Be Different or be dead

March 26, 2018

6 easy ways to improve marketing and sales working together

In every organization there is a degree of conflict between marketing and sales

Marketing complains that sales don’t move products or services effectively; sales claims they don’t get the support from marketing they need to do the job.

Marketing says that certain sales activity is off strategy; sales responds by criticizing that marketing doesn’t provide clear enough direction.

Around and around it goes.

A certain amount of this dance is healthy; too much, however, and it’s dysfunctional and can adversely impact organizational performance.

These 6 actions will help link marketing and sales in harmony.

Clarify the roles of each party

Marketing sets strategy; sales executes it. Sales is a channel to market; setting the channel strategy — i.e. what channel sells what product — is the responsibility of marketing.

Sales has no formal role in setting overall market direction other than providing input as the frontline customer facing team.
It’s critical that all align with these roles otherwise dysfunction occurs as groups trip over each other and little constructive gets done.
If there are issues about who does what, escalate to the highest level in the organization to get resolution.

Develop a detailed marketing plan

The marketing plan must have sufficient granularity for sales to create their sales plan incorporating the strategy focus and priorities they must carry out.
This is often a major issue where the marketing plan lacks the clarity required to define the specific actions sales must take to execute successfully.

Without absolute clear translation for sales they will be forced to make their own interpretation of what marketing expects. This puts sales in a quasi-planning role for which they are not responsible nor ill equipped to play.

Engage sales in setting the overall revenue target

This does not mean sales has a decision making role in setting the target; this is the responsibility of marketing.
Sales, however, should be looked to provide critical input on the available revenue potential and decide how it should be allocated at the customer level.

In addition, should there be any shortfall between the tops down marketing driven revenue target and bottoms up sales driven quota — and there always is — sales should decide how the difference will be allocated among customer groups and specific customers.

Implement an internal report card

The report card is a vehicle that allows marketing and sales to review and rate one another in terms of how well each function supports and meets the needs of the other.

The process is simple: marketing defines their 6 critical needs of sales who, in turn, outline what they expect of marketing. Every 6 months report cards are exchanged and each side rates the other — ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘F’ rating — on each support item. Results are analyzed and actions taken by both sides to address where performance has fallen short of expectations.

Jointly review revenue results monthly

Joint action planning based on results against monthly revenue objectives will solidify and direct the relationship to enhance performance.
Name calling is reduced and energy directed to resolving issues rather than blaming the other side for any performance glitch.

I mandated that these sessions be formally planned and would drop in unannounced to witness the proceedings and ask questions that challenged how well the team was working together. It became an integral part of “how things were done around here”.

Celebrate achievements together — good or bad

You either make it together or you fail together. There is no finger pointing, only sharing. Remarkable teams are created by jointly owning performance results.

As president of the organization I hosted quarterly performance celebrations between the two groups. We reviewed the successes — and recognized the heroes — and shortcomings — and what was learned through the process.
We tried to recognize groups of individuals with a mix of marketing and sales to further the notion of teamwork.

Aligning marketing and sales is not good enough. They need to be joined at the hip in order to deliver the high level of performance every organization expects.

Leadership needs to be engaged to make it happen otherwise nothing will change and mutual distrust will continue.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.26.18 at 03:55 am by Roy Osing
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March 19, 2018

7 proven ways a leader can pick the right person

Pexels

7 proven ways a leader can pick the right person.

How does a leader pick the right person when all candidates appear to be equally qualified?

This is a common question posed to leaders; but it’s one that has no answer.

The question is flawed; it’s based on an incorrect assumption.

It assumes that two candidates can be equally qualified.

No two individuals are “equally qualified”; no two people possess identical capabilities in terms of creating value for the organization.
The question assumes identical academic achievements in the same discipline (never happens); equal experience (never happens), equal skills (never happens) and equal potential (never happens).

If a leader can’t choose because they are unable to see the differences in individuals, they’re failing in their role.

If they do not have the insight necessary to break down common stereotypes in people, they are unlikely to be able to develop amazingly successful teams.

For those leaders who have difficulty seeing the differences in people these are the necessary actions to take.

Usher yourself out

Leave and seek another opportunity if you can’t see the difference in people. Because if you stay, you are likely to make bad people decisions and rob your organization.
The right thing to do is own up to your leadership deficiency and leave.

Ask more detailed questions of the candidates

Ask questions that probe their DNA. I was hiring a VP Marketing and the candidate had a history of Greek dancing. I asked why it mattered to the marketing leadership position and how they would apply the dancing skill to the position he was applying for.

His answer was threaded with skills like creativity, spontaneity and risk taking which were helpful in painting a picture of what he was all about.
You can’t discover differences in people if you don’t probe in detail how their skills and experience could be applied specifically to the job in question.

Insist that they ask you the top 3 questions on their mind as a candidate

This will tell you what they think is important (and how well they prepared for the interview) and how well they can focus on the few things that are truly important.

I would frame the question this way: “If I make my decision to hire you based on 3 questions you feel are vital to ask me, what would they be?”
This question separates the ramblers from those that can pinpoint their interests in a few words — good to know; the crowd has difficulty doing this.

Test their understanding of your company

Ask tough questions on your products and services, main competitors, strategic partnerships and financial performance to see if they have done their homework.

I would ask each person to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 on how well they think they understood our organization and the priorities it had — amazing how you can spot the bullshit.
Truly committed candidates will have thoroughly researched your organization and will standout from others you are interviewing.

Ask them “If you were to be hit by a bus and killed what would you be remembered for?”

And ask for a one word answer. What they define as their special redeeming value is critical information to test whether their is a fit between the candidate and the values of the organization.

Ask “What do you mean?” questions based on their one word reply to bring out what they specifically mean answer. Most replies tend to be high level and vague — “I think I will be remembered for my generosity” which tells you little about the actions they would take (and the values they live) to be generous.

Have more than one person engaged in the interview

It could be a peer but it could also be a high potential junior level manager who would gain from the experience of sitting in.

I used to invite who I considered high potential employees to sit in on candidate interview for positions more senior than theirs.
They were blown away by the trust I gave them; they returned my trust with creative questions that reflected a more inclusive view of what the organization deemed important.

Ask them what they learned from their grandmother

Grandmothers have amazing life smarts that are unmatched by most others and represent an amazing source of mentorship.

Discover what your candidates have learned about life that can be traced back to an old soul who has forgotten more life lessons than most of us will ever learn.
Individuals who can see the wisdom in experience have much to offer, and will show themselves as different from other candidates.

Recruiting top talent is an incredibly tough job. Don’t make it even more difficult by assuming any two candidates are equally qualified.

Your job as leader is to discover their differences and select the one whose unique attributes exactly match the needs of the organization.

If you don’t see the inequality between candidates, look closer; dig deeper.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 3.19.18 at 04:38 am by Roy Osing
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February 26, 2018

How a good marketing leader can become really great

Source: Unsplash - Bealach na bà

How a good marketing leader becomes great.

Marketing’s role in any organization is critical; its leaders must be extraordinary.

Unfortunately, I don’t think marketing generally has stepped up to the challenge of doing remarkable things; in fact I think the craft is currently quite boring and unimaginative.
I offer this perspective as a guy who spent at least 80% of his 33+ year career leading marketing organizations and fulfilling the role of CMO.

Sure, the internet has spawned a plethora of new tools to engage with and sell to people, but the essence of the marketing strategy employed by most organizations hasn’t changed much. There is still a relentless focus on price, mass advertising, product and service flogging and applying traditional marketing tools introduced years ago and pushed by academics and consultants alike.

Marketing leaders must take responsibility for this state of affairs; for the apathy they have accepted from their marketing teams. They must be held accountable to move the marketing discipline from an approach that was practiced in the past, and is now underperforming given the dramatic changes that have occurred in the market.

They must take responsibility to personally lead their teams to a new relevant place, and not accept the inertia caused by their junior teams of marketing
practitioners who have been taught principles of the past.

If marketing leaders accept how their team performs its role, they can’t be surprised when lacklustre results are produced.

Parochial leaders get mediocrity.

Organizations need marketing leaders to take control; people who will not stop until their team produces unheard-of results by practising the new relevant art.

Here are eight actions marketing leaders can take if they want to stand-out and turn their marketing teams into achievers of remarkability.

1. Set short-term revenue goals

Focus on the next 24 months rather than be a victim of the 5-year plan. This shorter term view will force an execution and results focus and avoid the “hockey stick” phenomenon where sales are supposed to miraculously show up at the end of the planning period.
Set revenue targets monthly and review performance to ensure you are on track.

2. Make revenue targets bold enough that you don’t know exactly how to achieve them

Discomfort and ‘I don’t know’ is an effective way to drive innovation and creativity. If you know how to deliver your expected revenue, there is little or no incentive to do different things.
If you follow yesterday’s path, nothing remarkable happens.

3. Eliminate benchmarking as a tool for marketers to use

Copying won’t step your organization up to a higher level; it simply keeps you in the competitive herd. Ask, “How can we be different?”. Apply this question to every proposal you review. 
If a proposal from one of your marketers doesn’t move your organization towards standing out from your competitors to being a ‘different breed’, reject the proposal out-of-hand. And fire any marketer who makes the same mistake twice.

4. Stop new customer acquisition programs

Insist on seeing proposals that generate more revenue from your existing customer base as opposed to providing special deals or promotions to prospective customers who you want to attract from your competition. The truth is that customers who join you from the competition can’t be counted on for any loyalty or added revenue over the long term.

Offer any special promotions or deals to your existing customers first; reward their loyalty.

5. De-emphasize price and establish value creation as your raison d’être

Ask what value is being created for your loyal customers, not, “How can we lower our prices?”. Everyone plays the price game and it leads not to competitive advantage but rather financial ruin.

Declare the marketing rule “There will be NO price incentives offered around here!” as the way to disrupt the momentum of using boring prices as a marketing tool.
And replace the product manager position with the product value position and reward those who are prolific at creating value solutions.

6. Recruit weird people

Marketing success today is all about finding what small specialty groups desire or want (satisfying what they need is passé) and proving them with unmatched value.

Start to populate your marketing teams with these types of people who can relate better to these curious customer segments. Look for contrarians. People who have bizarre ideas and question the common ways of doing things. People who hate fitting in.

You need a team of weirdos to carry your mandate breakaway from traditional marketing ways.

7. Expand your marketing team to include the frontline

The new marketing excellence is produced by understanding the deep innermost secrets of people you want to serve. The customer-facing frontline in any organization is THE most effective receptacle for customer learning; what customer’s desire. Recruit these people even if they don’t meet your “minimum education standards” — which are largely irrelevant in most cases anyways.

Get their ideas and implement them. And tell the rest of the organization what you are up to; hopefully they also will recognize the value of the human face to the customer.

8. Develop a competitive claim that is more than just hot air

The new marketing leader is not guided by aspiration. They are practical people who covet granularity, clarity and precision when it comes to defining why people should buy from their organization and none other.

Be clear and specific that the value you deliver to your customers is distinct from your competition. Create The ONLY Statement for your business.

They focus their attention on answering the killer question, “Why should I do business with you and not your competitors?” and purge comparative notions like best, number one and leader as ways of describing their market value proposition.

Marketing leaders must step up their game and take personal ownership of the changes needed to stay relevant and survive. Their organizations depend on it.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.26.18 at 04:18 am by Roy Osing
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February 19, 2018

How the best leaders inspire great teams that work together

Source: Pexels

How the best leaders inspire great teams that work together.

How the best leaders get people working well together.

A colleague of mine, Ron Cox, Founder and CEO of Tailwind Consulting in Tampa Florida says that “a staggering 95% of employees in a company are either unaware of or do not understand the strategy”.

No wonder execution fails!

One of the biggest issues in any organization is the lack of congruence between what the strategy says and what people do on a day-to-day basis.

The strategy says one thing and not only do people do another, they do different things out of sync with the strategy.
Massive inconsistency and dysfunction results.

This is a failure of leadership.

Leadership tends to place more focus on direction-setting rather than on determining how the strategy will be executed.
Precision is applied to ‘getting the strategy right’ and not how it will be implemented in the trenches where the real work gets done.

The gap between strategic intent and actual results is due to this skewed attention.
If only 20% of leadership’s attention is placed on the details of how the strategy will be implemented, the strategy will likely be hit and miss as employees find it necessary to execute the plan the way THEY believe it should.

Effective business plan execution occurs when there is clarity between the functional roles that employees play in the organization and its strategy.

It is about translating the strategy into what it means to each function involved in delivering it. What specifically should the call center rep do differently? The product analyst? The sales person? The internal audit manager?

If at the most granular level each employee in the firm doesn’t know how to behave and what results to produce within the context of the new direction change will simply not happen and improved results expected by the new strategic game plan won’t be achieved.

Line of sight

Line of sight to the strategy means what it implies; each employee can “see” the strategy from their position and they understand what they specifically need to do to contribute to the strategy.

If direct line of sight is defined for every role, flawless execution results whereas indirect line of sight results in people having a clouded understanding of what action the strategy demands.

Most leaders absolve themselves of ensuring activity and strategy are aligned. It generally gets relegated to functional heads to sort out by declaring their priorities that THEY contend are homeomorphic with strategic imperatives.

The problem with this process is that subjectivity is introduced at a very high level in the organization and is magnified again and again as teams are asked to do the same thing through middle and junior management levels.

And the tipping point, of course, is that leadership doesn’t approve detailed functional plans which would at least show whether they were bordering on out-of-alignment or not.

Any inconsistencies between activity and strategy at the highest level in an organization are multiplied by an order of magnitude factor before it reaches the frontline people.

Under these conditions it’s not difficult to see why strategy and organizational activity diverge and not converge.

What can leadership do about this problem?

First, ease the precision around business plan creation and tighten it up around execution. Get comfortable with getting the plan “just about right” and applying rigour to implementation and adjusting the plan on the run.

Next, take ownership of aligning organizational activity to strategy.

Alignment plans

Institutionalize ‘Alignment Plans’ with functional heads; ask for sufficient granularity to the determination of whether or not a team has direct line of sight to the strategy or not. Make them work at it until they get it right and your leadership team approves.

Alignment Plans submitted to the leader should:

▪️ Define the key elements of the strategy that everyone in the organization must align with.

There are many dimensions to any strategy but it is critical to prioritize and focus on the critical ones. Greater alignment success will occur by focussing on a handful of the critical strategic imperatives rather than trying to ‘herd the cats’ around a dozen.
                         
▪️ Define what needs to change in every functional team with an action plan to achieve it.

If the organization is pursuing a new or revised strategic direction, there will most certainly be projects, company values, people skills and technology that will have to be re-vectored to enable the execution of the new plan. Details of everything that needs to change must be defined in detail.

▪️ Identify activities, projects and behaviours that have to be dropped in order to take on new activities required for alignment.

Leadership is just as much about what has to be stopped as it is about what has to be started.

If out-of-alignment activity is not stopped, additional unnecessary resources will be most certainly requested. All non-strategic activity must be isolated and resources removed and redeployed to new challenges that must be undertaken.

Personal initiative

If you’re an employee in an organization that chooses not to impose a process to explicitly align activity to their strategy, take personal initiative to align your own work priorities to what the organization wants to achieve.

Successful careers are built on the backs of the organization’s strategy and those that execute more effectively than others are quicker to reach their personal goals.

These personal actions will propel you forward.

#1. Translation

Help others translate what the strategy means to them in the organization.

Once you have determined your own line of sight, help others through the same process.

Everyone needs to understand the new things they will have to do and the CRAP they will have to dispose of. Unless this translation for all employees is done, the organization will be frozen in momentum management and no progress in the new direction will be achieved.

Get involved in organizing and leading workshops with various departments in the company and explore a new blueprint for each that represents the new course for them to follow. 

The role of translating the new strategy for various employee groups is one that rarely gets performed. It’s a difficult task as it requires an intimate level of understanding of the strategy.
You can’t drill a strategy down into individual action if you don’t truly understand it at a detailed level.

If you’re a leader, you must dedicate much more of your time seeing that people treat this as a priority and hold them accountable.
Wander through the workplace asking people to clarify the top three things they are going to do to help deliver the new strategy and what dozen-or-so things they are going to give up.

And get the expectations hard wired into the performance planning process. It is the difference between an effective one where everyone is working in parallel to support a common purpose, and a dysfunctional one where people are working at odds with one another to deliver some things that are on strategy and other things that are not.

Synchronized outcomes release the power of execution - and competitive advantage; inconsistent outcomes zap the energy of the organization, encumber execution and impair competitive success.

#2. Set your calendar

Let the organization’s strategy guide your daily calendar. The ultimate manifestation of direct line of sight is a calendar composed only of activities relating to the outcomes you have deemed necessary for you to deliver the new strategy.

If you can’t strategically relate a particular activity you plan to do on a given day, question why it is occupying your time.

Zero base your calendar and build it through the weeks and months ahead in the image of your strategy.
If you are in a leadership position, ask to see the calendars of those reporting to you. Is each of them doing the things required of the new direction or are they continuing on as custodians of the past?

#3. Communicate the strategy personally

Communicate face to face with others in your organization as the most effective way of injecting the emotional component necessary to get people to believe and act.
E-mail blasts to a broad distribution list, employee newsletters and other mass means of communication don’t work as effectively. Use technology like ZOOM if physical distancing is a challenge.

These mass communications vehicles preclude the ability for people to engage in a conversation to enhance their understanding of where the organization is going.

You need to press the flesh even if it’s virtual, and make it matter by showing up in person, explaining the strategy and answering the tough questions.

In non-pandemic times, I used ‘Infonet sessions’ as well as the bear pit to communicate the company’s strategy to all employees.

They required high levels of energy and were extremely time consuming, but what else could be more important?
People in the organization need to understand where it is going and they have a right to challenge it if they are not convinced it is appropriate. You can’t capture their hearts and minds if you’re a ‘no show’.

#4. Use the strategy as the context for solving problems

When confronted by a business problem or issue, always assess it and talk about it with others from the perspective of your strategy.
Create the strategic context for the discussion and then assess your options. What does your strategy suggest is the appropriate action to take?

It’s an effective way to increase understanding and awareness of your strategy and establish you as a leader and the strategy hawk for your organization.

People suddenly forget that they have set a new course in motion for the organization and they look for solutions to problems in the old strategic context.

The opposite is also true; people often don’t relate the visible changes being made in their organization to the new strategic direction that has been put in motion. They don’t get that the cause of the changes they are witnessing is the new strategy.

Assume the role of connecting the dots for people in your organization. Reinforce that the changes that everyone is seeing are the result of your new strategy.

Line of sight leadership is necessary to build teamwork and commitment to the organization’s strategic intent. Take a personal role is making it an essential ingredient in your culture.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 2.19.18 at 04:19 am by Roy Osing
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