Quantum Sales, UK business sales and marketing consultants

Never mind the team building...

WHAT ABOUT THE ISSUES?

An article for Institute of Directors magazine

Steve Jessop

I’ve listened with interest to a wide range of speakers at IoD and other gatherings over the last year or two on subjects such as:

Team-building
Coaching
‘Becoming a learning organisation’
Empowering staff

They have varied from the whimsical, to the nebulous, to the practical and constructive. Whichever category they fit though we would do well to ask ourselves this question:

In relation to what?

Evidence seems to suggest that purveyors of such services often do not know enough about the high level business challenges their clients face, which their offerings seek to provide part of a solution for.

If we accept that we could know more, which subjects should we think about investigating? Starter-for-ten questions might be:

Which business / businesses is our prospective client really in?
What is driving / changing their markets, and how will it look for them 12 months or more from now?
How are the senior managers we are talking to themselves actually measured?
What are the really ‘hot’ issues within the business today?

Footnote for those selling in a business-to-business environment: The next time you lose a bid for a new piece of business, consider how well you covered these bases, and if the cap fits....... Does anyone know who said: ‘Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes’? I wish it was me!

Our ‘homework’ prior to speaking with them could indicate that issues such as these are on their agendas:

Over-capacity in virtually everything.
The increasing power of major institutional shareholders.
New methods of quantifying long term shareholder value such as MVA and EVA.
The threats and opportunities associated with globalisation.
Competition (particularly those not carrying western world-type baggage).
Customers who are relentlessly demanding more - and often for less.

Thoughts for us at this point

Are we talking to people who know the answers to these questions?
How might we move the dialogue forward when we have all the answers?
How well and objectively have we assessed what we can deliver for our customer?