Agile Business Development

So here’s my story. We are enlarging our marketing staff and I have two job postings advertised for which I am getting a good number of resumes and writing samples submitted. These are junior marketing positions, and we are very clear that we are seeking candidates with marketing education and/or backgrounds.

However, when I open and read the resumes, you wouldn’t know that the writer of the resume knew anything about marketing, as the writers aren’t marketing to me! In fact, with the sole exception of one submission, less than 1% of the responses, only one lonely resume has even deviated from the typical formal, chronological format that you might expect from an engineer, accountant or lawyer.

Now I’m not expecting a “personal brochure,” although that would be great to see. However, given that I expect candidates with a strong marketing mindset to be applying, and since one of the positions is for a marketing communications specialist, I would expect that a least SOME of the resumes would attempt to tell me the story of who this person is. Pretty basic, right?

But that’s not the end of the story. The writing samples for the most part are also very formulaic, maybe technically very good but somehow failing to engage me as a reader. Many of these are press releases and not one, not one single example out of the dozens and dozens of samples I have received, not one is written in such a way to effectively engage the reader, and absolutely none of these are written in a story format.

Now why am I so concerned about this? Well, from my perspective, and I’m not alone on this as any of you may know who also read from time to time, the single most important skill in marketing is the ability to tell a compelling story. I might even go so far as to say this could be the most important skill in sales, or in business period!

I hope some of the candidates who might see my job postings and who are thinking of applying were in Boston this week and got a chance to stop by Hill | Holiday to meet Frank Rose. You might remember him as the author of West of Eden. He’s here in Boston promoting his latest book, The Art of Immersion. Hopefully, this book will inspire more marketers to trash the dull, boring and dysfunctional style of techno-babble and put their pens to paper to create engaging, immersive stories that engage the readers at the personal and emotional level. So, that’s my story for today.

Frank Rose, author of The Art of Immersion at Hill | Holiday in Boston.

I recently learned that my father has trouble maintaining his balance. While I knew he had been using a cane to assist his walking, I had assumed it was because of the lack of strength and mobility in his legs, having had two knee operations and getting on in years. However, I was surprised to learn that the reason he is having difficulty balancing is that the nerve impulses just aren’t making it up to his brain like they use to. Therefore, using the cane gives him a 3rd reference point which to use in establishing balance, providing him an additional grounding point and thus making him more sure footed.

That got me thinking that a similar phenomenon can happen in companies. As they grow larger and older, companies can begin to have trouble maintaining balance. Perhaps they start relying on one ‘leg’ too much, or the market “impulses” have more difficulty in reaching the company’s “brain,” the managers making the day to day and longer term strategic decisions for the company.

For instance, take a company which becomes totally focused on the sales numbers, committing all their attention to meeting quarterly numbers, and focusing the majority share of the management’s time on managing their pipeline. What they tend to do is stop innovating and at some point their products fall behind the competition or get marginalized in the  marketplace. When this happens, these companies are in danger of falling over. Similarly, we are all familiar with technology driven companies with high ratios of engineers to marketers. These companies may have innovative and highly differentiated products, but often fail to gain enough adoption to obtain a solid “footing” in the market and they too stumble.

Even companies that have well balanced ratios of marketing to engineering, marketing to sales, or marketing to engineering, can sometimes appear to have balance but still have a hard time getting up to “running speed.” Similar to a 2 legged stool, their balance can be weak.

So how does a company achieve better balance? Well, to balance a stool you add more legs. It seems to follow that a business achieves better balance by getting better in more disciplines. So, if a company was strong in engineering and marketing, they could look to improve their sales function. If they were strong in all these areas, they might focus on improving finance or operations.

A company with a good mix of competencies tends to be more stable and more “grounded” in the marketplace. And they won’t need a crutch to keep them propped up!

This is not an idea I came up with – it’s very common knowledge among pragmatic marketers. However, visit any trade show, peruse the ads in any industry rag, or visit a random sampling of web sites and you will see how few high tech companies seem to execute on this concept.

Case in point, I recently attended a very large Health IT trade show and conference, and one of my goals while there was to find some very specific products and companies for my clients. The show floor consisted of acres of companies which I had to quickly navigate in the time I had allotted, and what I unfortunately found was that only a handful of companies actually assisted me in finding them through their listing descriptions or booth graphics. Most of the conversations went like this: Me  - Staring at a booth trying to figure out what this company does. Them, “Can we help you?” Me. “What do you do?” Them, “We have a fligamaflag that is the market leading blah blah with features X, Y, Z….” Me, “That’s great. What problem does it solve?” Them, “Problem?” Me, “You know, what problem do you solve and who would buy this?” Them, “Fred, can you help this guy?”  And so the conversations would go until, if I got lucky, I got a seasoned sales person that understood how to sell the problem, not the solution. And if such a person did present themselves, he/she usually lamented the bad booth graphics and couldn’t understand why “marketing” just didn’t get it, etc.

In another example, I just happened to be sitting with the CEO of a company when he received a call from his sales people on the floor at a trade show. He asked how the booth traffic was and the staff lamented that it was weak, that perhaps everyone who might care about their solution already knew about them, or that what they were doing was not new or exciting any more. I had a hunch and asked to see a picture of the booth. Sure enough, what I saw was just what I expected: the booth graphics had no mention of the problem this company was solving, and worse yet, no benefits of the solution either. Unfortunately the booth backdrop had the company’s name along with a tag line that illustrated a feature of their product. Of course no one was stopping in – there was no ‘what’s in it for me’ from the buyer’s perspective. Worse yet, the main graphic was a user using a product they did not even sell!

So, what’s going on here? Well first, High Tech marketers as a rule tend to market products or solutions. And in doing so usually showcase the product itself, along with the features and because they are good marketers, they make sure the benefits are right up front. The problem is even when benefits are front and center, they don’t always connect back to the problem, or it is a one to many mapping and that is where the disconnect is. Customers have problems and that is how they self segregate when looking for a solution. When prospects land on your website they are looking for things like “Click here if you have Problem X.” What catches their eye when passing a booth or scanning an ad is the problem statement because that is what they will identify with.

Another way to think about it is to consider what does your product deliver, not what does it do. Put this  into a clear and articulate message that uses terms and phrases that the customer would use themselves. Then, take it a step further and add what the value of your solution is, and what about it is unique. Doing this will give you a positioning statement that outlines your unique selling proposition from the buyer’s perspective, and which you can leverage across all your marketing programs and sales tools. By marketing the problem, not the solution, you will greatly simplify the entire sales process and you will see immediate improvements in your conversion processes.

A nephew of mine recently joined the Air Force and selected bomb demolition as his occupation. One of the trickier munitions he learned to defuse was based on smart weapons technology. These munitions are delivered to the vicinity of a target via a missile or other delivery vehicle, then smaller sub ordinances are released which perform the actual target sighting as well calculating aim points for maximal kill effect. This led me to think about an analogy with selling - how marketing organizations create programs to identify suspects then drop sales people in to engage with these potential customers, much in the same way that the missile gets the smart munitions into the battlefield for engagement with the suspected targets.

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What makes the better choice?

Think about it…the last time you purchased a big ticket item what did you do? If you are like me you check product reviews before making a purchase. Why? Well for me, a lot of products look very similar, at least in the way they are positioned and marketed. So in the shopping process I’m not really looking the buy the superior product, I’m looking to buy a problem free product - the “better” product.

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An agile methodology promotes processes that are structured, adaptive and reiterative, and encourages self-organization, teamwork and accountability. This makes agile methods well suited to use in sales organizations where the ability to adapt to quickly changing customer requirements and dynamic competitive environments is critical to effectively deploying and optimizing human resources to achieve financial targets on a daily basis.

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If you had asked me this question when I started my sales career, I would have answered definitely proactive. Every sales seminar I attended, every book I read, and every training tape I listened to instructed me to take charge of the selling process. All of the closing techniques from the tried and true to the more recent seemed to assume two things: That buyers tended to follow a fairly standard series of buying steps, and that I could impose a process of my own on the buyer to influence the timing and outcome of that process. What I have found in practice is that firstly all buyers do not buy the same way, and secondly buyers resist and detest you hijacking their processes! Additionally, many of the old and true sales techniques break down when there are multiple buyers in the process which is typical in high-value or enterprise purchases. Read the rest of this entry »

In my posts on Making Sales Agile I discussed the concept of how one might optimally map an Agile framework onto a sales process. In agile development, a Release is a set of functionality that is delivered usually in a series of Sprints. In the context of agile sales, I proposed that the Release is the revenue the sales team “delivers” at the end of a series of sales Sprints.

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In a previous blog post I covered a concept of applying agile methodologies to the business development process (http://agilebizdev.com/agile-business-development). In this post I wanted to begin focus down to the tail of the business development process, closing sales, and look at how one might optimally map an agile framework onto this part of the marketing process.  The idea would be to bring the sales team into an agile framework much in the same way as software development teams operate in frameworks such as Scrum. The goal of this would be to gain more control and visibility over the sales organization and process so that is can be better managed to deliver more accurate sales results.

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Market Discovery vs. Validation

One customer does not make a market. I heard this phrase somewhere when I first started selling and it has stuck with me since. It is almost so basic I hesitated to write about it, but it seems that every week I am speaking to someone who is either not familiar with this concept or has temporarily forgotten about it as “the market for out product is huge!”

Case in point, I was called a couple of years ago by an engineering PhD I used to work with who wanted to start a company and asked me to join him. At the time, he worked for a company that made display devices and had just made a routine site visit to a customer of his, a radiology clinic in a large and prestigious hospital. While there, he was viewing some medical imagery with a physician who described what he was trying to quantify in the imagery. The physician went on to comment that if my friend could come up with a way to do this automatically, “everyone would want the product.”  Is the story sounding familiar already?

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