RIIM CONF' 2012

Yesterday was the 7th edition of the RIIM CONF’ (relationship intelligence and influence management conference).  Opinion leaders, experts in sales, network specialists and international business people gathered in the Cercle National des Armées in Paris to share their ideas on relationships and networking in complex sales, global accounts and differing cultures.

Over the coming weeks we will be sharing some of the key ideas from the speakers on this blog.  Today, I’ll give a general outline of the speakers, to whet your appetites.

The day started with François Fleith, from Alcatel-Lucent, who spoke about the need to understand and manage relationships when working with large accounts in the public sector.  He told us of the all too real possibility of eliminating deals as “no go” too soon in the process, due to a lack of technical ability, while relationships and networks can save the day and help both sides of the deal develop new products and therefore new business opportunities.

Serge Papo, President and co-founder of Nomination, demonstrated how important it is to follow decision makers as they make career changes.  He used illustrations from Nomination’s own business case studies and during a live demonstration let us see the “musical chairs” in some large companies.

Christian Maurer, co-author of this blog, spoke about the myth of the ultimate decisionmaker.  He drew on his experience as an independent sales and business consultant to show how there are influencers working behind the scenes in every decision, and also how the role and positioning of the decision maker changes with the company culture.

Jean-François Ruiz, co-founder of PowerOn showed how to use social networking sites like Twitter and LinkedIn to for new business development in a B2B context.  He gave a concrete example of recent work PowerOn has done to develop leads and sales for a client using the technique “collaborative white book”.

Hervé Debaecker, Chief Methodologist from Perfluence, spoke about the need to manage the relationship capital of a company.  Based on years of experience and feedback from many clients, he gave approaches to doing this and ways that a sales team in a complex sales situation can work together to manage their ecosystem.

Matthieu Aubusson and Sébastien Leroyer from PricewaterhouseCoopers spoke about strategic value selling.  Matthieu started with a precise and informed description of what exactly is strategic value selling and how to go about ensuring your company provides it.  Sébastien continued by sharing information from PwC about the reality of what companies are actually doing versus what they should be.

Antoine de Septenville, Chief Technology Officer from Perfluence, introduced the Sales Data Hub.  He spoke about recent and continuing trends in IT, in sales, and in data management systems.  Using “pivots & facettes” he showed how it is possible to combine several systems to answer a company’s particular needs.

Sophie Galoo from ADP-GSI showed how to bring value to clients by enlarging the shared ecosystem.  She told us how ADP-GSI has moved very quickly from working alone as an HR specialist, to now working within and managing their ecosystem, including their partners and competitors in their scope.  She laid out the essential question that anyone embarking on this route will need to ask themselves.

Then two speakers shared their insights into different cultures and how these affect the networks and relationships.  Sam Wellington from Safran spoke about Brazil.  Starting from a historical perspective he showed how networks in Brazil are created and maintained.  Jean-Michel Terrier from Altair gave his experiences of working with Asian cultures, notably China and Japan.  He was able to draw comparisons between these cultures, the Anglo-Saxon culture and the French culture.

The day finished with a round table chaired by Christian Maurer with the following experts.

David Gotchac from E-DEAL, Thomas Cochin from Microsoft Dynamics, Khalid Madarbokus from Oracle and Hervé Debaecker from Perfluence.  They discussed the triangle of people, processes and tools, and the efficiency of CRMs to manage this.  The question of how to achieve high adoption of any tool was raised along with the importance of good change management.  The general conclusion was that any IT system should be sales method agnostic and that users would adopt it if / when they could see that it served their own best interests.

Special thanks for

Matthieu and Sébastien from PwC, who stepped up at the eleventh hour and gave a remarkably solid presentation.

Sam, who came from Brazil not just for us but it was very appreciated.

Apologies to

Sophie, who had her presentation cut short.  About half the audience came to complain to me in person.

As I get in the blog posts from the speakers I’ll add links to their posts to this page.

Please feel free to comment and share your ideas on this.

Cate Farrall

Job crafters and the network

Job crafting

Job crafting refers to the way that each individual shapes the job that he / she does in order to satisfy their own needs and desires.  This can be independently of the organization’s needs.  There are three main areas that job crafting affects:

·         Quantity of work (you can do more or less)

·         Relationships with others (these can be improved or can deteriorate)

·         Perception of work (an insurance agent sees his / her work as helping people after accidents, rather than just processing claims)

For more details, please refer to “What is job crafting and why does it matter” (Berg,Dutton & Wrzesniewski).

Jobs are crafted by different aspects of a person: ambitions, desires, skills, personality traits, personal interests, etc.

An interesting part of the job crafting approach is the finding that those who actively engage in it are more likely to be engaged and motivated workers.  If you are interested, you can find more informationby clicking here.

Job crafting is similar to job redesign, the difference being that job redesign is negotiated with the employer in a formal process while job crafting is done under the radar.

The job and the crafter

In a previous post (the company, the job, the person) we argued that the person and the post they fill should be kept separate within CRM systems because of the way that people move from one job to another in their careers.  Job crafting and its effects requires the person and the post they fill to be kept separate but for different reasons.

The job can be considered to be what the person should be doing.  It involves a list of requirements, expectations and reporting lines.  The crafted job is how the person currently holding that position fulfills the requirements, meets the expectations and respects the reporting lines.  The difference between the job and the crafted job will vary depending the person, but there will always be a difference.

Job crafting and the effect on the sales meeting

We can picture all the people in a network busily job crafting in their own manner (with a positive or negative outcome, knowingly or subconsciously).  The effects of this will filter down to many business situations, including the sales meeting.

·         The sales person who considers the job in terms of hitting his / her commission at the end of the month will have a different approach to one who thinks in terms of making the client happier.

·         The client who sees the purchase as part of a wider plan will use different criteria from a client who is looking for the cheapest, quickest to deploy solution.

       

As a manager of a sales team, I need to think about which aspects I want my individual team members to develop and which ones I think the whole team could embrace.  This kind of insight will help me to plan training and assessment programmes.

Job crafting and o2o

Within the o2o complex sales situation, job crafting will also play a role.  A new occupant, of whatever position, is going to bring his / her own way of crafting the job.  This could be in terms of

·         Priorities for business development (opening new markets in a given zone, etc)

·         Personal criteria for making decisions (carbon footprint, ethical business, etc)

·         Personal preferences for partners (size and profile of suppliers, etc)

As a sales manager, I need to think about which of my team, as job crafters, will be best suited to working on a particular account and with certain people within that account.  Using my knowledge of my team I am better able to not only cover the network (see our post onnetwork coverage in o2o) but also to cover it with people intelligence.

In addition, understanding how key people in my client’s ecosystem have crafted their jobs will help me to get a better understanding of the way that they fit into the network.  I can look for people who are making similar changes and possibly use this to my advantage.  The use of Key Opinion Leaders by pharmaceutical companies is an application of this idea.

Next generation CRM

Job crafting affects the way we as individuals work and the way we affect the organizations we work for.  And recognition of this is growing on both sides of the Atlantic.  It is clearly going to play a role in the way we think about people and the jobs they do. 

The question is: how will future systems manage this aspect of the person / post combination?



Cate Farrall

Client’s Corporate Culture and o2o selling

In the o2o selling situation, buying occurs when an orchestrated seller team is in a synchronized process with the buyer team. .Knowing about the buyer’s organization culture will help you to identify the working style of the buyer team you have to work with.



Four types of corporate cultures

These four types of corporate culture have proven relevant when trying to answer two basic questions:

-       How are decisions made in this company?

-       How do the people in this structure gain and build power?

In a bureaucratic culture, communication is tightly controlled and flows along hierarchical lines. Silos are an essential element of this culture. The power of any one individual depends strongly on his / her hierarchical position. The probability that the final decision is made by a single individual is relatively high.

In an entrepreneurial culture, speed is of an essence and short decision paths are a characteristic. Power comes from being an entrepreneur or from being an individual enjoying an entrepreneur’s trust. For this type of culture, there is also a high probability that the final decider is one individual because the entrepreneur or the trusted individual has the authority to make decisions. In fact, decision making will probably happen even faster than in the bureaucratic culture as there is a flatter hierarchy.

The consulting culture is composed of partnerships with high territorial and subject matter expertise. The members are highly autonomous. This kind of structure is a prototype of the individualistic culture. Here the source of power is influence. In its turn, influence comes from the individual’s competence and performance. The decision maker depends on the type of purchase. If I want to sell to one partner I can expect to have one individual as decision maker. When I want to sell to the firm as a whole, I am confronted with many individuals having major roles in the decision process. These organizations also have little experience in finding consensus. They only do this out of absolute necessity.

The collaborative culture is based on open communications. Power source is influence which is determined by performance. As in the consulting culture, influence matters more than hierarchy. However, decision making style is different. In the collaborative culture the decider wants to assure a consensus among all concerned irrespective of the hierarchy before taking a decision. The decider deliberately does not want to use his or her rank.  Decision making can be “democratic” by majority vote. “The decider” is then the role of a spokesperson for the team vis-à-vis the seller.

Consequences for relationship intelligence

Although the above cultures might often not appear in their pure form, being able to understand

the prevailing culture at the customer’s organization is the first act of relationship intelligence.

We must also consider that in large organizations separate specific cultures in part of the organization might coexist with a different overall corporate culture. In this case, the prevailing culture of the organizational unit involved or concerned by the decision is relevant.

The decision making process associated with one of the four culture types then determines the relationship network I need to understand in order to be able to effectively manage influence and decision making.

Consequences for influence management

For organizations with bureaucratic or entrepreneurial cultures, establishing a relation to the decision maker or at least somebody with direct influence to the decision maker might be sufficient to influence a buying decision in favor of my solution. Contacts with other individuals in the organization might be necessary for the purpose of understanding the subject and the type of argumentation I must choose to persuade the decision maker.

To get to a buying decision in organization where an individual or collaborative culture prevails, I need to establish relationship with all the people involved or considered in the decision making process. My added value as the seller is to help the organization to find the consensus in an organization with an individualistic culture or help build the consensus on behalf of the “spokesperson” in the case of a collaborative culture.

Conclusion

Success in complex deals with large organization undoubtedly requires the involvement of multiple people. This is the first step and will ensure that there is no single point of failure for the relationship between the seller and the buyer organization.

If in addition, you pay attention to the prevailing corporate culture this will help you to understand for what purpose you want to maintain and establish these multiple contacts.

What are your experiences about this topic? 

Christian Maurer

The company, the job, the person: making sense of identity

Three key elements

Any CRM worth its salt will let you stock and consult three key pieces of information: your contact’s name, the job title he/she holds and which company he/she currently works for.  Having access to these three sets of information help you target, shape your strategy and tailor messages.

Inseparable?

The vast majority of CRMs have organized their data fields so that the person and their post are inseparable within the date record containing contact information, and the company or organization is a separate data record.  This is why (for anyone who uses a CRM without needing to know the software architecture behind it) I can have people that come and go from a company in my CRM but I can’t have a person that changes post or a post that changes occupant (without deleting one of these key elements and starting to rebuild any relationship information from scratch).

The organization

The company is then usually treated by CRMs as a separate entity.  This makes sense as there are certain aspects of companies that shape the relationships of its stakeholders.  For example:

·         Business objectives

·         Size

·         Corporate identity and reputation

·         Company ethics

·         Its own relationship network: suppliers, partners, clients, customers, competitors, shareholders, etc

I’m quite sure I have forgotten some things, please add comments below.

The post

The job in itself can alter relationships too:

·         There are hierarchical links and reporting lines which force me into contact with some people.

·         Geographical zones of intervention and action exist which limit or extend who I work with.

·         I am held to follow certain procedures, which may detail who I work with.

Again, I welcome comments on anything you think is missing.

The person

People change and alter the relationships they have much more than any other factor.  In the list below I have detailed only the aspects that come into play for professional relationships.

·         I have a memory unlike a post, which existed before me and will continue to exist if and when I move on.  If I get on with a person I will carry this with me for a long time, maybe forever.  I can also bear a grudge for a very long time.

·         I have a life outside of my work, so I can interact with and meet people who are not in my existing professional network.  This extends who I know beyond the limitations of my job’s network.

·         I like other people, or I dislike them.  As an example, in my role as, let’s say, Sales Director Southern Europe I should work closely with my Sales President EMEA.  However, for one reason or another we just don’t click, and although we are both professional enough to do the job well, there’s no warmth or mutual support.

·         I have a set of ethics and opinions that may or may not be close to the company’s position.  For example, I may put greater emphasize on ecological issues, or health and safety, or equal opportunities, or X, Y, Z.  This could well lead to changes in the way I consider other people and the work they do.

Additions welcome in the comments box below.

Divide and conquer

At some point in the future I will leave my post (either to retire, following a promotion, or moving to another company).  Likewise, I existed as a person long before I came into the post that I currently hold.

These professional movements are key moments in the life of a company because new people bring new networks.  Traditional suppliers can often see themselves ousted shortly after the arrival of a senior person, as he/she decides to use their own trusted suppliers or decides to go for a new approach.  There are companies out there that track nominations of C level people (www.nomination.fr does this in France) to help you identify these key moments.

What this means for information storage

Key things to look for in a CRM (get their techie team to answer the questions)

·         Company, post and person are three separate elements.

·         I can move a person from company to company without losing any information about that person.

·         I can move a person from post to post without losing any information.

·         Personal relationships with any given person can be transferred easily as the person’s career develops.

Cate Farrall

Vital Data Elements for Effective Relationship Management

When you ask Key Account Managers (KAMs) to show you the relationships they have in their account, they most likely will show you some form of organization chart. Sophisticated KAMs have annotated those graphs with additional information about the people involved. Usually showing this information is accompanied with the remark: “It is a bit out of date, but I just did not have the time to update it yet. Things are changing so fast in this organization”. A sustainable up-to-date view of your relations in a complex account starts with having a more granular view of the data elements you need to describe your relations allowing for more flexible faster updates.

The skeleton is the structure

Most organization charts, I have seen from KAMs, essentially describe hierarchical relationships between people. Yet, at the origin, organization charts describe hierarchical relations between job roles (and not people). As people tend to change roles faster than the structural organization of job roles changes, if you have not made a distinction between the person and the job role, obviously updating your organizational chart is going to take a bit of effort.

Furthermore the hierarchical organization chart is just one element which helps you to understand how your customer’s organization works. It is comparable with a human skeleton giving the body a structure. But a skeleton doesn’t usually move on its own (except in horror movies).

The muscles are the power

In real life, the body needs muscles to move.

The analogue in an organization is the power the person has in a certain role. We all know that this power is not necessarily dependant on the hierarchical position of the role. To understand how an organization works, you somehow have to add the power component to your chart describing your relations in your customer organization.  In a more sophisticated scenario, you would also find information about the motivations and the source of the power of the person filling a certain role.

The nervous system carries information

Muscles and skeleton are both necessary but not sufficient for a body to move. Muscles need to be triggered by nerves.

In organizations, the analogue to nerves is conduits of information. In theory, this information flow should follow the hierarchical connections. In reality, information flow is actually governed by informal connections between the people working together. However, knowing that a certain relationship exists is not enough. For effective influence management, the quality of this relation must be known. Firstly, it is important to determine if it is an amicable or adversarial relationship.  Secondly, you need to determine the degree of strength of the feelings.

The senses show you the outside world

As a KAM, you want to influence the customer organization to eventually select your offering for solving a particular problem. To use again the analogy of the human body, you need to stimulate the senses so the nerves in turn direct the muscles which then move the body into a certain direction.  Your ability to stimulate the senses of an organization depends on four things:

–      The quality of the relation you have with influential people in the customer organization

–      The attitude these influential people have towards your solution

–      Knowing how to deliver a message so it is heard

–      The roles people have in a buying center (additional to their hierarchical position)

With exception of the last element, these distinctions are often omitted and can lead to serious misinterpretations of a situation and thus derail a deal.

Conclusion

Effective systems for capturing relationship intelligence should thus distinguish as a minimum the following data elements:

–      Hierarchical relations between roles

–      People filling these roles

–      Informal power of the people in their roles

–      Informal connections between people (strength and quality)

–      Quality of your connection to influential people

–      Formal roles in a buying center differentiated by opportunity 

–      Attitude of the influential people towards your solution per opportunity

The ease with which you can present these elements in an up to date form obviously also depends on the choice of graphical representation.

For complex organizations, there is also a need for a tool that allows for easy updating and automatic drawing of the graphic representation.

But these are topics meriting future own blog posts. For now you have already a check list which will help you to understand whether you track the right data for your relationship intelligence to be useful for defining influence management strategies.

Christian Maurer