Want Revenue? Dismantle the Maze!

Scenario: For the last 3-5 years the engineers have been working day and night to develop an innovation that will change the way people interact with their world. The engineers are very proud of what they have created, but still believe additional functionality is required to complete the project. Marketing is dutifully turning on the demand creation engine and developing literature, training sales personnel, and generating leads. The sales executive has hired a crack team to bring in that low-hanging fruit and to beat the goals promised to the investors. Everyone involved is convinced they understand what the market needs; they have developed the right tools and have contingency plans for problems that may occur. The excitement is high and everyone is sure that success is just around the corner.
Six months later, though, customers aren’t biting, the coffers are empty, and you are waking up in the morning with cold sweats wondering what went wrong. Ask your executive team, and they will provide you with hours of their spin. Many of the statements and arguments put forth by the executive team will be useful, others will be self-aggrandizing. You will hear arguments for and about increasing functionality, increasing advertising, changing market focus, hiring more personnel, and replacing the sales organization. Your team members will blame undercapitalization, product bugs, market timing, etc. Yet, when all is said and done, executive team members are only speculating. While some of their recommendations may be useful, expecting answers from them is unrealistic and actually adds unneeded complexity to solving the problem or problems. Companies, from the executives, to the field representatives, to the janitors live under a myth/vision of what the firm’s success will be and how it will be constructed; this myth/vision which was sold to investors, employees and other committed constituencies, may be flawed. The hardest part at this moment is in your mind to discern, if the myth is imperfect and to do so you need to gather information from the prospects.
Only two groups of people really know why the product isn’t selling: the prospects themselves and the field representatives who speak with them:
1. The prospects can tell you in a New York minute whether your product is appealing—or what’s wrong with it—and under what circumstances they are willing to bet their careers and purchase your firm’s offering.
2. The field representatives are constantly exposed to what prospects think is wrong with a product. Indeed, it is the primary responsibility of this group to remove prospects’ objections to the product until the prospects have no further objections to purchasing your firm’s offering.
Marketing and Engineering are great organizations, but even with the best product and service planning by these enlightened personnel, the proof of your success is when the company sells something. The prospect is not going to become a customer until every objection is addressed to the satisfaction of the prospect. The field organization may need all resources available with the company to remove these objections. So how have other successful CEOs leveraged these resources to remove objections?
1. Always, be available for meetings with prospects and customers.
2. Keep an Open Door policy for all member of the field organization.
3. Encourage your staff to spend at least 20-25% of their time with customers or the field organization.
4. Attend Sales/Customer Service Meetings regularly, listen intently and ask detailed questions about objections, on functionality, availability, price, competition, etc.
5. Have joint meetings with the field organization and the executive staff and in the case of smaller firms, the entire company can join in on field organization meetings.
6. Keep an account on the CRM (Customer Resource Management) system and peruse the activities of your field organization.
7. Attend tradeshows with your field organization and spend at least 50% of your time meeting with prospects, customers, and the field organization.
8. Create a sense of urgency within your executive staff to immediately assist the field organization is managing and resolving prospect and customer objections.
9. Most importantly in your mind constantly weigh all inputs as to the underlying motivation behind all providers of relevant facts, to determine bias based on Myth, self-aggrandizement and faulty measurement systems of achievement.
Unfortunately, upper management too often dismisses prospects’ objections as mere excuses by field personnel who are not meeting their goals. If you are to be a highly successful CEO, you must insist that the executive team not treat objections lightly. Rather, team members must listen to the feedback from each serious prospect, then systematically prioritize and remove every relevant and pertinent objection reported. Your executive team may have great insights into the underlying cause of the objections, but if you want the revenue, remove every wall in the maze between the mouse and the cheese.

Why Should You Listen?

I have worked closely with twenty CEOs in the High Tech Sector and have interviewed an additional dozen to identify those attributes that separate the winners from those who merely get by. These CEOs run the gamut from individuals who created multi-billion dollar companies in less than a decade to first-time CEOs trying to get the latest innovation into the marketplace.
There are over 20,000 books commercially available today that detail what it takes to be a great CEO and a great leader. They all focus on some fundamental factors:
1. An intense--even overwhelming--desire to create your vision of success for the firm and yourself, and your investors.
2. The skill in every moment and in every breath to balance the elements of simplicity, creativity and harmony within the organization, while moving unwaveringly to fulfill the vision.
3. the constant elementary understanding that the primary purpose of your business is to provide the acknowledged market with Products/Services that meets the needs of that market.
The ability to maintain equilibrium between these fundamental factors is based on your underlying value system which constitutes the essential attributes that will drive your decision making.
In this and upcoming blogs I will examine common occurrences that cause a CEO to lose either focus or balance and, as a result, for the company to lose momentum, personnel, customers, market share and capital.