Rainmaking Secrets

To understand what we need to do next in sales and marketing, we need to appreaciate where we have come from.

The huge change affecting markets and marketers came in the 1970’s when product-driven selling and marketing began to give way to customer-driven selling and marketing. The cause: A global over supply of product, virtually every category, shifted the balance of power in marketing from producers to customers.

Here is a quick history of the major changes:

Sales 1.0 Customer-Centric Selling

In the 1980’s, product-focused marketing gave way to customer-centric marketing. Relationship Marketing, Solution Selling and Customer for Life became the new mantras.

Sales 2.0 Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Techonology first began to transform sales with the arrival of contact management packages like ACT. Today, web-based CRM makes it possible for sales teams to manage, forecast and report on all phases of the sales cycle. But while CRM has delivered increases in efficiencies and sales force productivity, it has rarely enhanced the customer experience or deliver a sustainable source of competitive advantage.

Sales 3.0 Customer Experience Management (CEM)

Currently, the best performing sales organizations are shifting their orgranizational mind set from CRM to Customer Experience Management (CEM). Their goal: “Right Touch/Right Customer/First Time/Everytime”. CEM increases customer engagement, shorten sales cycles and increases closure rates. The result is a high velocity sales organisation.

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Talented business development professionals are always in scarce supply.

In The Differentiated Workforce: Transforming Talent Into Strategic Impact (2010) authors Brian Becker, Mark Huselid and Richard Beatty urge companies to manage their strategic talent like a share portfolio.

So, which business development positions are strategic?

Here are some key questions to remember when assessing whether a business development position is strategic.

1. Strategic business development staff are those who significantly enhance the probability of achieving your business strategy.
2. Strategic positions have major revenue enhancing or cost reducing impact on the firm.
3. Strategic positions have a strategic impact on the firm’s customers.
4. Poor performance is immediately detected.
5. The selection of a wrong person is extremely costly.

Virtually all senior business development professionals I meet, who hold positions in their firm’s senior hierarchy believe they are ‘strategic’. But that is not the case.

As a first step, you need to identify your strategic capabilities.

1. Identify and review your capability criteria
2. List possible strategic capabilities
3. Assess each for present wealth creation impact
4. Determine the most important three to five business development strategic capabilities for your business.

The Differentiated Workforce will end up, well thumbed, on most HR professional’s book shelves. The smartest Business Development Leaders I work with have already read it.

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Western companies struggle to cope with contradictions. Our language is typically bipolar: right and wrong, true and false, black and white.

By contrast, Eastern cultures see opposites not as contradictions but as complementary. Edward de Bono talks about a Western stone culture and an Eastern water culture. Physician Barry Johnson talks about similar issues in his book ‘Polarity Management‘.

Hermann Simon, in his book Hidden Champions of the 21^st Century talks about how hidden champion Gore, the world leader in Teflon based products has included specific polarities in its company’s philosophy.

The principle of freedom allows each employee to do what he or she considers is right. This freedom has limits. It is restricted by the “waterline” principle.

As soon as a decision could hit the corporate ship below the waterline, a colleague must be consulted to share the responsibility.

As Simon puts it, “while the freedom principle encourages all employees to make use of their full potential, the waterline principle is intended to guarantee that the company does not suffer any serious damage.”

Profound advice!

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