Why Are We in This Sub-optimal State?
If you’re exhausted by meeting, email, and collaboration channel overload, you may be thinking “Ugh, Maureen. There’s too much sharing going on NOW! What are you talking about?” And, yeah, I get that. But what we’re all doing at work on the regular isn’t sharing, is it? It’s pontificating, or firehosing, railing and wailing, CYAing, speechifying even. But not sharing. And certainly not collaborative sharing.
How did we get to this place of Not Sharing? We certainly share, often with great finesse, in our personal lives. Some of us may even be guilty of oversharing on social media (not naming any names). We analyze together, compare experiences, revisit problem issues in trusted relationships.Why is this not a thing in the workplace?
I see two fundamental reasons: First, it’s simply not an existing skill set. Second, (sigh) our legacy digital infrastructure is a material and exhausting obstacle to sharing.
Structured Sharing: Not an Existing Skill Set
What do I mean by “Structured Sharing?” To start, it’s the opposite of ad hoc sharing.
*Not* structured sharing:
“Hey Customer X is really happy/unhappy with Y.”
“We’re gonna lose this prospect becausewe don’t have.”
“Our webinars are doing great!”
Structured sharing moves us away from “Yeah? Is that an opinion or a trend?” Rather, it’s a concerted effort to track, collaborate, and share on the same, agreed data points. Is Product seeing an under-utilized part of the product? Is that because the market isn’t interested, or is there something wrong with the functionality? Well guess what? We can get answers to those questions via Product, Marketing, Sales, and Success (I’ll explain how in Chapter 7).
Structurally and regularly sharing insights is not an existing skill set. Sure, when we’re in meetings, or when we bump into each other in the hallway or on a zoom call, we share thoughts, we discuss, we collaborate. But that’s conversational. Fleeting thoughts possibly written down in someone’s notes, maybe shared in an email, hopefully making it to a PowerPoint. But it’s ad hoc and it’s qualitative.
Throughout our organizations we’ve all rolled our eyes when a colleague shares an opinion or one data point, and then tries to make the case that that is fully the way it is. How often in the course of a fiscal year are Product or Marketing teams asked to put aside solid plans because some prospect or customer’s business is at risk “...if we don’t immediately modify the initiatives...” to accommodate X, Y, Z need?
Or we anecdotally hear via one of our customer-facing folks that X and Y are absolutely critical to address right away because all the customers are demanding it ( Are they ? Are all the customers demanding it?).
Spoiler: We’re not sharing insights. It’s not a thing we learned in school, and as we learned in my research, it’s not a thing most organizations practice.
How often were material changes made to a sprint that six months later were clearly a mistake or simply not necessary or the wrong direction or we simply didn’t know? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say quite often!
I’m sure we’re all guilty of doing the same thing ocassionally - sharing an opinion, or homing in on ONE bit of information (that usually supports our own goals!), as though it’s the universal truth.
But how often are we sharing robust,structured insights?
And how can we structurally share when we’re not structurally listening or structurally mining? So really, all we have at our fingertips are ad hoc insights in the context of how our own brains process them.
Further, no one’s asking for these insights. CEOs aren’t asking for them, boards aren’t asking for them, executive leadership teams aren’t asking for them. Functional area leaders aren’t asking for cross-functional insights. They’re not asking us to mine, structure, and then share. This is simply not a thing that exists in most of our organizations today.
And while we certainly have some structured data in marketing automation and some structured data in sales and some sharing of intel across the sales and marketing departments, it usually stops there. How does this ad-hoc sharing align with product insights and success insights? Is anyone looking at that?
Mining: The First Step inStructured Sharing
To effectively and consistently be a sharing collaborator, and in order to have meaningful insights to share, we have to be mining practitioners. You can think of “Mining” as strategic questioning, a skill shared by great salespeople, investigative reporters, lawyers - really anyone whose job it is to convince people of something.
A quick story about Mining. People who aren’t in sales can be super uncomfortable with the concept of selling. And what they can’t see, because of our preconceived notions of selling , is that the best salespeople are first and foremost great miners.
In addition to a long career in sales myself, I’ve had the privilege to ride along, sit next to, and learn from some great salespeople in my career.
Their ability to drive a conversation by asking great questions, and then listening = goosebumps for me.
Over the years I’ve worked to coach non-sales people to become better miners in their existing relationships, and I’ve learned some interesting things.
One barrier to mining for non-salespeople (looking at you, my Success friends) is consultants are used to being the ones who know things . They’re experts. By the very nature of their job, they are guiding customers to Success. So it’s a bit uncomfortable for them to ask questions, when they believe they already know the answers.
But that’s the secret great salespeople know: the conversation is more fruitful when we ask the questions and the customer or prospect shares their story.
When the customer or prospect reveals the pain point, rather than the consultant telling the customer what the pain point is , the experience becomes more powerful for the customer.
When we look at how we got to this place of Not Sharing, it’s pretty clear that these missing human skills need to be nurtured. But even if we achieve that milestone , we’re then faced with tech that is not prepared to support it.
The Tech is Not OK, Y’all
May I be honest here for a moment? Most of us can’t really share details publicly of how truly abysmal our legacy digital infrastructures are. We know that CIOs have a material part of their budget invested in just keeping the lights on, with very little investment in modernization - although we are making progress for sure.
As goes the digital infrastructure of the company, so goes the digital infrastructure of any functional area. And, thus, the quality of the data and insights with which most of us pretend to be data-driven.
From a business perspective, many of you have experienced being in and out of the foundational tools right? How many of you have taken data out of your CRM, manipulated it in a spreadsheet, and then shoved it back in the CRM, or added it to a PowerPoint, or sent it on to others via a shared spreadsheet or email?
How many of us get reports from one department, then compare it to our own data and wonder how we all work in the same company?
Broadly speaking, the Martech landscape grows exponentially every year and causes a lot of excitement for VCs looking for the next new thing. But if you look more closely what we really have is an ecosystem of Band-Aid tech.
The foundational tech is really not great, so we use bandaids to make up for the flaws in the foundation.
Enter the ripple effect. Each bandaid point solution causes integration issues that then require more bandaid tech to fix. Rinse. Repeat. It’s a nightmare. I talked about this problem at a keynote in London last year: The Integration Leaks in Your Tech Stack.
SalesTech is in a similar situation, and I’d argue the same is true in HR, Accounting, and any other functional area.
If you’ve had to wrangle reporting from a CRM, you understand inherently how challenging this is, especially as time goes on and systems degrade. How challenging it is to get the upstream structure correct, in order to have downstream reports that you can believe in. We also understand all of the decisions made along the way while juggling resources, and then making compromises in the data you need, or how you structure a report that will serve different masters.
The system is fraught with error and riddled with flaws. And then the human investment required to reconcile, modify, and/or cobble together some semblance of cohesive data is insane. If only the C-suite could get thwapped every time a cadre of highly paid folks wasted time mucking about in spreadsheets, perhaps the problem would become real to them?
Under these circumstances, what kind of truly trustworthy insights can we pull from today’s systems? Our first hope is to prioritize the data within our own functional area or fiefdom. But the work needed (Productivity Debt) to get to even basic data analysis is challenging enough. Harder still to share/compare insights with other functional areas, in the tools, not just through ad hoc conversations or via ppt, email, or docs.
So even in a perfect world, we could inspire humans across organizations to start structured mining for insights. And further, let’s imagine that they are also inspired to share these structured insights with the other teams that need them?
How would we support these efforts with the tech infrastructure we have in place today? It’s barely possible with today’s systems, but we all have the power to change that - and I’ll share the path in the second half of the book.
Hank Barnes, Chief of Research, Buying Behavior, Tech & Service, Gartner
Some of the fondest times I spent during my tenure leading Marketing at Altify (sales tech including Account Planning and Opportunity Management solutions), was participating in Deal Reviews. For a complex sales team, a robust deal review is key to finding gaps in the opportunity before the prospect does.
Stressful but deeply valuable to the lead salesperson, a deal review is essentially a role play with the salesperson’s colleagues in different functional areas, taking the roles of the prospect team. The CTO may represent the prospect white knight, the CMO may take the role of the person on the prospect team who is against the deal, and so on.
It should be common practice everywhere, but it’s not, and so it’s receded into memory for me.
Until I stumbled upon this post from Gartner’s Vice President, Distinguished Analyst, Hank Barnes: Functionally Diverse Buying Teams Are Less Dysfunctional.
Whoa.
Quick read but here’s the highlight for me:
“In our much cited (by me and others) research into high quality technology deals, we looked at the composition of buying teams from a standpoint of functional groups that participated. The pattern was obvious – as the number of functional groups involved grew, the likelihood of a high quality deal increased.”
If this doesn’t impress you, I’m not sure what will. So much business value to be gained.
Hank is one of my most valued colleagues on social; you can catch him on LinkedIn and twitter.
