Jun 16, 2017 | Leadership
I walked into the conference room with my PR manager Jody. Mike awaited us to review our launch plan. About 15 minutes into the conversation, Mike interrupted us and said, “Damnit, I pay you to be a firestarter, not a fireman, come back with a plan to start some fires!” So chastened, Jody and I walked out of the office with our proverbial tails between our legs.
This was a memorable, though certainly not unique interaction, with the late Mike Homer. Mike, who died tragically young of a rare brain disease at age 50 in 2009, was the a key driving force behind the commercial success of Netscape from prior to it’s IPO in 1995 to after its sale to AOL in 1999. Eighteen years later, I still remember Mike as one of the leaders who taught me the most and led the best.
I was reminded of Mike when I read the new bestseller by Sam Walker, The Captain Class. In the book Walker first uses sophisticated analytics to identify the 16 stand-out sports teams of all time, teams as well known as the Pittsburgh Steelers (1974-80), the Boston Celtics (1956-69), and the Brazilian National Mens Soccer Club (1958-62) and as obscure as the Collinwood Magpies (1927-30) of Australian Rules Football fame. He then asked the seemingly impossible question to answer, “what made them great?”. His surprising answer, the presence of a certain type of team captain. One that shared 8 characteristics that he identified.
Among the eight, four stuck out to me when I think of Mike. First, they weren’t the usual suspects, i.e. the superstar. Mike was not the Marc Andreessen of Netscape any more than Helderaldo Bellini was the Pele’ of the great Brazilian soccer teams. Second, they were not Angels. Mike, like many of the captains outlined in the book, lead a hardscrabble childhood. Growing up in working class San Francisco, the son of a bar owner, Mike was a product of not the Ivy league or Stanford, but of UC Cal. Mike rose meteorically based on his skill and street savvy. Third, they broke rules. Mike was a street fighter. If there was a rule book to marketing, Mike knew it, and knew instinctively when to throw it out and break it. And last, they did potentially divisive things. Some of Mike’s conflicts were legendary, I’ll leave it at that, but in hindsight, they served the purpose of actually rallying the company to action or necessary change. When Mike saw the what needed to be done, he willed it to happen. Mike may be gone, but for those of us on the Netscape team, he’s the captain that won’t be forgotten.
The second book that I just finished is Michael Lewis’s “The Undoing Project“. The book is a profile of the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologist who, as Lewis puts it, formed a “Friendship that Changed Our Minds”. This is a challenging book for engineering types like myself who have transitioned into business careers.
We, myself included, think the world is rational, we are all in our minds, economists who believe that humans make decisions rationally. This, Kahneman and Tversky show us is NOT true. Over the course of decades, they showed that decisions and choices are impacted by our emotions according to things like recency, anchoring and relevance. Their work explains things like why people regularly turn down good gambles, make seemingly obvious mistakes in decisions over and over again and let bias impact their judgement. And this simple description does little justice to either Lewis’s book OR their work.
One concept that stuck out for me is framing, which says that “simply changing the description of a situation and making a gain seem like a loss, you can cause people to completely flip their attitude toward risk (pg 276) ” The classic Asian Disease Problem showed that Doctors would make the opposite decision on numerically identical choices when framed as potential success (# of lives saved) vs. potential failure (# of deaths). Astonishing.
I’ve long believed that in highly competitive markets, CONTEXT is a powerful motivator and critical part of messaging. It is the way we stand out from the crowd, by connecting to and FRAMING the way the market thinks about problems and solutions. But I left this reading thinking it may be nearly the ONLY think that matters when trying to differentiate our solution from competitive ones. Mind boggling!
Having had our context REFRAMED by Mike, Jody and I left and after licking our wounds, we came up with new FIRESTARTING plan, broke a few rules, and came back with a new and more powerful course of action!
Leadership it seems, is all about breaking rules and re-framing context! So now let’s go undo something together!
Apr 20, 2017 | Leadership
“We built the best deck ever, and sales just insists on changing it, they can’t stay on message” – Head of Marketing
“That marketing deck is out of touch, our audience just doesn’t want to listen to that” – Head of Sales
Sometimes, as a consultant, I just want to go all Rodney King on my clients and scream – WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG!
The truth of course lies somewhere in between, as it usually does. Marketing, for it’s part, needs a story that scales. They need to grab attention, keep it and create sales opportunities, real ones. And while we can tailor our message by audience and industry, the number of variations we can effectively create and manage is by the very nature of marketing, somewhat limited, by bandwidth, budget and media channels. And while Account Based Marketing and sales, buyer persona driven marketing, and technology driven personalization let us do more, we are still at the end of the day more like Classical Composers and conductors, writing and conducting the score to a large audience.
Sales on the other hand needs the story that wins NOW, with this customer, in this industry, against this competitor, in this economic environment, it this part of the buying cycle. Now, this conversation, not tomorrow’s or next weeks.
While at the Topo Summit last week, I was chatting with my friend Paul McGee, founder and CEO of sales enablement vendor Sharper Ax about sales and marketing messaging, and how they differ. Paul and I had done some previous work together for Sharper Ax and Paul had come up with the metaphor that great sales reps are like Jazz musicians, they know a lot of riffs, and they play the ones that are right for the small intimate audience they are performing for that day. Great sales reps are Jazz Musicians.
Great marketers are Classical Music Composers and Conductors.
Great sales reps are Jazz Musicians.
NO WONDER WE CAN’T GET ALONG!!!
To succeed we need to both understand and learn from each other. Here’s my ideas for how we can bring our sales and marketing music into pure Go To Market Harmony –
Marketers MUST understand that sales is a performance more akin to Jazz and Improvisation than scripted set pieces. While marketing needs classical music to do their jobs, sales performers need small repeatable riffs that they can string into story and on the spot performances that resonate with their audience of the moment. Providing sales with these riffs; be they stories, value statements, silver bullets and the like, is a critical sales enablement task for marketing teams. So when supporting sales, stop just writing symphonies and novels, and start writing musical riffs and poems.
Sales professional MUST understand that without classical training, your jazz improvisations will fail. Take the symphony (“The Deck”) as a work of art, worthy of respect. Before you start riffing on your own, master the classical version. Only then make it your own. Respect the effort and thought that goes into the deck, find the value, and then amplify it with you improvisation. And rather that telling marketing they “don’t understand” the audience, teach them by constructively telling them which riffs and passages are getting the most applause from the buying audience. Be a partner so they get you better raw material to build your performances from.
We all must understand that to win, we need both Classical and Jazz music performers and performances in our Go To Market approach, then we can all get along!
Apr 4, 2017 | Leadership
“When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, it will be time for you to leave.” — Master Kan, speaking to the young Caine in Kung Fu.
Today, being a Go To Market leader in an organization is harder than ever. I’ve written in the past that to be a Go To Market leader, you need to be Part Yoda, Part Leonardo and Part MLK, and I’ve also written about the 8 domain skills that organizations need to have on their team to build leadership that can take their products and services to the top of the market.
So with three personas and 8 domain skills, how can you possibly “do it well”?
Let me suggest one path to being a Go To Market leader that I have found useful in coaching clients, thinking about my career, and making sense of what I see in the world I practice in, Business to Business, or B2B Marketing, I call it the Way of the Go To Market Warrior and it looks like this:
As you can see, we all start as novices, as we learn and achieve the mythical 10,000 hours of practice, we become an expert. In the Go To Market leadership journey, we first focus on SKILLS, mastering one of the functional skills in Go to Market, be it Messaging and Positioning, Growth Hacking, Events, Sales Enablement, or one of the roles on the skills wheel, whichever you choose or is chosen for you. But we quickly learn that to increase our impact and build our career, expertise in one skill, however valuable, does not a leader make. We must become a skills polyglot, like Leonardo DiVinci. In fact, in the first third of our journey, Leonardo is our spirit guide, and our focus is on skills acquisition. Our Journey looks like this:
While we have upped our impact, skills will only take us so far. We can have great success, even be seen as a star, but to move the organization further and be a leader, we must expand our knowledge beyond our skills, and catalyze others to drive success. Our spirit guide for this segment of our Journey is none other than Yoda. To catalyze success and impact, we must learn the context in which we apply our skills. In the Go to Market world, this KNOWLEDGE means, deep understanding of the market, the selling and buying process, and the available solutions in the market, both ours and competitions’. Only with that knowledge can we catalyze our impact to extend not just to our skills, but to top line revenue, customer success and product roadmap. Our impact reaches beyond our domain and function and we emerge as a leader in the business. Yoda can take us far!
However, Yoda isn’t so good in a leading a big crowd. Yoda can coach and mentor you and lead by example in how you grow your knowledge and turn it into a force of impact (pun intended), but he’s not going to be much of the influencer of the big crowd. Become a master of Go to Market and moving from catalyzing others to leveraging yourself and the organization to accomplish the impossible, requires you to call on INFLUENCE as your focus, and Martin Luthur King as your spirit guide, or even spiritual guide, if you so care! Harnessing your skills and knowledge as the base, we now become the Master, the influencer, the larger than life leader in the organization and beyond. We are now a true leader and master; skillful ,knowledgeable and influential yet humble and serving. Our final journey looks like this, the Way of The Go To Market Warrior:
And from here, the journey begins again, with a new challenge and a new set of spirit guides. That’s a matter for a different day!
“The seeds of our destiny are nurtured by the roots of our past” – Master Po to Caine in Kung Fu
This post is dedicated to all my mentors of the past, present and future. I’ve grabbed a few pebbles and drop some too, but either way you have never failed to inspire me.
I love to Mentor others and do so with what I hope is mastery, competence and humility, and I consider it one of life’s greatest honors and privileges. If you are on a journey to leadership in the Go To Market domain, I’d love to connect and see how we can accelerate our journeys together!
Jan 15, 2017 | Leadership
I’ve been working on a model for clients who need to figure out how to build go to market leadership in their organizations, both at an individual and team level. I’ve come up with the following idea and would love to get your feedback. The eight slices of the pie equal the 8 key mastery skill areas. Like a compass, our skills model is oriented with tactical work to the north and tactical to the south, and brand on the east and demand on the western side.
I’d love to hear any of your thoughts on the following items
- Do the skills make sense? Are the labels “right” and is any critical area missing?
- Do the “compass points” all match up?
- Would this model help you in planning or assessing you or your teams skills, organization, development or staffing plans?
There is a lot of additional work to be done to flesh out the details and use of this model, and your feedback will be very valuable to me and the state of the art of Go To Market Mastery. I can’t wait to hear what you think!
Aug 29, 2016 | Leadership
In my travels through organizations small and large, I’ve noticed how difficult it is for my clients to find great go to market leaders to build their teams. I starting thinking there must be a better way.
As organizations expand and scale, they need find more effective ways to mentor and nurture a next generation of Go To Market leaders. These future leaders need a road map and path to learn the art of go-to-market leadership so they can master not just skills, but strategy, execution and leadership
What the $#%^ is a Go To Market Leadership Dojo? Get the whitepaper and come to the webinar to learn more! You won’t be disappointed!
Aug 26, 2016 | Leadership
As I’ve written in my previous post being a Go To Market Leader is hard. You need the knowledge of the Jedi Master, the broad skill-set of a Renaissance Man and the influence of a great evangelist. This is not only a challenge for individuals, but even more so for senior organizational leaders who must identify and develop these leaders.
Just last month, I visited a prospect, let’s call them Acme Corp. Acme’s CEO, let’s call her Connie, was nearly despondent in her inability to find true go market leaders on her team. She told me that no matter who she challenges, they seem to come up short in either skills, knowledge or their ability to lead the organization forward. “I can lead the go to market for the team, but I’ve got fundraising and product challenges that right now are consuming me,” she told me. “And hiring that person is proving to be beyond difficult.”
I’d like to say that Connie’s challenge is unique and one of. But over the last 5 yrs, and at an increasing rate lately, I see organizations of all sizes challenged with enabling the next set of Go To Market Leaders for growth and success. And without a handful of effective go to market leaders, organizations won’t leverage and innovate they way they need to in order to lead and win their markets.
I think this challenge comes down to three things.
- First, the potential Go To Market Leaders in the organization are so focused on task, they simply can’t develop the breadth of skills and knowledge they need to lead. We depend on “getting lucky” by hoping that new leaders magically emerge from the crucible of busy-ness, but this rarely happens.
- Second, the role models who must coach and nurture these up and comers, are themselves task overloaded, and when they do find time it is nearly always a skills based or crisis based intervention. Role-modeling problem solving is great, but again, when ad-hoc and crisis driven, rarely grows leadership skills in the follower.
- Lastly, when we do actually find the time to develop a person or team, it is nearly always focused on the organization meeting its goals, not growing the team. For example, the annual offsite spends most of its time on planning and tactics. In the rare time we do focus on “development”, it’s usually “team building”, which sadly usually doesn’t further organizational goals OR develop leaders. Or, we send the individual off on a seminar for “personal development”, which kinda, but never really ties much to the organization’s goals.
Clearly we need a new approach. One that not only helps drive organizational goals, but develops the leader at the same time, by aligning the participant’s personal growth with the organization’s goals. When you do this, you get engagement and results, and can grow the next generation of leaders quickly and effectively. One innovative approach to this challenge is to build a “Go To Market Leadership Dojo”. The Go to Market Dojo builds the leaders that the organization needs to meet its goals, and does it in a way that is rewarding and meaningful to the participants.
To learn more about The Go To Market Leadership Dojo, you can get the whitepaper and register for the upcoming webinar You won’t be disappointed!
