I recently was discussing with a client the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) that they endured intermittently for a month, before they were finally able to resolve the issue. As it turned out, the hosted services provider simply did not have the hardware infrastructure to handle the data traffic rates that were being hurled at them. In the end, there was no choice but to move to another hosting service provider who had engineered their system to handle the type of bandwidth that a DDoS attack was capable of.

It certainly raises the question of weaknesses and how we deal with them in our business endeavors. We have all been asked the question during a job interview at one time or another, about what our weaknesses are. It has to be one of the most popular interview questions of all time. Seemingly, it must be important to know the answer. Yet, it is also one of the most disliked and poorly answered questions, even though we know it’s coming.

The question really seems to attack our psyche. It seems that we would rather not have others know what our weaknesses are. And it may be that we do not want to dwell on this topic very much even by ourselves. It is just difficult to admit that we have a weakness. It just has such a negative connotation. That our performance could be hindered. That we may fail. That we can be beaten. So we do our best to change the topic and bury the idea.

I must admit that I do not like the question either. It bothers me to think negatively. But it is important to our business success that we wrestle with the issue and deal with it. So the best way to do that is to simply ask the same question with different words. Here is my suggestion: “What areas do you need to improve, in order to better move towards your goals?”. This completely reframes our thinking. We are no longer thinking about what we are not good at. We are now thinking about our goals and how we can better attain them. The feeling we generate by thinking in this way can bring forward a much stronger motivational energy.

So having the strength to uncover our weaknesses, and finding the will to deal with them is a milestone in itself. You can feel good about that. But, it is not a one-time thing. It is much more akin to the Whac-A-Mole game. As you improve certain areas that warrant the attention to move you towards your goal, new areas will emerge. It then becomes a continual process of improvement, as you meet you goals and establish new ones.

In the world of commerce, we are in a period of immense change. And change in itself creates weaknesses in how we operate and execute our strategies. If you are not achieving your goals and are simply trudging along, believing that you can simply double-down to achieve your goals, you may be ignoring the weaknesses that have beset themselves in your processes. And if you can’t see those weaknesses that are so painful to uncover, perhaps someone can help you with that.

You can’t have one without the other.

The left brain-right brain theory came out of the work of Nobel Prize winning psychologist Roger W. Sperry. This is the guy who actually cut the brain into 2 halves and had a bunch of split-brain patients. The essence of his findings were that the left brain is wired for certain functions such as: logic, math and analytical thinking; while the right brain is wired for things like: creativity, intuition, reading emotions, and recognizing faces.

In the world of marketing, we are in a catch-up phase where the use of analytics is on the rise. All of that left-brain power was just not a big part of the marketing mix. Or rather it was not an effective part. The availability of necessary data was just not there for that left brain to churn through. So quite naturally, the right brain got to do more of the work. In some arenas, the right brain’s creative and intuitive nature was what marketing was all about. But as we have seen, the right brain marketing efforts of the past may have gotten lost in all of its creative energy, and became awash in creativity for the pure creative effect. In that pre-internet marketing model, getting the right creative agency was key. They were the genesis of marketing.

But now, all of a sudden, the amount of data is exploding as is the computer processing power that is cheaply available to us. We now have behavioral, demographic and transactional data that is enabling us to learn a lot more about the buyer. And so, the use of analytics is steadily growing so we can make better marketing decisions about what is effective and what is not. It seems that the creative side, that right brain processing power is quickly moving to take a back seat to all the strategizing that is taking place.

But hold on for one second, you have seen this story before. Whether you reflect back on Space Odyssey 2001 and what happened with HAL; or more you recently reflect on the meltdown in the financial markets driven by all those algorithms and the quants behind them, the same is true. Somewhere along the way, the logic failed and the processing model did not behave the way it was supposed to. And of course, when the unexpected happens, it really is unexpected and we are not prepared for the recourse. So the left brain also has the ability to go off the deep end as well.

So, as we add more analytics to drive our demand generation processes, we cannot let the left brain take over with its extraordinary logic and reasoning. The right brain brings that intuition and experience to guide the process, and the imagination to create different possibilities and hypotheses. In fact, recent research on the left brain-right brain subject has shown that if the 2 sides can be harnessed together, as co-processors on various tasks, it produces the best results. The challenge of course is to establish that process that will harness the 2 sides together.

Providing all of your marketing content to your buyer at one time, or at too fast of a pace, just results in a data dump. This has 2 consequences: (1) it is too much data for your buyer to process at one time; and (2) your ability to get some feedback or garner some insight is corrupted. The end result is more likely to be a stalled buying process.

I started my career in semiconductor sales, and one of the first lessons that I learned was the manner in which marketing content is provided to a buyer. The semiconductor industry is characterized by having quite a breadth of content, which goes hand-in-hand with the fact that semiconductors are the building blocks for electronics. There are data sheets, application notes, and many catalogs. And the manner in which any one component may be used, is just too hard to determine. It is like selling wood. It could be used in a lot of different ways.

So even though the buyer had requested a particular set of data, my lesson was not to hand it out all at once during my visit. Rather, I was to sequence through the content, one by one, highlighting each briefly. With each one, my focus needed to be on the buyer’s reaction and see what kind of attention each piece received. I knew the products but I did not know the buyer. And this was how I would be able to gather the intelligence that I needed to formulate an engagement plan, and to nurture the process further.

But there is always the desire to provide the potential buyer with everything they ask for, and as fast as possible. If they are asking for it, it is a good thing. And certainly response time is important. But in the B2B environment, rarely does an order manifest itself right after providing the buyer with the content they requested. It is a buying process. It is akin to educational process, both for you and the buyer. And much like a teacher with a class of students, the information is metered out at a rate that the students can consume it, and the teacher is able to get feedback on how well it is being absorbed. We must understand that the same thing happens during the buying cycle. If you just do a data dump, things are not likely to proceed smoothly or rapidly. Too much choice, too many decisions, is what will stall the process.

When we are dealing with buyers that come to us online, we have to keep the overall buying process in mind. We need to establish ways in which buyers can consume our content, while not enabling them to overwhelm themselves. And we need to strive to establish, from their electronic footprints, what kind of persona it is that we are dealing with. Our challenge is to deduce the type of persona which our data analytics are describing. And then to proceed with actions that fit with the part of the buying cycle that we are likely at. Each of the buyer’s steps need to have a complementary response from us, that narrow the process going forward to the most-likely set of pre-determined possibilities.

It is ironic, but in my sales career I was surprised when I heard a buyer recite this phrase. It should be complete roll out of the welcome mat. But, it just seems to fly in the face of what buyers want. They don’t want to be sold. They want to be the ones who decide what solution works for them.

And here is where I see the danger in this phrase. Given that the phrase is action oriented, and comes from the lips of the buyer, it has the powerful psychological effect of focusing on “the order”. That is after all, what we get when we complete the sale. We get the order. But the order is the end result. It specifies the product/service, price and delivery. It is a complete focus on what the seller provides. And it risks focusing too strongly on why the product or service is so great. I find that if we think in this manner, it takes away our focus from what the buyer wants.

It reminds me of this situations where you are invited to present your solution to a new potential buyer. If the buyer reveals only a superficial level of information about why they are interested in having a look at your offering, marching forward with a normal instinctive response to a “Sell Me” request, can really go astray. It would drive me nuts in the early part of my sales career, when at the end of this type of presentation, the buyer would simply say “Thank You”, and scurry off to another meeting. This would leave me in the dark as to where things were going. And then to try to forecast my chances of getting an order would just end up as a statistical guess.

Before you can successfully execute on the “Sell Me” command, you need to qualify the buyer and the situation that they are in. That means learning about the problem that the buyer wants to address, and how important it is for them to resolve. So when I hear the request “Sell Me”, I now instinctively reframe it as, “Help me solve my problem”. And this gets things going in the right direction. Naturally, you need to know what the problem is before you can proceed. And as your depth of understanding improves, your ability to address the buyer’s pain points continues to improve. If you understand the problem, and understand how well you can address it, you are then in a position to forecast your chances of getting an order.

With today’s buying cycle initiating in an incognito online world, it is important ensure that our demand-driving tactics have a level of embedded intelligence gathering. We cannot just proceed blindly with an imaginary “Sell Me” response. The marketing content that is put out there, must be with the goal of addressing buyers’ problems, and embedding ways to garner insights and striving to make inferences. By incorporating this thinking throughout all phases of the buying cycle, it will be possible to refine and improve our model. And this will help to ensure that we are presenting our solutions to the problems we are best suited to solve. That is the ideal: the buyer has a problem, you have the solution, and the whole buying scenario is created and driven by the demand generation model.

One of the best business books that has become a classic is ‘Good to Great’ by Jim Collins. Truly it is an excellent book that crafts together seven characteristics of companies, that enable them to transform themselves from being good companies, to being great companies.

When I first read the book, one of the things that I found astonishing was that these seven characteristics were quite simple. For example, we have the Hedgehog concept. The 3 tenets making up the concept are:
(1) What does the company have a passion for?
(2) What could the company be the best in the world at doing?
(3) What is the economic model to make money at this?

Now that is pretty simple to understand. You might even say it is quite natural and intuitive way to think. And the remaining characteristics are all equally strong in their simplicity. So how is it that these seven characteristics have had such a profound impact on the business community? How has Jim Collins created such enormous value in the principles he has presented, and created this everlasting value in the characteristics themselves?

Well, I would have to say that Mr. Collins has created an undisputed level of authority. This was no simple presentation of the seven characteristics, backed up with a few anecdotes. This book was not opinion. The book was about the facts of what the data told him and his research team.

Let me add some more perspective here. The team began this quest with 1,435 good companies. They analyzed performance over 40 years. They then identified 11 companies that made the leap, alongside a well-matched list of comparable companies. They spanned the study across different industries. They read everything about their 11 companies and comparables. They interviewed all the companies and compiled 2,000 pages of interview transcripts. And even though Jim Collins had previously written ‘Built to Last’, they assumed nothing. If the findings of ‘Good to Great’ were to conflict, so be it. And then they debated rigorously on the possible findings, relationships and conclusions. It took 5 years to get it all done.

So it is not too hard to see that the presentation of the seven characteristics is based on a solid and defensible foundation of facts. All of the objections have been taken care. When I reflect on some of the other business books which have had strong impact and sustained influence, the amount of real life proof which they establish, is clearly there. In “Good to Great”, it is the sheer amount of raw data that they used that makes it especially powerful.

And this is a level of excellence that all marketers can aspire to. It is a level of authority that every marketer needs to strive to achieve. Why? Because buyers are all looking for the proof. Why should they believe you? Whether they are willing to disclose the objection to you are not, it may be lingering and preventing the buyer from moving forward. In building your buyer behavior model, you need to ensure that there is a solid basis of proof as the buyer comes to those natural pause points in their buying journey. If you can identify and strengthen those key points along the buyer’s journey, you may put yourself on the path of good to great yourself.