First Order Producers

After a meeting last month, one of my customers called and said, “Did you see all those really accomplished senior managers in the meeting who are either unemployed or underemployed? We should figure out a way to make money with that kind of asset!”

I had noticed, but my thinking was a little different.

Yes, they are senior, they are accomplished, and they are underemployed.
I think that is because in the course of their work, they have gone from first order producers to second and third order producers.

Since I am making these terms up, let me explain them.

First order producers grow, make, sell, or count work.

Second order producers organize, manage, or administer first order producers.

Third order producers find ways to improve the growing, making, selling, counting, organizing, managing, or administering process.

In a recovering economy, we have more of a need for first order producers. The growth of second and third order producers during the boom was an attempt to “do more with less.” That may not be as desirable in a restart as growing, making, selling and counting.

The best second and third order producers I have worked with started as first order producers and were moved to leverage their efficiencies. Of course, many others found themselves in higher order positions and used that as an excuse to consume coffee.

There are new breakthroughs to be discovered and used, but as work changes, we need a face-to-face familiarity with it to improve it. I suspect the next crop of second and third order producers will have experience with new types of growing, making, selling, and counting.

Your thoughts?

Hal Varian, Google's Chief Economist, On How The Web Challenges Managers

Google’s chief economist says executives in wired organizations need a sharper understanding of how technology empowers innovation.

“What is it that’s really scarce in the Internet economy?” And the answer is attention. [Psychologist] Herb Simon recognized this many years ago. He said, “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”

Interview transcript and video published in the McKinsey Quarterly

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Strategy/Innovation/Hal_Varian_on_how_the_Web_challenges_managers_2286

Will The Real Customers Raise Their Hands?

After the bars closed, a cop sees this guy on his hands and knees crawling in an empty parking lot. He asks the crawler what he is doing and learns that his keys were dropped and lost as he was getting into his car in the back of the parking lot.
“So why are you looking for your keys under this streetlight?”
“I can see better here.”
I heard that story about selling several times recently.
Yesterday I was talking with a strategy consultant who said a small company was going to sell to government agencies by going through integrators who held program contracts.
I asked him why an integrator would sell his customer’s offering. He said there was a legal requirement. I said there were a lot of solutions for that requirement, and the least expensive was ignoring the requirement. I knew it had been ignored for over a decade.
Years ago I was with another small company. One of the salesmen prided himself on getting us on “the best teams.” That meant that we had to participate in a lot of proposals. It also meant we got very little work from this effort, usually not even a task order. Management was thinking about legal force, since “we were on the team!” That never went anywhere.
I was privileged to bring a unique solution to a global integrator. However, that was not apparent to them at the beginning. I broke in by bringing them a project they badly wanted that I had won. The salesmen loved it. Their management was furious.
As we learned to work together, on two consecutive years my guy working civilian agencies was the top salesman on the globe the first year. The next year the DoD rep had the honor. For me, that was like winning the Superbowl two years in a row.
From them I learned that they had eight account reps in the federal space. Seven were totally focused on getting in to agencies. They never made a sale. The eighth was in charge of integrator relationships. He would get an inbound phone call, go over and make all the sales.
The company had come up with this organization when they realized that without penetration to the end customer, there was no demand for their product. Salesmen wanted to spend time with the integrators. That was where the sales came from. But the sales were usually created by the agencies.
I have seen similar in commercial sales. Someone represents that they have a “connection,” and want to get paid to use it. Months and years are lost by rookie sales teams that fall for that. Sales managers are trying to “recruit rolodexes.” Two problems with that. One, who still uses a paper rolodex? Second, people hold jobs for short periods of time. You want to be able to see the person holding the position, not the person who formerly held the position.
One time my boss wanted me to go to a networking party with my sales peers. I asked him, “Why, will there be any buyers there?”
Tom Peters said, “Networking is helping someone,” and I have given and been given referrals that resulted in sales. However, even though they are harder to get, the majority of my time is figuring out how to get the focus of the end users. Once I get their interest, it is much easier to work back to funds, end user permits, budgeting, agent networks, and whatever else their culture requires.
Build your machine to interest real customers.
Comments?

Focus – The Next Goal For The Web

Twelve years ago Mario Morino said, “The web changes everything.” I have remembered that every time I noticed the web changed something. What does it fully mean?

Three problems which the internet largely solves are time, distance, and addressable audience.

Time, because internet communications are both instantaneous and asynchronous.

Asynchronous means every participant in a communication does not have to be present at the same time. I can read an email or watch a video when I want to, which can improve impact of the message.

Another assault on time is that through hyperlinks we can provide a complete education, as quickly as the user wants it. No longer are we limited by the constraints of other appointments, energy, and availability. I don’t teach, people learn. My job is to make their learning as easy as possible. Hyperlinks allow user-based, custom learning.

Distance is solved because the internet allows us to interact with people anywhere. FedEx has built a business extending the illusion of “close” created by the internet browser.

Addressable audience means that for the first time, we have the technical capability to communicate with almost anyone, more easily than ever before.

Even though these three problems are largely solved, people are still building communication plans making these three problems the foundations of their work. Why? Perhaps they don’t know what comes after solving those problems.

What comes next is earning “focus.”
Just because you can contact everyone, everywhere, immediately, does not mean you are making a difference. To make a difference requires getting your partner’s focus. That is the next challenge of using the internet.

We have to earn the focus of the audience.

From push to pull.

From broadcast to conversation.

This weekend, I saw an advertisement on The Food Network. It was 30 seconds of “How To Make Mango Salsa.” I put my book down and watched attentively…because I was interested. I go to Baja Fresh for their mango salsa. I wanted to see how it was made. At the end I learned that the ad was sponsored by Garnier. I was appreciative of their commercial and resolved to look at Garnier the next time I needed shampoo.

Now I already knew what Garnier made. Sarah Jessica Parker from “Sex in the City” explained that last year. I had a low level cultural awareness, but no focus. Now I had focus.

Earlier this year I worked with a team from a global software company to figure out how they could take advantage of open source. They wanted to define their “open source business model.” They are not an open source software company, and have no plans in that direction, but their customers are interested in open source.

We realized that these customers build applications and utilities that work on our platform. And that these programs might be useful for other customers. And that the people who wrote those programs would be flattered to get some recognition from outside their company for the excellence of their work. Creating more utility for our platform could build customer loyalty, and might be useful for attracting new customers.

We saw the opportunity to create a space on the internet where our customers could share their custom programs.

Featuring our customers, the creators, gives them a place to see themselves featured on the internet, and shows newcomers that we are a tribe of heroes.

Instead of spending our time begging for appointments, negotiating for sales, we can also use the internet to spend time making our customers famous, honoring their achievements, and making everyone we touch feel better about being part of our tribe.

Creating focus is different from hammering the traditional “qualify, present, and close.” That is better done on the internet, at the customer’s pace. Our primary job is increasing their understanding the benefit we offer. Which starts by catching their focus.