After half a decade in corporate life at KPMG as the head of the Customer, Sales, Marketing and Innovation Practice I am now enjoying the pleasure of working directly with an increasing number of ambitious clients. This allows me to implement innovative concepts in the field of business strategy, customer centricity, commercial strategy, commercial organisation and commercial performance. Below I share 5 guiding principles for a fresh look at how to disrupt traditional thinking on strategy, customer, sales and marketing that are key components of the Disruptive Selling Methodology.
Most projects on improving the way customer, sales and marketing works start from the current situation with all its legacy, limitations and issues. Start from a white page with what you sell, to whom and link this to your personal and business ambitions.
Then apply all new concepts, frameworks, techniques and technologies that are available today and visualise how your organisation would look like if Day 1 was tomorrow.
Once you have your white page strategy and go-to-market target operating model mapped-out you can compare this to your current approach and make decisions on updates and changes from a much broader, better informed and more independent viewpoint.
Many companies consult me on growth strategies. Most of the time growth requires additional sales and marketing efforts.
But not always. And not always on a permanent base.
Some companies can grow through alternative sales techniques such as ecosystem hackathons and co-creation with existing clients. Others can grow significantly from better understanding what existing clients really need.
Some companies need a top-notch marketing and sales team for a couple of months to create markets and develop clients but need very different profiles to grow and maintain these same markets and clients later on.
Thinking and accepting the concepts of agility, flexibility, temporality and gig-economics for everything related to sales, marketing and service is an excellent recipe to come-up with innovative approaches that make better use of company funds and often deliver impressive results.
New ways of working cover a broad range of concepts and viewpoints. Key components are Working from Home (WFH) and Working from Anywhere (WFA). To be translated as working when you are feeling most like working, when you are most motivated and best prepared, as working without spending time commuting to the office for pointless meetings and working with the tools and concepts of your choice to get things done.
I am a strong believer that the attitude changes to work that were brought upon us by Covid19 are a major improvement. They bring increased efficiency and increased productivity and deliver better results.
I tend to propose clients to rethink office space as a place where people get together to co-create and co-develop and to think about office work as the exception in stead of the default model.
This works particularly well for sales, marketing and customer service functions. If you do it well people will get together when needed but otherwise will get 8 hours of work done in a better way than before in 5 to 6 hours and spend the rest of the time surfing, cooking and studying, leading to happier employees that lead to happier customers and in the end lead to much happier shareholders.
We live in times of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity and in times of a dozen other acronyms that basically confirm that the world as we may have known it is gone forever. So we need to make do with a very unstable and dynamic environment where surprises may be around every corner.
Strategic Optionality is a concept that allows keeping a broad range of options open, and to create potential alternative scenario's for when thing do not work out as planned.
Strategic Optionality is both an art and a management concept and it requires a number of techniques and principles that are not part of the standard curriculum of most managers and directors.
Particularly in the field of commercial strategy and marketing it pays to identify, develop and maintain a multitude of options in order to avoid being left standing when the music stops.
I am always a bit surprised when people in need for a new approach to customer, sales and marketing move rapidly to people, functions and organograms, often in this order.
Needless to say that disruptive solutions are not about people and functions but about design principles, northern star ambitions and target operating models.
If we finally get to people, functions and organisational structures you will discover that many of the traditional roles no longer exist and that a number of new roles have emerged.
Many of these come from the software industry where managing the cost of acquisition (CAC) and managing customer life time value (CLTV) make the difference between going under or becoming a US-dollar billionaire.
If you are redesigning a commercial team you should check if you have SDR's, Customer Success people and CRO's on the organisation chart.
If not, you may be organising for yesterday's world and may be at serious risk of being disrupted rather than disrupting something yourself.
I hope you enjoyed these 5 guiding principles from Disruptive Selling and am happy to discuss and elaborate on each of the topics and engage in further talks on white page exercises related to business models, sales, marketing and service.