http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell 

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

After reviewing Making the Number, there are a number of points about sales benchmarking that apply to our own theories about marketing.

The scoreboard for sales professional is and always has been the pay stub – this is the crudest form of sales benchmarking. For marketing, it has always been a bit stickier and this is because there has been a disconnect between sales and marketing in most organizations. Ironically, now it is more important than ever to make sure these two are aligned.

Here’s why.

Sources of competitive advantage have shrunk. What it really boils down to is customer satisfaction and customers are harder than ever to satisfy. The Internet has contributed greatly to this trend by arming consumers with a plethora of information before marketing departments have the opportunity to bombard them with ineffective, corporate messaging efforts. “Citizen marketers,” as the book refers to them, have made it impossible for marketing and sales to exist solely within the four walls of corporate America, and away from scrutiny. Web 2.0 technologies – blogs, wikis, social networking and so on – allow buyers to self-service, bypassing corporate marketing’s efforts. Therefore, the sales team plays a vital role as the buffer between customer experience and marketing. The sales force must execute the positive customer experience that marketing departments are communicating.

Thus, sales campaigns become like a chess match, where you need a solid strategy and where the ability to think trumps the ability to work hard. And data driven decision-making arms salespeople with the tools they need to be successful.  

Sales benchmarking requires companies to review the sometimes unseen links between process and result. This review encourages an objective look at practices, systems and metrics and challenges business methods that should be scrutinized; and provides a means for driving change in the sales process.

In the sales process, there are a number of intangibles – things we would rather measure by how they “appear” or “seem.”  The same is often true with marketing. The soft metrics of appearance make it difficult to measure.

The authors of Making the Number point out that successful benchmarking is only possible through data. By assigning key performance indicators (KPIs) to reflect key parts of the sales process, a sales manager can assess whether or not a campaign is successful and what needs to be continued or abandoned.

The authors are quick to point out that benchmarking is not merely a comparison of your current performance with that of past performances or a collection of meaningless data that cannot be applied to positive change. The benchmarking process must be repeatable, consistent, reliable, trustable, measureable and comprehensible. In other words, it must first lend itself to multiple iterations. There must be no logical contradictions. The same results should be produced when the process is followed correctly. All process activity must be described and defined. There must be metrics that enable the measurement of work within the process and it must contain instructions that are understood within all roles of the process.

Benchmarking is not an instant fix for companies who have broken sales and marketing processes, and it is not a way to force the organization to make the necessary changes. It is a merely a dashboard of what is going on inside and outside of the organization – a way to evaluate what processes are working and which are not. Only leadership and management can enforce and implement positive change.

The key is to making this change happen is implement best practices with benchmarking. First, identify the companies that excel in their business. Get their buy in to study their policies, technique and operating environment. Discover ways to transfer their best practices to your organization in a way that makes sense. Finally, implement these new best practices within your own organization, evaluate the process and continuously improve upon this method.

Part of this process is determining your sales management’s maturity level. Level one is the chaos level where activity is mostly ad hoc. The second level is the defined level where processes are documented but not necessarily consistent. Level three is the reportable level where the process has actually been adopted. Level four is the managed level which consists of quantitative sales management and level five is the predictable level where sales management is predictive and casual. Once you determine what sales maturity level your organization is at, you can work on advancing to higher levels through the employment of a consistent winning strategy.

The next step is the actual data collection, which is the most labor-intensive part of the benchmarking process and also where the organization begins to get a detailed view of internal and external operations.

A company will experience a sustained competitive advantage when sales benchmarking moves from being a one-time event to being embedded in the operating procedures of the company. You must understand that your peers will not stand still. Sales benchmarking needs to become a standard operating procedure and part of your company’s long-term strategy for success.

One of the biggest excuses companies see against adopting benchmarking as a regular business process is “Things are going well – we don’t need it.” The problem with this attitude is that you are looking behind instead of ahead. It may be very likely that if you are successful today, you will be successful tomorrow. But it is not a given and it would probably do you well to be sure that your company is doing what it needs to in order to stay on top.

Regardless of the obstacles presented by companies or employees that are hesitant to adopt benchmarking, each can be overcome. It is important to keep future successes in mind and to know that the sooner you implement continuous benchmarking, the sooner you will find the facts you need to make sure your sales organization is consistently a success.

Decent article here about content and the “emerging role” of marketers as publishers. Like a magazine, marketers should start thinking about their editorial calendar and pushing a new edition out every month to their customers and salesforce.

What is your monopoly?

Xerox sales training basically can be summed in in a few words: Find your monopoly. This is my summarization, not theirs, but I think it speaks volumes. Every premium priced product has more options then a standard priced product. Think Lexus vs. Toyota or Sony vs. Sanyo. If you are sold those products in a way that makes you believe that you cannot live without one of the premium options, and that is emphasised in presentations again and again you start to really believe it. Soon, that option is more important to you than price. If this is all done correctly it actually becomes your(the customers’) idea that that option is 100% necessary. It is developing this Monopoly in your customers mind that is so powerful in sales. Without it you are only competing on price. Every product has a Monopoly, even commodities. If you cannot find it, you are simply not a good sales person. So I ask you: What is your product/companies monopoly?

http://20somethingsalesrep.blogspot.com/2007/01/xerox-sales-training-find-your-monopoly.html

October 5, 2007, 9:32 am
by William Bache*

The President of the United States expressed his desire to build a democratic Iraq that could serve as an example to the rest of the Arab and Islamic nations. The American military was the instrument chosen to build an Iraqi security structure that could fight terrorism and still promote ethical leaders and democratic values. However, efforts to transfer American military values to Iraq have been a failure. The leaders of the Iraqi Joint Security Forces have politely listened to what the Americans have determined is best for them and then have gone back to doing what they feel is best for them—namely situational leadership, corruption, and human rights violations.

Great news here about sacrificing goats to get an airplane back into the air.

There was no mention of whether the sacrifice worked.

Perhaps animal sacrifices could be applied to marketing problems? But if you do use this as a tactic, we recommend that the sacrifice match the problem. If an airplane the size of a Boeing won’t or can’t fly, you likely need more than one goat. I’d try a dozen.

But of course animal sacrifice to improve marketing results probably won’t work here in the states anyway.

Someone would organize a committee to complain that there were too many goats being sacrificed or that the sacrifices weren’t done in a humane manner, or that we were using the wrong type of goat.

Plus, it is an election year. Talk about it too much and someone will take this the wrong way and form some new federal agency to oversee goat sacrifices (DGP – department of goat protection?).

However, if you are taken by the idea, and think you can apply it to your marketing challenges, I recommend…

http://www.goatfinder.com

Isn’t the internet wonderful?

Now, with sovereign wealth funds, many experts are asking whether cross-border investment is evolving into cross-border nationalization, raising the prospect of government interference in free markets, only this time, in other countries’ markets.

Read David Maister’s latest article (“Integrity Impugned”) which explores these issues, can be read and download(ed) here:

http://davidmaister.com/articles/2/108/1/

Thinking about Brave New War, I grabbed a copy of Innovation Happens Elsewhere from my shelf and looked for the secret of why open source works. I guess it is not a secret because right on page 60 they tell you…

Open source works when a group of people all embrace a shared set of goals and establish a community based on mutual trust. All three factors – enough interested people, shared goals and trust – are required; if any one is missing, the project will fail.

Open source in people working on things for the public good in the commons. In software, the commons is the source code. The business model around the commons, then, must support the code. The free market tells us that businesses will be created in the halo of the code.

Over at Global Guerillas, Robb reprints an article from Defense News about the IED Marketplace in Iraq. He compares IED production with self-organizing open-source software networks.

Small, highly skilled IED cells often operate as a package and hire themselves out to the more well-known insurgent groups, such as Amman Al Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq or the Sunni group Ansaar al Sunna. They advertise their skills on the Internet and are temporarily contracted on a per-job basis, but otherwise remain autonomous.

It appears that reputation and trust and marketing have as much impact in the IED world as they do in the software world. In fact, flipping back through Innovation Happens Elsewhere, there is a section titled: why do they do it? Why does anyone produce open source software? To summarize:

• need for the product
• Enjoyment, fun and desire to create and improve
• Reputation and status
• Affiliation
• Identity
• Values and ideology
• Training, learning, reputation
• Hope of making things better
• Feedback

“We have entered the age of the faceless, agile enemy. From London to Madrid to Nigeria to Russia, stateless terrorist groups have emerged to score blow after blow gainst us. Driven by cultural fragmentation, schooled in the most sophisticated technologies, and fueled by transnational
crime, these groups are forcing corporations and individuals to develop new ways of defending themselves.

The end result of this struggle will be a new, more resilient approach to national security, one built not around the state but around private citizens and companies. That new system will change how we live and work—for the better, in many ways—but the road getting there may seem long at times.

The conflict in Iraq has foreshadowed the future of global security in much the same way that the Spanish civil war prefigured World War II: it’s become a testing round, a dry run for something much larger. Unlike previous insurgencies, the one in Iraq comprises seventy-five
to one hundred small, diverse, and autonomous groups of zealots, patriots, and criminals alike. These groups, of course, have access to many of the same tools we do— from satellite phones to engineering degrees—and they use them every bit as effectively. But their single most important asset is their organizational structure, an open-source community network—one that seems to me quite similar to what we see in the software industry. That’s how they’re able to continually stay one step ahead of us. It is an extremely innovative structure, sadly, and it results in decision-making cycles much shorter than those of the U.S. military. Indeed, because the insurgents in Iraq lack a recognizable center of gravity—a leadership structure or an ideology—they are nearly immune to the application of conventional military force. Like Microsoft, the software superpower, the United States hasn’t found its match in a Goliath competitor similar to itself, but in a loose, selftuning network.