or one of the indicators that your managers have picked as very important is a real strength of yours, then develop at least 10 things you can do to make that strength have bigger impact on the business. Read that again. Notice that you start with your strengths, not your weaknesses. I heard Peter Druker speak once – an intense experience — and he said that he managed his executives so that their strengths were so blinding that their weaknesses did not matter. You could do a lot worse than adopting his management style for yourself. The key is that those strengths will always be your strengths and consequently that is how you can make the biggest contributions. Make sure you use your strengths fully instead of trying to do everything as well.

That being said, if one of the high important traits is an area of true weakness for you, then by all means develop a list of at least ten things that you can do to improve your performance and reputation in that area. While that trait may never become what you are known for, you can make sure that that is not a big liability either.

Finally, you may already have these desired traits, but they may not be visible to the people that matter. That is just like not having the trait. No whining: Justice always needs your help. As distasteful as it may seem to you, make a list of at least 10 things you could do to make your virtue visible. Most of them should be things that you do as an ongoing part of your job. A meeting with your boss that lays out your relevant past actions and accomplishments will be valuable ( See the May 6 post, “Thanks a Million, Kumar”), but you have to develop the skill of monitoring and managing your visibility on an ongoing basis.

To be sure that you are on the mark about your strengths and weaknesses, and also about how visible they are, you need input. Ask bosses, colleagues and friends.

3. Implement at least 3 of the actions you came up with for a chosen indicator conscientiously for 4 months. Look at them every week and assess whether you really did more of whatever you chose that week. Re-up after 4 months or pick something new if you feel you have established desired habits around your first chosen indicator.

For Managers

Possible ways to use this list:

Edit it to show your priorities.
Share the list with your teams (edited or not). It is a quick way to show support for their development.
Use this list at evaluation time to help you pinpoint and communicate specific behaviors to compliment or to suggest.

Input Welcome:

What do you think is the most important indicator of potential?

Do you have other behaviors that you look for when evaluating potential?

What Can the Design World Contribute to Management?

May 28, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

I recently saw a terrific documentary, “Objectified“, by Gary Huswit which is all about how things are designed and how design affects us. (Available on Netflix — I highly recommend it for various reasons.) When I heard the list of characteristics of Good Design put forth by Dieter Rams, it struck me that many of the elements of great design apply to management.

… should be Innovative. In the case of management, it is not about a stream of new programs, but it is about being open to innovation and ensuring differentiation.

… should Make a Product Useful. I think the important analogy here is that great management should maximize employee “usefulness” by enabling them to be engaged and productive.

… is Aesthetic design. Just as a product’s look and feel feed our emotions and sense of value, a management system needs to be made visible and felt. In fact, it is always visible and felt, but those impressions are not always the ones that management intends! 🙂

… will make a product Understandable. It should be easy for people to understand how to get their jobs done, how the customer experience gets formed, and how to get decisions made.

… is Honest. Enough said.

… is Unobtrusive. It should feel like the system is serving the people, not the other way around.

… is Long-lived. Things have to change super-fast, but every company has to build some fundamental principles that endure.

… is Consistent in every detail: Well, there is a part of me that immediately rebels, with Emerson’s “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” as my shield. But we’ve all experienced companies with big service messages that have rude representatives, or a great new product with no training for the sales force. So yes, great management means focus for a critical mass of consistent implementation.

… is Environmentally Friendly: Sustainability is no longer a matter of choice and it is definitely not a marketing message. It is an inescapable set of forces that affect every business in the form of cost changes, voluntary and uncontrolled transparency, customer expectations and regulatory actions.

“Last but not least, good [management] is… as little [management] as possible.” Whether we call it the self-organizing organization or the generative company, it is all about winning through “just enough” leadership and highly engaged employees. (See “Use the Force, Luke” post, April 2.)

The design world clearly offers a lot of catalysts for Affective Action. I’m intrigued. Are there other design principles or practices that you think can be used in management?

Marketing is Sales, Sales is Marketing

April 27, 2012 · by Taia Ergueta

Source: Africapic.com

Previously clear lines between Marketing and Sales are gone: Instead there is now a Marketing-Sales Continuum. The technology, sociology and economics of B-to-B Marketing and Sales functions have changed fundamentally. As a result either function can take over much of the ground of the other. By all means, do panic a bit – and then, relax. Extinction is not at hand. In fact, the new realities offer new glory for people in both functions. You can go get it.

FIRST: WHY YOU NEED TO REBUILD THE PLANE IN MID-FLIGHT

Technology shifts. The noble and oh-so-loved Brochure cannot begin to compete with something like a multi-level micro-site with rich modular video content supplemented by a strong user forum. Likewise, the continuous marketing din that surrounds every customer portends a sad fate for anyone doing one perfectly crafted Email Blast when his competitor is using marketing automation to do 5 orchestrated customer “touches” for the same price and effort. Finally, social media is just hitting stride and has already created and destroyed businesses and sales models on a large scale.

The sociological shifts are as big and cross-generational.

Place: Last Year’s Trade Shows are not where the majority of the world’s new young customers are getting and exchanging advice daily on what to see and buy.

Demographics are destiny. Your geographic mix almost surely needs adjusting: Most people keep investing disproportionately in their past markets instead of the important new ones. And, yes, it will take a lot more work, because your biggest problem is not that your new customers are foreign to you, it is that you are foreign to them.

The dynamic of evaluation and decision-making have changed. There is a network rather than a path to your customer. How do you find out who is your desired customer’s most influential acquaintance and what and where he/she wants to know about your product? Social media are the important new facilitators and accelerators of the primacy of customer communities.

The financial shifts are well known. Corporations expect a steady rate of productivity improvement. Sales forces are relatively expensive but efforts to limit them face the fact that those resources are difficult to leverage across geographies and product lines. The picture is no rosier on the marketing side. The effectiveness of Marketing spending often faces skepticism.

HOW IS MARKETING NOW SALES?

Marketing departments stagnate or decline if they do not get tangibly related to and accountable for creating real sales. In the past it was safe for Marketing to create information and sales tools and then rely on the sales force to use them to reach and influence customers. Marketing can now reach out very specifically and directly to the very people who were previously only contacted by Sales. OK, they can. But should they? Yes, yes, for at least two reasons:

Because there is no alternative. The buying process has clearly changed and customers now conduct much of their product investigation and evaluation on line or in person with people other than a sales person. If Marketing does not understand that buying process thoroughly and get its company’s messages where the customers are conducting their investigations, those customers will be lost to the competition.
Because generic information and sales tools have decreasing value. Customers don’t have the time or patience to figure out if or how your product meets their needs. Similarly, sales forces don’t have the time or knowledge to take all prospects through that process. To surmount these barriers, information, messages, sales tools and communication channels must be very specific to each target market segment.

HOW IS SALES NOW MARKETING?

How does an experienced sales person meet a quota that goes up 12% with products that don’t increase in net price? Note that I said, “experienced”. This isn’t a matter of learning to do the sales job. You have become more effective over time and yes, you have cut into your personal time more and more to meet or exceed your quotas to date. Now what?

The current sales force automation tools provide some of great capabilities including pipeline visibility, activity tracking and some outreach capabilities. But progressive sales people need information and capabilities beyond that. For example:

A CRM tool fully loaded with existing customers does nothing to expand the list of qualified prospects a sales person can address. For that, there are services that mine public sources and can give you detailed information about what customers are doing, which products they currently use, etc. But mining these sources requires a strategic marketing approach to sales development.
The capability to send automated check-in messages to customers does not provide the stratification and value added content that is really needed to evoke action or a response. For that you need to: 1. Know your high priority customer segments and 2. Develop and offer each set of target customers a continuous stream of relevant content and non-transactional engagement opportunities.

Whether the sales objective is bringing in new customers (“hunting”) or building deeper buying from existing customers (“increasing share-of-wallet” or “gathering”), to reach the required new heights of their quotas, sales people need to apply focused marketing techniques.

RIDING THE MARKETING-SALES CONTINUUM WAVES

As with all major changes, the technological, sociological and economic shifts described create waves of great opportunity for people who tune into them and act — and sogginess for those who don’t. Here are three ways to ensure that you surf to success.

New You.

Each function had reached the point at which it’s productivity gains were slowing or coming heavily at the expense of the personal lives of its employees. New marketing and sales automation and social media technologies are making large productivity and effectiveness leaps possible. But you’ll only get their real value if you identify with the whole Continuum—not as a Marketing or Sales person, but as a Sales Development leader.

Through that lens you will see beyond arbitrary function boundaries and you will change your world. You’ll probably become relentless about making tight, clear links from upstream of what you do through downstream of your actions, all the way to the ultimate results, sales. Find the gaps and fill them — or make noise until someone else does so.

New Us: Better Together

Marketing and Sales activities are often very loosely aligned. Everyone assumes that someone else is ensuring their disparate efforts and assumptions are adding up to the desired results. Despite each group working very hard, relations between them often run from apathy to mutual sympathy to barely muffled acrimony. Growth often falls far short of what can happen if both functions put collective effort into focused, aligned and technology-enabled sales development initiatives.

Marketing and sales teams can work together differently for higher aggressiveness and effectiveness. Marketing can provide additional value added that feeds into a jointly developed blueprint for sales generation. Sales can drive those sales generation blueprints that include:

Appropriate market goals tied to segment-specific customer intelligence,
An action plan with needed marketing and customer engagement tactics regardless of who does them and
The capture of leading metrics so that the marketing/sales effort can be adjusted frequently.

New. Period. Frontiers for Pioneers in both Functions

Find out what new inputs and outputs are possible by looking at competitors and, even more importantly, by looking at companies in other industries. Learn and standout in your company by becoming a champion for a pilot in one new initiative every 6 months. A few examples:

In the world of Big Data, many Marketing-Sales teams will soon be able to know every potential customer for their product and other relevant facts about them. Which function will make greater practical use of this capability?

Using Social Media, companies will truly be able to act as the “peer” and “partner” that they have always wanted to be for their customers. Which function will do so to create the highest quantifiable results?

The biggest value creators on Wall Street are now mathematicians whose algorithms exploit existing information in new ways to make profitable trades; is there analogous gold in your company’s customer information?

The future of your function is exciting — and it looks a lot like you.