On cutting one’s nose off…

As B2B companies get ready for “the recovery” they are finding out just how deeply and dangerously lean they have made themselves after so much cutting. If survival is the only revenge your company can have on its competitors, then it’s hard to argue there is a smarter way.

But what if you are a company that has a genuine business advantage and you were to take this time to face your marketplace, raise your identity, your voice and your message of greater value, while others languish indecisively?

The greater tragedy of this recession will be that so many B2B companies will have cut off their noses despite their faces, and learned nothing from it.

JB

You can lead a horse to water…

But why bother. Horses have the instinct and sensory skills to find it on their own. Humans, on the other hand, are not wired that way. People who work within organizations need to be led, or the organization will default to a state of entropy. This is especially dangerous at a time when organizations are desperately challenged to behave as unified companies.

Sadly, it may take a recession for many B2B companies to learn the difference between business management and business leadership. Even more sad is the fact that so many companies will not learn this difference, even if they survive the recession.

Yet the difference is clear. The managerial approach is to cut costs, make the necessary layoffs and furloughs. The leadership approach is to more fully exploit competitive advantage, become aligned on mission and identity, become all the better positioned for faster recovery, better margins and a stronger future.

Managing cost reductions is a lot easier than leading organizational change.

The entropy that now hampers the organization was there before this recession, only now it is magnified by the absence of leadership. You can blame it on corporate culture, but that would be wrong. Corporate culture is the planned outcome of thoughtful leadership. Entropy is the outcome of bureaucracy.

Who in your organization, if not the CEO, is asking the right questions about company identity, value generation, related customer needs and the greater growth potential of your company?

JB

If they aren’t buying, stop selling

I just dropped out of a Linkedin discussion group thread called “5 Qualities of a Great Salesman”. It’s one of those “discussions” impeded by self-promotion, with someone upping the anti to 7 and others contesting what the number should be.

Apparently misunderstanding the assignment, I briefly suggested that the ability to explore a customer’s need was important, to which one participant replied: “Solely understanding the customer's need is not enough, the word "need" had gone out of marketing dictionaries since WWII.”

Here’s the point I would try to make, were anyone listening:

Whether a great sales person should have 5 qualities or 10, they should all add up to the one quality of helping a customer solve a set of problems. In any engineered or considered purchase situation, when a sales person finds that the customer is not buying, then he or she should stop selling and start listening.

I suspect the problem with this discussion group is that they are all classically trained salespeople. They are mostly selling and not listening.

JB

The power of perspective

Life can be especially hard on companies that do not have the means to sort mission critical problems from the problems of this day, this month or this year, versus the problems that can set them off course for years to come. Or worse.

Once again my wife and I are on the couch watching Star Trek TNG reruns. This time captain Jean-Luc Picard and crew are entering an energy-draining asteroid field, big problems and little problems coming at us on-screen. You can bet we are about to deflect some of these smaller problems and take real care not to collide with the bigger ones.

But managing our own problems is not the mission of the Enterprise.

Today, we are going to make an important discovery about our marketplace, adjust, stay on course and come out stronger. Marketing leadership isn't going to let the Enterprise run aground or worse, idle about forever in this asteroid field thinking this is our mission.

This Enterprise has the reference points it needs to come out of these hard times, having maintained the strong sense of identity every B2B company needs.

JB

What's your major?

Having long ago left the college scene, I still hear a similar social question around the B2B networking table: “What business are you in?” is one of those loaded questions: “No, what business are you really in?” which can lead to the more provocative: “What’s your passion?” or more to the point, though never asked at the table this way: “Are you achieving your full potential in life?”

Such questions can make one uncomfortable. Even as thousands of people remain unemployed, the questions seem ungratefully out of place. The overriding sentiment is that now is the time to be thankful and to accept what we have.

And therein lies a danger all B2B leaders now face.

It is one thing to be grateful for a job, but it is counterproductive for a company’s workforce to accept status quo. For CEO’s and other business leaders, now is the time to lead; and if you agree that establishing a sense of urgency is the first step to leading organizational change, then you will also agree that now is the time for your marketing and branding disciplines to communicate the change vision for your company.

From the perspective of business leadership, these earlier questions go to the heart of the matter: What business are you in? What is your company’s passion? Is it the purpose of your company to more efficiently sell products, or to create customer relationships that bring greater profitability?

The point being, clarity and consensus is essential to overcoming the entropy that will otherwise hold your company back. As to the need for establishing this clarity and consensus within your company, it depends on your answer to yet another question:

What is your company’s greater business potential?

JB