Teach & Evangelize Structured Collaboration
So what comes first, the tech or the human skills? In my world, it’s got to be the human skills. Why? Because if you don’t have the skills, the tech could be approaching perfection and it wouldn’t matter - because no one would have the skills to fully take advantage of it!
Building New Skills is Hard
First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.
Fair warning: I have piloted the skills training enough to date that I can tell you people will think it’s weird. It will be puzzling to them. And you just have to believe, in order to help them believe . This is not dissimilar from any change initiative. And based on my experience, I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that the onus is on you: If YOU don't believe in what you're asking people to learn or change, no amount of skills training will get them to believe in or implement it.
So how do we get humans who haven’t done this before, to start doing it? How do we get humans who are used to being the experts comfortable with forensic questioning?
High Level: Start Small. Build From There.
Agree Insight Mining topics.
Agree Mining Questions.
Simple tool for gathering!
ID Timeframe to gather, sort, and collaborate.
BONUS for the Brave: Exec Awareness.
Agree Insight Mining topics
When you’re just starting out, I’d suggest focusing on one or two points. Then, as your team builds skills, and becomes more comfortable with the process, you can easily broaden to three to five topics at a time. Early on, prioritize a feature that all functional areas can effectively probe on. For instance, let’s say that customers are bailing on QBRs too frequently and that’s something you’d like to fix.
Sounds great, until you realize that’s an area Marketing and Product would likely not be able to provide material insights on. It’s better to find a different topic where all functional areas can work together.
Here’s my suggestion for a place to start. Ask Product for a functionality outlier. Perhaps it’s an underused function that the team is surprised doesn’t have higher utilization.
As a team, remind yourself what the business outcome is of X function. For instance, let’s say you’re selling Account Planning solutions. You have a really great political maps function to help your customer’s complex sales teams better understand the lay of the land in the organizations they’re selling into.
What we don’t want is for Sales and Success to say, “Hey! Why aren’t you guys using this great feature?”
Rather, agree on the business outcome behind that function. In this case a business outcome could be: Understanding key players in your targeted accounts to strengthen your case. As a salesperson, if you don’t understand all the key players and drivers, you’re likely to be far less successful in landing the deal you’d like, in the timeframe you’d like.
Let’s further posit, for the sake of this exercise, that your team feels confident about this being a fairly solid feature. But for some reason, it’s not being as utilized as you’d like it to be.
Agree Mining Questions
Next step is - what are the questions we can ask Prospects and Customers?
First the RISK for Sales and Success: don’t solve for their feedback in the moment. One of the underlying goals here is to start regularly doing this mining work, and build muscle memory for both you and the customer. You won’t say that overtly; rather, the vibe needs to be, “Hey I was just thinking about and wanted to know your thoughts.”
The point of this exercise is to listen and gather. It is totally cool to go back later (in fact, I’d recommend it) and say “Hey I was thinking about what you said about, and I have some thoughts. Would it make sense to discuss?” Then you can dig into how they might better use the particular functionality better.
Think of this as a mini focus group. There is no solving for anything in a focus group. Instead, there are questions, responses, and note-taking.
With that, now what are the questions we can ask?
If Product has any focus groups or useability projects in the near future, then Marketing, Sales, and Success can ask prospects and customers the following (for example):
How well is the team connecting with the decision makers at key accounts? (If they’re already connecting well, then that could be the answer and the exercise concludes with this question, with this customer. Most sales orgs struggle with this task.)
Ah, not great? What do you think that’s costing you? How would connecting better be a benefit to the organization?
When you get to Deal Review with your prospects, are there surprise topics brought up by prospects that you wished you knew upstream?
And what tools/techniques are you using today to connect with decision makers?
Then - and only then - can you zero in on the product function, as if it’s just occurred to you:
Ah, that’s interesting. And how often are you and the team reviewing the political maps to strategize your approach?
Now, if Product doesn’t have market interviews on tap, and has the ability to get some detail data out of your product, they could mine for that. For instance, does the product data show:
Use of the product by functional area, role, industry, established v. newer customer?
Product and Marketing: Between these two functional areas, there might be some competitive analysis for what others are claiming, regarding this specific functionality.
Relevant Search analysis on keywords and topics.
Could run ads or polls around the very questions Sales and Success are asking, like:
How well is the team connecting with the decision makers at key accounts?
Rerun reporting by segments on who is engaging with the marketing content on this topic.
Structure reporting in parallel to Product (by functional area, role, industry, established v. newer customer).
You are building new habits.
You are jointly structuring so you can make some sense of the data.
For most organizations, if you haven’t already custom built it, these tools don’t exist. Start with whatever spreadsheet product you currently use and make it accessible to everyone working this project. I’d highly recommend you not start in your CRM because that’s a rabbit hole you don’t need to go down at this juncture.
More on tech in the next chapter. Spoiler: it’s not happy news!
Select the cross-functional participants.
Collaborate to enable on the goalsand process.
Provide the tool for capturing the insights.
Together, select the topic for mining.
Agree on the mining period(start with two weeks).
Set the post-mining collaboration session to review all inputs.
Tweak the process and start again. 8.Rinse. Repeat.
Expect this to be messy. People will grumble. They won’t prioritize it, and you might be chasing them at first. But stay on it, optimizing where you can. Set honest expectations, and let participants know that the first couple of review sessions might not appear overly fruitful. The data might not deliver fireworks at first but, again, stress to all that the goal is for everyone to start building new muscle memory. These are brand new behaviors, the world over.
There are no established best practices. You will be establishing them. Heroes.
BONUS: Exec Awareness
I know this will seem uncomfortable. I mean, who wants the exec team following such a new (likely messy!) process? Ugh. But.
But in fact, if they’re at all human, they will weep over the possibilities here. Even better for you, advanced human that you are, their interest will ensure your colleagues don’t phone it in or ghost the project . If the tool is shared with all, and leadership has access, they will yelp if there are empty spots. No one wants leadership yelping at them if they can help it. So do this step and invite the exec team.
Are you an #InsightHarnesser?
Marian Croak, current VP Engineering Google, formerly Bell Labs SVP, credited as the developer of VoIP.
“The woman who created the technology behind internet calls explains what it takes to innovate.”
This World Economic Forum story is a must read for anyone who cares about humans-in-the-loop and the epic importance of diversity in collaboration. Takeaways:
“ ... for Croak, it is about having the right mindset and the confidence to know that you can fix things that are broken.”
“You don’t have to be a victim of trouble. You can rise above problems and fix them. In the journey to fix them, it involves failure. Things evolve and you have to keep experimenting and perfecting them.”
During the time I spent with my team in Amsterdam, the colleagues I was surrounded by were deeply nerdy, talented, PhDs in computer science. They were ALSO musicians, poets, philosophers, writers. True Renaissance humans. One of the many things I learned from them is that friction - really tough challenges - forces creativity.
I wonder now if this is a common thread between all engineers. The WEF article goes on to share:
“She says the current situation might appear to be a kind of stasis, but that things can and will change because human beings have the power to imagine different scenarios. ”
"Inventors are just humans. Anyone can have innovative ideas. But we have to share those ideas and collaborate with each other so that they can be realized."
Share and collaborate with each other to solve our challenges and navigate our way to sound solutions. What a concept.
