Strategy is a Sales Game
What is strategy?
The idea of strategy is ancient. In ancient Greek civilisation, the term ‘strategist’ was used to describe a senior military commander or chief magistrate. Activities that most modern managers would now think of as ‘strategic management’ have been understood and acted upon in the world's great civilisations over centuries and millennia.
There are competing views on what strategy is and how to achieve it. In our opinion, to put it simply, strategy is the determination of an organisation's primary long-term goals and objectives, the adoption of courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary to achieve those goals.
There are two equally important perspectives to strategic planning: the mechanistic, logical method and the dynamic human-centred approach. This article focuses on the latter.
‘At some time in the life-cycle of virtually every organisation, its ability to succeed in spite of itself runs out.’ (Brier’s first law)
Strategy is a sales game
Creating a strategy is straightforward, right? The executive team has an away day, the CEO has a vision, which a small group of directors’ craft into a mission. And then, after lunch, the group decides who is doing what and sets some targets. Someone takes photographs of the flipcharts and sends them to a junior staff member to create a PowerPoint deck. With all that hard work completed, the team then retires to have a nice meal at the expensive hotel where they are staying. Job done.
If this representation of strategic planning is a little too close to the truth in your organisation, perhaps it is time to consider a more collaborative approach. Because inevitably, there will be problems. Many people don’t like being told what to do. And often they will have strong views on what the organisation’s vision and mission should be. You know they have opinions; lots will want to contribute. So, it would help if you encouraged the people who want to get involved to do so.
Chief executives and directors need to learn that creating a successful strategy that everyone buys in to and works towards is, in fact, a sales game. Ask any good salesperson worth their salt what the central tenets of sales are and they will tell you:
People don’t want to be told what they want; they want to be asked
People won’t buy unless they are involved in the sales process
People buy on emotion and justify their purchase with logic.
A leader can create the most beautiful, intelligent and detailed strategic plan. But, and it is a big but, the people within the organisation need to buy it. They need to believe in the leader proposing the strategy and emotionally connect with what is being proposed if they are to adopt and enact it enthusiastically.
Executives and leaders should not forget that strategies need to inspire individual performance by creating a common understanding and purpose, putting faith in the probability of success and encouraging the satisfaction of personal goals.
After working with hundreds of commercial and public organisations, we have found (to many people’s surprise) the practices used by sales professionals to be highly effective in gaining the acceptance and participation of the workforce. Strategy is a sales game.
A human-centred approach
Should a strategic change be collaborative? Hopefully, that is a rhetorical question (we all know what a rhetorical question is, right?). A collaborative and participative approach needs to be integral to the strategic planning process to build trust. Trust generates commitment. Commitment ensures effort. And the collaborative, innovative and strategically directed effort is critical to the organisation's success. It isn't easy to motivate the staff to be cooperative and creative unless there is a heady combination of logic and emotion. But rest assured, it is possible to build trust, commitment and effort on the part of the stakeholders by including participative approaches in the strategic planning process.
People buy based on emotion and justify their actions based on logic. Your strategy needs both if your organisation’s staff is to buy into you and your strategy. And how do you get employees to become emotionally attached and believe in the strategy? Involve them in the strategic planning process and genuinely value their inputs.
Selling is the process of motivation
Humans are naturally motivated by the complementary desires of avoiding pain and gaining pleasure. These powerful twin forces drive our behaviour. And commercials play upon this desire to encourage us to avoid a specific pain or to achieve a particular pleasure.
Suppose you want to persuade people to accept and adopt your strategy. In that case, you need to understand that they won’t enthusiastically take on the additional burdens associated with a change programme just because you tell them. They need a reason to act.
People need to associate the action of buying into change as a way of creating pleasure and the act of not buying in as producing pain. This is the master formula for persuasion. People are drawn towards pleasure and move away from pain.
What do we mean by ‘pain’? It means that people think they will be missing something, that they would be losing, that they would be alone, that things would be worse if they don’t buy in. Psychological studies repeatedly show that most people will do more to avoid pain than to get pleasure. Here’s an example. If you were given the option (A) to save £1,000 or (B) to stop someone stealing £1,000 from you, which would you choose? Most people asked this question plumped for option ‘B’ – they didn’t want to lose. As a leader, you need to use this powerful driving force when creating change.
Strategies must sell outcomes
Employees will have questions:
Do you have my best interests in mind?
Can I trust you?
Is this strategy about you or me?
What's in it for me?
Will it work?
What am I going to have to give up to get the benefits?
What does not buying in mean to me? What will I miss out on?
Often, for someone to act, they need to be dissatisfied with the way things are. Your job is to find out their strong ‘wants’, to show them they are not getting the tangible things or emotions they want, to compel them to want to make a change, to buy in. You need to be a salesperson, a persuader, not only a chief executive.
What is persuasion? It is the process of getting someone to associate their most desired feelings or states with your product or service. If we want someone to buy, we have to get them to link to the feelings they want most (or want to avoid), and we have to make it compelling and authentic for them.
The decision to buy is based simply on one thing – people need to have enough reasons to buy. And most importantly, the reasons must be theirs, not yours. That's the common challenge that most salespeople have. We try to sell what we love about our product (or strategy) instead of finding out what this person would love about the product.
A collaborative approach to creating a strategy
A new strategy will have a greater chance of success if formed through a collaborative approach involving the staff. Collaborative approaches that involve customers, suppliers, managers, and those on the front line invariably achieve better results than top-down approaches that involve a narrow range of stakeholders (let’s be honest with ourselves here – devised and imposed by managers).
The strategic answers to your future survival and success can be found within the organisation.
A collaborative approach to creating strategy consists of four phases:
Conduct a situational analysis (internal factors, external factors and interdependencies) to establish the strategic context and to identify and categorise the aligning criteria for the future strategy.
Using the output of Phase 1 to provide structure, run a series of workshops with stakeholder groups to gather ideas. Synthesise the findings to establish common themes and options and their goodness of fit with the aligning criteria.
Using the output of Phase 2, conduct workshops and discussions to identify the main themes that will integrate all of the various aspects of the enterprise, establish vision and mission and then pinpoint high-level goals (or critical success factors).
Present the outputs as a strategy document. Communicate as far and as wide as possible. Make it easy to understand so the staff can recognise its inputs to the strategy.
Two last points
Make sure that the people facilitating the process are neutral. It doesn’t matter if you bring in professional facilitators familiar with the strategic planning process, people from a sister company, or an academic from a university – make sure they are viewed as independent ‘honest brokers’. Otherwise, the stakeholders will not engage from the outset.
It is invariably helpful to align the implementation of a new strategy with a significant date – the start of your financial year, or the beginning of the academic year, for instance. So, schedule the strategic planning process to take place well before this. For businesses with 31st March or 30th June year ends, the period from December to February is a particularly opportune time. People tend to be more reflective at this time of year and are starting to consider what the future holds. The staff will be more willing to participate in the review and planning activities.