The Random Thought Generator (RTG)

• Across geography and time zones
• Across business functions
• Across cultures, both societal and business
• Across hierarchies
• Across technologies

• What specific benefits does your organization expect to get from collaboration?
• Does everyone know about those expectations?
• Is there an incentive for collaboration?
• What projects, content or knowledge development do you expect people to collaborate on?
• Do your people know how to collaborate?  Do they know how to disseminate and find powerful information?
• Are your collaboration tools/technologies tuned to enable the benefits you expect?

By Elisabeth Watson

“Your hold time will be approximately 87 minutes.”

Who likes to hear that? Certainly not your customers.

We spend so much time (or we should) on training customer service people or sales reps or both. We study our potential customers’ responses to every possible method of engaging with them. We tweet, we follow, we friend, we call, we don’t call, we do whatever we think is possible to convert a prospect to a customer.

And then we put them on hold.  Or process their return in 4-6 weeks. Or refer their questions to someone who has no understanding of the product or how they use it.  After the romance of the sales cycle, that is more than a little abrupt.

We’ve done the hard part, convincing someone to buy from us, but then we often drop the ball. Revenues, especially new revenues, are the Holy Grail and it’s easy to forget that the cheapest and the easiest sales come from our existing customers.  And no matter how relevant our collateral or how effective our message, referrals are our most credible sales resource. It’s vital that we make it easy for our customers to pass along those referrals, long after they’ve signed the contract and committed to our products and services.

So how do we ensure that our customers have a great experience throughout the lifecycle?  By applying that old management adage, what gets measured gets done.  We need to evaluate each aspect of the customers’ experience from their perspective and look at how it impacts the customer experience—from that first call through every interaction.  We forget that our cost centers touch the customer, too. As Nigel Blair-Johns, Operations Manager at HP often reminds me, “Paying the bill is part of the customer experience.”  If our invoices are inaccurate or not timely, paying us can cost the customer money, not to mention frustration.

I know, I know, you can’t spend money and time on those cost centers. You need to focus on revenue. This economy is brutal.  I understand.  But.  Yes, but.  You can start with something as simple as your attitude.  Look at each of your processes from your customer’s perspective.  Just for a minute, stop channeling your accountant and consider ALL of your organization’s customer touch points.  Are any of those customer experiences less than great?  If so, that experience is hurting your customer retention, not to mention your brand.

Are you thinking that good service costs more than bad service?  Maybe, maybe not.  A customer-focused invoicing process, supported by reasonable technology, might mean fewer interactions, electronic funds transfers, and improved DSO (Days Sales Outstanding). That translates into lower costs and faster access to cash, which will enable you to return to channeling your accountant.

Reviewing, analyzing, and updating your processes, in the context of your customer experience, could not only improve your top line, but will help your bottom line as well.  What if you cut your fulfillment and invoicing costs by 20%?  What if accounts receivable process made your cash available 3 days sooner?  What if you cut an FTE from your invoice processing staff?  Or redeployed that FTE from problem resolution to reporting or fulfillment?  What if you could cut your accounting error management by 5%? That would be good news, but what’s even better?  Lots of pleasant encounters with—and, maybe even a few referrals from—those people you worked so hard to sell, your customers.

During economic meltdowns like the one we are currently experiencing, it is tempting for organizations to turn all attention to tactical execution, dropping any activities that are not expected to specifically generate short-term revenues.  Take strategic planning, for example. Even during “good times,” many managers view strategy development with a high degree of suspicion . . . and for good reason, I might add! 

I can recall many instances in my own experience where, after being instructed to spend quality time crafting a strategic direction and setting stretch goals to grow my division’s business, I ended up receiving what felt like a predetermined budget that totally ignored all the energy my team had put into analyzing the market and articulating a specific strategic plan of attack. So, it is not surprising that when the economy is at a generational low point, many managers are even less inclined to spend any cycles thinking strategically.

However, this is precisely when strategic planning is most critical, because only by preparing for an uncertain future will organizations be positioned to successfully ride the next set of waves that are not yet visible on the horizon.

Am I advocating that managers take their eye off the ball of running the current business and just “go think big thoughts” instead?  Certainly not!  Planning is not an either/or proposition and does not have to be an arduous and long process. But, it does require some concerted energy. The good news is that the slower pace of today’s marketplace provides a perfect opportunity to carve out some time to look beyond the daily grind of making a quick buck.  

To keep the process of planning from mushrooming into an all-consuming exercise, here are a few key principles I have found to lead to successful planning outcomes:

• Simplicity.  Although setting strategy in the 21st century depends on an increasingly complex set of variables, it is still possible (and desirable) to complete the planning cycle in a short period of time, so that more of the organization’s energy is spent on executing the plan, not just thinking about it.
  

• Focus.  In my experience working inside leading Global 100 high tech companies, this seems to be the hardest rule to follow.  It is so tempting to fall into the trap of thinking, “We have the best and brightest executive team, thus our company can successfully execute on all 28 of our breakthrough objectives.”  Yeah, right. That may sound good when it is spun to a group of market analysts, but just try to find an employee or channel partner who can remember that many “critical” objectives, much less act upon them! Winning organizations articulate a crystal clear vision of the desired future, and then a handful of critical objectives to get them there.
  

• Agility.  This was the mantra of the last decade, yet most companies still have no process to accommodate a change of strategy mid-stream.  If you want to test the agility of your company, just ask the following question, “What is the process to reallocate significant resources to a new strategic priority after budgets have been distributed for the fiscal year?”
  

• Alignment.  This principle takes the most effort, but can also result in the biggest payback. Alignment starts with being absolutely in tune with your target customers, understanding their critical business problems, and how you help your customers solve them. (Somehow, you knew I would get around to my baseline mantra of being focused Outside->In™, didn’t you?) Once each organization is aligned with its set of customers, the next step is to drive alignment within the company, across the silos. This is where the real magic occurs. By driving alignment around a focused set of objectives across disparate functional organizations, you put all the wood behind the arrow, which can differentiate your organization from the rest.
  

There are several effective approaches to building a strategic plan, so my recommendation is to find a methodology that includes many of the attributes discussed above, and that is compatible with your company culture and decision making process.  But whatever you do, make sure you don’t miss the opportunity to use planning as a strategic weapon to lead your organization out of the recession at the front of the pack!

If you have discovered a planning process that you found particularly useful, I would love to hear from you.  Just post a comment.

For readers in the Bay Area, I would like to alert you to a great opportunity to learn more about planning and innovation from thought leader and best-selling author Geoffrey Moore*, on Tuesday evening, January 26, 2010, in Menlo Park, CA. Hosted by the Association for Strategic Planning (ASP), this interactive discussion will include Mr. Moore’s latest thinking on strategic alignment and the dialog that needs to take place at every level of an organization for success in the current economic environment.  Don’t miss this rare opportunity to spend time with Geoffrey Moore in an intimate setting.

Register here.

*Best-selling author of:
Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution,
Crossing the Chasm,
Inside the Tornado,
The Gorilla Game,
Living on the Fault Line 

There is no doubt that at this stage of the economic cycle, smart investments in sales effectiveness can pay excellent dividends. Let's start with the premise that your board of directors has given the green light to discrete, strategic spending for 2010. The CEO has come to you or your boss and asked for a business plan on growing sales so that he or she can determine the payback if some of that strategic budget is sent your way.

What is your plan?

Before the recession started, you may have spent dearly on sales training, CRM and other productivity tools, but the combination of economic panic and resulting market pressures have conspired against your making real headway. Meanwhile, you believe that your products and services can deliver excellent value for your customers - right now, in this economy. So how do you set up an environment where your salespeople can get a big bump in sales before your competitors get the jump on you?

First, answer these three questions:

1. How much new revenue did the last sales training class deliver?
2. How much new revenue has your CRM delivered in the last 18 months?
3. How much new revenue did "non-selling" departments in your organization deliver in the last year?

If the answers to any of these three questions, or others you may have thought of, are underwhelming, perhaps the problem isn't a specific training, technology or process issue, but how these things integrate and work together. Study after study bears out that the best training in the world is worthless if your organization can't support it with reinforcement, process change, and peer-to-peer knowledge exchange. A great CRM system doesn't help close deals if people can't figure out how to access all the great stuff it contains. At the end of the day, were dashboards and forecasts what you were really after? And, if all of your "non-selling" departments aren't actively participating in creating value for new (and current) customers, it's unlikely your salespeople can carry your company to success on their shoulders alone. These are just three elements out of a multitude that affect sales organizations.

What should you do to to get the most out of discrete investments? Here are three tips:

1. Leverage. Unless you're very lucky, you don't have a blank check. Instead of searching for yet another magic bullet, think about how can you integrate your people, work processes and technology through a knowlege management system so the end result is an environment that makes it easier for salespeople to sell. After all, it's the ability to close deals, not create forecast data that matters most right now.
2. Plan. Keep your scorecard balanced. Your customers, people, finances and processes all matter. Limit your objectives to the critical few and within a time scope that is relevant to this economy - very few people know where we're actually headed yet. Make sure that your accompanying strategies and action plans address only these critical few objectives.
3. Communicate. A beautifully articulated plan does nothing if it sits in a file on your desktop. Engage and enroll your team in the process, let them know where you're headed, and let them help you create the ROI your CEO has asked for.

Guest blogger Dave Batt, CEO and Founder of StreetSmarts, Inc., discusses the challenges in sales effectiveness in a Sales 2.0 environment.

I reviewed some interesting findings from the Corporate Visions Inc. Quarterly Sales Messaging Report Q3 FY09 (www.corporatevisions.com) which surveys thousands of business to business marketing and sales professionals. The survey highlights the continued challenges around sales effectiveness, in that 74% of salespeople publicly admit to rewriting messages and tools created by marketing. There still seems to be a divide amongst many sales and marketing teams and the fact that selling time is being absorbed by sales people recreating marketing assets is not only inefficient but potentially dilutes or even damages a brand. It means sales professionals don’t feel confident in the messages they are being asked to deliver or don’t feel they are credible or compelling enough within the rapidly evolving competitive landscape.

Another key area of concern highlighted in the survey findings is that a staggering 87% of salespeople are looking for more coaching from their managers. The key area where sales teams felt there were gaps was how best to differentiate the company and communicate what makes the company’s solution different. Clearly classroom training alone is not the answer as things change quickly and most people will not contest that what is learned in the formal training environment is not used indefinitely or quite quickly forgotten. And one on one coaching is not really a scalable answer either. How can sales managers hold the hands of each and every sales person though each and every stage of the sales cycle?

The key to better enable sales teams and drive higher overall sales effectiveness is a more holistic approach to the whole sales and marketing function. What is needed is self help in an ongoing manner for sales and empowerment of the sales force to continue to learn and develop at their own pace. Marketing and sales are so often considered as separate functions in many organizations but customers assume they are dealing with a company and not a set of departments. What is needed is better collaboration to close the sales and marketing divide, where marketing assets are ranked and rated by the sales recipients so marketing have the insight from the field to make corrective action and build stronger business alignment. Though the use of enabling technologies this is now entirely possible and also means that consistent market messages are achieved, rather than recreating assets and creating several versions of the truth.

About StreetSmarts

StreetSmarts^® 5.6 is based on a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that unites company-wide knowledge and enterprise social networking components to deliver business value for enterprise wide knowledge based and line of business initiatives such as sales effectiveness channel enablement, training reinforcement and transforming intellectual capital into actionable knowledge through information management.

Because of its adaptive, lightweight nature and built in usability features, StreetSmarts^® is able to provide a working solution specific to each client’s business requirements in a matter of days, rather than months of complex software deployments.   In addition, this also allows clients to quickly react to changing new business practices and external market conditions without the need for massive customization or programming. For more information on StreetSmarts^®, visit www.streetsmarts.com.

When developing a company’s business strategy, prevailing thinking would have the executive team focus on their core competencies and products, then optimize the go-to-market strategy around specific target market segments that align most strongly to their product offering.  This is the classic Inside-Out approach to running a business.  OK, sounds reasonable.  What is wrong with that, you ask?

Well, in many cases, this approach works fine. In fact, the vast majority of companies use precisely this technique, especially startups, which must ensure a laser-like focus of their scarce resources to get their company off the ground. However, this Inside-Out view of selecting target customers can sometimes lead to major missed opportunities. Let’s look at a specific example. 

In 2004, a high tech startup called YottaMark launched to produce tracking labels to help authenticate electronic goods and pharmaceuticals, in order to combat counterfeits.  The company developed an innovative labeling system and focused their outreach on their two target market segments, with fairly good results. However, sales did not really take off until 2007, when forces outside the company changed everything. 

In late 2006, there was an outbreak of food-borne illness caused by E. coli bacteria found in uncooked spinach in 26 U.S states. In an effort to stave off catastrophic losses, several of California’s largest spinach producers began a search for ways to reliably code and track their produce. Finding no available off-the-shelf solutions, one of the spinach producers stumbled upon YottaMark’s anti-counterfeit coding system and urged the startup to adapt its technology to agriculture. It would have been easy for YottaMark executives to remain true to their original strategy and stay focused on their core electronics and pharmaceuticals markets; after all, they knew nothing about the agricultural market. Instead they responded to the Outside-In need and repurposed their system to address one of the largest agricultural disasters in recent history.

The results? In 2007, YottaMark successfully raised an additional $10M in seed funding, and sales from the new agricultural coding product has since dwarfed the original raison d’être of the company, accounting now for over 70% of total revenues. In the words of YottaMark co-founder, Elliot Grant, “This [new use of the software] was a perfect application we had never thought of.”

Now that’s what I call Outside-In thinking!

It seems that some people were born with the genetic makeup to do their job. A case in point is the New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz. Mr. Shortz has gained prominence in his job as the puzzle king for the past 16 years at The Times and was the subject of the 2006 documentary about crossword puzzles, Wordplay.

For me, reading his story (which you can see at Talk to The Times: Crossword Editor Will Shortz) brought up the inevitable question, can you excel at your job if you are not predisposed in some way to that job? Do you have to be "born to sell" in order to be a successful sales leader?

What do you think?

Did you know that people who hold a cup of coffee or a hot drink are more prone to agree to things than people with a cold drink?

This tip, called the Coffee Cup Effect, came from the Twitter feed of @atra_intelexis (Alfredo Trabulsi) and it's had an extraordinary effect on my day, making me wonder:  What other things can we do to help people say Yes to us?

If we are in sales or marketing, it’s our job to make people agree to what we are offering them, whether it's a specific product, service or idea. I suppose the best place to start is to be agreeable ourselves. The next step, it seems, is to extend that feeling and proffer something warm and sweet. One successful sales person I know carries a large bag of Tootsie Pops around with her and hands out two with her business card. “Who doesn’t like a Tootsie Pop?” she asked me. And, by her sales results, she’s on to something.

I know that bringing chocolate and sweets to a meeting makes people more agreeable—especially during the mid-afternoon slump time. The word "Free" gives people an all-over warm feeling, too, as does the sound of their own name. (This depends on the tone of voice, however. Hearing my name spoken in a condescending way makes me quite disagreeable.)

In the end, it’s whatever you are selling that must light the ultimate sales fire for the customer. Without a strong product, service or idea, you just might leave them cold.

What do you do to get a prospect or customer to warm up to you?