Tomicide Solutions April 2008: Five Distractions That Undermine Technology Business Development Departments' Performance

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

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While I've always preached for the automation of the business development process, I also believe that at the right point humans have to take over from the automated processes. Automation is excellent to take care of the transactional piece, but when it comes to the transformational bit, the engagement of hearts, then it's better to leave it to humans.

But while automated systems are pretty consistent and predictable, human beings are not. And there is nothing we can do about it. It's part of human nature.

One problem of this lack of consistency is that as human beings, we love giving in to trivial activities, and forego the vital few activities. Basically we ignore the famous/notorious 80/20 principle.

Hey, on various applications of the 80/20 principle you may want to read some of Richard Koch's titles, including...

It's great stuff to optimise both business and life in general.

Have you noticed how many people refer to the 80/20 principle, yet how few actually practise it? Yes, only a few because 80/20 thinking is hard and forces us to do the vital few activities. But we'd like to do what's easy, cheap, traditional, convenient and comfortable. We love pontificating about stepping out of the comfort zone, but when it comes down to doing it, we're scared shitless and, more often than not, step back into the comfort of the status quo.

Then some time later we start peering outside again and decide step out. And we usually repeat this peering => stepping out => getting scared => stepping back process a good few times before we finally step out and stay out to build a new comfort zone.

I've already written about my dislike of maximising and minimising things. I used to love them, but then I realised that the key is optimising things. When driving a car, I can maximise speed but fuel consumption goes sky-high too. Or minimise fuel consumption by standing still. The real art and science of car driving is to achieve optimum speed at optimum fuel consumption.

Business development is the same...

You can maximise your sales by hiring an army of peddlers and whipping them to work day and night. It's doable in the short run. But in the long run it would have disastrous consequences.

Soon people would start leaving your company and sales would hit rock bottom. Projects would run over time and over budget.

Responsiveness time to clients' enquiries would go up, and many other undesirable factors would hit your company.

Your business development folks have to find the 20% of the activities that create the 80% of the results. And this requires us to have the courage to temporarily let go of 20% of the results that allow us to stop doing 80% of the activities.

So, now we have our performance capability on our hands and bit by bit we can start polishing it in such a way that everything we do has a four-time return (80/20).

On a recent coaching call with the business development folks at a large IT company in Germany, I asked the folks to list their 20% and 80% activities. Then we went through the list item by item. Well, many of the "20%" activities were really "80%" activities.

It turned out, vital activities ended up under "80%" and trivial activities ended up under "20". For instance, interrupting current work and jumping on any incoming call or email was often listed as a "20%" activity. Vital meetings were cancelled with copywriters in order to spend more "creative" time with the graphics folks. Printing deadlines were pushed several times in order to spiffy up the CEO's portrait and other - usually useless - pictures in the brochure.

While these folks were terribly busy, performance was wwwwwwaaaaayyyyy under expectation.

Hey, you may want to find the activities equivalent of a real knight in shining armour on a white horse that can make a positive impact on your business, not merely busily farting-and-fannying around with a fool wrapped in tinfoil riding an old limping donkey.

So, what are the distractions that can get in the way of true performance in the form of busy-ness? Here is a few...

1. Over-learning - Often The Wrong Stuff

Many business development folks erroneously believe they have to know everything under the sun about business development, so they keep learning. And learning is fine. My problem is when people learn to become more deeply educated specialists. The depth of their education increases, while the breadth of their education decreases. Soon they become typical experts. They know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing.

My problem with specialists is that they can't think in context. They rigidly focus on their specialities and ignore the rest of the picture. I understood this problem pretty well when I worked as an embalmer in London many years ago...

I had a body on the slab and doctors would come by shaking their heads.

Orthodontist: "I don't know how he could have died. His legs are in perfect order."
Cardiologist: "I don't know how he could have died. His heart is healthy."
Respiratory doctor: "I don't know how he could have died. His lungs are healthy."

Well dear doctors, he choked on a bloody fish bone.

These doctors, as deep and narrow specialists, just couldn't see the big picture.

The same often happens to business development folks. They learn a lot about marketing or selling but ignore to learn about issues that are important for buyers.

For instance, business development folks should have a better understanding of leadership in general, the performance indicators clients use, human psychology, and how their technology dovetails into issues that cause heated arguments and downright panic in their clients' boardrooms.

In one sentence, technology companies should provide business solutions as opposed to technical solutions. The absence of this perspective causes many technology companies to be price-shopped and being treated as commodities.

And the other aspect of your solution is to hold your clients accountable to hold up their ends of your agreements and get fully involved in the improvement process. Clients with a "Do it FOR me and leave me out of it" mentality are heading to a slippery slope for they are forever dependent on their technology providers.

But from the technology providers' perspective to feed this kind of dependency is unethical. Clients must be able to operate at full speed without their technology providers' constant presence.

2. Engaging In Business Development Prostitution

There are tonnes of information sources out there that flood the world with "traditional, cheap, easy, convenient" methods of doing anything...

"How to lose 100 lbs in 10 days while eating your bodyweight's worth of chocolate and chips every day."
"How to land 100 brand new "premium" clients in one week without lifting a finger and getting out of bed."

And since these methods are comfortable and convenient, not only cheap and easy, people jump on them. I've seen a good number of companies to abolish successful direct response marketing campaigns because one of the top dogs had just attended a seminar at the local university's post-graduate school on "branding" where a business professor, who's never run a real business, was talking about the most recent branding strategies.

When we have a marketing strategy that works, it's a huge mistake to change it in the middle of a successful campaign.

What you also find is that in the shadow of the current campaign's success, the infatuation (what else really?) with the "new" branding strategy gradually dies down and your company moves on with what actually works.

3. Wasting Too Much Time at Conferences And Trade Shows

Conferences

Conferences can be good with moderation. But there is a problem. Conference organisers usually invite presenters who are pretty mainstream.

Most of the presenters are pure teachers and not practitioners. And they teach not necessarily what works in the real world (How would they know it?) but what they've memorised from books and other resources.

Why would I want to learn marketing and selling from college professors who've never marketed and sold anything in their lives? It's easy to pontificate about the recent trends (fads rather) in marketing when I'm hiding behind a cushy union job with steady perks and a hefty state pension.

Select conferences where the invited presenters are real life practitioners not professors or authors of "best-selling" books. Have you noticed that the truly best business books hardly ever become bestsellers?

The problem is that some people are great promoters and manage to get 220 pages of concentrated bullshit on the New York Times or some other bestseller lists. At the same time, some of the best and valuable books, thus their authors, often remain pretty unknown.

Just think of some great "inventors", like Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone...

Although most people believe that it was by Alexander Graham Bell who invented the telephone, Congress has revised history on 17 June 2002, and attributed it to Antonio Meucci, a Florentine inventor. Meucci invented the telephone in 1849 in Cuba and built its first practical incarnation in New York in 1860.

Meucci was unable to pay for a definite patent, therefore he received only a "notice of invention". Then his notice got lost, and in 1876, two years later, Bell filed for a patent for the telephone. Meucci tried to protest, but since his notice was lost, nothing could be done. Then with Meucci's death, Bell became to be known as the inventor of the telephone.

Also...

It was Joseph Swann in England and William Sawyer in the US who invented the electric light and built working models, but Edison was a better manipulator of people, so he managed to steal the idea and announced the invention before actually producing a working prototype.

Nikola Tesla invented radio in 1893, then wrote a series of scientific papers about exactly how to build one. In scientific circles, Tesla is regarded one of the most brilliant scientists to walk the earth since Leonardo da Vinci. But a 19 year-old boisterous loud-mouth, called Guglielmo Marconi was a natural-born promoter, knew how to gain people's attention and con them. Marconi read Tesla's descriptions, then built a radio and claimed it to be his own invention. Newspaper stories everywhere began touting the young genius Marconi, while paying no attention to Tesla. Nine months after Tesla's death in 1943 the Supreme Patent Court of the United States announced Nikola Tesla as the inventor of radio. The Court considered Marconi's argument, examined the evidence, and concluded that Marconi was lying.

Maybe not great inventors, but both Bell, Edison and Marconi were excellent manipulators and bold-faced liars.

Bestselling books are often the results of excellent PR manipulations. And many conference organisers invite these bestselling authors, many of whom are yet to prove their expertise in the trenches.

Trade Shows

I think this is a 100% useless activity.

Here is why...

Whatever you can learn at a trade show, you can learn by other means a lot more easily. You can read books, attend professional development programmes, may they be seminars, teleconferences, webcasts, etc.

So before you attend the next tradeshow or a conference, ask yourself how the attendance of that event can help you to achieve some of your major goals. And don't attend these events for the sake of attending. In a way this is like exercising. A 45-minute kick-arse session with a personal trainer is more valuable to achieve your fitness goals than four hours of aimless wondering around in the gym. Many people choose the latter because it's easier. Good luck to them.

The second problem with tradeshows is that high-level decision-makers normally don't attend them. So, you can't even initiate business relationships with potential buyers. Then what's the point?

If you're on a path with your business development, small tactical changes are fine but large strategic changes can lead to trouble. If you're a deep-sea diver, you can't become an astronaut by reading a New York Times bestseller book on it authored by an aeronautics professor who's never been either in deep sea or in deep space. It takes a bit more than that, and it may be the wrong move.

4. Selecting The Company Of The Wrong People

We know that 20% of the people produce 80% of the results.

Yet, we keep selecting the wrong people because they manage to impress us and most of us are suckers enough to fall for this.

And who are the people who prey on these poor suckers?

Using farming language, these are the people who wear big fancy hats, golden-handled branding irons and maybe even some cattle shit on their boots but have no cattle. They are excellent at bragging about their past successes, blowing them out of proportion.

HR departments all over the world are famous for falling for these tricks. And as a result of this mistake, almost 50% of sales forces fail to hit their quota.

Now this leads me to voicing my other observation that managing a sales force's performance by quota is as retarded as measuring surgeons' performance based on the number of cemetery plots their handiwork requires per month. Both are the wrong indicators.

It's vital that you find the right people to mix with. If you want to create and automated lead generation system, don't hang out with folks who are still living in the age of the cold-call craze, pounding on dial pads day in day out.

Peddlers love mingling with other peddlers and discuss how many doors have been slapped into their faces that week.

Smart business developers had better hang out with other smart business developers.

Check what people are discussing. If they're moaning about events and circumstances beyond their controls, then you'd better ditch them.

Are they highly productive or merely busy? During a 1-to-1 discussion with you, how many times do they interrupt you to answer their mobile phones? I believe only low-level people are desperate to be instantly available, and I think this comes from their insecurity.

I can spend hours in the company of my friend and mentor, Robin Elliott. Not only he doesn't pull his phone on me to answer it, he never makes excuses to stop an ongoing discussion to check his phone messages. Yet, he is one of the most responsive communicators I've ever known. The other day, we pre-scheduled a phone call and I called him at the designated time. And he was there and picked up the phone.

When I call people at prescheduled times, in 99% of the cases I end up on voicemail. And the funny thing is that, if we can't connect after several attempts, when I send them emails and say I was sorry for not being able to connect, they write back to me acknowledging and accepting my apology. Amazing.

What sort of lives do these people live? I know several IT people who live with their Bluetooth permanently plugged into their ears. What kind of life is that? And they can justify this silly act. They say they are so in demand that they have to be available 24/7. Really?

My observation is that there is a inverse correlation between success and haphazard phone use. At one end, successful people work on their own terms. At the other end, the welfare warriors basically carry their phones in their hands, so they can instantly flip it open and answer it. Although I think this is merely an ostentatious demonstration of their most precious possessions.

And last but not least, are these people excited, passionate and enthusiastic about what they do?

If not, no matter how many MBAs they have and how many fancy designations they have behind their names, stay away from them. They can only pull you down.

What you find is that for truly great people, work is an enjoyable means to an enjoyable end: LIFE. They create better futures for themselves and their families by creating better futures for their clients.

5. Lack of Proper Delegation

Call me a sucker, but I love watching CSI: Miami. As the team leader, Horatio is a sort of "puzzle master", the deep generalist, surrounded by good, but first and foremost, passionate and enthusiastic, specialists. These specialists provide their own pieces of the crime puzzle, and then, using his past experience from the homicide department and the bomb squad, Horatio puts the pieces together.

But...

Horatio doesn't analyse bullets because that's for Calleigh Duquesne, the team's ballistics specialist.

He doesn't do autopsies because that's for Alexx Woods, the team's medical examiner.

He doesn't do diving because that's for Eric Delko, the team's underwater recovery expert.

He doesn't do DNA analysis because that's for Natalia Boa Vista, the team's DNA specialist.

He doesn't do blood analysis because that's for Ryan Wolfe, the team's blood- and trace evidence specialist.

And the other interesting bit is that in spite of all the work, Horatio always finds the time to say some kind words to the victims and help them out beyond the call of duty.

When you watch some episodes, you also notice, that while he's the boss, he never yanks the chain of command, and he goes out of his way to protect his people. Especially from that overzealous bastard Internal Affairs investigator, Sergeant Rick Stetler, who's planning Horatio's destruction over a promotion, which he thought was his but somehow went to Horatio.

So, while Horatio is not a specialist, he is the engine room of the CSI lab.

And as a business development executive or sales manager, you should be the same. You should be the puzzle master, and have people on board who bring you the puzzle pieces.

For instance, when I do search engine optimised copywriting, I never do the keyword research. I always ask clients to get it done. Then we discuss which keywords we use to optimise which pages.

Many business development managers shy away from hiring good specialists because they are expensive, and the main mantra is to cut costs. Or they hire cheap folks. Here in Canada the papers are full of similar ads.

"World-class market leader company is hiring entry level people. You must have 5-8 years of experience at preparing Crystal Reports. Minimum wage guaranteed."

Well, hell, how attractive is this rubbish?

Entry level folks. Hm. Maybe this mentality causes Canada to be permanently stuck at the rock bottom of the G8 group with no hope in hell to ever rise any higher.

As a business development executive or sales manager, your job is to oversee client acquisition and client service. The other job is to build your team. And when you have the right people on your team, they will take care of the speciality areas.

And remember, the less supervision people need, the more valuable they are to the company. It's a lot wiser to tighten your belt and hire an experienced person than to hire someone you can "easily" afford. Hiring, just like everything in business, should be a bit of a stretch.

When you hire good people, with a short learning curve they catch up and take your performance to the next level. When you hire cheap people, they eat up huge amount of management time and still can't produce at an above-average level. And now you've lost two people's performance: The new person and the supervisor. That's double loss for no gain.

I know many people say that the best bet is to build watertight systems and then hire the cheapest people with the lowest skill level to crank the systems. And this can work if your stuff is 100% transactional cheap commodities. But you can't sell sophisticated technology using McDonald's calibre slave labour.

And when the client buys a $5 million IT systems with significant amount of consulting, what would these people say?

"Wanna some more routers and hard drives with that?"

That would sound rather retarded.

Hire good people and then you can become the deep generalist to oversee their work and coach them to achieve more.


Attribution: "This article was written by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan who helps privately held information technology companies to develop high leverage client acquisition systems and business development teams in order to sell their products and services to premium clients at premium fees and prices. Visit Tom's website at http://www.varjan.com.