by In 1968, at the height of the Vietnam war, there was over 543,000 American military personnel in the theatre of conflict, but only 80,000 of these were considered actual combat troops. What was everyone else doing? Supporting the front line!
Wars aren’t typically fought by everyone engaging the enemy in direct combat. The majority of personnel are needed for:
- Provisioning
- Engineering and Construction
- Transportation and Aviation
- Mechanical Assistance and Repair
- Emergency Medical and Care
- Food Preparation
- Strategy and Planning
- Intelligence and Surveillance
- … and hundreds of other roles to support the thin front line
These other roles exist as a multiplier of over 6 to 1. In other words, for every one person shooting at the enemy, more than six people are supporting them in some way to accomplish the mission.
Businesses are very similar. Of course, companies don’t shoot at enemies; instead, they shoot FOR customers. As management guru Peter Drucker succinctly states in the following quote, the primary purpose of a business is to create a customer:
“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.” – Peter Drucker
Get out there and sell!
In business, your front lines are your sales staff. When sales are down, a typical knee-jerk response from management is to take out the big stick and start beating the salespeople. “Get out there and sell!” is the yell. But if we look at it from the context of a combat unit, we see that sales teams primarily fail when support systems fail.
Here are some common reasons how support systems fail the needs of the front line:
… here are your business cards, there’s the phone, now start dialing for dollars!
- No clarity of mission – “Sell more widgets!” is not the rallying cry of a real mission. The theme of “Absolutely, positively, overnight!” (FedEx) is. By embedding this theme into their operations, salespeople know that the business’ mission is critical to their customer’s well being. Clarity of purpose, and pride of action ensue.
- No intelligence or surveillance systems – I was on the 53rd-floor offices of a major commercial bank a few years ago talking sales and marketing with the president of one of its divisions. The nearest I could tell, the bank’s primary go-to-market strategy for its sales force was: here are your business cards, there’s the phone, now start dialing for dollars! I was shocked. How much further could they have gone if they supplied even the simplest of market intelligence? Examples include:
- reports on the competition’s major accounts and what services they are currently providing to them
- targeting criteria for new prospects
- deep customer profiling – pain, patterns of behavior, motives, trends for future customer pain, etc.
- deep competitor profiling – capabilities, resources, industry penetration, etc.
- future trends for the customer’s industry, to offer in trade
- etc.
- No plan – Who, what, where, when, and why, why, why, why, why (5 whys) need to be answered BEFORE the campaign starts. Step by step workflows need to be established to ensure that every lead has a maximum opportunity to close.
- Inadequate weapons – Clear value propositions and offers embedded in professional collaterals are a requirement. Examples we create for clients include:
- What is the free or trial offering?
- What is the starter offering?
- What is the “make it easy to switch” offering?
- What is the core offering?
- What are the add-ons to increase value?
- What are the members-only offerings?
- What are the strategic partner pairings?
- No pride in the troops – I can’t count the number of times I’ve been in organizations where the sales staff are considered 2nd class citizens, and necessary evils. Can you imagine a country treating their military personnel in a like manner? Is it any wonder that a lack of motivation and poor performance results?
The above are only some of the ways a company fails their front line. Is your company guilty of any of them?
Give your sales team the marketing tools they need and watch their performance soar!
