You’ve worked really hard on your strategy and plan. You’ve communicated it to the troops. You’ve done this frequently though a variety of channels. But six months later, your strategy isn’t getting traction? There are lots of reasons strategies fail.

In a study by Donald Stull (MIT Sloan School of Management) and Kathleen Eisenhardt (Simple Rules), only 55% of middle managers can name one of their company’s top five priorities. Worse, when given five chances to list their companies strategic objectives, half fail to get even one right!

If you say this is unlikely to happen in your organization, then ask the questions. The CEO’s we work with are often shocked at the statistic above, but the problem is due to one simple error in thinking. Communications doesn’t equate to understanding.

Even if your team can parrot back your key initiatives and strategy, it still doesn’t mean understanding. And without understanding, it’s likely all your hard work on strategy will not materialize. What can you do about it? By now, you’ve discovered that yelling louder doesn’t help.

Here are a few recommendations:

1. Determine your audience first. Is your message for internal, board, stakeholder, or industry consumption? Messages need to be tailored differently for different audiences.
2. Keep it simple. The greatest communicators often have just one message. As humans, we have difficulty remembering three things, much less a dozen.
3. Explain why. Why is this your strategy? Why is it imperative? What’s changed?
4. Explain how. How are you going to implement the strategy? What’s the plan?
5. Use stories. We are geared to understand stories, metaphors, and examples. It’s the way we simplify and remember.
6. Help them see their role and what is expected. Participation in the process by all levels, not just the C-Suite helps.
7. Ask for confirmation. At all levels, confirmation helps reinforce understanding.
8. Incorporate your strategy into your performance standards and measures for employees.
9. Make sure your strategy communication is not just top down. It has to be top down, middle-to-middle, and peer to peer.
10. Test and measure.

Again, there are multiple reasons why strategies fail. This is just one. When you reach a level of understanding, remember that is only the first step. Then the real work begins.

Do Great Things!

Lee Hobart Stocking
Principal
Prairie Sky Group
prairieskygroup.com
651-357-0110 (C)

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A CEO of a $50M SaaS company is faced with a strategic implementation problem. In order to recognize his strategic vision of double-digit growth he has challenged his sales team to get so many orders that his implementation team leader literally cries.

Failure of managers to work across disciplines to implement strategy is one of the top three killers of strategy. After working to develop a great strategy and plan, you’ve communicated and helped your organization understand the strategy. Then you’ve put performance standards in place. Your objectives are cascaded. It’s what happens next that’s important to your success.

80% of managers say that their objectives are limited, specific, and measurable. An incredible 84% say that they can count on their bosses and their direct reports to support them in working on the strategic objectives. But here’s the rub. Only 9% say they can count on a colleague in another discipline all of the time. And only 50% say they can count on them most of the time! (Donald Sull, Rebecca Holmes, Charles Sull -HBR Mar15)

Consider the ramifications. Sales waits on marketing to launch a new campaign. But marketing is waiting on development to release the specs. Compound interactions and delays will kill the launch. Of course it’s nobody’s fault. Everyone has a valid reason or rationalization.

Here’s what the CEO in the “Make Implementation Cry” situation above did to solve his problem. He brought all the leaders from each of marketing, sales, development, implementation, and service together. He’d made sure that they all had a common objective and reward for hitting the vision when the strategy launched. So he congratulated sales for making implementation cry. He reminded them that they weren’t going to make their bonuses if they couldn’t figure out how to help implementation because their bonuses were tied to revenue that wouldn’t be recognized if their software wasn’t installed. Within an hour the team had figured out a solution. Marketing would give implementation $200K to hire more installers and trainers. Problem solved. They hit their year-end mark.

Is your strategic implementation hanging fire because different departments aren’t working together? What did this CEO do? Here are a few solutions to the inter-department strategic implementation killer:

1.    Make sure your team has the same key objectives and rewards.
When a new strategy is launched many hang onto the old strategy. You can’t have a tacit strategy and an official strategy. Everyone needs the same strategy, objectives, and rewards.

2.    When you launch a new strategy and plan, makes sure you’ve budgeted for it.
One reason strategic plans fail is for lack of budgeting, both financially and resource-wise, as well as management attention. When you add new objectives or work, have you also budgeted for it or taken something off the table? Many managers complain they can’t support new initiatives (or cross-discipline efforts) because of this.

3.    Try Agile Development across other disciplines
A solution to doing many things poorly or slowly is to do one thing really well and fast. If this is supporting a new strategic initiative or another discipline then your rate of success is improved. (see the Prairie Sky Group e-Book on Agile Marketing)

4.    Hire for Teamwork
More than all of these there is one thing that the CEO did in this example. He made sure that one of his company values was teamwork, and he hired for it. Marketing didn’t see giving up part of their budget as an obstacle because they were wired to work as team. They all knew they had each others’ backs. Look at your core values if your have cross-discipline issues in supporting your strategic initiatives.

Solve the cross function issue and you’ll be well on your way to a successful implementation of a new strategy. How many other solutions to this problem are there?

Do Great Things!

Lee Hobart Stocking
Founder
PrairieSkyGroup.com
hobart@prairieskygroup.com
651-357-0110 (C)

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The VP of Sales is the most fired position in corporate America today. The reason is simple. Their forecast number is tattooed on their foreheads for everyone to see. Make it and the Sales VP is a hero for a day. Miss it and well….

But consider this. Before any sale goes up on the big board, there are at least 10 critical functions that your sales leader has to perform. As CEO’s, and business leaders, we would do well to inspect these critical functions and to help our sales management succeed. Otherwise, you’re going to start over, which can be even more costly.

You can help sales management by looking at what’s not working. Here are a few questions to ask when your sales management is not delivering the number you both agreed to.

1. Do we have the right sales and go-to-market strategy?
2. What kind of sales structure do we have in place to support them?
3. What kind of motivation and comp system will accelerate results?
4. Is the team sufficiently trained on our product or services?
5. Are they trained on industry and competition?
6. Do we follow an effective and predictable sales process?
7. Is marketing providing qualified leads?
8. Are we supporting sales with the right tools?
9. Are we mentoring and coaching our sales team?
10. Are we hiring the right high-performance sales people?

If your first reaction is to fire the VP when the number on his or her forehead doesn’t match yours, then ask these questions. If you’ve asked, and coached to these questions, and not gotten answers, only then must you answer question number 10 with respect to your VP of Sales. But the final question to ask is, “What makes a great sales leader?”

(Take our 90 Second Sales Performance Benchmark)

Do Great Things!

L. Hobart Stocking
Founder
PrairieSkyGroup.com
651-357-0110 (C)

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The first thing to die on the battlefield is the battle plan. The same thing applies to strategic plans.

A big problem with strategic plans is that they often assume a static view of the world or the competitive landscape. For example, assuming that if you reduce your price, competition will just let you take more market share. The real world rarely works like that.

Yet many CEO’s are insistent that the “Plan” be followed. After all, you’ve spent a lot of time and resources working on it.

Two keys to success here are making sure your team understands the plan objectives, and then giving them the freedom to work out problems when they hit new obstacles. Only 20% of managers say their companies do a good job of moving resources, budgets, people, and focus to respond to new contingencies in implementation of a strategic plan.

One reason for this statistic is that resources and budgets are tied up in non-strategic initiatives. For example, many companies are slow to exit or sell lagging businesses. There are lots of reasons for this.

Like a bad bluff in a poker game, it’s hard to walk away from the chips you’ve already put in, but it hurts like hell when the guy across the table (or the market) keeps raising your bluff. Prairie Sky Group sees this reluctance in many companies looking to raise money for blue ocean strategic opportunities. The first question we ask is, “How is your current business.” Often we find CEOs and Managers reluctant to abandon bad bets. And most often, we find personal reasons such as loyalty to a manager running the business.

A smart response to changes on the battlefield is to allow your team flexibility to respond. This means moving attention, resources and budgets quickly. The ability to do this is called Agility, “the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly; intellectual acuity… the power of moving quickly and easily; nimbleness.”

Agility should not be confused with pursuing everyone’s new idea. Otherwise you’ll be chasing your strategic soccer ball like a group of five-year olds.

The freedom to overcome obstacles is real Agility. Companies that allow for flexibility of resources and budgets wind up being more profitable and successful.

Do Great Things!

Lee Hobart Stocking
Founder
Prairie Sky Group
651-357-0110 (C)

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It’s not just your differentiation that makes your strategic plan successful. It’s where that differentiation occurs in the Value Chain, and whether it’s worthwhile.

When my daughter was younger, she came to me and asked me to help her develop a plan for a terrarium business. I thought it might be a teaching moment. So the first question I asked her was, “Are you going to cast your own glass?” Admittedly, I can be a pedantic jerk sometimes. (Look pedantic up.)

She said of course not. Then I asked her why. She said it would cost too much to buy a kiln and blow glass for the terrariums. She could buy them online. Then I asked her if she was going to build a green house to grow the plants? She said she might because she enjoyed gardening. Next I asked her if anyone would buy her terrariums if she grew the plants and put them together? She said that she thought they would.

So finally I asked, why not try to sell them before you grow them and make them? She asked why.

I told her that it’s important to do the last experiment first, a lesson taught me by an old 3M research chemist, Dr. Gerry Larson. When I ask him why you would do the last experiment first, he said that way I would know if all the other experiments were worth doing. Why waste your time otherwise?

There are two critical strategic principles in this little story that many CEOs often overlook. The first is where in the value chain you are going to compete. The second is whether it’s worthwhile.

Too many organizations miss value chain analysis. They rely on history (the way they’ve always done it) or simply ignore it. It’s especially important to consider it when industries are going through disruption.

Try getting your team to think this way in your next strategic planning session. It’s an inexpensive way to avoid costly mistakes. It’s also the last experiment.

Do Great Things!

-Hobart

Lee Hobart Stocking
Founder and Chief Provocateur
Prairie Sky Group
651-357-0110 (C)

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Why don’t you pay your VP of Marketing or CMO the same as your VP of Sales?

This may seem like a radical concept. But as CEOs and business leaders, our success is often in how we hire, and how we motivate our team.

The classic answer to the question is that the VP of Sales is more important. They bring in the revenue. Power in a company is directly proportional to proximity to the revenue stream. Marketing is behind the lines. Therefore they should be paid less.

But in today’s environment, buyers say they find their vendors 80% of the time rather than the other way around. When they do find you, they are much further down the sales funnel than they used to be. They no longer rely as much on sales people to provide information, or help them understand how your products and services help them solve a problem. When the prospect doesn’t buy from you, 80% buy a similar product or service within 18 to 24 months. Sales doesn’t nurture prospects for that amount of time. Their attention span is too short. You don’t want sales doing these things, because they also aren’t very good at it, and you want them selling. <see How Many Sales People Does It Take To Screw In A Forecast?>

Who does these valuable things? Marketing.

Our prejudice is to believe Marketing offers less value. That the return is harder to measure. But whose fault is this? While there is a lot of crappy marketing going on out there, a big portion of it is our fault.

For what other function would you lower your expectations, and therefore pay less? When you set low expectations, you get crappy results. This doesn’t mean you should pay for crappy results. But what if you changed your expectations?

There’s a new wave of brilliant marketers out there, using sophisticated new tools to bring prospects through your funnel. They are going to work for the people who “get” marketing and who challenge them. They are going to add tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to their company’s revenues. But maybe not yours.

At minimum, they are going to want the same goals as sales if not similar incentives. Because when Sales and Marketing don’t have the same goals and rewards, they piss at each other, and your company suffers.

You get what you pay for. Raise your expectations… and your pay.

Do Great Things!

L. Hobart Stocking
Founder
Prairie Sky Group
651-357-0110 (C)

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In the movie City Slickers, Curly says, “There is just one thing.” I think he was wrong.

When it comes to driving business growth and fixing problems, it’s not just one thing. If it were, then you’d just fix it and get on with your growth. Then take a break in Barbados.

Chances are the source of your growth issues is more than one thing, and you know that. But with the constraints of budget, board direction, competition, and your management team, it’s not easy. That’s why CEO’s aren’t paid to solve problems, but to determine which ones are the most critical, and then assign your team to address those.

To achieve significant top line growth, it’s often a combination and interaction of Strategy, Marketing, and Sales. Then, add focus and execution.

When I began my practice in consulting, I was advised that I needed to specialize. Become a strategy expert, or a sales training expert, or a left handed feng shuie social media marketing expert. The rationalization was that you had to go deep. You couldn’t be an expert at more than one thing. Really?

However, I rarely saw the experts make substantial changes in growth. They made incremental changes that helped. But the reliance on specialized experts only is called the silver bullet syndrome. It’s the hope that an expert in the latest business trend can save you. Instead, Prairie Sky Group built a practice on going both broad with Strategy, Sales, and Marketing, and going deep in each area. It doesn’t make sense to go deep until you know you’re working on a critical problem. Growth is a process problem.

But the question is, “What’s your process for determining what isn’t working?” Here’s a simple example. If your sales are lagging, do you fire your VP of Sales, VP of Marketing, your training manager, or VP of HR? There are numerous things that have to happen before anything get’s sold. Have you hired the right sales people? Are they motivated? Are they trained in the industry, competition, product, and process? Are they getting qualified leads? And so on.

The important first step for a CEO to ask to stimulate growth is, “What are all the (process) steps required for growth to be successful?” The next is, “What isn’t working?” This is followed by, “On what else does the broken step depend?”  (“What are the dependencies or interactions?”) In order to drive successful and substantial growth CEOs need to ask these questions in all three disciplines of Strategy, Marketing ,and Sales. CEO’s need to ask these questions because sometimes your leadership team is biased by the perspective of their discipline.

Along the way, you can ask:
1.    Is it in the plan?
2.    What’s changed?
3.    Is this what the data says, or opinion?
4.    Why? And,
5.    So what?

Finally, the checking question is, “What’s my own bias and perspective?” To answer this question, you might consult a peer group, or an outside perspective. And beware when they tell you, “It’s just one thing.”

Do Great Things!

L. Hobart Stocking
Managing Partner
Prairie Sky Group
hobart@prairieskygroup.com
651-357-0110

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Many CEOs, presidents, and owners of small and medium sized B2B businesses believe Brand is something that only large consumer businesses like Target need to think about. They have lots of other pressing investments, and Brand has the connotation of being expensive, with lots of glitz, advertising, and PR, but without a good or measurable ROI. I don’t agree with this assessment, and I believe there’s another way to think about Brand.

Your Brand is important, especially in an Internet connected commodity oriented world. There isn’t anything your customers can’t buy from someone else for less. One of the things that distinguishes you is your Brand, and you have a Brand whether you think you do or not.

Brand is the value people are willing to pay you over the intrinsic value of your product or service because of it’s perceived value.

Brand is determined, not by what you say about yourself, but by what customers and prospects think about you based on their interactions with your company, products, and services.

So you may sell reliable products, but if you are hard to do business with, your Brand of “Reliable,” may be derailed by a competitor whose Brand is “Reliable with Great Service.” It doesn’t matter if you say you have great service if that’s not the customer experience. The customer will think of your company and think, “Reliable, Crappy Service,” and pay you what they think that’s worth.

How do you know what your Brand is? It’s simple. Ask your customers. There are lots of ways to do this, but it means making a small investment in figuring out what your customers think. If you are not doing this, then how can you get better, compete, and grow? You’re simple guessing or trying to convince with your messaging. Our recommendation is to get the data that defines your Brand.

But just as Brand is determined from outside your company, and not dependent on what you say about yourself, there is one major factor for Brand that is determined from the inside out. Since Brand is created in every interaction with your company, whether on the web, or how you answer the phones, or how you service you products, the one common denominator is your people.

Your people, whether in billing, or service, or delivery, or sales, create the Brand for your company.

So here’s an easy way to get started. It’s the formula at the top of this post. The most important thing a CEO can do is to hire the right people. If you hire for Values (V) and do a good job, the Values of an individual determine their Attitude (A). The Attitudes of a group of employees determine the Culture (C) of a company.  Culture and execution trump everything in the SMB space. Culture determines how employees interact with prospects and customers, and this determines your Brand. Hire for Values, reinforce them with a strong mission statement, and you will find that your Brand will follow. Fail to do this and your Brand will evolve haphazardly, and you’ll find yourself wasting money on marketing messages that fail, and not getting paid what you think you should.

So now as a test, without looking them up, list out the values of your company. Let us know how you did, and whether you want to find out if your customers agree.

Do Great Things

L. Hobart Stocking
Chief Provocateur
Prairie Sky Group
651-357-0110

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As a CEO, President or Owner of a company, you are not paid to solve problems. Rather, you are paid to think about the consequences of problems, determine which ones are critical, and then get the appropriate resources focuses on solving them.

That is management. Motivating your people and allowing them to solve the problems is leadership.

For the management portion, the question is, “How do I determine which problems are the most important?” More than that, “What skills and practices can I use to help?”

I believe Critical Thinking is core to deciding which problems are important and also in helping solve them.

In much of my experience, I see lack of critical thinking as a key issue in limiting the success of many businesses. Often, critical issues are not pursued because of some emotional or historic attachment.  For example, one of our clients continued to pursue a failing business unit because it was their business partner’s pet project.

Critical Thinking is the process of deciding whether something is true, partially true, or false, through a rational and disciplined thought process based on evidence, and open-mindedness. It requires setting emotions on the side, and looking at the facts.  It requires some maturity and reflection, and sometimes creativity. But it can also be mastered through a set of steps and skills.

The first element to determine if something is important is whether it’s part of “The Plan.” This can be your strategic plan, your tactical plan, or your marketing and sales plans. But the question many people omit is, “Is this in the plan?” Too many businesses change direction on a whim. Someone get’s exited and all of a sudden they have a new direction. A good question to ask is, “What’s changed?” Then, if it’s not part of the plan, “Is it important?” Focus and execution are keys to business success. So if it’s not in the plan, then it better be important.

The second element is to ask, “Do we have all the facts and information required?” Often decisions are made based upon opinions, or the power level of those with the strongest opinions. One client, a CEO of a very successful SaaS client always makes it a practice to make sure his people come to him with data. They know this, so they spend extra time gathering information before meeting with him. When he asked what his market share was, and I had to tell him it wasn’t what he expected, I had the data to back up that conclusion. Facts and data result in better decisions.

Another key skill to develop is patience. Patience helps critical thinking. This is often difficult for founders and entrepreneurs. We are men and women of action. It can be argued that’s why they are successful. But I also have a belief that many entrepreneurs and founders have an element of ADHD in their personalities.  Email and the Internet are also affecting the way our brains work. Other than taking Adderall, a good question to ask is, “Is this so important that it needs to be addressed immediately?” Or, “Can it wait?” Sometimes patience, time and distance are the answer. Give yourself some space.

Finally, another skill is to get an outside perspective. Often we are too close to a problem. The solution requires opening our minds a little. Every CEO, President, Owner and Founder needs a council or someone to offer counsel. Believing that it has to be lonely at the top is wrong. Successful management often has someone they trust to bounce ideas off. This trust is often based on experience because no one person has experienced every situation.

At Prairie Sky Group we help our clients develop plans, get the facts, and provide outside counsel based on years of experience. Sometimes we prescribe Adderall.

Do Great Things

Lee Stocking
Chief Provacatuer
Prairie Sky Group
651-357-0110

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When many types of pelagic sharks stop swimming they die.  Swimming to forces water over their gills and provides oxygen for life.

I believe that there is a similar necessity for sales.  Since the sales and customer environment is changing so fast, when a sales person stops learning, he or she becomes less effective, and dies as a sales person.

What has curiosity (See my post Curiosity Killed the Cat) got to do with learning?  It’s simple.  Curiosity is the catalyst for learning.  If you aren’t curious or interested, it’s very difficult to learn.

I believe learning is important in sales for two reasons.  First to stay current in your own disciplines, both sales skills, and the product/service areas you sell.  The second is to learn about your prospect’s business.  Are you curious about their business problems?  Do you ask yourself how you can help solve them?  Can you learn a way to help them?  Curiosity is also a catalyst for problem solving.

Can curiosity be measured?  Not directly or easily.  But we can ask interview questions on learning.
•    Give me an example of the last time you learned a new sales skill, or technology.
•    Give me an example of when you uncovered a problem your prospect didn’t know they had.
•    Give me an example of how you provided a unique solution to a customer problem.
•    Give me an example of the last thing you read and how you used it.
•    How many good questions did they ask you about your business problems?

And how many of you bothered to look up the word “pelagic”? Is the candidate confident enough to stop you when they don’t understand something?

Keep swimming, and look for others that are curious.

Do Great Things!

Lee Stocking
Prairie Sky Group
Making Sales Cry With Qualified Leads
lee.stocking@gmail.com
651-357-0110 (Cell 24×7)

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