EXECUTION – GET STUFF DONE IN 2010

A topic I could spend hours talking about but a good reminder as we plan for and head into 2010.

Success in improving business performance is not in the blinding brilliance of your strategy, but rather it is in it’s execution. It is important to work efficiently and make sure you are squeezing every ounce of productivity from your team but it is equally important, and oft not focussed on as much, to ensure YOU have your team DOING THE RIGHT WORK.

Make sure you close the Strategy – Execution gap before you refine strategy. Being an organization that listens, learns and iterates is absolutely crucial to be an innovate, market leader. But if you are not good at executing the tactical details of your strategy, further refinement of that strategy will be of little value.

In small companies this is tough in most (not all) cases the person is a really creative, strategic thinker is NOT a detail oriented, nose to the grindstone executor. Know what you are good at and what you are not and make sure you get someone involved in your business who will focus tactically on absolutely driving the day to details of getting stuff done. Implement some process, use technology, do whatever works for you to ensure that you can not only execute really well but also sustain the execution of the many iterations that will inevitably come to your strategy. Execution is not a once and done proposition. A learning, changing organization needs to be able to do this CONSTANTLY. The challenge is that EXECUTION IS REALLY HARD WORK AND TAKES TIME! Strategists don’t appreciate how hard execution is and tactical operators don’t appreciate the big picture perspective and how hard it is to bring all the pieces together and build a cohesive strategy.

Understanding the effectiveness of your strategy is very important as you look to listen, learn and iterate to ensure you are modifying the right things and to make sure you know that the strategic changes will in fact be implemented and delivered on day to day.

This year focus on your execution and make sure you are comfortable that YOU or someone you trust is doing the hard grunt work executing.

Crossing The Chasm - Lesson#1 – Marketing In The Early Days

Where Do We Start??

Initial Assumptions:

1. I'm going to assume you have a business concept, a strategy, some funding (bootstrapped or otherwise) and a product in some stage of development.  You may have some customers or you may be looking for your first but you are fairly early on in your company's life but perhaps beyond pure start-up.

2. I am writing from a B2B perspective but most of this is applicable to all businesses.

3. While Crossing The Chasm ("CTC") focuses mostly on marketing and selling I will touch on product planning and development as well.

4. Lastly, I will assume you have read the book and are familiar with the concepts without reviewing and reiterating the great teachings in the book.

Given you can see as clear as day how you are able to solve some of businesses biggest problems and help them save or generate huge amounts of dollars it is only fair to assume that someone closer to that business (the customer) will see your solution as the answer to all their prayers, right?  WRONG. 

Education is one of the single biggest portions of  a sales cycle in the early days.  In most cases you are trying to sell them something that they don't even recognize that they need yet.  I know in my situation we spent countless hours and dollars trying to educate prospects on the basic NEED for what we do.  We also spent untold amounts trying to build awareness and lead generation marketing campaigns through the years.  In hindsight I would have ENTIRELY cut out these programs.  Money is tight and intuitively you think getting your message out to the masses will build brand awareness and will mass educate the market on your fantastic approach to solving their problems.

RECOMMENDATION #1 - DON'T SPEND WASTE MONEY ON MARKETING PROGRAMS IN THE EARLY DAYS

If I had to do it again (and by that I mean, the next time I do this) I would spend all those efforts on tracking and speaking to established bleeding edge early adopters within the target verticals/customers that have the most strategic value to me as a reference.  Finding bleeding edge early adopters should be the single focus of marketing efforts.   I want to be clear that when I say target early adopters I am talking about PEOPLE NOT COMPANIES.  People lead the early adoption of new technology.  Yes Corporate culture and willingness to take on these types of projects is important but in my experience, even in a let’s say less than progressive industry or company, you can and MUST find people who are visionaries and those are the people you need to market and sell to.  Seems pretty logical but tactically how do you execute against this?  Here’s my lesson’s learned for your consideration:

1. Regardless of the type of solution you are offering and the functional area of the organization your solution is applicable to it is usually easier to find someone in the IT group than on the business side simply because of their background.  This person will be your sponsor, your advocate and it is important that in the early days you really view them as a Partner more than a Client.  Many of these people can be found using bleeding edge technologies as that is their disposition, so social media tools, SXSW type events is where they will be hanging out to try to get info about the newest and shiniest things happening in their world.
2. Look for companies that have already crossed the chasm selling into the general space you are in and reach out to them.  They will have lessons learned that will be as and more valuable than what I am telling you here.  The most important thing they will have is the name of PEOPLE that they dealt with at the companies they sold into.  Early adopters typically don’t change, even when unsuccessful.  Finding a person inside a target company that sponsored/led/bought another visionary offering was critical to our success.  This is the person you need to contact, court, and convince that you can help them.  They will understand more than anyone else the problem you are solving and the evolutionary way in which you are going about solving it.
3. As you look into your target industry for ideal strategic candidates, in my experience the ones who are most likely to be open to your message as Company’s are the ones who are in the Top 20% of the industry and the ones who are in the bottom 20% of the industry.  The top 20% are there for a reason and have a couple things that are very important to you as you look to sell/partner with someone.  First, they probably have access to cash more readily than weaker companies in the space and second they also have an interest in staying ahead of everyone in their space and are willing to invest in new technologies that will continue to push their performance and create further distance between them and the middle class in the industry.  Bleeding edge people are attracted to these types of companies and are given more flexibility to thrive in this type of an environment.  Companies in the bottom 20% come at it from the opposite end but are viable for a different reason.  Finding a bleeding edge person is harder (but not impossible) in these companies but the culture of the company is more open to leading edge change because in many cases they have fallen so far behind the industry leaders they know that they need some game changers to get back in the game and in a lot of cases they have tried all the “non-evolutionary” solutions available to them with little or no effect.  Both of these are good customers for different reasons which I will get into in another post when I talk about “Sales In The Early Days”.  The middle performing companies are much harder to get into when Crossing because the risk of them investing in something new and having it fail from a personal perspective is very high.  The company is performing OK and often the culture of (the risk of) failure in a mediocre company does not support individuals stepping out and taking risks where in successful companies this risk taking and failure potential is accepted and frankly expected!

SUMMARY-KEY LESSONS

• DON’T SPEND PRECIOUS FUNDS ON MARKETING INITIATIVES
• KEY IS FINDING EARLY ADOPTERS…PEOPLE NOT COMPANIES
• FIND PEOPLE WITH A PROVEN HISTORY OF SPONSORING LEADING EDGE INITIATIVES
• RESEARCH OTHER TECHNOLOGIES THAT HAVE BEEN ADOPTED IN YOUR TARGET BUSINESSES AND FIND OUT WHO SPONSORED
• FISH WHERE THE FISH ARE…USE CUTTING EDGE TECH/MEDIA TO FIND CUTTING EDGE PROSPECTS
• OFTEN EASIER TO LOCATE IN ‘IT DEPARTMENT’ THAN IN THE BUSINESS
• TARGET COMPANIES THAT ARE TOP OF CLASS LEADERS AND BOTTOM OF CLASS LAGGARDS IN THEIR INDUSTRY

Agree, Disagree, please share your experiences.

Crossing the Chasm - The "Lessons Learned" Series

For starters, if you have not yet read "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore please beg, borrow, steal or buy (link attached) a copy and read through it. This book is one (of the two) most influential books that I have read in my time in small technologies companies.

Crossing the Chasm is a book about the journey, the trials and the tribulations in taking your product and company from one where every sale is a missionary sale to a place where there is a broader market acceptance of what you do and the business need to solve the problem that your product solves. The transition from one side to the other requires different approaches to almost everything you do as a business. In this series of posts I will walk through each of the functional areas in a business and the external influences on each and from my experience what worked and what did not work. For most businesses despite the brilliant guidance provided by Geoffrey Moore, this trip is one riddled with trial and error. Like anything not everything will work for everyone but in this series of posts I'd like to provide what I learned and where I failed in and effort to assist others in completing a journey that many (some may say most) companies never actually complete.

Follow along as I hope I am able to provide you with insight and the ability to avoid the 1 misstep that prevents you from Crossing. If you agree, disagree, have additional stories, thoughts please add in the comments so others who read can learn from all of us as much as possible.

Let the journey begin...if there are specific areas, topics you want me to cover please let me know. Hope you enjoy.