Everyday Influence

Working with Influencers to Create Market Opportunities

Throughout my career I have had great success working with industry influencers to identify, create, and redefine market opportunities for my employers.

Drawing back on a few underlining themes in my previous posts - success here hinges on the ability to understand the objectives, business model, and strategy associated with the ‘business idea.’  Examples of some key questions to explore are:

• What is the problem or market need, to be addressed?
• How does our product or service solve the problem/address the need?
• What is the significance of this problem in the market (low, moderate, high)?
• Who are the people/organizations directly/indirectly affected by the problem?
• How will we deliver the product or service (channel/OEM; direct; region specific; focus on vertical industries; etc)?
• Who makes the decision to purchase the product/service and how are they influenced?

These are examples of some basic ‘exploratory’ questions that will help identify the types of influencers to engage with as you establish a strategy to create/redefine a market opportunity for your company’s business idea.

The next step is to research and qualify potential influencer partners.

You will likely need to work with a mix of influencers to effectively educate the market (on the identified problem) and advocate your solution as the best way to solve/address it (e.g. issues-based thought leaders, business gurus, customers, partners, media, academia, bloggers, consultants, community leaders, professional associations, etc.). 

It is important to engage with a core group of the most important influencers as early as possible to help validate the market opportunity, your business approach, and to validate your overall messaging and positioning platform.  This early engagement will help to harden your strategy as you prepare to ‘go-to-market.’  The further in advance you engage the greater your ability to secure buy-in and advocacy from the core set of influencers. 

It is also important to understand the business and influence models of each influencer type (how do they make money and how do they educate the market?) and create appropriate forms of partnership that provide incentive for them to work with you.  As an example, traditional IT industry analysts make money on subscription to research, revenue from events, consulting engagements with customers, and general 1:1 advisory meetings.  Analysts educate the market through written research, presentations, 1:1 conversations, and through the press.  Every influencer type has a varied business and influence model that is important to understand as you determine your specific engagement strategy.

Early engagement allows bi-directional influence of the ‘idea.’  If managed successfully, your influencers will take some ownership of the ‘idea’ and your ability to address the market need.   Their ‘idea ownership’ creates inherent advocacy driven through their own thought leadership platforms allowing them to provide greater insight, education and advice to potential buyers in the market which in the IT industry anlayst example - drives business for them.

By doing this right, you will enable your company’s efforts to grow a great business. 

No mater what industry you are in, this is an approach that will lend itself to great outcomes.

The Evolution of Industry and Influencer Relations at SAP - Part One

To expand upon the mention in my inaugural post, I am the VP of Industry and Influencer Relations at SAP.  This is a relatively new 'title' and group that resides in SAP's Global Communication department.

In 2006, we conducted an exhaustive evaluation of our communication practices, org design, programs, processes and engagement strategies to understand the changes required to better support SAP's 2010 business strategy.  In a nutshell, the 2010 strategy is designed to double SAP's addressable market to a $75B opportunity.

Through the evaluation we found (to no suprise) that our structure and many practices and engagement strategies were based on outdated models that were inadequate to support the company's evolved growth strategy.

There are a number of important functions represented within Global Communications at SAP: Investor Relations, Government Relations, Employee Communications, Media Relations, etc.  As part of our reorganization, I was asked to lead a new group called Industry and Influencer Relations. 

Following the evaluation, we entered the next phase of reorg activities. The design process for what eventually evolved into the Industry and Influencer Relations team (which is the only aspect of the reorg that I will focus on) was guided by the fundamental question of: What problem are we really trying to solve? 

In answering this question, we determined that the charter of the new program should be to influence the awareness, reputation and experience of SAP (products and services) with business and IT decision makers in the industry.

To this end, we commisioned research to identify the IT and business decision makers in our industry and understand the dynamics of how they are influenced (e.g. where do they go for research, advice and education to support their decisions). 

We used social networking technologies to map the flow of influence up and through the decision maker.  We were surprised to find that a number of our assumptions on decision making authority and influence were challenged. 

Today, the mission of the Industry and Influencer Relations team is to enable sales execution and the accelerated adoption of SAP’s products and solutions by generating positive experience of SAP’s brand, products and reputation within strategic business and IT communities of influence (globally).

There are five dynamic teams that operate under the umbrella of Industry and Influencer relations, at SAP.  Each has a unique mission and a value proposition that stands very strong on its own:

o    IT Influencer Relations (evolution of traditional AR)

o    Business Influencer Relations

o    Customer Communities (e.g. User Groups)

o    Integrated Partner Communications

o    University Alliances

Each program utilizes a balanced mix of social media principles, technology, and 1:1 relationship practices to reach scale and effectiveness.

Using innovative research techniques we have found that the combined channels (above) that the Industry and Influencer Relations team manages has a $40B impact on purchase decisions world-wide (based on SAP's target $75B market opportunity).

The research and reorganization process that we went through was very enlightening and renewing.  It set the stage for creating a new ‘reality’ for communications at SAP with a more strategic purpose.

In future posts I will break down the value proposition of each team and share some of the insights that we learned as we moved from design to implementation – resulting in the creation of new engagement models, best practices, resource and operational design, and metrics for managing each component of the influencer program (above).