Unterwegs zur: Diagnostics, Facilitation, and Coaching for the B2B CRM & CEM Strategists

On the way to ....
As I walked in this morning, I saw a large horse fly resting on the sidewalk. Huge, not particularly attractive: it couldn’t possibly fly. When She (sic!) created flying creatures, people asked what God had been thinking to design the horse fly or the bumblebee. After all we know that God has a grand design and all creation fits into the plan according to Her design. In truth, however, God’s design of bumblebees and horse flies has come under question for centuries. As in: what was She thinking? Or, nothing designed that way can fly. Yet, we know that both creatures do fly and do so well. What works so easily for God does not work as well for humans when it comes to successful planning on how to get to there from here.

Getting from here-to-there is always on everybody’s minds; and, getting from here-to- there is always already a clearly visible destination. Truth is, however: often we get lost on the way. [And, no! I really do not just mean driving directions]. I’m thinking more along the lines of the transformation the US now faces as the Tea Party tries to hold the nation hostage and take its citizens back to the 1787-9 period; or, a lot more simple to solve, how to transform a business into a customer-centered, customer-based business.
The challenges are so immense as to risk hyperbole. The missteps made happen so frequently and predictably that there must be a better way.

We no longer can afford missteps in today’s hyper-competitive, always-on, flat world. No, what we need is a way to assure breakthrough performance and to assure creation of a roadmap that outlines our best chance to arrive at the destination, the desired end-state.
And it really is quite simple to effect best-planning and execution of these crucial transformations. The keys are diagnostics, facilitation, and coaching.

Plans, lucid, readable and comprehensible roadmaps are important, nay vital to success: whether it is a “simple” exercise, such as taking your family of 5 to [you fill-in-the-blanks] for a mini-summer vacation, or (more) complex such as planning for your 24 year old daughter’s dream wedding, or compound-complex as in establishing your firm’s new customer centered and customer focused strategy. (Thinking of plans as a type of sentence construction may be a helpful metaphor).

Distractions, unanticipated events, setbacks, life: all these “things” happen and so our best laid plans somehow end up producing horse flies rather than hummingbirds. Problem is our horse flies don’t fly. Our “success” at planning, unfortunately, does not translate into successful implementation and operational effectiveness.

And, so what?! What now? How can your B2B CRM & CEM strategy be implemented successfully, without a hitch? How do we plan for life to happen and keep on the path. As I began to write this paragraph these 2 phrases surfaced: “Seek first to understand.” “Start with the end in mind.” And, yes, both pieces of advice are apropos of this discussion. Do they give a way to find planning and implementation success? I think they do. And, I think they do because they un-conceal what has been hidden or that which may distract.

What is needed is diagnostics, facilitation, and coaching. The process will clearly define 3 critical areas: 1. Where you are starting from: the point of departure or your “Current State”; 2., Where you intend to end up: your destination or “Desired End-State”; and, 3., the stuff that has to be done, accomplished, solved, etc. so that you can, in fact, get from here to there: “the bridging tasks”.

Unterwegs zur…

"Sustainability", a distinctive definition

“A new and distinctive definition of sustainability.”[1]

How do you feel about how the Health Care Debate and health care reform have been handled so far? Personally, I’m fed up with, and a bit confused by, the “public conversation” over Health Care Reform. Personally, I can’t help but believe that the public is being too confused to decide, and the roots of the confusion were the words chosen by certain groups in order to make their point. The next public debate is going to be about creating a sustainable future. The multiple threads of the conversation are already glistening, popping out for examination. Among the threads we can already identify: global warming, carbon emissions, cap and trade, waste, water, soil, food, and so on. And so, as with many people, I am trying to wrap my head around the term “sustainability”.

I do not want to fall victim to lobbyists, or industry positioning, or vitriolic posturing by a faction with an axe to grind. I’ve seen how damaged the public conversation can be after witnessing the debacle over Health Care Reform. Believing that, if I read enough and talk to enough people, I can come away from these educational moments with a more balanced, more rounded, and a more thoroughly informed understanding, I set out to investigate the challenges that accompany the theme of sustainability, and how to guarantee a safe, prosperous world for our children and their grandchildren.

My educational journey has permitted me to experience the poetry of Wendell Berry and the anti-Capitalist rantings of Vandana Shiva. I’ve allowed myself to be captivated by Al Gore’s visuals; and, I discovered that I don’t have patience for the alarmists who produced Food Inc. I found E.O. Wilson too ephemeral, too “airy-fairy” for action; and I found Peter Senge’s The Necessary Revolution challenging me (and each of us) to make a difference and to help the wave move out from its center.

I was drawn to John Ehrenfeld’s deeply philosophical book, Sustainability by Design, for his definition of “sustainability. Ehrenfeld is an industrial ecologist, a systems thinker, and, philosopher. Throughout the book he makes use of the now-familiar-to-many causal loop diagrams, system archetypes, and mental maps made popular in Senge’s phenomenally successful book, The Fifth Discipline.

Ehrenfeld throws down the gauntlet by offering provocative assertions, while continuously using Senge’ Causal Archetypes as framing images, metaphors, and mental maps: Fixes that Fail, Shifting the Burden, & Limits to Growth in this profound questioning of our current situation, which he labels “the global crisis”.

“To create sustainability, we must first adopt new meanings for the words we use to tell our stories.” I certainly agree that language and the metaphors by which we live (write and speak) are more powerful than we normally realize. And, in our use of language we do have the power to shape the future. Just think for a few minutes about the language sales and marketing uses to talk about the people who buy and use your products and services. “Campaigns”, “account penetration”, - we display our cultural values through the language we choose.

Storytelling will have an important role in the public debate. We will have to decide as “The People” how we want to, and will, shape the future of our planet. Ehrenfeld points out “in the environmentalist’s conversation, we almost always speak only in terms of problems to solve, and rarely in terms of nurturing possibility.” He goes on to say: “Something is missing here. Better, many things are missing here.” Using words and causal loop diagrams, Ehrenfeld’s mantra is we need to create a new future (italics mine) because what we have been calling “sustainable development” is just painting the pig, dressing up a problem with a fix but never solving the problem with a creative solution.

His definition of “sustainability” is “the possibility that human and other life will flourish on the planet forever”. He then goes on to add that “flourishing is the key to a vision of a sustainable future, and this way of conceptualizing sustainability connects to every kind of audience.” In other words, this definition works for marketing, for sales, for scientists, etc. as well as for solving such issues as creating a sustainable future. Does it connect with you?

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[1] Sustainability by Design, pg. 6, John Ehrenfeld, Yale Press, 2008

Marketing Madness : Steps to recover

Recovery in a world gone mad

For the last 40 years, B2B marketing professionals have created program rules intended to cause results. From steps-to-the-sale programs, to dealer-loader initiatives, to programs aimed at directing the behavior of the parts counter guy, to frequency programs: the list is seemingly endless. "Incentives" have brought a kind of destructive madness to marketing. Rather than creating a holistic solution, these programs - in the language of systems - have "shifted-the-burden", become "fixes-that-fail", and highlighted why our channel partners should be thought of as "the commons" in the "tragedy of the commons" archetype. it is time to create sustainability in our marketing programs. that will require a kind of recovery for marketers.

“Recovery programs”, in the form of the multitude of 12-step programs that have proliferated since Bill W. and Dr. Bob, made profound contributions to living and the wisdom literature of the 20th century, is a radical paradigm shift in attitude and in living. Its two primary drivers — powerlessness and acceptance — are characteristic thoughts counterintuitive to the marketing imagination.

The reality of marketing today is that we must acknowledge our need for recovery. Over the past decade we have watched the power shift 180-degrees into the hands of our customers. We must all realize and embrace our powerlessness, and understand that accepting this brings greater power. In marketing, as in life, we need to become focused outside of ourselves and allow that others —our customers — hold the power and the key.

The power in the marketplace is held by our customers. No one can doubt this in the twitter-age of social media. Many of us erroneously believe that we own this power. Many of our dealers believe they own it. The truth, however, is that the customers have redefined value and the ways they want to buy our products, and, as such, hold the power over us. Moreover, through the power of social media, our customers now “hold sway” over our reputations and the success of our customer experience management initiatives. To not accept this power and to ignore what our customers tell us is to guarantee that we will be out of business in the near future.

One of the most powerful and pervasive movements of the 20th century has been the movement to heal the individual. Wherever we turn we are confronted with healing the inner child, dysfunction, codependency, etc. In the business arena, we’re being told to listen to our customers, to empower our employees and to develop a sense of community in the workplace, and this whole process is a journey.

Suppose we were to take the wisdom of self-knowledge, responsibility, acceptance, doing things one day at a time, easy does it, etc. and apply them to our marketing lives. Where would these musings take us? Perhaps it will lead to a paradigm of healing to make up for the marketing damage we have done. Let’s call it “12 Steps for Marketing Recovery.”

The Twelve Steps for Marketing Recovery

Step 1. We admitted that we were powerless over people, places, things, and situations, and that our sales and marketing lives were unmanageable.

Step 2. We came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore our focus and us to sanity.

Step 3. We made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care of a power greater than ourselves: to our customers.

Step 4. We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our sales and marketing selves.

Step 5. We admitted to our customers, and to ourselves, the exact nature of our wrongs.

Step 6. We were entirely ready to remove all our defects of sales, marketing, and customer experience.

Step 7. We humbly asked our customers to guide us as we remove our shortcomings.

Step 8. We made a list of all those we had harmed and became willing to make amends with them all.

Step 9. We made direct changes to our treatment of customers and to our processes wherever possible.

Step 10. We continued to take an inventory of our sales and marketing practices and when we were wrong we promptly admitted it.

Step 11. We sought through a quest for continuous process improvement and purging of our database to improve our conscious contact with our customers, seeking only to assimilate, to cultivate, and to retain them.

Step 12. Having had a spiritual awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

Twelve-step programs hold many points of enlightenment for us as business people since their principles define behavior, communications and ethics in a world driven by openness, honesty, willingness and responsibility. The opposite behavior in

the language of “recovery” is codependency.

In agribusiness, codependency takes the form of entitlement programs, programs which rob our businesses of integrity, strength and self-reliance. Entitlements and the incumbent expectations of payments from manufacturer to their channel partners ultimately serve to destroy the marketplace and the covenants/relationships between manufacturer, dealer and grower. Entitlements hurt business because they cause loss. Loss of credibility, loss of price stability, loss of support, and loss of profit for all.

Reversing the codependency of entitlements is just one way the 12 Steps for Marketing Recovery can offer a road to marketing recovery. The solution requires detachment and tough love, but the end result is healthier, more profitable business relationships.

an education challenge for all in agriculture

Like many of us, I am deeply bothered by the current public debate about food, food production and safety. The traditional, and newer "social" medias have taken this very, very complex issue and lumped together factoids about "feeding the world", "clean air", "global warming", "genetically modified crops", and the very sustainability of our planet. Doing so only made things worse and certainly more confusing for most listeners. A great deal of positioning; a good deal of shouting; not much listening and working together going on there, so far, in this public debate.

Agribusiness cannot allow itself to be dragged into a public brawl such as the one we've recently watched - and still are watching - about Health Care Reform and The Public Option.

These issues surrounding agribusiness and farmers, are among the most important topics of today because we all are involved in food and clothing and environmental issues. Yet, journalists such as Michael Pollan, Paul Roberts, and notable world citizens, such as Vandana Shiva, are inciting their audiences and special interest groups, mostly through fear and "adjustment" of the facts. In contrast to these divisive voices, Peter Senge, of Fifth Discipline fame, offers a much more tempered approach, deeper and more thoughtful and quite a bit more challenging to each of us in his newest book, The Necessary Revolution.

Crafting a sustainable solution - just to guide the public debate - can, and will, not result from singularly slanted, or otherwise distorted preaching. These interrelated problems can only be corrected through a creative learning process. Rather than creating an atmosphere in which a true long-lasting solution can be crafted, these activists see only one way: their own. Instead we need to work together. Education and communications will play a huge role in shaping the outcome for many of us. It will take hard work.

We lose all chance to shape the future, however, if we allow those outside agribusiness to shape the public debate or if we yell and/or complain about what they are doing.

We need to listen. We need to practice what Stephen Covey suggests: "seek first to understand, then to be understood". We also need to build a dictionary that guides this conversation and mutual learning. All of us need to shape the language and use words that work and metaphors that reach across the gap between sides, pulling them into our conversation.

Keep this truism on a Post-It: "...those who define the debate will determine the outcome" (c.f., Frank Luntz,What Americans really want ... really).

It's time to re-tell, or to tell anew, the story of farming, of how the world is fed and clothed - and what it will require when there are 9 Billion people on earth. It is time for us to educate the rest of the world about farming, agriculture, tillage practices, land and water conservation, seeds and chemicals. If we shape the conversation, without rancour and with a complete and easy-to-comprehend story, which helps reveal the truth in its complexity, everyone will come out ahead. Then we can move ahead proud of our stewardship and assured of a sustainable future. But remember, "It's not what you say; it's what they hear" that matters

If agribusiness addresses these same sometimes-difficult-and-admitedly- complex subjects through education and communication - the ones the extremists have distortedly made visible - so that our fellow citizens of the planet can help better understand the reality, the rancorous, drama can subside; constructive conversation, dialogue and trust can be built; and, we can craft a sustainable future together.

That future will renew the social contract. Then we can walk our talk proudly.

- old consultant adage, however: easy to say, harder to accomplish.