The Sales Café

Setting up a Business Architecture helps solve unwanted mysteries

How well an organization performs in and across locations or departments can be a mystery to many. Business leaders have to assume that each person is doing their job well and that local leaders will course correct when that is not the case. However, there is a nagging awareness that something important - something slithering in the dark spaces beween the departments - could raise its ugly head and cause corporate misery. Rather than hope an antidote will be available when needed, you can dig deep inside the organization before a crisis hits and take positive action to prevent these kinds of unfortunate surprises. 

Using the following checklist is the first step in creating a Business Architecture that will help identify hidden issues and immediately improve system-wide best practices. 

Do you know the answers?

1. Aim for the future:  What’s changing and how does that impact your business?
2. Identify the big changes:  What do we have to do to be successful in the future & how is that different than today?
3. Pinpoint focus:  What are the few key things we have to do to move to our future state?
4. Prioritize actions:  What are we working on today and how does that relate to what we will need to do?
5. Measure effect:  How will we know if we are making progress to our desired state? What can we measure?
6. Repeat:  Change is the only constant. Repeat the five steps to make sure you are adaptive to the inevitable changes.    
   

Once you've tackled these questions, assign a dollar value for each answer or situation. How much does your organization stand to lose or gain if the worst or best were to happen? 

Set up a structure using Business Architecture

The first way to put your arms around these issues is to map your business and create an architectural plan. Business architecture explains the structure of an organization in terms of its capabilities, governance structure, business processes, and business information. The business capability is what the organization does; the business processes are how the organization executes its capabilities. The business architecture takes into account all of an enterprise's external stakeholders (including customers, suppliers and regulators) and captures all pertinent and critical data and information.

A business architecture helps you understand the impact that change has on the business environment. Ensuring harmony between goals and objectives, programs and initiatives, and the underlying information systems and processes enables managers to adapt to dynamic - and inevitable - business change.

Example: Preventing micro-managment after a merger

Organizational leaders often micro-manage, not because of character flaws, but because they don't know what's going on. An incoherent structure, misaligned processes, and poor reporting systems try even the best managers.

In a post-merger environment, these problems are magnified. Very often, the goals for the newly combined organization are stated before the path to reaching them is built. The leaders of the acquiring company manage without knowing exactly what the workers from acquired company do. New managers don't know what the new reports are doing - and the new reports don't want to tell the new managers what they are doing! Both sides are afraid for their jobs. 

Creating a post-merger business architecture provides managers with a deep current understanding of the business - the "as-is" state, and tools to visualize and create the path towards "to-be" state: what the teams do, the processes they use, how current workflow affects other areas of the business, the results produced by the work processes, and how processes and people are managed. 

With a deeper understanding of the business and how it runs, leaders and managers can make rational decisions without having to micro-manage. 

Business mysteries are dangerous and certainly unwanted. With a business architecture in place, leaders can know what is happening throughout the business, how managers and workers are addressing challenges, and how to create successful solutions.

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.

You’re on your way to an important meeting. Let’s say it’s with a prospect your company has been pursuing for two years and the COO has agreed to meet with you. You know she’s got a trough of problems – that’s what your sales team has found out so far, at least.

You’ve got an hour-long drive. You call your mate to check in. Your eastern regional sales manager calls because two of his salespeople just won big deals. You get stuck in lunchtime traffic at the bridge. You check your Blackberry (c’mon, admit you do). You turn on the news and none of it is good. You switch to a music station. As usual, none of that stuff is good either. You arrive at your destination, wait for fifteen minutes in the lobby, check your Blackberry three more times, and then finally go to your meeting. Sound familiar? Is it any wonder that listening skills are at a premium in the 21^st century?

This post isn’t about “listening skills” – nodding at the prospective customer while she answers your questions, repeating what she says and using her name, so that you’ve indicated that you’ve heard her (and hoping you did). It isn’t about quieting the noise in your head either. You didn’t really need to check your Blackberry six times in the last hour, did you? And, it isn’t about a technique to try and reconstruct that most important morsel of information your prospect has just told you, that you’ve just missed while your brain has been multi-tasking. You know, the one tidbit that means the difference between a $200K sale and a $2M sale. You’re a senior sales executive – a trained professional! You know this stuff by now.

Let me turn you onto a little tip, something that you may not know unless you happen to play jazz, blues or some other type of improvisational music. This tip will perhaps help you quiet your brain and get the bigger deal that solves all of your prospect’s problems.

Think of a great jazz show you’ve attended. If you haven’t been to one, then go, they’re good for you. Then, come back and read this again.

What distinguishes a great jazz performance from a good one is the listening skill, not the playing skill of each musician. In this day and age, any musician you hear on stage is highly skilled at playing their instrument, but many of the musicians you hear are lousy listeners. The great stuff that’s making you bob your head and dance in your seat is the interplay between the musicians – the subtle adjusting, reacting, leading, and inventing that goes on chorus after chorus. (For all you non-musicians, a chorus is each time the song goes around.) Each solo you hear is a product of both individual invention and supportive collaboration.

All of this fantastic interplay is grounded in intuition. This intuition isn’t something these musicians were born with. Their intuition was developed by paying attention, in other words listening, to what’s going on around them; absorbing the mood of the piece, moving to the rhythm, and inventing counter-melodies to something the bass player or singer might be doing at that moment. We jazz musicians call this improvisation, but really it is an intuitive management of the situation combined with an invention – original or not – that suits it.

One additional point: When you find yourself bored or yawning during one of these shows, it most likely isn’t that you don’t like jazz, or that you haven’t gotten enough sleep the night before. It’s because the musicians on stage aren’t there. They’re playing licks that they’ve played a thousand times in the same way and even though you may not have heard those notes in that particular way, the notes lack energy and creativity. These licks are not born of the moment, they are standard issue notes grounded in past years of meticulous practice and current situational distraction. It’s the soloist’s stock marketing material. No wonder you’re bored, who isn’t?

So what does this have to do with a sales call? The short answer is everything. As you know by now, anything can and does happen during these calls. Whatever you’ve heard before, or heard from your team is only information. What goes on during a sales call is all possibility. There is a rhythm and a mood to each one of these situations that calls for intuitive management and invention, energy and creativity.

To play like a jazz soloist, you need to listen like a jazz musician. Don’t rely on your licks, your marketing material, and your pre-planned competitive differentiation strategy. If you’re good at that stuff, you’ll get the $200K deal. When you’re on, you need to forget that stuff, and forget the jibber-jabber on your Blackberry as well. Key into the people in the room. Listen, absorb, react, and observe, and then step out and “take a solo” that’s driven by your intuition. That’s the difference between a good and great performance.

Peter Krammer is Managing Partner of ELA Consulting Group, co-author of Let Your Music Soar with Corky Siegel, and a jazz guitarist.  

While economists have recently announced that there has been a global recession, and that it will extend into 2009, most business people have seen two dramatic dips, one last year and one now.

As with all recessions, amidst all the doom and gloom, there are interesting opportunities. For entire sectors of the marketplace, in all lines of business, companies and people are taking the steps to remake themselves now, launching the necessary strategies that will initiate a strong recovery. These are smart moves, because any company that wants to stay in business beyond this current economic maelstrom needs to create a plan to find new business and grow.

It could be the recession or just the usual forces that propel change that are stressing your company. Telltale signs might include:

• Sales opportunities of any size become challenging to close, because the market is so volatile;
• Customers are not buying at all; and,
• High commissions have spiraled downward, adding a level of personal stress to salespeople and resulting in them not keeping an eye on the ball.

When times are tough, companies basically fall into two camps: either 1) they cut back to stay profitable; or, 2) they lose the ability to make a profit and have few prospects in the pipeline. Obviously, it’s better to be in the first camp.

Take Action
Here are a few steps you can take during the next six months to navigate this uncertain economic climate.

1. Put together a good plan that deals with reality and determines your next arc of growth. Be honest about your company’s current strengths and weaknesses. This is essentially a recovery plan. It needs to be well thought out and well researched. This is a very shrewd investment of time and resources.
2. Assign your sales force the tasks to execute this plan. Make this a team effort. Have your sales people use the extra time they may have now to find new markets and do the critical on-the-job research.
3. Assess your people and fill the gaps. But, only fill the gaps, focusing on your plan instead of general “need to get better at selling” initiatives.
4. Invest in your personal leadership development. This is not the time to start building basic skills in your people – you need to lead them through the battle.