My friend Skip was telling me about strategic planning at his place.
You know strategic planning. That's the process you don't get to take part in because that would be the end of it right there and a million billion consultants would be out on the street, begging for your watch so they can tell you the time, at $275 an hour.
Really now: Is there anything you do in the course of carrying out your assigned marketing duties that isn't strategic planning? You're always strategically straddling departments and responsibilities and projects, and reconciling manufacturing and operations and sales, speaking pinto to the bean-counters and CAD/CAM to the engineers and faux jive to the sales dudes, and toggling between the quark-level view and the view from heaven, which provides definitive evidence that the CEO is not God.
Because you're doing strategic planning all the time I'll bet you're good at it, whereas when executives try strategic planning they look like pitchers batting, and their sessions deliver the goods about as well as amateur night at Beansnappers.
And guess whose recommendations get served up to the CEO on a silver tray? Certainly not the recommendations of the guy who just played the role of the cheek-biting native girl in The Man Who Would Be King.
(Spoiler alert: The cheek-biting native girl draws blood, thereby proving that Sean Connery is not God. Connery is pitched off a cliff. No comment on real-life applications of this information.)
That's neither here nor there, but in the immortal words of The Ol' Duke, it does get to sticking in your crawl after a while.
So anyway, my buddy Skip relates that part of his company's strategic-planning process involved role-switching. The head of operations became a designer, and the head engineer became a customer-service chief, and his boss got to deal with IT and the HR director became a salesperson.
On one level it was no sweat for these highly trained executives, because they could simply tell their subordinates to do what needs to be done, just like back in their own cozy departments.
On a different level, Skip reports, it was far more interesting, primarily when it came to other departments' perceptions of how money actually comes in the door.
The predominant perception was that products dropped from the sky like frozen turkeys in an episode of WKRP In Cincinnati, and money flowed up to the sky on an electron beam, at which point it condensed and fell back to earth, where it was sucked up by bankers carrying large gasoline-powered contraptions that resembled Rush Limbaugh.
In other words, there was no disconnect quite like the disconnect between the stuff and the sale of stuff.
Distribution force? Forget it. They might as well be the Power Rangers Strike Force? Third-party resellers? You mean, like H. Ross Perot back when he was running for president with that senile Army guy?
Companies that ultimately have to sell things often forget the most basic premise of their operation: that things actually get sold. And the burden for educating them falls, like all burdens, upon marketing.
Why marketing? Because marketing, rightly or wrongly, is positioned as the mouthpiece of sales. Sales is the New Headshrinkers; marketing is Captain Lou.
So what can marketing do to bridge such a basic knowledge-and-reasoning gap?
First, get other areas of the organization involved in the sales process. Start by having executives from other areas of the organization accompanying the sales force on calls.
Oh, yeah. I can hear the howling from here. Sounds like Hüsker Dü. The executives aren't going to understand why and the sales force is going to flat-out hate it. Anything that brings home-office staff into a salesperson's territory is going to get the same rousing reception as a Barack Obama appearance at a National Association of Loudmouthed Chuckleheads convention.
They way to handle that situation is with some strategic planning. While good salespeople believe they could sell anything, even pimple-flavored ABC gum, they don't mind having better products to sell and a more compelling story to tell. Sending people from other areas on sales calls will at the very least give the salespeople more stories to tell. Most of them will be flat-out lies about how they licked IT or Operations with one hand tied behind their back, but fine. That's how salespeople manage to work up enthusiasm for the latest piece of industrial hot lunch foisted upon them.
You would hope on the other side that the ops person would come away with a firm knowledge of how money actually comes in the door, but don't be too sure. You may also hear something like, "Well, all they did was talk." Yeah, it's nowhere near as substantial as clicking and dragging a trapezoidal shape, but it'll pass.
It's never stated in your job description, but an essential part of your job is making sure all the silos in your organization share the corn. Sometimes you have to physically haul it from one silo to another. But the payoff in understanding is worth the effort.
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