Workplace Engineering

The biggest “aha!” that I’ve had since starting my own business is how difficult it is to get your message out and to encourage potential customers to buy from you. I used to flatter myself that I was a good communicator and could persuade business leaders to follow my recommendations. Since last summer, I’ve found out that moving from selling to internal corporate customers to selling to real customers is like doing well in the little leagues and then walking out into the Superbowl. It’s enough to make you want to change your pants/trousers!

Here are some of the things I’ve learned:

1 - Great sales professionals deserve HUGE RESPECT! It takes a special kind of person to walk into a room, create rapport, build trust, maintain enthusiasm and have the stamina to eventually close the sale.

2 - A lot of sales professionals are not great. We’ve taken mentoring from a number of sales people along the way. As we’ve learned more, we’ve figured out that most just are not that good. Fortunately, we have one in our back pocket now who is causing the scales to fall from our eyes (you know who you are).

3 - The sales cycle isn’t like running a marathon, it’s like sailing around the world! In a marathon you have some control - train and eat well and put on a decent pair of running shoes and you should get to the finish line at some point. If you are sailing, you need the right training, right clothes, right boat, right equipment, right charts, right crew….and then you put to see, hoping that you’ll make all your checkpoints and get to your destination before you sink.

4 - Selling enterprise software is really hard! First you need to find out if a customer for your software actually exists. If you have an application that runs across organizational boundaries, it is especially difficult to find someone who can make a decision. If you can find someone who can be a champion for you, you are now in a race to get through all of the gates to an order before they move on to bigger and better things.

5 - Software is not a complete product (or at least ours isn’t). After spending six months as a pure software play, realized that we actually need to put food on the table. So, we’ve started to consult. Guess what! Now people are starting to get interested in our product…..provided we consult too.

6 - It’s the benefits, Stupid! I have spent six months extolling the features of our portal only to find out that our possible customers don’t really care. They want to know what our product can actually do for them. Our customers may not be able to calculate ROI is or even give a business school definition, but they have a very healthy understanding of what return on investment actually means.

7 - Focus. Focus. Focus. It is easier to sell a product that does one highly targeted thing well than a complicated the cure for world hunger. We’ve moved from selling a general light-weight online dashboard/scorecard that does everything to a services-vendor KPI reporting tool.

8 - It’s all about the customer. I did a Dale Carnegie course last year. It has taken me around a year of soak time to finally get the idea that it really is about them and not about me.

Big Up Respect to great sales people. I think I’ve at least found where the path to sales success starts now. 2009 is going to be about learning more and actually doing it!

Zen Habits post A Minimalist’s Guide to Using Twitter Simply, Productively, and Funly: is really helpful to anyone like me who’s been trying to figure out how to engage with Twitter….

“Twitter is like a river … you can step into it at any point and feel the water, bathe in it, frolic if you like … and then get out. And go back in at any time, at any point. But, you don’t have to try to consume the entire river — it’s impossible and frankly a waste of time in my eyes.

So that’s how I approach Twitter these days: I’ll just jump into the stream of incoming tweets and see what people are saying. I can ignore them or follow their links or reply if I want. Then I get out of the stream. I don’t try to read everything I missed, and if I miss a lot of stuff, I’m OK with that.”

I think this advice could apply equally to all the corporate information my clients have to keep up with. There are some core performance KPIs that they need to be on top of all of the time, but much of what passes an executive these days is just the flow of the corporate river.

(See the rest of the post in Zen Habits.)

The failure to meet unrealistic expectations can have a huge detrimental impact on a business partnership. Business partnerships and outsourcing relationships in particular are complex, lengthy, involve considerable change and require both personal and organizational investment to be successful. Lack of understanding, over ambitious promises and lack of preparation and rigor can all lead to expectations that are not matched by reality.

Knowledge, preparation and communication are the answers to unrealistic expectations. Developing a deep and structured knowledge of your processes, needs, performance requirements and your partner capabilities drives realistic criteria. Deep preparation leaving little to chance ensures that scenarios are thought about and surprises are reduced. On-going, honest and clear communications ensures that everyone is on the same page and there is little room for unrealistic expectations.

There is a temptation to over measure and get lost in detailed performance metrics and lose sight of the overall objectives of the partnership. After taking the time to develop detailed processes, understand key quality items, benchmark and then developing a complex algorithm linking pay to performance that a mad scientist would be proud of, performance stubbornly refuses to budge and great expectations are dashed.

This temptation to measure and set targets for everything the greater the possibility that they will influence each other (in possibly not fully understood ways) and  prevent major gains in any one area. In statistics, this is known as “regression to the mean,” for the poor individuals managing or performing in this scenario it is a classic no-win situation.

It can also be tempting to set arbitrary standards because they seem to make sense at the time. The percentage is the biggest villain here. 98% performance may sound great or 99.99% may sound like perfection. When that becomes a target for missing mail for an organization delivering 100,000 letters a day to a business, it means that that means 99 can go missing each and every day. Reality checks are critical when setting targets.

Both of these problems can be avoided by taking a step back to clarify objectives and what actually needs to be measured and then give that balanced scorecard a healthy dose of reality.

Unless there are clear tangible and intangible benefits from the new arrangements there can be a significant tendency to revert to old ways of doing things.

Investing the time and energy to make the partnership and the relationships with in it are the only prescriptions for ensuring that the change holds and continues to deliver value. Using Prosci’s ADKAR stages of change can provide an effective gauge of personal and organizational progress in a transition

• Awareness - Identified that a change is coming
• Desire - A willingness to change (have decided to support the new over the old)
• Knowledge - knowing how to change
• Ability - implementing new skills and behaviors
• Reinforcement - maintaing the change once it has occurred

(Adapted from “Employee’s Survival Guide to Change by Jeffrey M. Hiatt)

It’s quite a time consuming and resource intensive process to find and transition in new ways of doing things. It is the small interventions all the way through that ensure that the change becomes as embedded as the old way of doing things.

Even within supposedly single industries with common training structures, regulated activities and well defined professional organizations there is a surprising amount of disagreement over fundamental definitions of an object, service or performance. 

Turnaround or response times are a key item in many outsource partnerships, yet the start and finish point can be a major point of disagreement. For a customer, the start point may be when they first picked up the phone and had an informal conversation, for the help desk when the work order was actually entered, for the maintenance manager when they got it and the ultimate performer when they were asked to do it.

The possibility for confusion and disagreement around definitions, standards and service levels are enormous. Although reference to recognized to standards endorsed by IFMA, OSCRE, BOMA or other institutions is a great start, time must be taken to develop an agreed set of performance criteria that can be measured and actually reflect a common understanding of the operation or service.

Introducing a new partner into an existing environment or creating a whole new environment out different parties coming together to form a team creates a new dynamic that needs to be worked through to enable the team to perform effectively.

Without knowledge of how involved the client team should be in the day to day running of the operation, there may be a tendency to stay out of the expert’s business. Until there is a problem, that is. 

With pressure from above of dissatisfaction from the recipients of the service there is huge temptation to intervene directly to resolve the problem and become highly directive. Where the partnership was set up to effectively just out-task items or just use the labor of the other party this may not be such a big deal. In partnerships where the goals are more wide ranging, potential strategic benefits can be quickly lost.

In fact, these behaviors are the result of people using “common sense” to fill a vacuum and make an ambiguous situation workable. Preventing this needs management tools that work. 

Understanding and agreeing escalation processes, decision rights and mechanisms for correcting poor performance is critical as is understanding and agreeing the objective criteria for measuring performance and ensuring that a mechanism is in place to collect and share them with the people that need them.

In addition to underestimating the effort and time required to plan for and procure a partner, the resources and effort required to ensure a successful transition are also often underestimated. The transition phase can last for six to eighteen months after a contract is signed. The results of underinvestment here can result in an unacceptable reduction in service levels and in the worst cases early failure of the relationship.

For a client, this underinvestment can be the result of leaving too small a team in place (or not leaving one at all) to manage to the relationship or not having the necessary skills.

For the vendor partner, this may be the result of leaving the transition team in place for too short a period or rotating key people away from the contract to meet the pressures of other new contracts. For both client and vendor it may also be the result of a complete lack of understanding of the impact that the change may have.

Commercial realities mean that these issues cannot always be avoided, but they can be mitigated through the development of a clear and unambiguous transition plan and lots of feedback between the partners on how the transition is going, developing risks, actions and next steps.

More detail on the process for securing a vendor partner

Pre-qualification (finding suitable parties). This is where an industry consultant can be useful in identifying potentials based upon an understanding of the work, processes and performance criteria. Depending on the size and complexity of the work, this process can take several rounds or happen pretty quickly.

Document preparation. The processes, performance criteria and overall goals established earlier in the process are turned into formal scope of work documents, business requirements, performance metrics, inventories, staffing lists that form the basis of the procurement exercise.

Out to bid (or RFP). Packaging up all the documentation into a standard form, adding contractual terms, building a pricing list and then sending it to pre-qualified bidders. 

Return (of the bids). During this period, the potential suitors work through the documents, ask questions, clarify requirements and generally build a hopefully compliant proposal. This stage culminates in the return of a bid.

Place Order. Once returned, bid documents need to be evaluated and compared. A clean package of outgoing documents containing easy to understand and unambiguous descriptions, criteria and requirements increases the possibilities that the bids will be directly comparable. Pretty quickly front runners will emerge and the team will move to tighten up and negotiate requirements, offers, counter-offers etc. until the favored bidder emerges and a contract awarded.

Start work. Once an order is placed, there is a period of time when both organizations prepare to actually do business with each other. Again, the level of complexity and scope can influence the time, extent and energy. This is a period when the contracting organization can do a lot to ensure the proper integration and success of the new team.

Not understanding the basic fundamental activities, resources and performance criteria for an activity or function make it difficult for a potential partner to be successful. Unrealistic expectations and lack of knowledge of the procurement process can lead to a poorly executed exercise that at best means that the parties need to rework their agreements very early or at worst results in a disastrous relationship that is unwound in acrimony and sometimes with the help of the lawyers.

Understanding and allowing the time to go through a proper selection process increases the chances that the resulting relationship will be successful for many years. Organizations have different methods and processes that they undertake to search for, find and then contract with a partner. Most successful ones contain the steps of

• pre-qualification
  
• document preparation
  
• out to bid
  
• returning of bids
  
• placement of an order
  
• starting work in one form or another.

Under pressure to achieve a quick result, the temptation is there to short circuit the process or negotiate with a single party. Unfortunately, the absence of clearly defined steps and milestones that can be monitored and measured can result in a long and drawn out process that is ultimately unsatisfactory to all concerned.