Common Portfolio Challenges for PS Organizations

Too often, companies misdiagnose or have a hard time identifying the root causes of their biggest challenges, therefore their efforts to address these symptoms are either ineffective or too involved.  After more than 20 years spent working with some of the world’s largest and most complex PS firms, we find that many organizational symptoms are linked to a struggle to answer the question: “what needs to be in, and how should I be managing, my portfolio?” Here is our point of view on how portfolio can be at the core of many common organizational challenges.

Common Portfolio Challenges for PS Organizations

Client SymptomsM&R Point of View
1. We are struggling to grow and meet our financial goals. Often, companies' portfolios are too large and disaggregated, making it difficult for the buyers to buy, the sellers to sell, and for the organization to deliver on its value proposition. Rather than continuing to expand the portfolio, most organizations would benefit most from consolidating their offerings and evolving their portfolio into one that ties together discrete offers into more holistic solutions – moving from point solutions to Service Chains to topical offer sets, and finally to segment account journeys.
2. We have a 100-page offer book, but don’t feel we have the “right” offers for our market.
3. Our value proposition often falls flat.
4. Our enterprise strategy is disconnected from our PS strategy.
Often, the broader organization isn’t effectively enabling the PS business, or PS has different goals and expectations than the rest of the corporation. As a result, the PS portfolio winds up in disarray and is disconnected from the enterprise strategy. The PS team doesn’t have the support to know what solutions to be developing and selling. Maximizing the return on the PS portfolio begins by ensuring the PS business is properly supported by and aligned with, the enterprise strategy. This will help dictate the portfolio’s role, and therefore the required portfolio strategy (e.g., to provide differentiation, create intimacy with customers, and pull through products and services).
5. Leaders outside the PS business have a different strategy in mind for us than what we believe will be effective.
6. We are having trouble differentiating with new offers or retiring stale offers.
Due to many organizations’ portfolio construct or management, there is often a struggle to maintain the portfolio’s relevancy in the market. Either nobody owns a portfolio decision, or everybody owns the decision – either way, the result is a portfolio of stale offers. Establishing the necessary discipline to continually evaluate the performance of existing solutions, determine their appropriate place in the client journey, vet new solutions, and make the decision on when to get rid of old solutions that are no longer appropriate for the portfolio typically requires an empowered portfolio management function, rather than counting on everyone in the business to play their part.
7. We are entering a new market space and don’t know what these customers need.

Written by: Anthony Paluska

More from this Author

About the Author: Anthony Paluska is a Partner at McMann & Ransford with experience helping organizations overcome commoditization by developing stronger, more intimate, relationships with their customers. He has leveraged his management consulting, problem solving, and change management skills to support 15+ Fortune 1000 organizations, across a multitude of industries.

The Challenge of Meeting Sales Goals

Sales, one of the most important functions of any company, is becoming increasingly complex and difficult as customers become more savvy and knowledgeable. The shift in customer power is impacting both B2B and B2C companies. Both types of businesses call for very specific sales organizations to sell to their potential customers. To effectively sell, B2C companies must be nimble and engage directly on multiple levels with their customers, picking and in certain instances, setting trends, creating emotional responses, and driving experiences. B2B companies require a different approach, as they must clearly define the right opportunity, sell to influencers at multiple levels, and manage longer buying cycles. Addressing these realities involves gaining a better understanding market and industry trends, and creating tools, services, and solutions to help other businesses provide greater value to their customers.

Additionally, every B2B firm encounters unique challenges because of their market and buyer’s expectations. For example, in some companies, innovation drives the sales cycles. Others must work under price and distribution pressures driven by advanced stages of commoditization. Regardless of size, industry, or market, many B2B sales leaders face one hurdle: consistently meeting their sales goals.

A recent Miller Heiman Group study shows a recent and steady decline of sales goal success. The report revealed that 18% of the sampled companies failed to meet their goals, up from 11% just 4 years before.

Almost 1 in 5 companies reported that they are not meeting sales goals of their organization, and 43% of those that miss are missing by more than 10%. Missing sales goals, especially by large margins, creates stress on the organization, and depending on the structure (private or public) and the growth cycle of the industry (early to late), this stress may require price adjustments, adjusting sales deployment strategy, or in dire cases, restructuring of the entire organization.

The specific reasons for missing goals vary, but at the highest level, there are two driving factors: poor plans and poor execution. The first issue is often the result of aggressive senior leadership deriving plans based on the board’s need to meet growth metrics. There is a considerable lack of science employed when setting goals with this type of top-down approach. Sales leaders and sales people often feel that goals are arbitrary and don’t involve the opinions of those responsible for delivering the goals. On the other hand, leaders are fearful that sales people are “sandbagging” or manipulating the compensation plan when applying a bottom-up approach.

The second issue, poor execution, arises from a combination of factors. Firstly, sales leaders are in their positions because they have a bag of tricks that they often pull from to resolve execution issues. However, when addressed in isolation these tactics can be ineffective and fail to address the root cause holistically. The Commercial Sustainability StrategySM includes levers to improve performance that are often overlooked. While some of the individual levers of Commercial Sustainability StrategySM may not appear revolutionary, a sales leader may lack the wherewithal to implement these comprehensive changes successfully.


Written by: Marc Cottle

More From This Author

About the Author: Marc Cottle is an experienced sales leader with 15 years of experience; he is a Principal with McMann & Ransford and leads the Commercial Practice at the company.

 

Developing a Portfolio of Offers – Part II

In the previous entry, we discussed solution development as a process and shed some light on the intricacies needed to create a winning portfolio. Now let’s look at the design of the portfolio itself:

Think about the portfolio from a holistic point of view. What are we offering that is truly important to the executives we need to have intimacy with (above the safety line™), what offerings can we bring to bear that directly pull through our products or outsourcing, and what large offerings can we bring to bear that give us critical mass in our business and in our accounts. It is important to strive to be as complete as possible, and this effort might send you back to a Market Landscape effort. This point of view will drive much of the portfolio work you will do (think product R&D). It is important to get it right because it is expensive to be wrong – in real money, market opportunity, and momentum of journey. Also, remember you will not be creating all these Service Chains™ at the same time, so you do not need to hinder your broad thinking. The mistakes made at this stage are either slipping into wanting to do things that you like (because you’re good at it) but do not meet the market opportunities or letting the organization (which often does not really truly understand the market needs) deflate the portfolio.

The portfolio strategy can now be validated with the market. This includes discussing the importance of the Ideas with key potential buyers. This usually not only sharpens the portfolio and assists with prioritizing which Service Chains™ will be early offers, but also begins the process of creating meaningful messages that will be needed when the offers are taken to market.

The next activity is to prioritize which Service Chains™ will be created first. This is an important decision. It not only drives resource allocations (investment), but also drives the business model and financial plans. You cannot go to market without something Above the Line of Safety™, and you cannot go to market without something that pulls through your other products and services. You must be able to put a meaningful group of Service Chains™ in the market at the same time (within a reasonable time of each other -weeks/months). Further, as you look at the account life-cycles, you must decide which Service Chains™ you lead with and which ones are introduced as you have intimacy built with the client.

Let’s develop the solutions. In other blogs, you can read more about Service Chains™ and the process of creating the solutions, but here let’s discuss market validation. As soon as you have roughed out the Service Chain™, know the implementation projects, laid out in detail the entry project and developed the messaging for Idea Selling™ – idea meetings and stakeholder meetings – it is time to take the messaging to some virgin accounts as a validation of both the messaging and the Service Chains™. It is important to quickly get in front of several potential buyers and walk through the Idea Selling™ process. The messaging can be altered to elicit their views of the value of the Idea and its importance (as opposed to actually selling the deal, although you will probably sell some deals in this process). These meetings cannot be with lower level buyers currently known by the company, they must be the executives above the line of safety. They should not be friends or friends of friends – that kind of data is always suspect. There are approaches for getting these appointments that we will cover when we discuss Idea Selling™ in more detail.

This data will immediately help in several ways – clarify messaging (very important) and continue the education for the go-to-market teams on how to have Idea-based executive conversations. In addition, the Service Chains™ itself will be validated or invalidated and adjustments can be made from it.

Once the market validation is complete, the Service Chain™ can move forward into its next step of development and go to market. The initial portfolio can be hardened and leveraged both internally and externally.

Developing a Portfolio of Offers

The entry to the commercialization phase of the Customer Intimacy Journey requires a re-evaluation of your Market Participation Strategy. This deals with which markets, which geographies, and which accounts we are trying to impact. The answer, of course, will include several over time. Remember, companies live in verticals; understanding and expertise in those verticals are mandatory for success with them. During the forming phase of the journey much that is learned about these verticals should to be applied to this evaluation. The company may not be able to move as quickly as we first hoped, or, now that we have some experience, markets that initially seemed important seem less so. Also, with some success under our belts, we may be able to go after more jugular markets that better impact the broader organization. An example of one participation strategy (over simplified for brevity’s sake) could be – “we want to develop meaningful revenue in 100 accounts in Northern Europe that are currently non-accounts for us” or “for our top 100 accounts in North America in the construction vertical, we want to increase our penetration by 32% and become the partner of choice for our vertical offerings.”

As you can see, the participation strategy gives guidance to the effort, but would be unable to direct the HOW (outside of Intimacy Engine of course). The HOW is developed as you create the portfolio to fulfill the strategy. This effort is often minimized or overlooked entirely.

Like all things, it is important to know where you are going.

The next effort is to determine the market opportunities. This requires expertise in the market to truly complete this task. Also, this quality of information is rarely gathered through traditional market focused efforts (mainly because asking customers what they want, by definition, limits their view of their business). So, how is this accomplished? A three-dimensional point of view of the market, including what is driving it (what will drive it), & what true issues are being faced (and will be faced), must be developed. This post won’t delve into the output views that this effort creates, but we can discuss some of the sources of information.

– Interview the consulting firms that have meaningful sway in the market and glean their views of today and tomorrow.

– Visit universities that have centers dedicated to subsections of the market to gain insight into what they think and how it’s being received.

– Conduct internet research on key topics driving issues in the market

– Determine likely areas of interest, the experience you have gained, and seek out the experts in the businesses that work on those areas to gain an understanding of the business model drivers and cutting-edge ideas being discussed.

Next, drive this information through a process of determining the following:

– Create a solid document (more visual the better) of the business flows, its drivers, opportunities, and hurdles. We call these the Market Landscape. It should be shopped and edited by taking it to the key players in the market for validation and adding depth and reality.

– Develop some opinions as to who is best situated to take advantage of the opportunities identified in the Market Reality and build visuals comparing them, with support for why we think this. We call this the competitive landscape. This should not be shopped, but it will assist in how you target accounts.

– Build the opportunities matrix. This will include: above the safety line opportunities (Intimacy Only Opportunities), pull through opportunities, and opportunities that don’t fit you, but that you need to be aware of.

– Move the opportunities through the idea evaluation model we have discussed before. This includes things like ability to deliver, fit in broader strategy, size of opportunities, etc.

– Valuation of opportunities – build a financial model of the opportunities, including intimacy impact (i.e., ability to pull through additional products and services) and absorption rates.

Now stop and determine where you are.

– Do you have a real understanding of the market?

– Do you have meaningful opportunities?

– Can you go forward and build a portfolio point of view?

If you answered no to any of the above questions, go back to the market understanding step and repeat until you have true opportunities and unique ideas that can differentiate your business.

Establishing a Beachhead: Introducing Customer Intimacy to the Organization

Here, we will discuss the importance of establishing a beachhead – a successful safe-place to expand into a market.

This is important for an early solution business and for any new market/customer segment you go after. You must focus early offers on the market exclusively – it is so easy to ignore the needs of the executives in your market – we call this getting above the safety line – and focus on the products or abilities you have now. We’ve seen firms struggle in the first year of their Customer Intimacy Journey because they did not create anything meaningful for the market.

The Customer Intimacy Engine™ business model can take into account that your customer facing people are not used to selling to the executives, it can take into account your brand does not give you legitimacy in the executive-suite solving real problems, but it cannot make up for poorly planned offers – those with no real value to the executive.

The beachhead begins the process of establishing your legitimacy and proves to your organization that you can do it. The early focus should be on getting reference-able accounts that believe in what you offer. By the way, you must be able to implement the new idea, as well.

How do you select the first offers for a new market?

You need to do a thorough review of where the market is focused. This would include:

Reviewing current thinking by consulting firms – this can be accomplished by reviewing their info in the market place and meeting with representatives from large and specialty firms.
Meeting with executives in the industry that are solving key new issues – these discussions must be done differently than market research and require market experts in the room on your behalf to interpret the comments.
Diagram the business – this should include org charts, supply chains, major processes, etc.
Once this exercise is complete and a diagram of potential opportunities is created, you should meet with people who represent best practices for these areas within the market segment – these will usually be lower level SMEs and/or people who have left the industry and are working on these problems as adjuncts to the industry. Also, see what professional associations are doing on these issues.

Now, you should have a reasonable list of opportunities and enough information to begin the offer evaluation process.

The challenge with establishing a beachhead is that companies usually lack the patience to spend the time to do it right and they want meaningful revenue now – this is usually because they look at Customer Intimacy Engine™ as “solution selling” – a go-to-market issue only. I suggest that you talk about this phase of the journey as R&D spend. A Service Chain™ portfolio is not that different from bringing a new product to market, similar phases are involved and similar investment is required – although, the way in which the evaluation and creation activities are accomplished differ.

So, how do you go about leveraging the beachhead? Once several accounts have purchased the new offer(s), you can trumpet the release of the offer, increase the staff involved and move towards leveraging the beachhead. This will include creating those offers that more directly pull through your products or services. This begins with building a strategy (portfolio document) of where you plan to take the market, which includes identifying how each offer area impact the safety line and/or builds critical mass, and/or drives solution revenue/profits, and/or pulls through products. This document in turn becomes the vision that drives the market activities you undertake for the business. It also provides a communication document for educating and discussing the business with your company on broader basis.

In summary, focus first on establishing a firm beachhead and then on the broader business offerings that expand your influence.

Customer Intimacy: Messaging to Enable Sales

Since it’s so important to success, let’s talk about messaging and the sales force. You must differentiate your business with clear messaging attributes which include:

  • An Idea Sellingstoryboard
  • Answers to key questions like:
    – “Why” they should do this
    – “How” they can do this
    – “With whom” should they do this

The Idea Sellingstoryboard must be complete but concise.  Glean out a 2-3 minute explanation of why examining the Idea is so important for the customer group – The Idea Statement.  If the story takes 15 minutes to explain, it is by definition not messaged well, too complex, or too focused on your firm’s capabilities, for this stage of your journey. 

Since it’s so important to success, let’s talk about messaging and the sales force. You must differentiate your business with clear messaging attributes which include:

  • An Idea Sellingstoryboard
  • Answers to key questions like:
    – “Why” they should do this
    – “How” they can do this
    – “With whom” should they do this 

The Idea Sellingstoryboard must be complete but concise.  Glean out a 2-3 minute explanation of why examining the Idea is so important for the customer group – The Idea Statement.  If the story takes 15 minutes to explain, it is by definition not messaged well, too complex, or too focused on your firm’s capabilities, for this stage of your journey. 

The early stage of the journey and the early stage of the portfolio are different from later stages of your journey, and later stages of your portfolio.  Also, what you take to market and what you pull through is different from your solution set.  Again, you must boil the message down into something that is clear, well defined and easy to talk about in 3 minutes.  The rest of the messaging for the Idea Meetings and the Stakeholder Meetings can be created off the initial messaging, but the primary mistake is never getting a clear, concise message to begin with.

Now, let’s discuss enabling the sales force. Please remember that by nature, salespeople live in a different world than everyone else.  They have the need to be successful to support their families and much of their compensation is leveraged on success.  They spend much of their effort minimizing the chances of failure by working internally in their organization and out to their customers.  Over time, the tendency in the sales organization is to encourage the sales rep to do what he/she is good at, to stay with products and services they know really well, and to deal with those accounts and people they already have relationships with. 

Therefore, to change that – i.e. to call on different accounts or different levels in the organization – will work against all their risk aversion habits.  Thus equipping and enabling the sales force so they can be successful is a significant effort, and should be looked on as such. This begins with a game plan that fully explains the sales cycle for the offer.  This will include: the storyboard; how the Service Chain™ will work; how the Idea Meetings will work; how the Stakeholder Meetings will work; what they’re going to draw; and how they will communicate.  The game plan must be complete, easy to understand, and supported with visuals and videos that can be repeatedly watched as they begin to learn the offer.  The next step in the journey is to provide education on the offer.  They will need direct educational support that is intellectual, including role playing opportunities, coaching, and probably someone to go to market with them to show them how it works by example.

In summary, I cannot stress enough the things that are necessary to create meaningful True Solutions™. If you do not pick the right offer and you cannot differentiate well, it is relatively difficult to make up for that without really good positioning documents and sales enablement.  If you do not invest heavily and do everything right in getting the positioning correct, and you do not invest heavily in getting the sales force successful, then you run the risk of being unsuccessful and not knowing why.

In the end, you have to remember that customer intimacy is about business model transformation, and the sales team is a key part of this change.

Where Does Customer Intimacy Apply in Your Business?

One of the first questions we get is “Where in our business would this apply?

It’s a good question – because in many corporations, multiple customer engagement models co-exist in support of various parts of the portfolio – and will continue to do so.

To answer the question, it helps to think about the nature of a customer relationship when a Customer Intimacy Engine™ is in place:

  • Is your Account leader embedded in the account?
  • Do you have a high level of knowledge, trust, and cooperation with your customer?
  • Do both you and your customer feel you’re achievingthe full impact of your company’s portfolio, and your work together is informing decisions on the future direction of your portfolio?
  • Are your relationshipswith the people who control and direct the resources (e.g. with Business GMs and/or the C-suite) built on substance, not just camaraderie?
  • Are you able to monetize these relationships, pulling through or renew less differentiated or transactional business, at fair prices?

At first glance – one might say “I want all my customer relationships to be like that!”, but, except for certain service businesses, that is rarely the right answer.

An examination of the customer and offer portfolio will show that there are likely certain lines of business that won’t just benefit from this model, but actually require it in order to succeed. And, very often, it is in areas where the company has said they need to own a greater piece of the opportunity space for strategic reasons

Developing Compelling Service Chain Linkages

Linkages are pre-planned connections from one offering that pulls through the next offering. The connections are made by carefully pre-planned and executed sales activities. Of course in reality, linkages do not begin at the end of one project and end at the beginning of the next. Linkages are positioning activities that take place during the initial sales process and during projects. The positioning may not only be related to the next project in the Service Chain, but also can be made with regard to the entire Service Chain.

As we explained in an earlier blog post on Service Chains, a Service Chain is a pre-planned set of offerings that have an entry offering with linkages and methods that pull-through the other offerings. Service chains formalize implied client value propositions by providing a framework to aid in the transformation from an opportunistic selling approach to a pre-planned, deliberate selling approach that delivers to clients the total value proposition offered by your company.

Linkages are pre-planned connections from one offering that pulls through the next offering. The connections are made by carefully pre-planned and executed sales activities. Of course in reality, linkages do not begin at the end of one project and end at the beginning of the next. Linkages are positioning activities that take place during the initial sales process and during projects. The positioning may not only be related to the next project in the Service Chain, but also can be made with regard to the entire Service Chain.

For example, a business development or account manager might choose to paint the entire Service Chain picture in their first meeting with a client. The purpose would not be to begin closing deals for all projects in the Service Chain. Rather, the purpose would simply be to position the entire value proposition up front and condition the client for future possibilities.

Linkages provide excellent integration points to other Service Chains. In fact, such linkages should be pre-planned in the Service Chain if it is likely that one Service Chain could link to another.

In our experience, we see three types of linkages:

Organic Linkages
Organic linkages link natural follow-on projects. They are typically dictated by the methodology used in delivery of the work. These linkages serve as checkpoints for client review and approval before proceeding to the next project. The linkage is organic because it will naturally happen assuming good results are achieved in the prior project. Examples of organic linkages are architecture leading to design and design leading to implementation.

Proof Linkages
Proof linkages position the next project by proving a benefit or other projected result in the preceding project. The fact that a hypothesis is proven to be true creates a logical linkage to the next project to act on those results. Examples of these are assessments and feasibility studies. If an assessment proves out a weakness, there is an obvious linkage to a next project to fix the weakness.

Facilitated Linkages
These linkages should be designed into the service chain when it is believed the client will have difficulty understanding the linkage to the next project. In such cases, there is a need to educate the client on the merits of the following project. A classic example of a facilitated linkage is the creation of a Steering Committee. The official purpose of the Committee is to oversee the current project. The linkage purpose is to provide a forum to educate the client on the rationale for the next project in the Service Chain. This approach might be useful, for example, when a client is changing their go-to-market strategy to include partnerships, and needs to be educated on the benefits in an ongoing way.

I can’t emphasize this point enough: Service Chains are opportunities to build long-term relationships with clients. They’re the key ingredient in your Customer Intimacy Engine™ that will allow your services organizations to scale and gain the critical mass they need to become dominant leaders in the industry.

Evaluating Ideas: Criteria to Foster Customer Intimacy

When developing Service Chains™ it is important to evaluate their business value and your ability to implement them in the market. At McMann & Ransford, we recommend tracking the following criteria to help foster customer intimacy:

When developing Service Chains™ it is important to evaluate their business value and your ability to implement them in the market. At McMann & Ransford, we recommend tracking the following criteria to help foster customer intimacy:

  1. Strategic Importance
  2. Financial Importance
  3. Market Attractiveness
  4. Demand & Delivery Potential

Please keep in mind that each criteria directly relates to the overall portfolio. As your business grows you will want a portfolio of True Solutions™ that a) builds intimacy with key executives above the safety line, and b) builds critical mass of the solution business, and pulls through product directly.

1. Strategic Importance 

The Proximity to What we Currently Do reflects the alignment to our current strategy.  If a potential offer or Service Chain is very close to what we currently do – in terms of problems addressed in the market, segments served, etc. – then there is a logical buying connection between this offer and our portfolio.  This linkage enhances our ability to sell (since we are already a known commodity in that space), and reinforces the firm’s strategic direction. 

Differentiation Potential deals with the solution’s ability to create or build differentiation in a market.  Evaluate whether or not this solution can either: 1) protect or cement your position in the market and accounts you already serve (i.e., fill a known gap); or 2) build differential for new/exisiting markets and accounts (i.e., create a gap).  Finally, a prioritized solution should address a specific problem or opportunity that matters to a certain segment.  It should be unique on its own, or should be a new Idea or “twist” on an exisiting Idea. 

The two factors together provide indications of the strategic impact of the Idea and its related Service Chain. 

2. Financial Importance 

Account Impact (average revenue per account) deals with both the revenue driven by the service chain (or group of service chains in an umbrella idea). Again, “intimacy-only” solutions may rate low on this measure, but might have financial importance because of their influence on the solutions portfolio. Another consideration: does the idea drive large product deals?  Is it driving significant revenue?

Market/Portfolio Fit.  This deals directly with the issue of rounding out your portfolio and assuring that you have customized, meaningful intimacy offers. Intimacy offers are often the most difficult to get our clients to create (especially meaningful ones) and embrace because they require deep vertical knowledge and often are far from their traditional business. This criteria should also drive interest in outsourcing offers which have long term contracts and force interest in direct product pull through offers.

3. Market Attractiveness

Projected Market Size deals with number of transactions that can be reasonably expected from the market, specifically – number of potential clients that could buy the offer. These projections should take into account where the market is in the absorption bell curve. Is the offer creating a market? early in market? in the middle of the market? or late to market? 

I have experienced many clients that want to bring offers to market late in the cycle. I’m not sure why this is so prevalent, but it should not be done. Typically, these types of companies are also the least comfortable bringing an offer to market early in the curve. 

Potential Market Share deals with the issue of the number of people that could buy the offer what percent will buy yours. It is best to be conservative about this calculation. One thing to keep in mind is that some markets are so large compared to the penetration needed for success that performing detail calculations of this are not necessary. 

One last thought: sometimes markets are relatively small – think aircraft components manufacturers, or telecom providers suppliers – for them, the value of the intimacy offers dominates the discussion of the idea.

4. Demand and Delivery Potential

This criteria deals with your ability to get to market, get deals, and deliver the promise. Sales Capacity deals with number of resources that can perform idea-selling activities for the offer. This means they are trained and equipped to conduct idea and stakeholder meetings and perform the linkages throughout the service chain. This is no small feat. As we’ve discussed, Idea Selling is much more about advising the client rather than traditional selling. 

Delivery Capacity deals directly with number of trained resources available to deliver the dream and participate through the sales cycles. 

Many companies short-change this investment in the misconception that these people are a cost item not a revenue item.

Putting it all together
In summary, once you have scored an idea you can apply weighted averages of the different criteria – driven by the gaps in your portfolio. This provides the mechanism for making idea in/out decision.

 

Leading with Ideas: The Key to Customer Intimacy

Let’s take some time and discuss the power of ideas and their importance as the central component of a True Solutions.  Good ideas facilitate the road to true customer intimacy. 

A solution is the embodiment of an idea – and how the idea can be realized.  The idea is the kernel of the change in the relationship from pushing products and discussing business opportunities.  Often conversations that are supposed to be about solutions are really about how to better use our products and get more bang for the buck in our relationship; these are valuable issues but not True Solutions™ discussions. 

Let’s take some time and discuss the power of ideas and their importance as the central component of a True Solutions.  Good ideas facilitate the road to true customer intimacy. 

A solution is the embodiment of an idea – and how the idea can be realized.  The idea is the kernel of the change in the relationship from pushing products and discussing business opportunities.  Often conversations that are supposed to be about solutions are really about how to better use our products and get more bang for the buck in our relationship; these are valuable issues but not True Solutions™ discussions. 

As seen in the diagram below, there are many levels of impact from solutions.

The solutions that build intimacy above the line of safety are what we term True Solutions™.  These solutions are based upon ideas.

Using ideas as the focal point of discussions with clients immediately changes the dialog and therefore the relationship.

The power of ideas is that they immediately accomplish several things:

  • They focus the discussion on the idea – not the sales representatives (or consultants)  skills,  not the company or current relationship, but the idea.
  • They enable a more consultative conversation – discuss the merits of the idea in a particular environment.
  • They align with the way real decisions are made – instead of working against the process. 

What makes a good idea?  Ideas for this discussion are focused upon seizing an opportunity for a company – be it business growth or protection, increase revenue or cut costs.  A good idea is not wishful thinking – but a challenge to see the business differently.  A good idea should be easy to summarize – to be expressed in a few minutes.  A good idea should be actionable, understandable and straight forward to evaluate for applicability.  Finally, a good idea should have a “wow” factor.

Granted some ideas are bigger than others – some require a bigger budget, some require more authority to move forward, but all good ideas should draw the client into a discussion about the possibilities.
 
How do ideas flow with the way decisions are made? 

Decisions are made by deciding:
1) Whether to Act,
2) How to Act, and only then,
3) With Whom to Act

Whether to Act – This stage is all about deciding if something should be done. Is it worth investigating this opportunity or issue(s)?  Only when this is decided does How to Act come clearly into view.

How to Act – How can this be done – What are the alternatives? Where are the risks? What’s the game plan?  The stage is fruitful with analysis of how to get things done.

With Whom to Act – Can I do this alone, do I need help, who can I trust, etc.  This is about selecting partners for the implementation.  If you have assisted in Whether to Act and How to Act, then you are the partner for Whom to Act with.

How often have you been involved in a sales situation where all the discussion is about With Whom to Act – our product is better, cheaper, etc.? 

For clients to buy from these discussions they must have determined the first two questions without you – either buy themselves or with someone else’s help.   Also, long sales cycles are often caused by selling With Whom to Act when the client is still deciding Whether to Act.

The importance of moving up the food chain is paramount – the true value of the relationship is created in the Whether to Act and the How to Act stages of a decision.   Also, this help must be paid for – yes paid for, otherwise it is not of any value to client.