Everyday Influence

Establishing Value and Sponsorship with Executive Stakeholders

The best way to secure engagement and support from your stakeholders is to establish trust based on the value of ‘what you do’ as core to enabling their success.

I learned long ago that if you want to have a seat at the table and be viewed as a strategic contributor to the business you must shift the perspective in how you view your role - to one of value and enablement.

As an example – in my early days as an AR manager it was very easy to look at my role as a ‘function’ of working with analysts.  The problem of associating yourself solely to your function is that you tend to execute in a very transactional way (executing briefings, consulting sessions, inquires and report review). 

It was not until I looked at my role in a slightly different capacity that I began to scale significant support from the senior most management of my company. 

I began to look at analyst relations as a ‘process’ and sought to understand how I can use the process of working with analysts and other influencers to enable success of the stakeholders across the value chain of my company.

 

To do this effectively, you must first have mastery of your function (rules of engagement; interaction scenarios; and best practices of relationship management).  Then you must seek to understand the challenges, goals and objectives of your stakeholders across the value chain of your business: strategy, sales, development, business development/partners, services/support, etc. 

Once you understand the goals, challenges and opportunities at each level of the business, you can then establish programs and deliverables that through the process of working with influencers - enable success.

There is a value proposition that can be created for each link in your company’s value chain.  You just have to ‘think’ about it.

By shifting your perspective, to a ‘process view’ no matter your ‘function’ (media relations, analyst relations, marketing, etc.) you will be able to facilitate high impact programs and conversations that enable great success for your business and each important stakeholder, across the chain.

This is the best way to institutionalize your value and gain the much needed support and investments to scale even greater success for your companies.

Influencer Relations Metrics

There are many perspectives on which metrics and key performance indicators to use to support new era influencer relations programs. Metrics are by-and-large extremely important as they help to represent the true value of programs. I don’t proclaim to be the expert on metrics and KPIs (just ask any member of my team). I have experimented and used a number of approaches however that in many ways are better described as KPIs. An example, using traditional analyst relations.  It is common practice to track the following:

• Tonality of written research
• Survey-based analyst perception audits
• Company positions in key research (MQs and Waves)
• Analyst media quotes

These are good KPIs to support the effectiveness of program execution but they do not support the most strategic metric (if you are a sales driven business J) of actual influence on deals won and lost.

I suggest that influencer relations pros work to establish a metrics model that integrates with your company’s sales process. For instance:

• Pipeline Analysis:  Leverage your company’s CRM or sales management tools to understand which (if any) influencers are impacting your deals. 
  
  This allows you to map the influence of analysts directly to sales – the ultimate metric to secure strong executive support of time and budget to support the execution of your programs – as well as helps you understand where to appropriate your time and tier/rank the influencers with whom you work with.
  
  
• Win/Loss Analysis: Integrating key questions into your company’s process for tracking win/loss intelligence will provide you with the definitive impact (positive or negative) of influencers in your company’s deals.
  
  
• Analyst Events:  If your company sponsors analyst events (e.g. Gartner Symposium) it is important to work with your field marketing or sales operations organization to track leads gathered from these events – through the pipeline:
  • How many prospects entered your pipeline as a result of the event?
  • How many prospects that were already in your pipeline (who also attended the event) resulted in closed deals?

This approach is good to use with all influencer types (media, peer associations, partners, etc.).to understand who your prospects are relaying upon for research, education and advice to support their decisions.

The information gathered from these metrics will help you to effectively rationalize which influencers you should work with and why.  My bet is that you will find that many of the assumptions that you currently use to tier your influencers and appropriate resources against (people, budget, executive time) are not geared to the enabling the sales effort in the most effective ways.

Biggest Challenge for AR teams in 2008

In January, Carter Lusher from Sage Circle asked a question through Linkedin Answers about “The biggest challenges that tech vendor analyst relations (AR) teams will face in 2008?

Below is a ‘clean’ version of my response:

The biggest challenge for the next 18 months is the marginalization of the traditional AR function.

Many of today’s AR ‘practices’ are based on antiquated engagement and relationship models defined over a decade ago. In order to maintain strategic relevance, the AR practitioner needs to understand the problem(s) that they are really trying to solve for their company and demonstrate how ‘the process’ of working with analysts and IT Influencers can help solve them. As you go through the exercise of really understanding your company’s business challenges, you may realize that the analyst engagement models of the past will not help you (entirely) secure the future opportunities for your company.

Looking beyond the traditional engagement with the big 3 or 4 analyst firms in your industry (choose from Gartner, AMR, Forrester, IDC, Ovum, Yankee, etc.) you will find that these firms have limited scope of 1:1 influence - relative to the true market opportunities that your companies may be targeting.

Gartner (as an example) has about 15k customers (of which 30% are vendors). The global market opportunity for vendors targeting the Large Enterprise market is about 80k customers, and for SME it is about 57million! Who are the influencers reaching the 99 percent of the market that your company is targeting???

This is not to say that the 1 percent of companies that the traditional analyst firms influence are not important! However, if we are in fact entering a recession, then growth for our companies will need to come from new markets and most likely new customers. Perhaps it is time to challenge ourselves to rethink the traditional AR approach that was cast over a decade ago?

If we do not innovate our approach, the value of the traditional AR manager will be marginalized as our precious resources (stakeholder time and budget) will be diverted to other high return marketing and communication activities that target new/expanded high growth opportunities for our companies.

Elements of Influence: Playmaker's Standard

I recently read a great book (for the second time) by Alan Kelly called the Elements of Influence.  This is a book that all marketing and communication professionals should read to gain new insights on an important strategy system that is sure to strengthen the effectiveness of any marketing, communication, and influence effort.

To quote from the introduction of Alan’s book:

“Economists have game theory. Biologists have the phylogenetic tree. Chemists have the periodic table of elements. Software developers have object oriented programming.  But for those whose work centers on strategy, positioning, or some form of marketplace spin there is nothing.

There is nothing for those whose jobs involve the pursuit of influence and, accordingly, the management of opinions, perceptions, behaviors, and decisions. There is no table of elements, per se, for this emerging class of free-form yet indispensable professionals I call playmakers. There are myriad principles, best practices, laws, rules, and admonitions in what amounts to vast collections of terms of art. But there is no science and no transforming framework to give these pursuits measure and meaning.”

Alan’s book is the first of its kind to identify a system to manage communication strategy for great competitive advantage.

In the book he illustrates, classifies and defines the unique set of moves that are made by ‘playmakers’ everywhere and offers a framework to decode, respond, and proactively make plays for great competitive advantage.

I have had the great pleasure of working with Alan over the past year and have come to admire his work and have benefited from his experience and sage advice.

You can learn more about Alan’s work and services at his website www.plays2run.com

Best Approach to Influence Opinions

I have found that the most effective way to change someone's perception or opinion is not to argue, coerce or threaten them until they see eye-to-eye with you…rather using basic fundamentals of rhetoric...challenge them with the right questions that allow them to come to the 'right' conclusions on their own terms.

Team Leadership Practices

Below are invaluable leadership practices and principles that I have learned over the years.  I will add more over time…but these are a good start. I would be interested in your thoughts on leadership practices and principles, too:

·     Be accessible to your team and to stakeholders

o    As you move up in management you must not loose sight of the issues and reality of challenges being managed on the front lines - by your team and internal/external stakeholders

o    To avoid the ivory tower label of ineffective management – be present and interact often with the your team and stakeholders

·     Be demanding but fair

·     Be an enabler of success

o    Your success as a leader is based on the success of your team and their success is only as good as your ability to enable it

o    Provide air cover for your team (limit distractions, buffer politics and complexities of management and business)

·     Take care of your people

o    Generously reward and recognize outstanding results

o    Manage the mediocrity of low performers and underachievers

·     Design MBOs that require collaboration to be successful

·     Establish metrics that reinforce the strategic value proposition of your team

o    Understand the difference between KPIs and metrics…

·     Establish a ‘reality’ with your team that is based on value and enablement

·     Establish a clear direction of strategy and purpose - and then 'get out of the way!'

o    Don’t micro manage - allow your team to innovate and execute

·     Share and promote success!

Most Important Question When Planning

The most important question to answer as you develop an influencer strategy is ‘what problem am I really trying to solve?’

This is a fundamental planning question that is often overlooked or not properly thought through when developing any form of plan or strategy.

We often try very hard to fit the problem into the scope of the world in which we work as apposed to modifying our scope to the requirements of solving a much bigger problem for our business.

Into the Fray

“It’s about time.”  This seems to be the reaction these days when someone ‘finally’ enters the world of blogging. It is even worse if you are a communication and marketing professional and don’t have a blog to account for your thoughts, musings, and perspective on…well just about anything.

I have been on the verge of starting a blog for some time, but was not quite sure what I wanted to discuss or write about. I named my blog ‘Everyday Influence’ to reflect my profession and interests.

I am a communications executive at SAP (the worlds leading business software vendor) where I lead a dynamic team that operates under the name Industry and Influencer Relations.

I have spent the majority of my career working in Silicon Valley for Internet and enterprise software companies (start up and large enterprise companies) and professional services companies (law firms, accounting and construction) where I have developed and executed multifaceted influence strategies to introduce companies, products, and services in the market – where in many cases no market existed.  In nearly every situation the goal was to generate awareness and buzz about legitimate problems in the industry that my company (and or clients) products and services were best fit to address.

I have also developed and successfully executed several campaigns to redefine existing and mature markets to accelerate the position of my company as a leader in the market/industry - true game changing campaigns.

In this blog I will share my experience, best practices, and perspective on the new world of influencer relations, social media and communications.

I hope to post at least once a week and when I am unable to contribute new ideas and thoughts I am sure that I will fill in every now and again with musings on the latest trends and industry events.