So, it's important to understand that first Porter's five forces model is a tool that's used in strategic planning, right. So, strategic planning is really about stepping back from the day to day operations and all, and taking a look at where do you come from and where do you want to go. Now, that point about where you want to go, oftentimes, there are many options that are available to a business and you think about sales operations, many different strategies, and different approaches that one can take and all, but what I think ultimately becomes the right approach is your evaluation of those options and the decision as to which option is going to do the best in terms of the broader sales and other goals of the organization. So, we use for Porter's five forces model as a tool to help you to evaluate various options that you may have available to you. I'm reminded of the childhood book, Alice in Wonderland, and in that, if you've read it you might recall, that at one-point point Alice walking along and she comes up to the mad hatter and the mad hatter says, "Where are you going?", and Alice says, "I don't know.", and the mad hatter's response was, "Well, then, any path will take you there." So that's what you don't want to do in the business world, right. You don't want to be in a situation where any path is thought of as good as any other path that's there, right. Porter's five forces model is a way of analyzing the relative competitiveness of a particular marketplace that's out there. Ultimately, that understanding of those competitive forces helps you to determine what is your most profitable course of action. So, the Porter's five forces model, what we tried to do in our little discussion of that is to sort of adapt the porters traditional five forces model to things that are very relevant to sales and sales force management and all. So, the big thing that's important is to understand what are some of the do's and don'ts of using this model. I think, the most important thing to understand is that a model is just that, it's a model. It's no guarantee that it can help you to achieve success, it simply gives you a tool to screen various ideas from. It's a way of organizing your thinking. Too often, I see people who are expecting, in some ways, simple answers to really, really complicated problems by using a model like five forces. I think, what it does is helps you to understand the various elements that you need to consider as a sales manager and to pick the one that is most optimal. One of the things that is important to kind of understand is that there's a certain amount of, I think, personal judgement that has to be used when you are assessing the relative power of customers, and suppliers, and substitute products, and so forth. And sometimes, business executives can kind of get either very rosy, I didn't think of as everything as something that would be very easy to achieve, or they can become incredibly pessimistic and all. It's important to try to be fact based. Take that model and use that model but then bounce that thinking off of other people whose opinions you respect. Ask for some very candid feedback to ensure that you're just not telling yourself what you want to hear but rather, you are learning and acting upon what you should hear. So, when we talk about strategic planning and sales management, one thing that gets often talked about are the certain types of strategies that are better than other strategies and all. And I think that perhaps the biggest problem that a lot of companies run into is trying to be all things to all people, right. So, part of the task of management is allocating precious few resources to wherever we feel that those resources can apply and generate the best return on that investment. But what can't occur, you're never going to have enough resources to cover every one of those opportunities but yet, that doesn't stop managers from trying to do that. And oftentimes, they try to be, as I said, all things to all people. A watered down, very diluted type of an approach like that often results in complete inefficiency and ineffectiveness. I'd rather like to see you pick one of those things and put the full force of your resources against achieving that particular goal. The second thing that I think is important is to understand that with very few exceptions, strategies are not some big gigantic idea that's a revolutionary idea that completely changes the way people tend to think about things but rather, they're small incremental improvements. So, don't beat yourself up thinking that you need to have the big idea when sometimes, the little ideas are staring you right in the face. I think that strategic planning is about where we are and where we want to go, and I think that the important thing is trying to be honest with yourself. Too often, I think people convinced themselves of things that they want to hear as opposed to things that they need to hear. And so, that sense of honesty is critical. So, how might that turn into a question to ask? When you're involved in a strategic planning process, imagine that if you had someone who was in that room, that was whose opinion was well-respected and all, like what would they think, how would they react to what's going on? The second thing would be to think about your various stakeholders; your employees, your customers, your suppliers. And as you are working through a strategic planning process, how might they react to what is done? Some companies actually create like a sounding board or an advisory council to help them to provide that type of perspective. Recognize that you are in a unique position, you head up an organization and you've got a great view of what that organization is, but that's very different than what your customers' view might be what, your employees' view is, or what your suppliers and other types of stakeholders would be. So, I think that if you strip away a lot of what we teach about in the area of sales and marketing and so forth, it's all about understanding consumer wants and needs and the relative benefits of your particular product or service. Where there is a legitimate and good match between some consumer need that's there and your product and the benefit of that product to satisfying that need, that's a really good fit, right. We also need to acknowledge that there can be times where there's a mismatch between those needs and your product benefit and it's far better to just sort of walk away from those kinds of situations than trying to convince somebody to buy something that they really don't want. So, that really requires a level of honesty with yourself and understanding really what your customers really want and need. Too often, you find that sales managers can be so myopic and tend to think that irregardless of the customer, they have to have your product or service. That's nonsense. Not every customer is going to really need that particular product or service or doesn't really value that particular thing. The other thing to consider is that if that person, that customer, has a very satisfying and acceptable relationship with a competitor. One has to understand that it can be really really tricky to dislodge that relationship. Sometimes you almost have to wait for that competitor to somehow screw up or to to alienate that customer. But when you've got a customer that's 100% satisfied with your competitor's product or service, sometimes it's best to understand that that may not be a particularly good prospect for you. There's two fundamental approaches that can be used and we refer to these as top-down and bottom-up. So a top-down sales strategy is where you the sales manager develops a particular strategy or plan and then your task is to get that to be bought in by the rest of the sales force. The other approach is of course the opposite, right? Where the sales strategy originates by the sales team and then ultimately it sort of bubbles up to your particular level. So those are two fundamental approaches and oftentimes there's nothing wrong with maybe simultaneously trying to do both. Right? Developing your own strategy, but at the same time allowing your sales force to help to developing their particular sales strategy. Ultimately, what you're hoping for that there's enough overlap between those that it makes a lot of sense to move forward with that. The other thing to recognize is that when you're developing a sales strategy with a sales team, it has to be an iterative process. That is to say; this is something that the sales team may come up with some ideas, you need to react to those and maybe modify and reformulate those and it continues through that process over and over until you've been able to craft one that is mutually acceptable by all stakeholders. So recognize that often what first comes out of the pipeline isn't necessarily the best. But it's working carefully with all parties involved, they can help us to attract that. Now, as, you as the sales operation manager, your task is to sort of ultimately decide on a preferred strategy and that ultimately, your task is probably is to make a candid assessment as to the preferred strategy and its likelihood of success in the marketplace. I think that there's a couple of really important steps that are important to consider when you're developing something with a sales team. The first is that it's important that everyone is operating from the same basic perspective, the same understanding of the market in your environment, right. So some companies will go through like a SWOT analysis; strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. That's a very useful way of trying to get a snapshot as to what's going on in the marketplace around you. The strengths and weaknesses relate to your internal operations. Right? They are things that are important to you as a firm. Opportunities and threats are external to that organization but have a great deal of influence on what happens. It's important, as the sales operation manager, that everyone involved in developing a plan buys into that perspective. Right? You can have really bad problems occur if you've got a mismatch between those different types of parties. The next thing that I think is important is that it has to be understood and accepted as to what the overall goals will be. Now, goals are typically spin out of the overall strategic plan for the organization and then they are adapted or modified to something that's relevant in the sales area. But we begin with the goals and then we have discussion with the sales team on how to best achieve those particular goals. So one of the things that most sales operation managers will run into is the notion of resistance to change. Right? So the reality is that most of us don't like to change and yet your task as a sales operation manager is to often implement that particular change. Right? So we need to understand that. There's going to be a certain amount of push back that's going to occur no matter what the nature of that particular change would be. So how does though one try to minimize that or try to work around it? I think the first thing that is important is the notion of involvement in buy-in. Right? So one of the things that there's been studies that have been done that when you involve salespeople in setting their own quotas. That sometime sales people actually will set quotas higher than the managers themselves. Alright? So this is where you want to be able to involve them and to empower them to be part of that process. Right? So, it's a lot harder to criticize things when you are part of the whole process that goes on with that. So I would say involvement empowerment with your sales people is critical to kind of overcoming resistance. The other thing to understand is to kind of understand the notion of resistance to change. Right? One of the things that I've done is when I've been working with people in situations like this and all and I begin to get pushback from people on that, is to ask people, whatever our course of action, can you, can you live with this or are you really pushing back and what you're saying is you simply cannot accept what it is that we're trying to do? What I have found often is that people actually can live with it, they don't necessarily like it but they can actually live with it. So one of the things that you need to do as a sales operation manager is to try to really tap into what is the depth of that resistance right now. In situations where people are saying "I can't live with it," right, then you've got a pretty tough situation to go with and that probably is going to require a very different kind of conversation between that person and yourself and really what their role could be kind of rolling forward, maybe there really isn't a place for them in that organization. That as I have said, many times people don't necessarily like things that they're willing to live with it. I think that part of what is also helpful is to some degree a bit of empathy on your part. Simply acknowledging that people are struggling with this change can go a long way towards helping people to get their heads wrapped around that particular change. I think the toughest question that you have to ask is a real serious and frank and candid appraisal of what your customers are looking for and how your product stacks up against what those customers are looking for. I think too often, managers are are such strong believers in the product and they think their product is so good and it's going to work for every customer that's out there. No, that's not the way it works. I think really understanding what your customers really think about your product helps you to kind of keep yourself grounded and it avoids I think, very unrealistic goals about that. So then the part about this then is though so what's the best way to go about that. Well, I think it's really tapping in is talking to customers. Right? And in doing so, preparing yourself to maybe hear things that you don't necessarily want to hear. Alright? It is critical that you approach those kinds of discussions with a very open mind and in a very non-evaluative mindset within that so one of the things that you will find though is that sometimes customers or many times are nice people and don't necessarily want to say anything bad to you to your face and all. So one of the questions that I love to ask customers is would they be willing to recommend your product to friends or colleagues? Would they be willing to recommend or endorse your product and all. To the extent that people are willing to recommend your product, that's a really good thing. That if they're not, that's really a trigger to for some additional conversation to understand what's really going on with that. Another way that people tend to go about trying to get that information is when you use a third party to ask those questions because sometimes people will tell things to a third party and not to yourself in general. So, sometimes I'm asked, "Do I have any horror stories? or, how can I learn from maybe my successes and mistakes and all?" One of the things that I've learned over the years is that when one is developing like a sales plan, and going through a planning process here, it's very important that as you develop that plan, that you recognize the importance of communicating that plan to all parties that are involved in all stake holders. So, what do I mean by that? I can recall back, I worked for one company and we had developed a sales plan for a particular part of that company, and it required some very different strategies, things that this company had not done in the past and we began to roll that plan out. From that particular division of the company, things went really, really well. But one of my errors I guess, was that I didn't recognize how important it would be to communicate what was going on to the other parts of the company. Suddenly, there were all this, complaints that were going on, and there was all this bad, like these comments were being made, and so forth. In particular, I recall, I had a friend of mine who was a customer of this company, and my friend calls me up one day and tells me that he had had lunch with his key contact and this was in another part of the company, and how this person went on and on about what was going on in this area, and how bad that was and whatever. So, companies have kind of big under-recognize this, sometimes they call this internal marketing. But to recognize that when you are dealing with a large organization, you can't communicate enough. To recognize that, don't just communicate to the people who are the ones that are most directly affected, but really to communicate to as many as you can. Making sure that everybody is on the same page, helps to implement and really to achieve greater success with your program. So, when you're doing strategic plan, it is important to try to be as collaborative as you can and to try to promote inclusion. I would say that first and foremost, in order to do that, that really requires really a mindset, a big change. One of the things that we talked about was the the history of management, and sales management, and there was this model before that was called command and control. So, the top person like a sales manager will be the one who called all the shots. They were in-charge, they controlled everything and all. What was kind of implicit with that was, that was the only person that really cared, and they almost like ignored, didn't really communicate, or include, or involve others with that. That model is long dead. In order to be more effective, you as that sales operation manager, has to approach things in a more collaborative and in a more inclusive fashion. So, I have to ask you, if you're developing a strategic plan, and the only person that's developed that plan is you, and there's not a whole lot of other input that's with that, how inclusive is that? So, sometimes recognizing that you need to involve others with it is important. Now, don't make the mistake of bringing others into this and in a sense allowing them to sort of form an opinion that they've got, complete authority or power in this whole process, they don't. You the sales manager ultimately bear that responsibility, but including them on that, getting their input, getting their feedback to the plan are important steps in that particular process. The result will be an organization that's going to be more supportive of the plan. But if the plant is just viewed as the sales manager's plan, as not mine, but the boss' plan. What's the likelihood that people are going to actually embrace and actually work towards achieving that particular plan? So, it's these little steps that I think are most helpful in terms of promoting the notion of collaboration and inclusion. One of the things that it's really important to getting buy-in is trust. People are not going to buy into a plan if they don't trust you and your authority to do things and all. So, one of the things that I think is important in your role as a sales manager, is fostering and building trust with people and all. I've got a couple of different thoughts and experiences that I've had with that over the years. I think we need to recognize that trust is usually given by people to a manager. They'll be willing to trust in that, but the slightest breach, the slightest thing that you do to cause people to not trust will completely destroy it. Then it's extremely hard to build back that trust. So, what does that mean? It means stay true to your word. If you tell people that you're going to do something, or you believe in something, or whatever, stick with it. But the minute you will get people turned away from you faster than anything, if they're catching you sort of saying one thing and doing something that's different. I think the other thing that's helpful in terms of trust is some level of transparency. The whole business of planning should not be some big dark hole that nobody really understands what goes into the plan and how a plan was formed, but you need to shed some light on that process. You need to involve them with it. These little steps I think a long way towards building trust. So, I can recall back in my days in the advertising industry and all, I went to lunch with one of our clients and I had known this person for some time, and I was kind of caught off guard when the client described a level of frustration that he was experiencing with dealing with a certain group of people within our company and all. It was a little bit tricky because the client didn't necessarily- Didn't make it like as if this was a huge problem, but it did seem unusual for him to even bring up that he was experiencing this kind of an issue or not. So, after thinking about this, I went back to the management team of the company, and raised the issue, and it was a bit of a challenge here to sort of do that, but what it helps to do is we were able to to neutralize that problem and we reassign those people that were on that particular clients business, and kind of put that to bed. Now the interesting thing is that at least in the advertising business, that's probably the number one reason why you lose clients. You get like a conflict with the people who were working with that null. So sometimes like you need to listen for those little tiny things and be able to sort react to that. You don't want to wait until you've got the the client or the customer screaming at you at the phone about a really bad situation and those times it's often too late to make a change. One of the things that, so sometimes out of failure comes comes great success and my own personal experience with that was back in my days in the advertising business. We decided to create a business within our business that was providing an additional service to our clients that we had in the past outsourced to some of the other suppliers that were out in the community and all. But we felt that we could do the same work cheaper and more effectively for our clients if we were able to kind of pull that in house. So we agreed to sort do that and we hired some people to pull that off and what we discovered was we were having a hard time getting business to flow through that. If you looked at it kind of on a profit and loss kind of basis just on that little small micro-business this thing was actually losing money and all. It wasn't the results that we were hoping for and to some degree we were kind of scratching our heads over that. But ultimately what I learned was that the people that we had running that particular business really weren't the right people. They didn't have the right skill sets that we needed in order to really keep the clients kind of happy. So, we needed to make a change and we reassigned the people that were in that particular unit and hired some additional people to that and completely turn things around within about a six month period it was very very profitable operation and all. So sometimes you need to do need to recognize that just because you've got a really great goal and you think you have a really good plan no guarantee that you're going to achieve that. What you need to be prepared to be able to adjust and make a battlefield decision traps, be at different strategy maybe it's different people that ultimately we did achieve our goal. It just took us a little longer to do that. So in the assignment that we asked students to sort of develop their own personal vision and vision the question is, what kinds of personal qualities have I emphasized in the workplace that have helped to make me successful? I think that for me I think there's a couple things that I feel has helped me to be unsuccessful. First of all, I think that in order to really be successful you need to have a great work ethic, you need to to kind of go in with an effort to wanting to work hard into put forth a maximum effort right and you know it's going to help you to I think accomplish more but it also allows you to kinda stand out with others that are there. I think that having a natural sort of curiosity about things, the desire to continue to learn to want to understand things that go on I think it helps you to be more in tune with changes that are occurring in the workplace and what is being asked of you and also that kind of natural inquisitiveness I think is also important. I think that we do live in kind of a goal-oriented world. I think it's important to have goals. It's important to have some focus to your efforts to go on. I've tried to have both sort of short and long-term goals that have helped to guide me with what I'm doing and my efforts that are there. So I would encourage people to think about goal setting and all. One way to go about that is to think about you know ten years from now what do you envision yourself? What type of job? What type of activities would you be doing and alright? Half the battle is figuring out where you want to go and then it's getting yourself there. I think the most important value to express at work is your own personal reputation and your own personal brand. You need to be true to yourself, you need to be honest, and transparent, and trustworthy. We see frequently celebrities, and other high profile people who end up doing really bad things and destroying their personal brand. Your personal brand is the one thing you own and you need to protect that at all costs. So it's interesting being the age that I'm at I sometimes do think about knowing what I know now what would I do differently, what I told myself 20 years ago 30 years ago that I wish I had been able to do. I think the one thing that I have learned over time is the need to trust yourself, to be maybe a little bit patient with the process that works out. I know one of the things that used to frustrate me, I guess I'm in nature a very impatient person and I wish that sometimes that I've been able to better control that. I've had a really great career and I have enjoyed a lot of terrific career successes, and accomplishments and all. But the odd thing was that on any given day back in the time, in any given day, it was very easy for me to complain about my career and not feeling like I'm making as much progress as I'd like to. It's really hard to kind of gauge your progress on any given day to day. But if you've got a good plan that's in place you got to trust that plan is going to work out to you and you will achieve the kinds of successes that you want to do. I just wish I was maybe a tad more patient with myself.
