Posted by Bob Apollo on Thu, Dec 17, 2009
All the publicity surrounding the Copenhagen Climate Conference has reinforced the world-wide need for sustainable development. It seems clear that this can’t be left to governments alone – we’ve all got a role to play, and a responsibility to avoid wasteful behaviour.
Thinking about how we can all eliminate waste isn’t just good for the environment – it’s a powerful perspective for improving the efficiency and productivity of everything we do. And maybe we can do more with the idea than our politicians seem able to.
Where's the waste?
I’m specifically thinking about how we might establish a framework for sustainable sales and marketing. Ever since John Wanamaker famously complained that “half of my advertising is wasted – I just don’t know which half”, marketing has had a deserved reputation as a wasteful endeavour.
Of course the truth of the matter is that a great deal of conventional sales and marketing activity is far more inefficient than even John Wanamaker knew. I’d suggest that in sales and marketing terms, sustainability involves using our resources wisely to generate the maximum customer value with minimum wasted effort.
More Science than Art
I think it is (or should be) pretty obvious to everybody involved that neither marketing nor sales can continue to hide behind a claim that they more art than a science. A series of significant studies from CSO Insights and others have proved the value of repeatable, adaptable process.
In fact, I think it’s legitimate to claim that effective sales and marketing processes foster innovation and creativity rather than suppressing it. So what are the keys to achieving sustainable sales and marketing? Here are three to start with...
Three Recommendations
First: do nothing that is of no value to your customer. This does not have to mean charging them for everything you do – although sooner or later an exchange of tangible value needs to take place. But before conducting any sales or marketing activity you need to carefully consider whether your prospect would be prepared to invest their time or money on the outcome. For example, does that expensively produced piece of sales collateral play any useful role in facilitating the prospect’s buying process? Most (up to 90%, according to a recent study) don’t.
Second: if you are going to lose, make sure you lose early. Chasing deals that are never going to close, or are inevitably heading towards a competitor, is an unbelievably wasteful strategy. Yet sales pipelines around the world are full of these limbo deals. The problem seems to particularly affect middle-of-the-road sales people. The top performers are too smart to waste their time on a losing proposition. The also-rans are too scared to qualify them out because it makes their pipeline look smaller. If you are a sales manager, the single most powerful thing you can do to eliminate waste is to insist on evidence of buyer potential and intent, and to qualify the remaining deals out ruthlessly as early as possible in the sales cycle, and replace them with better ones.
Third: don’t waste your time pushing your products towards the prospect with scattergun marketing campaigns, find ways of getting them to pull you along with them. You’ve got to deeply understand the trigger events that disturb your prospect’s status quo, and you’ve got to ensure that you get found when they start searching for solutions. Rather than focusing on promoting return on investment, help your prospect to recognise the costs and consequences of inaction should they choose to ignore the issue – and ensure that you can demonstrate that you are the lowest risk of all alternative outcomes – including a decision to do nothing.
Lean Thinking
There are many other lessons that sales and marketing could learn from the lean thinking that has already revolutionised manufacturing industry. But don’t be misled into thinking of lean as primarily a cost-cutting exercise. I believe that its’ primary value actually lies in the thoughtful and efficient creation of real customer value, and in refocusing everything else onto more purposeful activity. You can read more about lean sales and marketing here.
What do you think? Is it possible to achieve sustainable sales and marketing? What other strategies have you found helpful in eliminating value, avoiding waste and improving predictability?
Posted by Bob Apollo on Mon, Jul 06, 2009
How confident are you that you truly, deeply understand who your best prospects are, what really matters to them, and how and why they choose to buy?
It's an increasingly important question, for two reasons: firstly, the latest studies confirm a trend which has been apparent for a number of years - that prospective B2B buyers are using the internet and their circle of connections to do much more research before they are ready to approach potential vendors. The balance of information power has unquestionably shifted in favour of the buyer.
Second, in the current economic climate, we're seeing B2B buyers shy away from anything that might be seen to be a potentially risky decision. If they cannot be convinced otherwise, a growing number are inclined to believe that the safest thing is to "decide to do nothing".
Faced with these two trends, vendors have to focus - on connecting with prospects who have issues they cannot afford not to deal with, and for which they have a demonstrably superior solution - and then they need to ensure that they emerge as the lowest risk of all available options - including that of simply preserving the status quo.
But careful qualification isn't enough - vendors also need to execute impeccably in facilitating the prospect's buying process - and to influence the way the prospect looks at the issue that caused them to start searching for a solution in the first place.
Persuading the prospect to think differently - to embrace a new perspective - is one of the key factors in creating a potentially winning environment. Sales people who successfully pull this off are able to achieve the much sought-after "trusted adviser" status. But timing is critical - they need to shape the prospect's view of the world before they formalise their needs and priorities.
That's where trigger-nometry is so important. The time during which a prospect evolves from being unaware or unconcerned to recognising they have an issue that they need to deal with is a critical stage in the whole process of buying.
Vendors need to understand and anticipate the trigger events that catalyse this transition. These trigger events can be external (things that happen in the market) or internal (things that happen within the prospect's organisation) but they represent the time during which the prospect's perspectives are at their most pliable.
Vendors who only get involved in deals after the prospect has crystallised their view of what they need, and what they should be looking for, start with an obvious disadvantage - whereas vendors who are visible at the time of the trigger event, or who can help create a trigger event, are in pole position to shape the buying agenda.
How can sales and marketing organisations improve their trigger-nometry? By observing the key forces that are shaping their target markets. By tracking key changes within their prospects. And by ensuring they have a relevant and potentially provocative perspective on how the prospect might respond to these issues.
Posted by Bob Apollo on Mon, Jun 22, 2009
It's clear that in the current economic climate, avoiding wasted sales and marketing effort (and budget) is a subject that is dear to many hearts, as organisations react to the challenge of trying to do more with the same or fewer resources.
Tough economic times are a powerful catalyst for selling and marketing smarter, and for doing a better job of anticipating and satisfying customer needs. Having a company-wide focus on elevating customer value and eliminating wasted effort is a great start.
With that in mind, here are my conclusions as to the 8 most common sources of wasted sales and marketing effort. Each will form the subject of a future article, when I'll share some more ideas about how to systematically eliminate them.
1: LACK OF AWARENESS: According to some, this has the potential to be the greatest waste of all, since it means that vendors may fail to be considered in deals they could have won, and prospects may fail to identify an optimal solution.
Lack of awareness cuts both ways: it results in vendors being unaware of potential prospects or their issues, and in prospects being unaware of vendors who may have the answer to their problems.
2: OVER PRODUCTION: Over-production is the result of vendors initiating more marketing and sales activities (generating large numbers of unqualified leads, for example) than their organisations are able to properly follow-up.
For anything (like an enquiry from an active prospect) that has a "best before" date, over-production can make it difficult to accurately qualify prospect activity, which has a direct impact on the third waste:
3. POOR QUALIFICATION: Accurate, timely qualification of prospects is critical to the effective use of sales and marketing resources. Like awareness, poor qualification cuts both ways: it renders vendors unable to distinguish between "good" and "bad" deals or to respond accordingly.
The effects of poor qualification are profound. Vendors many end up failing to allocate sufficient resource to otherwise winnable deals, while they waste valuable energy pursuing bad deals that should have been discarded far earlier in the sales cycle.
4: VALUELESS ACTIVITY: This waste involves any action on the part of the vendor that fails to create meaningful customer value or - just as important - to facilitate the prospect's buying process.
These valueless activities can include irrelevant marketing programmes, actions or campaigns, inappropriate sales tools, or sales actions that do nothing to advance the sales cycle. A recent study suggested that in some organisations as much as 90% of the materials produced by marketing were never taken up by either the salesforce or prospects.
5. VALUELESS FUNCTIONALITY: A regrettably common waste amongst technology or product-driven companies. It includes any functionality that prospects see no significant value in, or serves to make the vendor's offering over-complex.
Like the other wastes identified here, valueless functionality is completely avoidable - but only if product development is completely driven by a superior understanding of who their best customers are and of the most critical (and therefore valuable) issues they are trying to solve.
6: UNBALANCED RESOURCES: This waste can be observed wherever bottlenecks or over-capacity are found across different elements of the business or at different times of the business cycle. For example, certain pre-sales resources may be overloaded while others are under-utilised - or back office teams completely maxed out at month or quarter end but under-used at other times.
This waste can be significantly reduced by carefully designing business processes so that they carry a more even workload - or by amending the incentives that cause frenzied end-of-period activity followed by quiet periods.
7: WAITING: This waste can be observed whenever the actions that a vendor takes - or, just as significantly, fails to take - have the effect of slowing or delaying the prospect's buying process.
You might think that vendors would be particularly sensitive about the consequences of the waste of waiting - yet many have habits, processes or procedures that keep the prospect waiting when they would otherwise be willing to move forwards.
8: UNFULFILLED POTENTIAL: The final waste, but the one that most commonly reflects cultural failings on the part of the employer. It is caused by the failure to fully harness your workforces' potential to identify and solve problems and to drive performance improvement.
It's widely recognised that a centralised "command and control" approach is incapable to creating the organisational agility required to cope with changing market conditions - yet many employers fail to systematically engage the talents of their workforce - or the insights of their partners.
So there you have it - the 8 most common causes of waste in B2B sales and marketing. Their cumulative effect is frightening, yet adopting a "lean mindset" can start to change things quickly - and provide the platform for continuous improvement.
Subsequent articles will address each of these wastes. But if you can't wait to find out more, or would simply like to share your opinions and experience, please drop me a line to bob.apollo@inflexion-point.com.