The FT’s wonderful Lucy Kellaway recently wrote about how the odd white lie can be a useful thing and, in general, I think there’s something to be said for the “occasional bromide” to make the days pass more smoothly.  But that got me thinking about instances where these kinds of social niceties might be causing real damage.

Specifically, I’m thinking about the white lies we tell ourselves concerning the desirability of Marketing generating leads for Sales.   As part of our current research about gaining commercial alignment, we asked sales and marketing executives to force-rank their priorities.  Somewhat surprisingly, ‘lead generation’ appears toward the end of that list, with sales executives ranking it as an even lower priority than their marketing counterparts. Read More »

Sometimes the things you don’t find in a study turn out to be as interesting as the things you do find.  One very consistent “non-finding” concerns the effectiveness of the classic ROI message. We’ve asked customers to rate the effectiveness of the ROI pitch they hear and assessed reps and managers on their effectiveness at delivering this pitch, trying to link the effectiveness back to a variety of commercial outcomes.  To our surprise, we’ve never found the delivery of the ROI message to have any significant explanatory power.  And since zero correlation means no causation, this is a finding that deserves some exploration.

I’m reminded of a recent conversation with business owners at a software company, who developed a new way of thinking about certain data problems.  Though customers generally agreed that this was a better way to handle the data problems, the solution spanned many departments, and the software company couldn’t convince customers that the hypothetical returns were worth the extra coordination efforts. Failure to generate a positive emotional response likely explains our non-finding with regards to the effectiveness of the ROI pitch. Read More »

Continuing a very episodic series on how some things might be bottle-necked, my next observation is around the number of key accounts that a company manages at any point in time.

This observation comes from a study of key account managers in 2006 that surveyed key account managers from 53 large companies.  The study found that, while all companies tier customers, they also tend to limit the number of accounts that fit the description: “a customer relationship that is deemed significant to your company’s long-term growth because of that customer’s current and/or expected financial, learning or strategic value”.  Specifically, the number of true key accounts tends to cluster around the 15- to 20-mark, irrespective of the company’s industry segment. That was a surprise, since we expected certain firms (like the delivery industry) to engage with a much larger number of accounts given their routine interactions with 100,000s of customers. Read More »

A recent New Yorker article on the financier Martin Armstrong’s obsession with cycle theory got me thinking: while I don’t know anything about cycle theory, I’ve looked at enough data to observe that some numbers are indeed fixed. Not literally fixed in that they are absolute numbers like pi, but fixed in the sense that they are hard to move and in that they will tend to revert back to the mean. This makes them very powerful from a management perspective in that changes in either direction provide you with a lot of information about what’s happening in the marketplace. Read More »