Steve Kimber – Blog

Lots of different companies use Unified Communications (UC) in different ways and with different degrees of success. Whether it is web, video or voice conferencing – or a blend of all three, and no matter which vertical sector or company size you look at, UC use and adoption varies wildly. In some organisations UC in an intrinsic part of the company culture, without it the company would simply grind to a halt. Speaking to someone via Lync or having a WebEx session is as natural as chatting at the water cooler. In other organisatons, UC is seen as a painful necessity of working in a world where globalisation and mobile working are becoming more prevalent.

My first point is why? If you compare two similarly sized companies in similar sectors, their UC use could be totally different. I personally have seen four separate large technology organisations use it spectacularly well and equally poorly. It is not just the tech sector either, be it consulting, manufacturing or finance – the diverse uptake and acceptance of UC is the same. What is your experience? Care to share?

Secondly, I have some thoughts for employees and leaders of organisations where UC adoption/usage is not commonplace;

 As an employee it is all about mindset/perspective. US IS becoming more and more widespread, you may as well accept it! Instead of “Damn, another conference call”, why not see it as “Great! We are having this meeting now instead of a week’s time, that’s 7 days over our competition already!”. Also, in the future you are going to have to use it. I read an interesting HBR article (http://goo.gl/9JCJU) posing that technology skills (including UC) will be necessities in tomorrow’s workplace. It is not that the technology is bad, how you use it is the most important factor affecting the quality of experience – if you don’t know how, LEARN!

 From a leadership perspective, why not measure your different departments on how much they utilise the technology assets you have provided for them? Setting a goal of 25% of all meetings to be held virtually does not seem unrealistic to me for 2013. Also, be a champion yourself – why not?

Surely, the significant increase in collaboration you will see between employees (and added revenue as a result!), combined with the huge reduction in travel OPEX, is going to drive your share price up high enough so that you can forget about those Frequent Flyer miles you’ll be missing out on? What is there to lose?

A lot of people work in very multi-cultural environments – I am certainly one! Both at University and in my previous roles I worked with people from all across Europe, Middle East and Africa, as well as the US. It was an incredible experience, and constant change and adaptation was essential. I was fortunate enough to be put through some excellent training around communication styles, when considering different personality profiles (HBDI www.hbdi.com). This was excellent at communicating and working with others who were different to me – visionary, structured or logical people working with me as an emotional type of person. It worked fantastically, and still does to this day.

However – I am now in a whole different situation. How does that personality profiling and those communication techniques stand up when the person you are working with sees things completely differently to you?? Not very well it seems.

My experiences over the past 18 months have been amazing. What I have learned is that emotions are THE common denominator between people of ALL types and cultures. Some of my colleagues now could not come from a more different background. They have a different perspective, philosophy, political ideology, language structure and work ethic to me. Working alongside totally different people is possible by adjusting your communication style, but leading – that is different.

I have observed that happy and excited, or sad and despondent feels the same no matter who you are, where you come from or what your perspective is on the world.

By really observing someone and communicating with them on the most fundamental of levels – emotional – you can lead any mix of people. No matter whom it is you are working with, and whatever their background, if you can use emotional intelligence, talk to them and become vulnerable yourself (www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html) – you have a great chance of successfully leading interculturally.

Experience is such a huge advantage in a sales role, especially when forecasting and managing your organisation’s expectations. Experience only comes with time spent in the field, and by learning the lessons of lost deals, last minute delays and reduction in project size. A lot of people have been there and felt the pain. The key is, I think, to learn from your mistakes and those of others, and apply that learning to your next project.

A sales manager I worked with a few years ago (and he knows who he is) would ALWAYS ask me the same question about every project I forecasted – “What is the customer’s compelling event?”. This is such a key point to any project, as without a significant compelling event, there will be no project. ‘They are expanding’ or ‘looking to drive cost out of IT’ does simply not cut it when looking to get a contract signed and commit investment. If by relying on those reasons you expend significant effort of both your own and your customer’s organisation, without understanding the compelling event you are wasting everybody’s time. As a salesperson it is your responsibility to look for the compelling event to ensure that a) your customer is making the correct decision in investing in your product/service, and b) that your organisation does not invest huge amounts of resource to support ‘information gathering’. Every organisation is trying to reduce cost of sales and IT currently, and working on a project that does not have a compelling event is a great way to waste resource.

An example of a true compelling event is a confirmed opening of a new office, where 250 people are starting work in 6 months time, and no other office is closing down (infrastructure can be moved remember). Another – if a customer’s existing infrastructure is becoming End of Life and there is absolutely no other support available, and corporate policy of that customer dictates that the risk of running EoL infrastructure outweighs any potential impact to customer/internal operations. There must be a dollar value attached to any failure that is greater than the investment required.

Alternatively, if your product/service offers your customer a significant benefit or new feature that they currently do not have, and that benefit addresses a tangible business need which can show real ROI. This particular ‘compelling event’ can also be attributed to consumer products and services.

Take Google+ for instance. I use Facebook for personal social networking, and both LinkedIn and Twitter for business. They offer me exactly what I need, a platform for communicating with my friends, colleagues, customers and the industry as a whole. When Google+ was launched I did consider joining, but thought about the cost to me (time inviting new friends, learning a new system, something else to check every day, the impact of losing touch with people not on Google+) and I did not see a compelling event to move. It turns out that I am not the only one http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/google-minus/ I am wondering what Google thinks is my compelling event to move, what is the value they are offering me via Google+?

I still hear stories from top level sales organisations of salespeople panicking at quarter/year end about deals that they have forecasted and were ‘sure’ would be in on time. As much as I feel for those salespeople, I can’t help but feel that they did not get to the position they are currently in with no experience, and MUST have come across this before.

So, if only for your own state of mind, please, please, please – ask yourself the question; What is the compelling event?

I’ve worked in sales for a few years now, and have come across all types of salesperson – some good, some not so. Having just moved to Stockholm, I was somewhat alarmed to discover that being a ‘salesperson’ is somewhat looked down upon here, and I wondered why? We have so much to offer our customers, well – some of us do. The world is changing, customers are changing – sales is changing. We need to respond.

How did we get to this point? In my view, it is simple. I have a great respect for anyone with experience in sales, especially those with more than me. Our career is one continuous learning curve, and every day holds it’s unique challenges. However, if that someone with experience (or without) is approaching customers with the same mindset as they did in the late 90′s, they are doing damage to our credibility and I find it hugely frustrating. It all comes down to integrity.

Previous generations of salespeople would enter every meeting, start every day and plan every project with one thing in mind – their commission check and the new 911 it would buy. I cannot emphasise this enough – THOSE DAYS ARE OVER. Change is necessary if you are to continue to be successful. You will fail in this new era of financial crashes, redundancies and cutbacks if your customer is not absolutely centric to every single one of your actions. Can customers tell if you are not focused 100% on them as a business? In my opinion absolutely!!! If you go into a meeting thinking like this, you may as well be selling a vacuum cleaner on their doorstep. It is this approach that has resulted in customers shuddering every time they see ‘Account Manager’ on a business card, and the somewhat questionable status of a career in sales here in Sweden (and I am sure in other parts of the world).

Obviously, money is a major driver for any salesperson. It is why we pull 80 hour weeks, and put up with hundreds of rejections throughout our career. However, I see money as being purely a side-effect of success. True success is enabling customer growth, preventing them from having to make redundancies by offering them cost savings in other areas. Improving the work-life balance of their employees by introducing mobile working, reducing their carbon footprint by introducing Telepresence. If you are able to help your customers achieve those things, money will come. We need, as an industry, to move further up the ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ away from ego-comforting sports cars, to believing we can really make a difference to the world. We can be responsible for faster/higher uptake of technology that reduces carbon output – what an amazing responsibility that needs to be taken seriously! We need to rediscover the passion for our job, and focus on what it is we can really achieve besides smashing this quarter’s target.

So – what does this new approach look like? Firstly, and key to this is selling with integrity. The title of ‘Account Manager’ is in my opinion wholly unsuitable for how we need to be approaching our customers. We need to be ‘Buying Facilitators’ or ‘Client Strategists’. We need to be helping our customers devise a strategy to best work with our organisations and vice-versa. Only by truly understanding how our customers got to where they are, if can they fix it with what they have, and what impact any change is going to have on their organistion can we even begin to think about suggesting a solution suitable for their needs – let alone a product! We need to understand that in order to mitigate risk, a customer should not necessarily standardise on one vendor. We need to be focused fully on their business’ value and sustainability. Soft factors need to be brought into play, HR must be a huge element of who we now sell to, with increasing demands on parents to spend quality time with children, mobile working is a must for any company in order to attract top talent (more on this next time!).

A ‘Client Strategist’ is the New Salesman. They are responsible for facilitating the relationship between two organisations. They are there to assist with new technology adoption to drive a customer’s business towards it’s goals whilst ensuring they receive utmost value and ROI. They are there to improve the quality of work and personal life every employee of every customer organisation they interact with.

It absolutely will be difficult to manage this approach whilst ensuring those targets continue to be surpassed. Buy-in to this approach from management is key, as much as a stale approach to sales stifles our credibility, a similarly ‘old school’ approach to sales management stifles our creativity.

Step up. Straighten up and fly right. Go out there and change the world!

As a salesperson with integrity you can achieve amazing things.

Steve. Stockholm Oct 2010.

I have lost count of the times I have heard from colleagues in sales meetings, from peers and from friends that the customer they visited last week claimed they were very ‘traditional’; that they were not interested in technology and that their meeting was, at best, not as productive as they had hoped. Now, as frustrating as it is to hear from a prospective customer that they are not interested in your product, I am left wondering what drives a company to stick to it’s ‘traditional’ business practises and processes. What is the value in taking that position? What are the results? What is it really driven by?

I can fully appreciate a ‘traditional’ company’s viewpoint. They are proud of their history, their ability to weather the economic and regulatory storms experienced over the years. Their business practises have worked successfully for xx years. They are in a comfortable position and have no intention of fixing what isn’t broken. I can see that this approach has worked, account managers would not be talking to them if it hadn’t. I would like to propose that the true driver that lies behind this strategy of not acting on market trends, or being a ‘late adopter’ of technology is perceived risk and cost along with the extra workload and mindset change required to bring IT out of functionality and into business enablement.

To address these challenges is a huge task for any CIO/ITD, and it is an ambitious account manager who approaches a traditional company with an emerging technology opportunity. However, I feel that any officer of any organisation has a duty to their stakeholders to seriously consider all options available to them. If only to ensure the further success of the organisation, and in return the jobs, families and livelihoods that depend on that success of not only their organisation and employees, but those of their suppliers and partners. They also have a duty to society as a whole to explore as many ways as possible to reduce their environmental impact to ensure there is a market in existence to serve. To articulate this need, and to provide an organisation with the products and services needed to succeed now and in the future, a partner and account manager who sells with integrity is needed. Someone who truly has the success of his/her customer as their prime motivation – not their commission cheque at the end of the month (more on this in my next post).

The thing that worries me is, that despite however sceptical the CIO/ITD is about emerging technologies, social media, unified collaboration, that scepticism does not stop the market’s perception and expectation for those services and that infrastructure to be present. If you take a look at how society’s perception of and demand for technology has changed in recent years, you can see an exponential trend towards adoption of new technology. For example, Christmas 2009 in the UK. Society was fed up of being spoon fed manufactured pop music by a certain Simon Cowell, and fought back through social media. I must admit to taking part in this ‘real music revolution’ and being one of the 502,000 people who bought Rage Against The Machine’s single driving it to number 1. I saw this as amazing. The UK’s society’s culture of easy listening pop music being the most popular of all for the busiest shopping week of the year, turned on it’s head by a social media campaign. The only people who really gained from this financially were the band, who were surprised as anyone that their single had been chosen, and were completely separate fro the campaign.

Another example directly affecting consumers focuses on contact centre strategy. Having recently moved countries I have had the pleasure of organising a new mobile phone contract and number. With some organisations this is a smooth process, however, with a certain national carrier in my current location, nothing could be further from the truth. My view may well have been tainted by being exposed to cutting edge technology through my occupation, but I can honestly say that the service I have recently received from other organisations (public and private sector) blew these guys out of the water. When telephoning customer services (the only contact option, and at a cost not included in my call plan) I found it insulting to be placed in a queue at position 83 and told my expected wait time to be approximately 36 minutes. Quite simply, that is not acceptable today – let alone next year or in 3 years time. When contacting an organisation I expect, as a valued customer, the option to be called back by said organisation when I rise to first place in the queue. I expect the option to email, SMS, MMS or video call that organisation. A multimedia contact centre with workflow management is in my view, an essential piece of infrastructure in order to attract and maintain a loyal, spending consumer base. Full stop.

Not all ‘traditional’ companies take this viewpoint however. Take for example, Marks and Spencer. An organisation that was very nearly a casualty of the recent economic crisis. One that is very proud of it’s heritage, customer service and traditional ‘feel’ of it’s stores. Certainly not one you would expect to be using cutting edge technology in their supply chain to improve customer experience. News for you – they do. M&S have so far used over 200 million RFID tags on retail items destined for their stores. Having spent resources driving customers to as well as, lighting, heating and staffing their stores and products, for a consumer only not to buy due to the lack of right size items in their store is hugely costly. M&S have realised this. By using real-time inventory information they are able to move away from traditional timed deliveries and towards a more demand driven replenishment system.Although historically they suffer less than average slippage, further reduction in this and the ability to put the right items in the right place at the right time must be reducing logistic and storage costs across the board. The impact to them must be huge both fiscally an environmentally.

Also look at Volvo Trucks. This truck manufacturer has certainly been at the front of safety technology over the years, but never have they made an impact anywhere else in any market place (marine aside). A fact I find heart warming is that they have a Wireless Car business unit. This unit develops bleeding edge wireless convergence technology for cars, and reports directly into IT. Volvo Trucks see IT absolutely as a business enabler. They count BMW amongst their customers, with their popular Telematics systems a direct result of with Wireless Cars BU.

So – to sum up. I fully respect traditional value in organisations. They certainly have their place in business ethics, HR policy and governance. However, technology adoption and those values do not good bedfellows make. I have been told numerous times that doing nothing is the biggest risk of all – and I could not agree more. How much do you value your organisation, your stakeholders, your current market position. At the very least, you owe it to yourself to look at the options. Be open minded . . . . . . . . . .

For further reading on managing risk, take a look at Gartner Analyst Mark McDonald’s thoughts on ‘Managing Risk Up’.
http://blogs.gartner.com/mark_mcdonald/2010/09/10/manage-risk-up/

Steve K. Stockholm