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!

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.

Execute, execute, execute!! The Economist has a great post on Obama’s earnest army. It contrasts the McCain campaign with its focus on traditional political campaigning and Obama’s relentless and highly focused machine.

For all its pretensions to be about “you”, the Obama campaign is strictly hierachical and impressively disciplined.

I’m an expat living here and feel fortunate to have great friends on both sides of the political divide and a ringside seat as the election has unfolded. It is really hard to not be impressed by such a focused (and well funded) mash-up of old school and new school leadership, culture and technology:

• Applied Social Networks - online forums, accessible downloadable information, on-line and real world collaboration opportunities……all focused on a very clear objective
• Supercrunching - action oriented mining of huge databases of information to drive action
• Crowdsourcing - sophisticated technology enabling campaigners to easily organize themselves to pound the streets and keep important voter intentions and tracking databases scarily current
• Detailed scripting at all levels - foot soldiers are told what to say and they say it
• Clear and unambiguous leadership - Obama stays on message, his team stays on message (well mostly) and when they don’t it gets drowned out

The result is a huge, focused army of unpaid supporters that is on-message, disciplined, working phenomenal hours and relentlessly getting one vote at a time.

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.