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The Culture of Asymmetric Marketing:
Enabling Marketing Management by Values (MMBV) through ‘Culture Management Systems’
Joseph E. Bentzel, Founder
Asymmetri Inc.
‘Ownership’ as a Values Component of MMBV
What do I mean when I say that ‘ownership’ is a core values component of an MMBV approach to building a highly competitive marketing and sales culture? What I mean is that every individual in the organization will answer the question “Who owns the challenge of creating revenue momentum” with the same answer….”I do.” Not he does, or she does, or the sales guy with the fat rolodex who rarely comes into the office.
Working to embed the ownership values component is the best long term approach to eliminating ‘leads falling through the cracks’ or confusion over ‘what constitutes a qualified prospect’, two of the major culture gap symptoms uncovered in the Accenture study. Shared ownership of revenue momentum creation, not complete reliance on your ‘rolodex warriors’ in the sales team is the surest path to asymmetric advantage in the new uncertainty of the sandstorm economy. As Sun Tzu pointed out, “Therefore good warriors seek effectiveness in battle from the force of momentum, not from individual people." Translation. Creating sales momentum is not just the job of the sales organization, it’s a challenge for the whole sales and marketing culture. This is not just a noble idea, but in fact the way things are actually getting sold to IT organizations in the sandstorm.
Sun Tzu describes it this way. “Getting people to fight by letting the force of momentum work is like rolling logs and rocks. Logs and rocks are still when in a secure place, but role on an incline; they remain stationary if square, they roll if round. Therefore when people are skillfully led into battle, the momentum is like that of round rocks rolling down a high mountain---this is force.”
Creating momentum means fostering ownership best practices on the part of product marketing, partner marketing, field support, call center customer support, etc. that become the equivalent of the ‘round rocks’ on the ‘incline’ of sandstorm economy IT buying patterns.
How does this play out? In the new uncertainty, IT organizations considering new projects are increasingly demanding that technology sales and marketing organizations (both new and incumbent vendors) pre-prove ROI not simply to invest budget dollars but to invest the finite ‘human bandwidth’ of their staffs. Let’s take the application or infrastructure software segment as an example where a ‘qualified lead’ does not even exist without shared ownership by:
- Product Marketing: In order to pre-prove ROI, IT organizations expect software products to be highly evaluation-ready via either a downloadable trial version of the product, or a hosted instance of the software available as a subscription web service. Without this, the sales force is not really operating with the force of momentum, but as ‘individuals’ attempting to convince the customer prospect ‘a priori’ of their value proposition. I don’t care how many ‘relationships’ your newly hired VP of sales has or how many names are in his rolodex. Without pre-proving ROI through the execution of best practices in software marketing (trialware editions), how can you ever really know if you have a qualified prospect? Product marketing organizations with a culture of shared ownership take pains to design evaluation readiness into products upfront and do not see it as an afterthought feature.
- Partnering/Distribution: If our hypothetical software company markets the software product via a network of partners, it is expected by IT organizations that these partners will not simply have evaluation-ware, but have access to a standard version of the product deployed in their shop and available to run full customer pilot programs or extended trials that may involve customization by the partner. This is especially true in vertical market situations with highly specialized business logic.
- Customer Service/Support: Asymmetric marketers know that up-selling and locking in existing customers is the key to establishing revenue momentum and a long term asymmetric advantage relative to these customers. Support and service organizations are critical in providing customer insight and competitive intelligence on how to make that happen and what product changes need to occur. Without embedding ownership values in the support organization, up-selling and emergent opportunity detection are less likely to happen.
To really drive momentum creation in the sandstorm, the traditional boundaries between sales, marketing, business development, field engineering support etc. must evolve into what the new military calls joint warfighting, unified command and control and a single view of the battlespace. And it’s not enough to have a modern SFA or CRM system, there has to be cultural transformation.
Let’s re-wind a few pages to revisit the research compiled by Accenture on sales organization effectiveness.
- 58% of companies say that sales teams are ‘stuck in the past’. One startling thing about this ‘stuck in the past’ observation is that most of the companies surveyed have more often than not installed enterprise Sales Force Automation (SFA) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems from major vendors like Seibel or rely on web based systems like Salesforce.com or Upshot.com (now part of Siebel). With so much sales force automation, how can anybody be stuck in the past? Here’s how.
In my essay, ‘Asymmetric Marketing: Winning in the New Uncertainty’, I make reference to some powerful observations about cultural behaviors made by legendary physicist Richard Feynman. Let me repeat some of that here in a new context.
In 1974 Richard Feynman gave a commencement address at CalTech he called Cargo Cult Science. In his speech Feynman tells the story of a group of south sea islanders. “During the war (WW2) they saw airplanes (landing on their island) with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.”
More than a few installations of SFA and CRM systems fall into the trap of cargo cult marketing, doing what management thinks is needed (i.e. automate the sales force with new technology) but momentum does not occur without the cultural component being changed, without reward and incentive systems that foster momentum. In fact the SFA vendors have recognized this and the new features and capabilities that are being added to SFA and CRM systems are aimed at addressing this issue. For example, Salesforce S3 was updated to include cross-organization collaboration capabilities like ‘team selling’ and ‘opportunity sharing’, while incorporating a new web services API to extend the traditional SFA system functionality to partner systems, internal marketing campaign management systems and miscellaneous customer facing systems (call center, ecommerce). Siebel is also getting into the culture game, having recently bought startup Motiva, to incorporate their capability to dynamically create cross-organization or cross-channel incentive programs. In other words, next generation shared reward and incentive systems referred to as EIM (enterprise incentive management) need to integrate with SFA functionality to foster the values component I call ‘ownership’.
Organizations committed to not staying ‘stuck in the past’ work to deconstruct, reconstruct and incentivize the selling process with ‘momentum’ (not total dependence on a few sales heroes) as the outcome, and shared ownership as a core embedded value. But they go one step further and reward behaviors that extend the concept of community outside the company through a sense of higher mission.
Intangible Incentives---A Sense of ‘Higher Mission’
Many in the high tech industry have historically embraced a sense of higher mission to super-charge their cultures. For example, the open source movement has a market power greater than the sum of its parts for this reason. Without the culture of collaboration as an embedded principle, the open source movement would not be successful. Many ‘white hat hackers’ in the security space also see it as their higher mission to expose software vulnerabilities through highly publicized system break-ins. And we may not like it but those of us in the marketing and sales community of tech have left that period of history where expert B-school panels on the new economy held interesting cocktail party discussions around concepts like ‘creative destruction’ and entered a time of focus on the extremely uncreative real market destruction that threatens the very existence of individuals and businesses, and the western way of life itself. Understanding this higher purpose is why Akamai denied service to the Al Jazeera network after its founder was murdered by terrorists on September 11th.
While the bubble and the ‘web of entitlement’ may have been all about rapid personal enrichment and anything it took to get there, a growing number of business and marketing leaders in the tech sandstorm economy are turning to higher mission or higher purpose as part of their reward systems, their intangible incentives in dealing with this threat of real destruction. For example, a number of asymmetric marketers are starting to see that one important aspect of their role in society is to create and market technology products that foster homeland defense. Like the high tech industry in Israel, a nation that has dramatically grown it’s software exports during a 20 year terror-induced sandstorm of market uncertainty, conscious asymmetric marketers are part of what I call the ‘eFront’, i.e. the electronic front in the war on terror. One of the key reasons behind the growth in the Israeli technology industry, as well as its ability to pioneer in the creation of new categories of capability (security, instant messaging, electronic warfare, optical processors) is its relationship to the Israeli government and the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces). This has fostered a sense of shared ownership for national survival in the face of decades of terrorism. Like their counterparts in Israel, U.S. asymmetric marketers align with government IT initiatives, adopt new partnering models, and know intuitively that the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York and Washington altered the relationship of US tech companies to the US government for the foreseeable future.
Against this background, embedding a sense of higher mission in your marketing and sales organization may best be accomplished not simply by fostering community volunteerism in general but by turning your ‘government marketing’ team into a values attractor, an engine of self-organizing activity and a hotbed of rich dialog within the organization as a whole. Here are some examples of what I mean by ‘higher mission statements’ focused on the government marketing team:
Vertical SW Provider Higher Mission: ‘We provide business intelligence and analytic software to target Al Qaeda funds. Part of our reward system is living in a terror-free world and we want to play our part.’
E-security Managed Services Provider: ‘Our company is proud to defend corporate networks and critical infrastructure against cyberterrorism. Part of our reward system is in knowing that despite uncertainty outside our control, we can help to foster business continuity.’
Mobile Services Network Provider: ‘This organization is dedicated to provide mobile technology and connectivity to first responders who are on the frontlines of homeland security. No fire or rescue professional need suffer additional risks for lack of robust mobile communication.’
Culture Management System Module 4: Team Incentive Management
The 4th module of an asymmetric marketing CMS should incorporate EIM (enterprise incentive management) technology both to reinforce your ‘ownership’ values component across the organization and reward a sense of higher mission. EIM will allow you to implement ‘pay for team performance’ strategies that can reward teams and individuals and be managed directly by the responsible business managers. With EIM as a component of your CMS, you can design sales and marketing compensation models that reinforce the ‘sobriety’, ‘get real’ and ‘self-organizing’ values components described above and simultaneously facilitate market momentum. With EIM you can reverse engineer your best practices and reward only those that create momentum while eliminating barriers to collaboration or compensation programs that reinforce your silos.
As I mentioned above, both Siebel and Salesforce.com are incorporating EIM technology into their SFA platforms. In addition, stand-alone EIM vendors like Synygy and Callidus can also be considered as providing support for the embedding of ownership values in the sales and marketing organization by enabling dynamic compensation models for self-organizing teams.
Conclusion
Culture facilitates execution, for better or worse. Culture releases behaviors that create positive or negative momentum. A healthy marketing and sales culture is not based on canned HR department Corporate Values statements but is about strong traditions passed down by word of mouth, and repeatedly embedded by reputation-rich doer leaders in day-to-day processes in which everyone participates, e.g. conflict-rich weblog-based dialog, cross-organizational collaboration and shared momentum creation. Culture is what drives people to execute creatively across organizational boundaries, or dysfunctionally engage in regular turf wars between and among sales, marketing, engineering, service, finance, legal, etc.
The culture of asymmetric marketing in the new uncertainty is about capturing asymmetric market advantage based on the strength and flexibility of your core embedded values systems and the cultural artifacts and self-organizing processes that take shape around those embedded values. When a new, post-bubble generation of startups and emerging category leaders create an internal marketing environment focused on ‘bootstrapping’ their business without venture capital in the tradition of garage entrepreneurism, that’s the culture of asymmetric marketing. When market share leaders get real about their vulnerability and don’t shoot the messenger for blowing the whistle in advance of a meltdown, that’s the culture of asymmetric marketing. When even Microsoft, the mother of all market gorillas, takes in negative customer feedback and adjusts its strategy and licensing model in real time to gain an asymmetric customer advantage, that’s the culture of asymmetric marketing.
As you have seen throughout this essay, my own views on healthy marketing culture are drawn from many sources, but principally from the Spartan, pre-bubble cultural legacy of high technology entrepreneurism in the United States. I also draw upon ‘recovery theory’ as practiced by the professional addiction treatment industry and related self-help groups as a way to understand the mass phenomena of business dysfunction called the tech bubble and the toxic values passed down from that period to today’s marketers. I also integrate complexity theory into my approach particularly in terms of understanding why some organizational cultures are dynamic and can cope with uncertainty, and others are static and paralyzed in the face of uncertainty. My advocacy of social software technologies inside organizations as a key element of Marketing Management by Values and Culture Management Systems is also based on understanding the power of self-organizing processes and the infrastructure or catalysts that enables those self-organizing complexity-driven processes to take place. Finally, my discussion of higher mission in the context of the war-on-terror, while perhaps controversial to some, is simply practical for today’s marketing warriors because to win this prolonged conflict the U.S. high technology industry must remain ‘2nd to none’. This will most definitely not happen if the dysfunctional marketing values of the bubble are not replaced with the core process values of a culture of asymmetric marketing.
Part Five: Ownership
About the Author: Joseph E. Bentzel is President of Asymmetri Incorporated, a marketing consultancy providing ‘asymmetric marketing’ services to high technology companies in the U.S and around the world.
Copyright 2003, Joseph E. Bentzel. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction with Author’s Permission.
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