Why do we see so little HR managers in executive committees?
By Pascal Persyn on December 17, 2009 @ 14:21
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Tags: , change management, HR policies, Leadership, value chain alignment, walk the talk
I regularly hear HR managers complain about the lack of impact they have on corporate decisions. That they’re not taken seriously. Being informed way too late of decisions to act pro-actively. That they should be part of the executive committee because people are the most important assets of the company. Could it be that HR is stuck in his own theories and all together are enclosed in their own HR living environment?
I see 3 reasons which I will support by real life examples:
- Many lack the necessary business insight to serve as a sounding board for line management. Therefore they behave as “prescribers” to questions from line management. Yey these questions are usually too symptomatic due to the daily ins and outs involvement of managers. A good example is a sales manager asking for closing skills training because of a too low hit-rate and/or decision dates continuously shifting over time. Result a closing skills training is being organized. Yet a lack of closing skills is in less then 5% the real cause of the mentioned problems. The solution should have been HR offering to analyze the root cause and to propose solutions with a lasting impact. This of course is only viable if HR is taken seriously thanks to their business insights.
- Secondly, I see HR departments with new, good in itself, theories and plans that are too heavy and difficult to be implemented on top of the daily work that unfortunately does not stop because of a change process. This in turn leads to frustration in HR departments because they get too little involvement of line management to implement the necessary changes. These projects are usually not enough adapted and pragmatic to the real world which leads to quite large resistance. This in turn leads to a too low adoption rate and results quickly fading out. A good example is some of the competence and growth/evaluation practices and programs put in place. Heavy bureaucratic processes with formalized timing and reporting from managers to HR. Automated in user unfriendly intranets. Seldom based on simple deliverables and a common language which improves day to day communication between manager and employee. Let alone creating an environment stimulating people to give the best of themselves in order to create a chain of actions leading to optimized business results.
- HR does too little effort to understand and create insights on management level in cross departmental issues and linkages. Their distance to the daily ins and outs puts them in the ideal position for those insights and to share these with their colleagues. Of course, they simultaneously need to propose pragmatic solutions. A good example is a solution consisting of building sales ready deliverables combined with sales training, coaching and upgrading sales meetings to becoming an experience sharing platform. This solution require budgets from 3 departments in a lot of large organizations. Training from the HR budget, deliverables from marketing and coaching/consulting from the sales budget. I’ve seen very few HR people who took internal actions to launch such a project, let alone understanding the business need and internally sell such an integrated approach.
The above shows in a painfully obvious way that a lack of operational knowledge and insights on the one hand, and implementation focus on the other hand forms the basis of the problem.
Some possible actions which can resolve the problem:
Start by breaking down the HR walls. Translate theory into pragmatic solutions feasible even if it sounds like a bad idea from the theoretical point of view. This means that the broad and deep use of the skills and tools must get the upper hand on the theoretical appropriateness of the solution.
Focus on gaining more business insights through more time to spend in the workplace. Divide your time outside the company premises by not only networking and studying in HR circles but also spending a lot of time in broad management environments such as the vMA (management association in Flanders) to name only one. It will allow you improve your operational knowledge as well as being able to toss of your ideas and experience with line managers from other companies.
Only then will HR:
- sufficiently understand what really lives on the floor;
- get broad support from the staff and get surprised by the acceptance of their projects;
- asked to be part of the executive management team;
- and create lasting impact thanks to their efforts.
How to be a topnotch B2B marketer part II
By Pascal Persyn on August 19, 2009 @ 16:12
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Tags: , innovation, lead generation, market readiness, marketing and sales alignment, product management, value chain alignment
- Build an experience sharing platform: It’s amazing to see how much information and experience stays underutilized and leaves the company with former employees. An experience sharing platform, ideally, managed my marketing is pivotal to leverage, study and optimize the best practices. Sales-marketing alignment is the immediate result. The platform consists of a small set of sales-ready deliverables which are kept up to date per segment and key-contact in the buying process of prospects and customers. Regular sales meetings with best practice sharing and assisted by marketing are the starting point. Ask your sales to send a blackberry style email with the summary of meetings (especially on pains, challenges and capabilities) and make sure marketing has access to that information in order to keep the best practice up to date.
- Facilitate market ready innovation: The information gathered during the visits by marketing (see post with must do’s 1-5) and aforementioned internal meetings will deliver a wealth of information to help inform and educate R&D and product management on market needs and what they should be capable of doing. I’m still surprised to see how R&D, product- marketing and management are limited in their view and understanding of the market because sales is translating customer needs in features themselves leading to the battle of prioritizing development on the product roadmap. On the contrary of what they think at a first glance, R&D and product marketing/management will be able to be creative and innovative to an unprecedented level because they will understand the native customer environment.
- Educate your internal customers: Increase the value of the marketing department by playing a pivotal role in all communication from and to the market. Keep the following up to date:
- win/loss reasons by calling key decision makers per deal yourself a couple of weeks after a decision has been taken. Assemble those winning and losing buying criteria per supplier;
- best practice per segment and key-contact and use it as a base platform to streamline interdepartmental communication;
- prioritised market pain/capability area’s for which the product should be upgraded.
- This will enable you to monitor proposed product upgrades and new versions in terms of competitiveness and hit-rate thanks to a better coverage of market needs.
- It will also enable you to focus your external market education to a group of prospects who are seeking your leadership.
- Implement a lead nurturing program: You main mission next to the management of the experience sharing platform deliverables and educating internal customers is to deliver ‘real’ sales ready leads. The only ROI based approach is to start communicating with your targeted market on a continuous basis with ‘role-based’ messaging. Meaning language adapted to the specific role in the company of each of the different contacts involved in the decision making process. also see: necessity of lead nurturing
- Measure and communicate: Make sure you can measure most if not all of the marketing activities. It will help you to communicate progress on all these area’s. Some of the mentioned points might be quit heavy change projects and thus will take time, patience and continuous improvement. This is the best way to ensure a large enough budget to accomplish all of the 10 must do’s.
Have fun implemeting the 10 rules to be a topnotch B2B marketer and keep me posted on experience and/or challenges.
5 strategies to improve sales performance
By Pascal Persyn on June 03, 2009 @ 19:59
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Tags: , funnel management, hit-rate, lead generation, marketing effectivenes, Sales effectiveness, Sales efficiency, sales skills, sales tactics, value chain alignment
You typically have 2 main reactions of sales reps having problems to reach their quota. They start to:
- take excessive actions on their existing opportunities. They hope or are convinced to influence the outcome and decision date. These sales reps are typically faced with a starved pipeline. They will never experience the benefits of a balanced pipeline because of this. Moreover, they risk on ruining good opportunities by their behavior.
- call on more and more potential customers. They will take massive actions on each of them willing to have a meeting. This will lead to too many unqualified prospects in the pipeline and create time shortage at the same time. It will lead to a lot of good actions on the wrong prospect and/or wrong timing.
So in other words, both actions will never deliver consistent resolution in the long run.
5 strategies to overcome typical quota issues:
- Continuously qualify your opportunities:Is this really an opportunity? Will I be able to differentiate myself. Woun’t I be used to put pressure on the preferred vendor? Do I see a lot of similarities with already won projects? Will I be able to influence the buying criteria? Is a budget available or can it be made available. Can I get in contact with most or all decision making people? All of these are examples of qualifying criteria to make sure you spend time on the right accounts.
- Reduce your sales cycle: Stop using a sales-process. Use the buying clock. Think in terms of readiness to buy and adapt your actions and time between 2 actions. Who should be your next step contact? Use a structured way to prepare yourself. Think and report based on the outcome of your next steps instead of tracking the content of the next step. Keep all DMU members synchronized on their readiness to buy. Figure out typical time delays in the buying cycle and work ahead of time to overcome them.
- Increase your actual selling time:Figure out a way to decrease your admin time. Stop writing visit reports but send bullet-based short emails to your contact. Save them in your CRM and ask for feedback in order to stay in sync with your contact. Use CRM as your central repository allowing you to self-coach and become more effective.
- Build a pro-active opportunity pipeline over time:Make sure you work with marketing to create leads early in their buying cycle. This will allow you to educate them on their specific needed capabilities and link them to your differentiation. This will put the competition on the defence. It will lower your overall time spend per opportunity and increase your hit-rate at the same time.
- Improve your hit-rate: Get to know the impact your solution has on different people. Find the link between their specific problems, needed capabilities, benefits and results. Use that knowlegde to adapt your questions, value proposition and sales pitch to each of the individual contacts. Make sure you talk to decision makers (Source of Power), people negatively impacted by not having your solution (Source of Dissatisfaction) as well as influencers. Don’t make the mistake of having the project manager as your main contact. This is another reason why you need to get in early in de buying cycle. Add strategy 2 to the equation and you will experience massive improvement in your hit-rate.
The nice thing about these 5 strategies is that they create a snowball effect if you work on all of them at the same time. Make sure you share these ideas with your colleagues and help each other to become more effective with these strategies. Get pre sales support and marketing involved and create a value chain instead of trying to do all things by yourself. After all sales has become a team-sport.
Scalability: The best way to maximize your market potential
By Pascal Persyn on February 05, 2009 @ 13:01
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Tags: , bottom-line growth, scalability, top-line growth, value chain alignment
Dirk Verhaeghe, a recent new colleague, asked me the following question: How did you come to the conclusion that growth maximization is only achievable if you “design for scalability”?
People that work(ed) with me know and experience my passion to find ways to maximize the market potential of an organization at any given moment in time. But always taking the human factor into account and knowing that innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit are key to success.
Challenges such as:
- The right business model
- Aligning the whole value chain and not only sales and marketing
- Understanding customer needs
- Selling value not price
- Aligning the product road-map to market readiness
- Organizational change and structure
- Creating continued competitive differentiation
- And many more
are all part of the day to day life of people working in B2B environments.
The common denominator is the fact that each of above mentioned challenges has a tremendous impact on the business results, profit and the company growth. This both in terms of top-line and bottom-line results.
The fact that I summarize all these business and commercial aspects as “scalability” issues is far from surprising if you know my ICT background where scalable solutions, databases etc are part of the day to day vocabulary. That’s how the concept of “design for scalability” was born as a foundation for the methodology which I co-developed.
Underneath is a picture representing the ”design for scalability” concept.
Wikipedia is also referring to commercial scalability in above described way.
Feel free to start discussing how we can make companies more scalable in a pro-active way.
