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CREATING THE |
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B2B CUSTOMER |
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Alan/Anthony August 2002 |
How to Stay Out (or Get Out) of Trouble
A few high-profile companies are getting into spectacular trouble these days for actions that range from the shamefully venal to the flagrantly illegal. But in 19 years of consulting with B2B companies, we found these kinds of shenanigans to be the exception, not the rule. Far more companies get into trouble — meaning slow or negative growth, sudden P&L disasters and liquidity crises — for one of three reasons:
1) Failure to communicate clearly
2) Loss of focus on the core mission
3) Resistance to change
Human-factor problems, in other words. The warm-and-fuzzy, not the cold and quantifiable. Yet each weakness can have a corrosive effect on the people in the organization and the organization’s ability to bring revenue in the door. As our senior consultant, Robert Rogus says, “There is nothing harder in business than for a salesperson to get in front of a qualified lead. To not fully equip that person to make the sale is the most costly mistake in all of business.”
Once top-line growth is seriously impaired, it’s a short trip into crisis. Just ask technology and marketing leader Xerox, which went from Document Company to Rope-A-Dope in a New York minute, and is still clawing its way back.
Communication Breakdowns
Communication failures may be internal or external. How do you know if internal communication is a problem for your company? The most common symptom on the senior level is silence.When the chairman or president talks about the company, there is a thin-lipped silence from other managers at the table. The body language tells us they each have their own story that differs drastically from the official one. And when we hear those stories, they seem to describe completely different organizations.
How about external communication? In a nutshell, if the only time your customers and prospects hear from you is when you bill them or want to sell them something – you’ve got a problem. For companies, good external communication begins with the premise that you want to do something for your customers, not the other way around.These days, there are many cost-effective communication and service tools you can use to make your customers’ lives easier – and they will contribute to both increased bookings and customer satisfaction.
Losing Focus
The consultant Peter Drucker noted in his 1968 book, Management, that employers need to remember something about their employees. Money is only one of the things that people work for. They also want to be part of a team, large or small, that functions well and seems to be going somewhere. They want a degree of predictability and a sense of accomplishment. And those are the fruits of focus.
The most common symptom of loss of focus is “management by inspiration.” Every week or every month, the leader(s) come up with a new priority. Forget what you did last week or last month — we’re headed in a new direction! Clearly, this is a recipe for ineffectiveness, because it takes consistent application of effort over time to achieve results. But it also causes a deeper rot. As our principal consultant Steven G. Tom likes to say, “when you forget to stick to your knitting, things come unraveled. Good people get intensely frustrated, because they are smarter than management is willing to acknowledge. Sooner or later, they leave and take a precious asset — their talent — with them.”
Resisting Change
Sometimes it’s a good idea to resist change. We seriously considered starting up a dot-com company back in the Silicon Alley glory days.Fortunately, after a lot of planning and consultation, we decided that it would involve putting too many eggs in too fragile a basket. Not so fortunate was a well-known and now-defunct Internet company with the revolutionary idea of sending 10,000 vans to deliver consumer items to 10,000 doorsteps. In retrospect, it seems obvious that loading 10,000 items in a van and sending it to one location (known as a “store’) might have a better chance of producing net income.
Resistance to change becomes a problem when it prevents your company from doing what it needs to do. We once worked with an information technology company that knew what it wanted to do: transform itself from being a custom “job shop” that built ingenious systems at pathetically narrow margins, into one that produced broader technology solutions, which could be sold and resold again at progressively higher margins. The company had the talent to do it; they just needed good marketing. So we put together a comprehensive marketing program with elements of branding, communications and product development. plus sales training. It was never funded. Why? Because the senior team could contemplate change but not actually undertake it — not if it meant changing their own habits. What they knew how to do was issue proposals for job-shop work, and that’s what they went on doing in the face of their own frustration and desire for change.
In our experience, resistance to necessary change has kept more companies from uncovering new opportunities in their marketplace than any other factor. But it can take considerable skill to determine when your company is being rationally cautious, and when it is stuck with outmoded ways of thinking and acting.
Let Us Know Your Story
These problems are so common that most people have a story about at least one of them. We’d like to know yours. Please take a moment to send me an email with your story of communications breakdowns, lost focus or resistance to change. Make it funny or frustrated, cynical or sad, as you like. We’ll share the best of what we receive with our readers.And you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you may have helped somebody sidestep a large pile of trouble.
Want to know more?Learn about Alan/Anthony, the partnership of business development consultants with decades of experience at growing companies in tightly-focused B2B niches.>
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