Conclusion

This, then, is the tribal wisdom, the folklore which those who went before you have learned. Like any folklore it needs interpretation, and contains seemingly contradictory advice. Over time, as you apply unremitting intellectual effort to study your territory, you will learn to apply these ideas in your own way, and will add to this store of wisdom from your own observations and experience. So only one article remains: and if you remember nothing else, remember this:

Whatever else you do, keep the initiative. In sales, the initiative is everything. If your competitor is reacting to you, you control the environment. Provided you mobilize the population, you will win. If you are reacting to your competitors, then they are controlling the environment and you will eventually lose. Do not be drawn into purely reactive operations: focus on the population of contacts within your prospect and client companies, build your own solution, further your game plan and fight the competitor only when he gets in your way. This gains and keeps the initiative.

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Note: This is the only Article of the 28 that does not easily translate to sales strategies or tactics. The best that comes to mind is the continued presence and continued management of client relationships when your sales duties and responsibilities require you to reduce the time spent with existing clients.

Keep your extraction plan secret. At some point, your sales responsibilities will require that you reduce the time you spend with your clients. Remember, they have seen salespeople come and go. You must build the client’s confidence in your supporting staff so that your absence does not present your competitors with the opportunity to score a high-profile hit, or recapture the client’s allegiance by scare tactics that convince them that you will not be there to ensure they achieve results. Resist the temptation to withdraw, and ensure you have a communication plan that supports the client’s confidence.

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Build your own solution-only attack the enemy when he gets in your way. Try not to be distracted, or forced into a series of reactive moves, by a desire to beat your competitors. Your aim should be to implement your own solutions – the “game plan” you developed earlier in the campaign, and then refined through interaction with your prospects and clients. Your approach must be environment-centric and client-centric rather than competitor-centric. Remember, you are not creating value for prospects and clients by competing with your competitor.

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Fight the enemies strategy, not his forces. At this stage, if things are proceeding well, your competitors will go over to the offensive. Yes, the offensive – because you have created a situation so dangerous to your competitors, by threatening to displace them from the environment, they have to attack you to get back into the game. Thus it is normal, even in the most successful sales campaigns, to have spikes of offensive competitor activity late in the campaign. This does not mean you have done something wrong (though it may: it depends on whether you have successfully mobilized the population).

At this point the tendency is to go for the jugular and seek to destroy the enemy’s forces in open battle. This is rarely the best choice, because provoking a major showdown plays into enemy hands by forcing a decision. Instead, attack the competitor’s strategy: if he is seeking to recapture the allegiance of a segment of the contacts, then co-opt them against him. The permutations are endless but the principle is the same – fight the enemy’s strategy, not his forces.

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Small is beautiful. Another natural tendency is to go for large-scale, mass programs. In particular, we have a tendency to template ideas that succeed in on area and transplant them to another, and we tend to take small programs that work and try to replicate them on a larger scale. Again, this is usually a mistake – often programs succeed because of specific local conditions of which we are unaware, or because their very smallness kept them below the enemy’s radar and help them flourish unmolested.

At the company-level, programs that succeed in one territory often also succeed in another, but small-scale projects rarely proceed smoothly into large programs. Keep solutions small: this makes them cheap, sustainable, low-key, and (importantly) recoverable if they fail. You can add new programs – also small, cheap, and tailored to local conditions – as the situation allows.

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Practice armed civil affairs. You must restructure the prospect or client’s environment to displace your competitor from it. You must focus first on meeting basic needs, improving the problems that you were hired to fix, then progressing up towards more value creation as each successive need is met. Surveys and personal interviews with contacts at all levels, regularly executed and maintained, are an invaluable tool for understanding needs and tracking progress in meeting those needs over time.

You need cooperation from all areas of your client’s team, as well as your own. You will not be able to control these teams. Instead, you need to work on a shared diagnosis of problems, building a consensus that helps you self-synchronize. Your role is identify needs and improvements and to build networks and mobilize the populations.

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Local forces should mirror the enemy, not ourselves. By this stage you will be working closely with the prospects and clients in your territory, training them or supporting them, and building their capability to achieve the promised results that allowed you win their business. The natural tendency is to build forces in our own image, with the aim of eventually handing our role over to them. This is a mistake. In order to lock out competitors, it isn’t enough that we deliver the promise results that gained the business. Instead, we have build in the results that a competitor might also be able to achieve. If there is dissatisfaction or frustration in achieving those results, your competitors will easily gain access to your contacts, and these contacts will open the door.

When training and supporting your clients, seek to build the ability to generate results from your products and services while at the same time building the ability to generate the results that your competitors might also build.

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Exploit a single narrative. Since sales is a competition to mobilize support, it pays to know how people are mobilized. In most companies, there are opinion-makers who set trends and influence perception. Your competitor has a single narrative, a simple, unifying, easily-expressed story or explanation that organizes people’s experience and provides a framework for understanding. To undercut their influence you must exploit an alternative narrative: or better yet, tap into an existing narrative that excludes your competitors.

This narrative is often worked for you by higher headquarters – but only you have the detailed knowledge to tailor the narrative to local conditions and your prospects to generate leverage from it. At the company level, you do this in baby steps, by getting to know contacts who are opinion-makers, winning their trust, learning what mobilizes them and building on this to find a single narrative that emphasizes the inevitability and rightness of your ultimate success. This is art, not science.

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Take stock regularly. You need to develop metrics early in your campaign, and refine them as the you progress. They should cover a range of activities and economic results and issues. Use metrics intelligently to form an overall impression of progress – not in a mechanistic “traffic light” fashion. Typical metrics include: new engagements with prospects and clients, engagements with prospects in the pipeline, proposals and presentations delivered, win/loss ratios, sales and margins, and sales and margins compared to prior periods. These mean virtually nothing as a snap shot – trends over time are the true indicators of progress in your territory.

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Note: Despite the lack of continuity with the original article, I have removed the part of this article called beware the children. It doesn’t fit well in translating the articles to sales. However, the section on engaging women makes more sense than it should, and it had to be retained. For more on marketing to women, I recommend chapter 13 of Tom Peters‘ Re-Imagine: Business Excellence in a Disruptive Age.

Engage the women. Most people at the highest level of executive management are still men. In marketing campaigns generally, women are mostly ignored. While this changing (too slowly), know that women hold more influence over decision-making and purchasing than men in both households and business. Build your campaign to appeal to women, and build networks that include women. Win the women and you own the market.

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