Uncovering and Advancing Personal Motivators

The ability to uncover and advance Foxes’ and Power Base members’ Personal Motivators is a powerful source of Political Advantage. Of course, you can’t possibly do this unless you’re providing strong business value to their organization that is linked to a Personal Motivator, as previously explained. What we are talking about is the ability to provide political and cultural value in addition to and not in place of product and business value. We address this Unexpected Value in more detail in the next section of the book; for now, let’s discuss how to uncover and advance Personal Motivators.

We use a scenario that illustrates the three steps summarized in Figure 7.4.

Figure 7.4: Uncovering Personal Motivators

Let’s touch on an example that is close to home for sellers—one that concerns an up-and-coming telecommunications provider that wanted to increase its share of large enterprise business, which largely meant taking it from their competition. This company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) realized that his sales organization needed new thinking and new leadership in order to live up to its potential. Before long, he made an announcement identifying a new Vice President (VP) of Sales—a man named Jeff Gahagan, who had a reputation for building world-class sales organizations that outperformed competitors and who could hit the street running.

Jeff restructured the sales force to create an enterprise sales group composed of business developers. Their job was to penetrate and develop new accounts while also building competitive immunity into existing ones, thereby protecting and growing the installed base. However, Jeff knew that these business developers needed to be very consultative and innovative in creating customer solutions to accomplish this. Jeff had succeeded in the past not just by building and managing sales organizations well, but by the way in which the rest of the company adapted to his actions and initiatives. Although his company would still offer “cookie cutter” or prepackaged solutions, they’d also make a new level of customization available. That meant enacting changes in their Design, Engineering, Manufacturing, Support, and Marketing Departments if they were truly going to put customers’ needs first.

History had taught Jeff that the right market segments would reward this type of quality with increased revenue, margins, and customer satisfaction ratings. He also knew that if his approach succeeded, his competition would have a difficult time replicating it. His competitors were just too big, too set in their ways, and too accustomed to having customers adapt to them. Jeff’s company had to build new infrastructure anyway, so why not do it right? This meant that Jeff needed to do two things:

Part of the new infrastructure included selecting and deploying a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to support account planning, manage the pipeline, forecast sales, and provide an array of leading indicator metrics that would help proactively manage sales campaigns. It was not, however, to overburden the field with needless reporting. Jeff understood the difference between these efforts; he knew what he wanted and how to make it work. Still, he decided to conduct an evaluation to select the right supplier.

This is where you come in, as one of the suppliers. It doesn’t take long for you to launch your Fox-Hunting activities and determine that Jeff is the Situational Fox. You also uncover during your intel gathering that Jeff spent several months very early on traveling to all the company’s facilities to understand their local markets. He personally met with noncompetitive industry leaders to better understand their approach to growing their enterprise businesses. He also spent a great deal of time searching for best practices to add to his own, while beginning to build a reputation for innovative sales management.

Over time, the sales cycle progressed and you were down selected to the short list. Soon it was between you and one other supplier, both of you from good companies and proposing effective solutions. Next, you moved into the hypothesize phase for determining Jeff’s Personal Motivator. Although you would have liked to get there sooner, you knew that the more obvious Personal Motivator of simply creating the expected success for his company was not enough to distinguish you from the competition. You knew that Jeff wanted more, but what was it?

The hypothesis began to take shape when you observed that Jeff spent a lot of time with industry analysts, leaders, and members of the press. You postulated that his goal was to achieve strong personal recognition at the industry and country level. Whether this was to gain recognition for its own sake, to set himself up for a CEO position in the future, to pave the way to starting his own consulting firm, or for some other reason, you simply didn’t know. But you were fairly sure that he was on the road to making a name for himself in the world of business development, beyond the field of telecommunications.

The only thing left to do was to test the hypothesis. If you had it right, there would still be time to enhance your proposal in such a way as to advance Jeff’s Personal Motivator—if your competitor didn’t get there first. With a real sense of urgency, you would meet with Jeff and wait for a casual moment to present your thoughts: “Jeff, not to be overconfident or presumptuous, but I have been speaking with our Marketing Department and we are very excited about the innovative thinking and practices that you are establishing to grow enterprise market share. Assuming that we work together, would you be interested in speaking at our telecommunications conference next year and participating in a joint article that we are preparing for a leading business publication? We are excited to be part of your team and believe that there would be a lot of interest in the best practices that you’re implementing.”

Generally speaking, the response to this type of test is binary. Because the individual has internalized his or her Personal Motivator and considers it important, the reaction will be visibly positive or absolutely neutral. Jeff’s enthusiasm and unhesitating agreement in this case told you that you were on to something. As such, you offer to set up a meeting with your VP of Marketing at corporate and, following that, organize a lunch with your CEO. All of this looks to be part of a supplier evaluation process to everyone else, since a supplier decision has not yet been made. However, you know that similar meetings with your competition are not taking place.

You soon find out that you have been selected. You know that you have outsold your competition, but how, exactly? Both companies had good solutions, were committed to the customer’s success, and were credible providers. But you had an advantage—Political Advantage!