Category Archives: Get Clear

Know whose problem you solve, how, and how well.

Get Aligned, Get Clear, Manage to Lead, Plan Change

From Vision to Action! How to Align Your Team and Execute Your Plan

September 10, 2023 Whitney Bembenek 2 Comments

In today’s rapidly evolving landscape, having a clear and well-defined strategy to win the game you are playing is critical. It’s the roadmap that guides your organization towards its goals and ensures that every action and decision aligns with your vision.

However, crafting and implementing an effective strategy can be a complex and daunting task. This is where the IntelliVen Strategy and Planning Offsite comes into play.

Why the Strategy and Planning Offsite with IntelliVen?

If you’re at the helm of an organization, you understand the importance of strategic planning. You also know that it’s not enough to simply have a strategy; strategy needs to be translated into a practical operating plan that guides your team’s actions throughout the year. The IntelliVen Strategy and Planning Offsite helps leaders like you bridge the gap between strategy development and successful execution.

The Strategy and Planning Offsite empowers you and your executive team with:

Clarity: Achieve a clear and common understanding of your organization’s current state, the case for change, and your target next state.

Strategic Initiatives: Identify strategic initiatives that will propel your organization from its current state to where you aspire to be next and prioritize actions that will close the gap based on their impact and feasibility, culminating in a roadmap for implementation.

Resource Allocation: Determine roles, responsibilities, and resource requirements for your most important initiatives. This includes allocating the staff, time, money, and other resources needed to make them a reality.

Financial Alignment: Align your financial and operational plans with your strategic initiatives. This ensures that your strategic initaitives are not side-jobs to be done as time permits but, instead, are woven into the mainstream of day-to-day activities.

Effective Communication: Develop a clear communication strategy to convey your vision and plan to all stakeholders, including your board, investors, employees, and partners.

The Outcomes

Working with IntelliVen Senior Oprating Partners, leaders will achieve key outcomes from their Strategy and Planning Offsite:

Alignment: Participants agree on your current state, case for change, target state, and the necessary actions for each strategic initiative.

Implementation Readiness: Lay the groundwork for the successful implementation of strategic initiatives, and establish a governance process understood and agreed upon by all participants.

Team Cohesion: Participants leave the offsite with a deeper understanding of each other and a stronger commitment to the organization’s mission and leadership.

Get Started with IntelliVen

If you’re ready to take your organization to the next level, it’s time to consider the IntelliVen Strategy and Planning Offsite. Contact us to learn more about how our team can help you identify and reach your strategic goals for the long-term.

Invest in your organization’s long-term future with the IntelliVen Strategy and Planning Offsite.
Contact us now!

Get Clear, Sales Matters

Sales — whose problem is it anyway?

June 2, 2023 Peter DiGiammarino

Background

A credible organization consistently performs and grows according to a plan. Such an organization will invariably be a system of three systems:

A system of delivery.
A system of sales.
A system of growth.

It is not uncommon for an early-stage organization to be good at delivery and good at growth but stuck at square-one when it comes to its system of selling. Leaders of such organizations often find themselves consumed with delivery and with never enough time to develop and drive a system that generates new sales opportunities.

Extend Expand Find New Nearby Black v2 — Click for a presentation on how to drive sales in a services business.

Interest and competence in sales starts at the very top of an organization. It is in everyone’s best interest for a top executive to own the challenge to determine how to systematically create demand for what the organization offers. Once a leader figures out how to sell, the method can be routinized and taught to others to execute, manage, and scale.

If no one on the leadership team happens to have passion and skills for selling, their instinct is often to contract out the sales problem, or to hire a rainmaker, or to get better at writing proposals. Such approaches rarely pay off. Selling is not a side-job and great proposals are not enough.

Approach

Any top executive can systematically generate opportunities to deliver more value if they:

For Current Client Development

Assign someone to pull together intelligence on who to speak with about what in a current client organization to cultivate new opportunities to deliver great value in other parts of the client organization.

Conduct Client Development Reviews to assess, govern, and guide sales efforts on the most promising current clients and then follow through on the best ideas.

Turn what works into methods that systematically extend and expand opportunities to do the same thing in other current clients.

For Lead Generation

Develop a way to present the best examples of value delivered to current and past clients that you want to do again for new clients in a high-quality form such as a blog, a publishable article, an e-book, white paper, or slide presentation.

Do research to identify named individuals, not just organizations or positions, in targeted organizations who would be insane not to become customers.

Find or develop a forum in which to present the high-quality presentation and invite the targeted individuals to attend a workshop in which a top existing or past client describes the value they received. Follow up with attendees who ask questions and contribute to group discussion to cultivate interest.

Action Plan

Top leaders need to make sales a priority for everyone. Develop and aggressively use language and an orientation towards sales in meetings, hallway conversations, performance goals, performance assessments, promotion criteria, position descriptions, hiring criteria, and employee training. In so doing it works well to think about sales competence in terms of mechanics and process.

“Mechanics” refers to skills and behaviors professional sales personnel use to cultivate prospects to close. For example carefully chosen words in a conversation can be used to elicit expressions of need that can then be fulfilled through a sale. Sales skills training along these lines was developed and formalized by work Xerox did in the 1960’s and ‘70s that today can be accessed via methods and tools known, for example, as:

Other tips and techniques have been formalized by sales masters such as:

Sandler
Zig Zigler
Dale Carnegie in: How to Win Friends and Influence People
Jeffrey Gitomer in: Little Black Book of Connections

Process refers to a systematic approach to launch and manage campaigns that cultivate demand for an offering across stakeholders in a single targeted organization over a period of time (usually many months and even years). Examples of such methods include:

Further developed sales processes are described in IntelliVen Posts in the Sales Category including especially:

It is also a good idea to connect in to a continuous stream of sales advice such as the Weekly sales letter from Clarity Advantage and to conduct sales training. Keep in mind that any sales training is better than none and whichever you go with will need to be tweaked and adapted for you. Take what works and turn it into system that you monitor, teach, evolve, and use.

Summary

Every once and a while, a big new sale may come out of nowhere but such events are rare and cannot be counted on to build a reliable demand-creation system. Neither can the problem be contracted out to a third party or solved by writing better proposals or hiring another rainmaker, though all of these may be good things to do.

Sales is a broad and deep area of functional competence that requires its own leadership, language, systems, and processes. One among the top team must have or develop sales as a primary focus in order to figure out the pattern of proactive selling, build the sales system, and drive and guide that system to scale.

The one so assigned need not start from scratch as a great deal of material on the subject is easily accessed. Go after it all and decide what and how to share with the organization that which has the best chance to generate the most lift the soonest. Learn from and institutionalize what works and drive to scale.

How to drive sales in a services business.

How to turn a prospect into a customer.

Five steps to turn a prospect into a sale.

Three steps to selling a services work plan.

The #1 problem with teams is not what you think

August 1, 2022 Peter DiGiammarino Leave a comment

Every leader needs to know that they and their team agree on the problem they solve for whom. While this seems simple enough, in practice almost nobody in their organization answers in exactly the same way, and even small differences can disrupt operations.

Examples, practice cases, and your own case reveal that even well-known firms have a WHAT-WHO-WHY that is surprisingly different than it seems. In the highly interactive WHAT-WHO-WHY Workshop, participants learn a tool and method they can use to reveal disconnects and align their team.

The WHAT-WHO-WHY method reveals disconnects and aligns your team.

The WHAT-WHO-WHY method has helped create $Billions in value and is 100% recommended by users.
You will learn to:

Describe any organization in terms of whose problem it solves.
Discover disconnects in your team’s thinking about their business.
Align your team’s thinking about their business.

Use this link to:

Schedule a Zoom call with PeterD to see if the W-W-W Workshop is a good fit for your team or peer group.
Pass on to your group leader or facilitator.
Pass on to a colleague, family member, or friend to suggest they consider the W-W-W Workshop for their group or team.

For More Information

WHAT-WHO-WHY Workshop Overview

Manage to Lead System Introduction

Get Clear, Manage to Lead

How to set direction when the leader is not sure where to head next

May 10, 2020 Peter DiGiammarino

Leaders set direction, align resources, and motivate action as suggested by the panels in Figure 1. Another way to put it is that a leader develops, holds, nurtures, communicates, and drives to achieve a vision.

Figure 1: A leader sets direction, aligns resources, and motivates action.

As in Figure 2, it helps to think of the leader holding a map, like Harry Potter’s Marauder’s map that is always changing, making sense of it, and navigating the course with those led looking on over the shoulders. The best leaders constantly check with their top team to confirm that they are headed toward the same goals, in the same way, and for the same reasons.

Figure 2: A leader develops, holds, nurtures, communicates, and drives to achieve a vision.

Top leaders are also always open to input from their core team to tweak goals and plans along the way. Clarity starts with the leader. If the leader is not clear then no one else can be clear. A leader either: Continue reading How to set direction when the leader is not sure where to head next →

Get Clear

Tips to consultants helping organization leaders create THEIR WHAT-WHO-WHY

February 23, 2020 Peter DiGiammarino Leave a comment

Before leaders set out to change their organization, it helps to be ready to change. To get ready to change, leaders should be clear about their organization as it currently exists. A good place for them to start is with their organization’s purpose.

The purpose of an organization is to solve a problem for a customer. It follows that there must be a customer WHO has to solve a problem (WHY), with WHAT the organization provides to the customer.

As simple as it sounds, most every organization leader and top team finds it more than a little challenging to compile a clear, consistent, and articulate explanation of their WHAT-WHO-WHY. The following tips are to help third-party consultants work with organization leaders to get them ready for change by agreeing on their WHAT-WHO-WHY.

Create a WWW

Ask each top team member to create a WWW using this template. Make sure that each leader works alone to fill out the template off the top of their head.
Collect submitted WWWs and share them with the team without attribution. Insist that team members work the point and not the person; that is, it does not matter which of them said what…what matters is what is said.
Don’t worry if the first cuts are rough. Plan to iterate with the team, stakeholders, and outsiders to distill complexity (and ugliness) into simple, clear statements over time (weeks, months, even years).
Do not strive for brevity right away. Use all the words that come to mind to get points expressed before editing.
Encourage team members to not settle for what first comes to mind. Ask them to read and think carefully about each word. Ask for clarification. Parse each word carefully and iterate to achieve specificity, clarity, and accuracy.
Then dig even deeper, and keep digging until the team gets to the essential truth for each W.
Encourage the team to share their WWW with as many smart people as they can to get honest feedback. The more input they get, the better the result will be. “Group think” is their enemy.
Remember that more important than getting the WWW right is getting the team to reach agreement on any WWW.

It is vital to cut through the dream and get to reality. The points below are to push on the WHO and the WHY to move past the obvious, hypothetical, or imagined answers and get to truth.

About the WWW

Work on WHO

Identify the buyer WHO makes the decision to purchase what the organization provides by role, not by industry or by organization.
Study people in the role to understand their persona. It is vital to understand the thinking of WHO makes the decision to purchase the product or service. Only once the actual customer is known can those responsible for sales find buyers and market to them.
The organization’s board of directors and investors are someday soon going to stare into their CEO’s eyes and ask: “Can YOU sell what the organization provides?” It is not possible to answer in the affirmative without the rigor associated with the research and analysis suggested here.
Once the team knows and understands WHO they are selling to, they can begin to answer WHAT and WHY; specifically: “WHAT does the buyer need/value?” and “WHY does the buyer need/value it?”.
Organization leaders rarely explicitly know exactly who their buyer is and what their buyer really wants. Once you really understand your WHO you will be able to “crack the code” and stand out compared to the crowd.
If there are multiple WHOs, have the team create a WWW for each WHAT-WHO-WHY combination by repeating the process documented here for each, and then facilitate the team deciding on which one to run with first.

Work on WHY

A decision by a customer to pay for the organization’s product or service must be because it solves an important, pervasive, and persistent problem more efficiently, i.e., better, cheaper, and/or faster, than available alternative solutions.
Push really, really, really hard to get to the reason underlying the customer’s decision to buy. Every buying decision is motivated by a reason and it is rarely obvious. The challenge is to get inside the buyer’s mind to ferret out their logic and understand WHY:
- - What drives the purchase decision?
  - What are the rewards?
  - What are the timelines?

If the answers to these questions are not known, then find them.

While there may be subordinate/secondary WHYs. It is critical to get to the primary one. Secondary reasons are good to understand and consider because they help differentiate the WHAT from other solutions, but the primary WHY makes the sale.

Stick to the three simple (but, by no means easy to answer) questions.

Don’t modify them as there is no need:

WHAT does the customer buy?
WHO buys it?
WHY do they buy it?

About the Author

Eric Palmer has 30⁺ years of outstanding success as a lead operating executive in private, public, private equity owned, and venture capital backed companies. He is particularly adept at strategy formulation, operational execution, International operations, M&A, leveraged debt, IPOs, and working with professional funders.

IntelliVen

Category Archives: Get Clear

From Vision to Action! How to Align Your Team and Execute Your Plan

Why the Strategy and Planning Offsite with IntelliVen?