by Peter A. Arthur-Smith, Leadership Solutions, Inc.®

“Clarity on outsider collaboration and insider teamplay optimizes overall success.” 

Alex and Susan initially drafted the adjacent Constituent Map, without the stars and notes, to aid their thinking about key external and internal players that could impact SMARTSales Advisors’ growth success. Although there are clearly sub-sets to small ventures – e.g. start-up, critical mass and early growth – they kept these distinctions out of the picture for now to aid simplicity. In the case of the other outsiders, they would eventually pinpoint subsets such as: A= Early adopters, B= Mainstream customers and C= Laggards. Very shortly, their Strategist team would specifically target one or more subsets for their marketing strategy. Have you done something similar?

With their draft in hand, Susan the Visionist invited her Strategist team to an early, weekday-evening dinner session; subject to everyone’s availability. Now that the wind was seemingly behind everyone’s backs, an occasional evening dinner meeting would be tolerable for people who worked elsewhere.  Besides, she anticipated that the overall session wouldn’t take so much of their evening time.

Susan, with Alex looking on, called everyone together in the back-room of a favorite, local restaurant. They deserved some pampering after all their efforts so far and Susan had access to early customer revenues from her “initial test” advisory activities to meet the restaurant’s bill.  In fact, judging by the smiles all around, as team members tucked-into their appetizers and cocktails, this venue was a likely winner. The food and cocktails would fuel their insights!

She then shared the above SalesSMART Advisors’ Constituent Map for briefing and discussion purposes. She did invite additions, although everyone felt it pretty much met their purposes. She then invited them to split into two groups of three as they wished. After appropriate questions, the two groups set to work with Alex and Susan rotating for listening and suggestion purposes. They set themselves forty-five minutes for discussion around the potential merits of who to pursue among the external constituents. Where do you think they began to intuit SalesSMART Advisors most promising bets?

At some point, Susan briefly interrupted their deliberations to ask them to designate their three best bets on one of their in-hand paper copies. Once each team finalized their thoughts, they handed their chart to Susan to transfer preferences onto her laptop version. Now she was able to project their selections onto a nearby, temporarily, white-papered wall. There were one or two differences, so they debated these contrasting perspectives. (NOTE: This was part of orchestrating them to all arrive onto the same page.)

Finally, they agreed that: Their #1 Target would be A’s within Growth firms as the most likely place to find early adopters. Their #2 Target would be Initial Growth entities within start-ups for similar reasons and because salesperson success would be critical to their future. Their #3 Target would be A’s within not-for-profits, since funding success would be critical to meeting their purpose. How would they identify the early adopters? Although Sharon, Expansionist, had some ideas, she offered to collaborate with Malcolm, Innovationist, and Jeff, Promotionist, to figure out an appropriate solution within the very near future.

It was notable that they ultimately set aside large firms, academia, institutions and government as their less likely bets. This was mainly due to the latter three not being used to the idea of having salespeople on their staff, even though they have a variety of roles that interface with necessary external funding sources or support. In the case of large firms, with their more probable inward-looking viewpoint, they were more likely to have B – mainstream – and C, laggard, mindsets. The team would clearly have to deal with these issues at a later date after they have proven themselves with many early adopters.

With all these valuable discoveries now laid out, the team felt it had arrived at another important insight-point. They realized that they would have to return to this chart, after they reached a critical mass and later as an early growth entity, to add other outside-inside constituents. So, it was time for dessert and coffee to celebrate. They were now positioned to draw everything together that had already been resolved and then decide when to launch. Such a session would arrive pretty soon, while momentum was still on their side.