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Strategy Is A Sales Game

Forbes Coaches Council

Peter Brodie, Organisation Design Specialist and Director of The Orgworks.

Let's start by defining strategy. There are competing views on what strategy is and how to achieve it. In my opinion, to put it simply, strategy is the determination of an organization'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-centered approach. This article focuses on the latter.

Creating a strategy is straightforward, right? The executive team has an away day, and 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 organization, perhaps it is time to consider a more collaborative approach.

Chief executives and directors need to learn that creating a successful strategy that everyone buys into and works toward 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 purchases 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 organization 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.

After working with hundreds of commercial and public organizations, 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-Centered Approach

People buy based on emotion and justify their actions based on logic. Your strategy needs both for your organization’s staff 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 input.

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 behavior. 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 program just because you tell them to. They need a reason to act.

People need to associate the action of buying into the changes as a way of creating pleasure and the act of not buying as producing "pain." This is the master formula for persuasion. People are drawn toward pleasure and move away from pain. As a leader, you need to use this powerful driving force when creating change.

Strategies Must Sell Outcomes

For someone to act, they need to be dissatisfied with how 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.

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 it.

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 achieve better results than top-down approaches, in my experience.

The strategic answers to your future survival and success can be found within the organization.

A collaborative approach to creating a strategy consists of four phases:

1. Conduct a situational analysis (internal factors, external factors and interdependencies) to establish the strategic context and to identify and categorize the aligning criteria for the future strategy.

2. Using the output of Phase 1 to provide structure, run a series of workshops with stakeholder groups to gather ideas. Synthesize the findings to establish common themes and options and their goodness of fit with the aligning criteria.

3. 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).

4. Present the outputs as a strategy document. Communicate as far and as wide as possible. Make it easy to understand so the staff can recognize their inputs to the strategy.

Wrapping Up

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, fiscal year ends, or 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 likely be more willing to participate in the review and planning activities.


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