Is your company selling itself short?

Yesterday I was in a meeting with a client when word came that one of our competitors was going under. The reaction among us was mixed. Someone said hoorah and someone else said now we can raise prices, but the group’s tone then became muted. That competitor has families and people we know. That competitor could have been us. Unlike us, for a long time now that competitor has been trying to become the lowest price option.

Offering the lowest price can be a smart tactic on occasion. But when it becomes your internal brand identity, when your own people come to see that this is the mission and message, then your brand image in the marketplace will also become just that and only that: You are the low price option. And in any market, there may only be room for one low price option, so you had better be built for it, otherwise, here is the risk…

Companies don’t fail, their leaders do.

To be clear, the people who are expected to lead their organizations, they fail when they fall out of touch with their customer segments; they fail when they fall out of touch with themselves, with their own companies’ greater capabilities and potential for creating value.

Leaders fail, when they do not use their positions of power to bring about a greater understanding of expectations to their people and to the people who would thereby become better customers.

jb

Have we lost our sense of urgency?

The phrase did not originate with President Obama. John Kotter first articulated the value of having a constructive sense of urgency in his book Leading Change back in 1996. And in case business leaders and America’s leaders missed it, he underscored the message again in his latest work A Sense of Urgency in 2008.

Both books outlined the steps to leading organizational change, of which having a sense of urgency is just step one. The next steps are to establish an achievable vision and mission, construct the core coalition that agrees with and will carry out this mission, communicate the mission internally to align the organization, empower the many others who must carry out the plan, report on the short term wins that reinforce and encourage the new way of doing things – and then finally anchor this new way of doing things in the culture of the organization.

As we look at the business of bringing recovery to America, it can’t be said that President Obama missed this first step to leading change. But he sure has hit some snags leading the next steps.

It’s not enough to say, “Yes, we can,” when “we” becomes the democratic party. This is the observation all effective business leaders can recognize, an observation that can be made about too many of our politicians, democrats and republicans alike. To be clear, it is not an observation about the shift now in power from one party to another, but about wasted opportunity to bring meaningful change.

This was the greater meaning of the Paul Brown senatorial "upset" election in Massachusetts. And this is the greater meaning of Evan Bayh’s resignation as senator in Indiana. While the news media reported on how the democrats received another major blow, and while democrats are now rethinking their exposure, and while republicans are jockeying to take advantage, they all overlook the simple message Evan Bayh has tried to make…

"There is too much partisanship and not enough progress – too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving. Even at a time of enormous challenge, the peoples' business is not being done.”

Turn your sales funnel upside down

Any company still attempting to SELL a complex product as a “solution” is in trouble. So long as a CEO and his or her core coalition allow this behavior to continue, the company’s sales force will not learn how to explore with customers to bring higher-margin value beyond the fixed, immediate “product solution” they are pushing.

In our own presentations with clients, we sometimes use the classic metaphor of a sales funnel to illustrate this problem. Sales-driven companies want a big funnel that narrows quickly to close the sale. My firm helps companies re-engineer this funnel, so that it opens up just as widely on the customer’s side.

As we move out of this recession, longer term and more profitable relationships will not come from the selling and buying of today’s product, but from an understanding of where company and customer can continue to grow together.

A tale of two realities

Yet another lesson of this economy is that it has exposed the stark difference between sales and marketing – the function of selling and the function of cultivating customers. We say functions, when of course we are talking about people. Human behavior. The pressure is on to sell, when the greater need is for stronger and longer-term customer relationships.

In the world of B2B, marketing never did get a lot of respect. But look at it from the sale engineer’s point of view: Marketing is a cost center. Sales is a profit center. Marketing is mysterious voodoo. Sales deals in tangible features and benefits. You know all this because the VP of Sales told you so. And since when did marketing ever help you close a sale?

Marketing has failed you. Or more precisely, your company’s leadership has failed to prove the worth of marketing. So you will continue to do what you get paid to do. Sell stuff. So long as you are recruited, hired, trained and paid to sell what is in front of you, you will continue to sell what is in front of you. There will be no deeper exploration of customer problems and opportunities.

It’s a tale of two realities.
Your company’s leaders can see this clearly now.

JB