Says Focus on Both Internal and External Customers Increase Business Success

SEATTLE, Washington (April 14, 2008) Paul Travis of OneAccord was interviewed for an article entitled, “Some Visions of Workday of the Future.”by columnist Margaret Culp syndicated in publications such as the Hartford Courant and the Dallas Morning News.

Mr. Travis is a Partner at OneAccord, a leading sales and marketing professional services firm headquartered in Seattle with 15 offices in North America.Travis also co-authored the book “Leadership on Demand: How Smart CEOs Tap Interim Management to Drive Revenue.” During his 25 years in high technology, marketing, and consulting, he was nicknamed “the Columbo of Marketing” for remarkable skill in uncovering what drives customer behavior.

The article quotes Mr. Travis as saying: “[Businesspeople are] realizing that they can only go ‘so far’ with past measures of profitability”. He goes on to say that customers are rarely lost to competitors, but more often because the businesses they patronize seem not to care.

Even internal customers can feel devalued, Mr. Travis noted. A focus on inter-departmental collaboration, such as between Marketing Departments and Research & Development groups, can help reduce finger-pointing and increase overall output.

OneAccord partner and co-founder Dave Parker said, “At OneAccord, we view organizational success as more than an improvement in the sales division, a great product launch or a new brand or a revamped sales force. A OneAccord engagement leaves the organization with the infrastructure to grow predictably and a culture that can adapt to the changes necessary to reach the next level.”

About OneAccord

OneAccord is a partner-owned, sales and marketing professional services firm that delivers significant operating executive experience to clients. The firm brings customer-driven organizational competencies that can empower clients to multiply revenues and delivers products and services that incorporate best practices in strategic sales, marketing and leadership to drive profitable, sustainable revenue. OneAccord partners’ operational experience spans a wide range of industries, from consumer products and services to business-to-business technology and service providers in large corporations and mid-market businesses, as well as start-ups. Client engagements can encompass time and/or deliverable defined project work, to interim or permanent leadership roles.

Columbo is a trademark and copyright of Universal Studios.

Outside Influences

Globalization continues to shorten cycle-times and deepen the talent pool. Leveraged corporate consolidations, mergers & acquisitions, and continued moves toward outsourcing have put tremendous pressure on corporate cultures – with companies often increasing their talent-churn, and leaving “career security” up to the individual to manage. Along with the accolades of success, most mid-career executives are deeply yearning for more control, balance and significance in their lives.

Today’s experienced professionals have increasingly been called a Free-Agent Nation, with an estimated 1 in 4 workers working outside the bounds of regular, full-time employment. (2) In the last generation, a typical executive would work for two or three companies during their career. Today the average is six to eight companies – and there’s every indication that the number will continue to climb. Companies are striving to create increasingly flexible workforces, permanently changing the model of a lifelong career at a single company.

The restructuring of American business means we are coming to the end of the age of the employer and employee. With all this fracturing of businesses into different and smaller units, employers can’t guarantee jobs anymore because they don’t know what their companies will look like next year. Everyone is on their way to becoming an independent contractor. The new workforce contract will be, ‘Show up at the my office five days a week and do what I want you to do, but you handle your own insurance, benefits, health care and everything else.’ (3)

Executive job tenures are shrinking. Talent is increasingly just one more commodity. So, what career-model aligns with these 21st Century trends?

“You may have begun your career as an employee. You most certainly will end it as a consultant. In between, you will criss-cross the employment and assignment trajectories several times.” (4)

In this insecure market, the ability to adapt and be positioned for the next opportunity is the closest thing to job security. “Security” exists in knowing you can work on a Project, Interim, or Full-Time basis - as each situation might require. The key is to have as little “transition down time” as possible.

Is there a model that can flip all of these trends to your advantage? The OneAccord team member structure is designed to create a powerful career management opportunity within a single organization. OneAccord team members can manage their careers from project assignments, through interim work, to permanent employment, and back again. Mixing and matching to meet their career needs in a way that delivers the flexibility that the global market requires.

At the beginning of the 20th century the average life expectancy was 47. Today’s 50’ish executive has 25-30 additional years to go. What are you going to do? Disappear to the Sunbelt as soon as possible, or redefine your professional success – finding significance, multiplying yourself, and building a lasting legacy? It’s really up to you.

To look into joining the OneAccord team, please send a resume to careers@oneaccordpartners.com

1. “Managing Oneself”, Peter F. Drucker, HBR, Exec. Summary Mar-Apr 1999
2. According to a survey by Drake Beam Morin.
3. “What In The World Is Going On?”, Herb Meyer, Global Intelligence Briefing For CEO’s
4. “Good Jobs Are Perishable”, Laurence J. Stybel, Ed.D & Maryanne Peabody
5. “The Short Life of the Chief Marketing Office.”, Kiley, David and Helm, Burt. BusinessWeek. 29, November, 2007.
6. Tatum. 2008 www.tatumllc.com/news_room.aspx.

SEATTLE, Washington (March 23, 2008) Paul Travis of OneAccord LLC has been elected President of the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Institute of Management Consultants USA. Mr. Travis is a partner at OneAccord, a leading sales and marketing professional services firm headquartered in Seattle with 15 offices in North America.

Mr. Travis co-authored the book “Leadership on Demand: How Smart CEOs Tap Interim Management to Drive Revenue.” Nicknamed “the Columbo of Marketing” for remarkable success in digging up clues to true customer behavior, Mr. Travis has spent 25 years in high technology, marketing, and consulting. His two core specialties are:
• Determining and developing the right product for a given target market
• Establishing the right marketing infrastructure to profitably attain and retain customers.

“One of our core beliefs is that startups often need the same things to become successful as the largest private and public companies do,” said Jeff Rogers, a Managing Partner at OneAccord. “Paul knows how to apply the strategies for success in business to building member benefits and community viability for IMC’s Pacific Northwest Chapter.”

About OneAccord
OneAccord is a partner-owned, sales and marketing professional services firm that delivers significant operating executive experience to clients. The firm brings customer-driven organizational competencies that can empower clients to multiply revenues and delivers products and services that incorporate best practices in strategic sales, marketing and leadership to drive profitable, sustainable revenue. OneAccord partners’ operational experience spans a wide range of industries, from consumer products and services to business-to-business technology and service providers in large corporations and mid-market businesses, as well as start-ups. Client engagements can encompass time and/or deliverable defined project work, to interim or permanent leadership roles.

Successful leadership will additionally focus on transformation/innovation. If Henry Ford had been merely trying to achieve incremental improvement, he would have tried to breed a faster horse.

I’m reminded of a breakfast meeting I attended recently with Carly Fiorona, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard. While she took pride in being a good listener with all stakeholders, she knew her leadership group must be transformational in their thinking and lead the commitment to innovation. H-P has often commented publicly that a significant percentage of their revenue comes from products that simply didn’t exist 18 months earlier. A bit of Moore’s Law in practice!

She told a fascinating story of the development of the digital camera. It wasn’t demand from customers, who all seemed satisfied with the 100 year domination of the market by Kodak; and it wasn’t exotic research in some secret lab. It was transformational thinking that led to innovation at its best. In an H-P center scientists watched eight year olds learn to surf and master the web. Occasionally they would print a page. Each time they were asked why they printed a particular page they responded in way that made it quite clear the print function was a way of claiming ownership. Until they printed it, it was just information on the web, but once they printed it, it became theirs.

Next came brilliant leadership, fostering innovation and potential transformation. They needed to determine what the connection was between the web and the print function that H-P could leverage, creating a new product or service. They felt H-P possessed a clear advantage in digitizing data, and they were the leader in print technology. The concept of having images digitized, and then being able to deliver them anywhere on earth immediately after they were created, allowing the recipient to print, and thereby “own” them was the epiphany that conceptualized digital photography. Within just a few years, H-P had toppled the once mighty Kodak and was in the enviable position of being able to claim market leadership. And now, in just a few years, it is estimated that the vast majority, perhaps as many as 80% of all photos taken are taken with a cell phone, and are immediately ready to forward electronically.
But it’s not enough to invent something. The mere creation of a new product doesn’t really help anybody until it’s taken successfully into the market. You must produce! You must make the product and you must move it into the market effectively and efficiently.

While this may seem intuitive while thinking about products and markets, it is rarely practiced effectively when it comes to the sales arena where it is largely absent altogether. It’s a critically important part of a healthy sales process. Companies often tinker with quotas, assigned territories and commission/incentive plans, trying to make things just a bit better than they were the previous period. And yet we read in a recently published study that less than 10% of most company’s salespeople can effectively describe their core business. The ability to turn average sale people into a high performance team often requires transformation. It’s executive leadership that must recognize when small improvements are not the answer; rather the solution may very well be in recognizing when to pull the trigger on a transformation of the sale force. This is not to suggest a whole new staff. On the contrary, while occasionally some do need to replaced, the ability to think creatively and create a productive environment is what is called for in this case. I once thought of it as much like playing golf. If we ask a golfer who normally shoots in the nineties to shoot a par 72 and offer him a million dollars to do so, he’ll fail, so it’s not about the incentive. If we tell him we’ll fire him if he doesn’t shoot par, he’ll still fail, so it’s not about the threat. If we show him exactly what to do, and then tell him to go do exactly as demonstrated in order to shoot the desired par score, once again he’ll likely fail, so it s not about instruction. So what’s the answer? How do we get a 90’s golfer to shoot a par round? In golf the answer is a scramble. In scramble, all players work together to achieve the best possible score. Each contributes his best shot toward the goal of a lower score, and to be sure, when the round is over, the player who has never scored under 90, will have posted a par or better round. It happens every time. And it does in sales too. When we come together in an environment that allows the entire team to contribute their best effort, where all have a role and contribute to the victory that which they do best, the result will always be much better than the individual is able to accomplish by himself. We will have succeeded in transforming an average salesperson into a high performance, highly productive contributor.

The issue then is from whom we should expect the innovation and occasional transformation, such that we’re not relegated to the scrapheap of obsolescence. The answer is confident, skilled, visionary leadership. Employees can be empowered to recognize process deficiencies and recommend improvements; it’s a matter of the culture. But it’s the leadership that must find ways to pull themselves out of the trees and look candidly and critically at the forest, listening to all stakeholders, but relying on none exclusively. The role of transformation and the requirement for innovation are among the most important roles in managerial leadership today. Many leaders have come to rely on external interim skilled and experienced help to position them for success as these significant changes are sold to the employees, and embedded in the culture and processes. They realize that a fresh perspective based on years of experience removes the bias that often exists toward the status quo. And the ability to discern precisely when it needs to occur separates the well known successes from the mediocre. The desire and ability to predict, anticipate and foster a culture that craves innovation, and expects transformational creativity is the leadership we will be reading about in the chronicles of success.

An article by: Michael Pearce, Partner

www.OneAccordPartners.com
Ofc: 425-830-4156
Hm: 425-453-9688
188 - 106th Ave NE #650
Bellevue WA 98004 USA
Michael.Pearce@OneAccordPartners.com

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Demand for your goods is at an all time high. Business is so good that you cannot provide the customer with what they need fast enough. You’re anxious as the company’s executive about how long this business cycle will last and if cap ex investment will justify itself 2 or more years forward.

This scenario of seemingly unlimited opportunity to grow revenue becomes a nightmare for some companies.

One client called their posture…order prevention… avoid answering the phone…

While this approach does not endear a company with customers, it’s all too common. Commonsense suggests there’s an opportunity to provide value in satisfying customer in such circumstances, and with even higher margins… but how?

Some suggestions for the senior sales and marketing executive:

• Develop knowledge about supply chain and when products can be reasonably made and delivered to customers> demonstrate to customers your leadership on understanding and managing the process issues;
• Know your most important customer very well > define the ideal client profile; tier their value to your company in segments and treated accordingly;

Strategies to address demand issues:

• Consolidate business around the largest worldwide customers by offering preferred contract rates for extended terms;
• Focus precisely on key account needs and issues to meet delivery expectations;
• Process these needs into ideal client profiles that might look like the following:
• Extended multi-year contracts;
• Client understands Company’s value proposition and the need of dialogue in partnership if the service provider is going to properly address their economic and business issues;
• Emphasis on delivery solutions to problem versus price point;
• Win- Win account management approach to establishing benchmarks, goals, fair pricing and incentives to achieve mutual satisfaction and benefit;
• Greater mutual business visibility to understand requirements for profitability, equipment and people, supply chain, and cap ex support for manufacturing expansion for product.

The most significant in orienting a business in a demand management scenario is a willingness to train a company’s efforts on listening to the customer, and then outlining what can be reasonably accomplished to meet the challenges.

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Danger comes in multiple forms but in this case, danger is defined as job security, or the lack thereof. What we know is that the average tenure of mid-market executive is just over 24 months according to BusinessWeek and we also know that very few people are asking why?

There are numerous factors behind the statistics. Loyalty in the workplace is gone. We watched as young adults our parents grow up in a world of pension, tenure, and retirement only to have the model flip on them to 401k, contract, and consultant. As we watched the transition of American business happen above us, we sadly, yet sub-consciously were taught that we needed to be free agents, to take care of ourselves because the company surely wasn’t going to take care of us. This created an environment where the experience of five companies in fifteen years is viewed as superior to the loyalty and proven ability to deliver over twenty years in the same organization. People with multiple jobs have seen more cultures, more problems, and more exposure to good and bad leadership. They just know more!

We now live in a professional world where the ability to deliver on the job for an extended period of time simply has little value. Who reading this right now really thinks about the impact your decisions today will have on the company five or ten years down the line? Today’s business climate almost requires us to live for the day. Your shareholders rarely say; “no its okay, don’t worry about the quarter, just make sure you deliver moving forward.” What about the Private Equity Group saying to the Founder/CEO, “We want you to make the right decisions for the long term viability of the brand even if that means a reduction in top line for a while.”

When the metrics in which we hold leadership accountable are short term in nature, the behaviors are soon to follow. So why does an average tenure for a VP of Sales of just over 2 years surprise anyone? One of two things is going to happen: either he/she is successful in making a big splash and leverages it into a superior position inside or outside the company, or, more commonly, they simply can’t deliver in an acceptable timeframe and that timeframe is ever shrinking. Just recently, I knew of an individual that took over as the Interim VP of Sales for Private Equity held company. They were released from the role in two months because the revenue wasn’t coming in as the firm expected.

Here is where we get to the real rub in the mid-market, which by the way, is where the churn of leadership is most prevalent. We simply ask too much from one person. In my days with Maytag, the VP had multiple Directors, who in turn had a platoon of Managers, who ultimately led the sales organization. To use a military analogy, the Generals created the strategy; the Colonels took those strategies and then broke them down into actionable plans for the Sergeants who barked tactical commands for the Corporals and Privates. In the mid-market company today, there are no Colonels or Sergeants. The Generals are talking directly to the Privates and that language of “Strategy and Vision” has no translation for the tactical, bag carrying sales rep to understand. The end result is a big gap.

In our business, we are consistently asked to join organizations that have churned through several executives. The cycle is eerily similar in most companies. They have hired good pedigree, strong resumes and rock star bios. The hire traditionally is a strategic mind and can cast a vision for what they wish to accomplish when you bestow upon them the mantle of leadership in your company. Then sometime after 6 months but almost always before 18, it starts to happen. The grand promise and hope attached to this individual starts to erode. The vision isn’t converting to revenue or share growth. The team is starting to show frustration or you are losing key talent and the reason is right before you, yet, you cannot see it.

Organizations need executive leadership to cast the vision and they need leadership to lead the troops with empathy, compassion and consistency. Or in my terms, you need the visionary, entrepreneurial leader that is also excellent on analytics, metrics and empathetic people management. Now try to count on one hand the leaders that you know that fit the description in the last sentence. If you happen to know one that can deliver both for an extended period of time, they are currently running companies or are senior executives in major corporations. Likely, they probably aren’t working for you.

The solution is simple, so simple it may surprise you. That surprise may turn into anger if you are currently paying a sitting VP while still paying for the severance package from the old one. Hire the visionary to build your strategy, create your structure and define the tactics or plan to achieve success. If you can’t find one that will take a W2 post with a known exit, look to do it on contract. Embrace the reality that this person is probably only with you for a season and begin the search for the empathetic, strong leader of people that can carry the ball handed off by the visionary. You will then have the strategy to achieve exponential growth followed by the leader that will actually get it done.

Crazy and controversial? You bet! Is it logical and real? From my perspective, it is the future…

Darin Leonard is a Regional Managing Partner at OneAccord, a professional firm that provides interim and permanent executives to mid-market companies to drive exponential revenue growth. OneAccord is Bellevue, Washington based with over 40 Partners in 12 offices across the country {www.oneaccordpartners.com}. Also, Darin is currently serving as the CEO of Dream Dinners; the Snohomish, Washington based company that pioneered the Meal Assembly industry. Dream Dinners has over 200 franchise locations around the United States {www.dreamdinners.com}. Darin can be reached at darin.leonard@oneaccordpartners.com