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As a manager, have you found yourself asking an employee or team to do something differently and, despite your best attempts at getting through to them, their old behaviors remain? Does this not make you want to pull your hair out in frustration and consider a new career in bocce ball?

If you’ve answered even a half yes, you’re obviously not alone.

Often things go like this. You communicate to an employee or a team that something needs to change. You make sure to look for signs of shared understanding and commitment back from them: “Does what I’m saying make sense to you?” or “Can you repeat what I said back to me so I know that I was clear?” In that moment, they seem to get it. But when you follow up a few weeks later, you’re dismayed to find out that their old behaviors remain are stuck in place.

This scenario is as frustrating as it is common. The good news is there are approaches that can help you get the results you want with much less effort. I’m going to share a great one here that I learned recently from a wise mentor and coach.

The next time you find yourself in a similar situation, you can try this approach instead. Begin first by communicating what they need to STOP doing, then communicate what they need to START doing, and then paint a picture to define in unarguable terms what the IDEAL would look like.

If you can follow this sequence of STOP-START-IDEAL, your chances of initiating change and seeing new and positive behaviors is much greater. Why? Because each of us has finite energy in time. If you don’t first call out what existing behaviors or mindsets need to STOP, that person won’t likely have the energy and capacity to START something new. Finally, if you don’t create a shared consciousness about what the IDEAL or goal actually looks like, you may even lead the person in the wrong direction.

Let me illustrate the key differences between they typical approach to coaching and the STOP-START-IDEAL approach to coaching. We’ll start with an example from sports and then apply that understanding to a corporate setting.

The Blind Side

Ben Jones is a hypothetical left tackle for the Jumbotron Jets. He has all of the physical tools and potential to be a great player but he isn’t performing at a high level. Despite the team’s best efforts at ensuring his success, he just doesn’t seem to get it.

It’s not from a lack of effort on Ben’s part either. Ben has clearly been working hard to get better. But at this point in his development, everyone — including Ben – is frustrated with his ongoing poor performance. It’s a real drag on the organization.

I’d […]

Lex conducting an Organizational Structure & Design Workshop in Capetown, South Africa. Photo Credit: Gregor Röhrig

Changing your organizational structure sucks.

There. I said it.

Helping companies change their structure is the work I do every day. If I didn’t know what I know now, I’d wonder, “Why would anyone want to do it?”

Changing your company’s structure can be a massive initiative. If you don’t do it correctly, it’s a recipe for disruption and disaster. People’s careers are on the line. Job titles can change. Existing reporting lines can get disrupted. One leader’s turf can expand and another’s shrink. The political fallout can be a huge cost in itself.

Even worse, if the new structure is done wrong, you’ll have the classic case of the cure killing the patient. You can set your company back even further in its development.

The corollary is also true. Structure done right can be the breakthrough you’ve been looking for. It’s like activating the booster stage of a rocket. It’s the catalyst to the next level of performance. I know because I’ve seen it happen over and over. It’s the reason why I do the work I do. It’s also one of the most misunderstood aspects of organizational design.

Let me explain all this by starting with a recent example at Microsoft.

In the early 2000s, a few years after taking over as CEO from co-founder Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer decided to double down on the existing divisional structure at Microsoft. A divisional structure typically has strong divisional heads but poor or limited cross-functional coordination across the divisions. Ballmer’s approach led to this infamous visual about working at Microsoft in the 2000s (I’m not sure who the source is but I still find it funny):

If your business has the wrong structure for its business model, strategy, or lifecycle stage, it’s not going to scale up. It’s going to trip up.

What was the problem with this approach? It was the wrong structure for a changed reality. The existing divisional structure worked well for Microsoft in the 80s and 90s during the desktop/data-center era. But the structure itself also made Microsoft incapable of adjusting to a radically changing, Internet-first era. Ballmer tried to rectify this problem by changing strategies several times but he never changed structures until 2013 (and then only haphazardly or half-heartedly). It was too little, too late. Under his tenure, Microsoft lost half of its enterprise value. Not a good score.

Within a short time after taking over from Ballmer as CEO in 2014, […]

If I were to ask you — “How are you instilling a culture of speed, accountability, and teamwork as your organization scales up?” — how would you respond?

This is a critical question. On the one hand, you want to keep what works well from your early start-up culture — fast decision making, risk-taking, camaraderie, and innovation. On the other, you have to manage the growing complexity — more people, new product lines, multiple business units, increasing regulatory requirements, and more. How can you achieve both?

Most entrepreneurs and CEOs struggle with this. They know that as their business scales up, they must evolve how the business operates, makes decisions, and cascades its culture. They also rightly fear that more policies, centralization, and procedures could cause the company to bog down and lose its entrepreneurial edge. The status quo is no longer tenable. You need a cure but the cure shouldn’t also kill the patient. What to do?

If we were to ask Jeff Bezos the same question — How do you instill a culture of speed, accountability, and teamwork at Amazon?” — he’d say something like this:

“Amazon’s management philosophy is to be customer obsessed, treat every day as if it were Day 1, manage the two major types of decisions (Type 1 and Type 2) differently, reinforce that it’s better to disagree and commit than get stuck in information paralysis, and elevate true misalignment issues quickly.”

What Bezos has figured out, and what he’s consistently trying to communicate and reinforce, is that to be effective at scale means to build on principles, not on policies. Policies, procedures, and rules may be necessary to some extent (especially if you are in a highly regulated industry) but they do not create high performance. As you know, they often prevent high performance.

Principles, on the other hand, are designed to be few in number but strong in impact. Meaning, a principle points you in the right direction but calls on the common sense and creativity of the individuals executing it. Also, if a principle is violated, this must carry big consequences. It has to, or it has no weight; it’s just a platitude.

If you’re like me and you tend to resonate with the principles-over-policies approach to scaling a business, but you’ve also been wondering how to bring this home for your leadership team and staff, I want to share with you a one-page document I use with success in my coaching practice. This one-pager presents three operating agreements that bring […]

I’m writing this short article for any manager who is looking to make a new hire or is considering someone for a promotion. There are four criteria you should be basing every new hire or promotion opportunity on. Time and time again, I have seen the wisdom of this approach. Think of these criteria like a checklist. When considering a new hire or promotion, work through your checklist in this order of priority:

#1 Values

Values are a person’s deep-seated beliefs that motivate their behaviors. The question you’re seeking to answer when assessing a candidate’s core values is if their personal values are in alignment with the organization’s core values. There are tests you can give to candidates to help ascertain their values but in my opinion, the only way you can really get a sense for someone’s soul is to spend time together. Why have they made the key decisions in their life? Who are they at their core? It’s why we date before we get married. The more senior and critical the hire or promotion is to the organization, the more time you need to spend dating.

#2 Style

Style is how the candidate thinks, behaves, and approaches challenges and opportunities. Each of us has a style or a unique way of managing the world. Some styles are exceptional at being tactical, detailed-oriented, and executing a process. Other styles are better at being strategic, conceptual, and results-oriented. Don’t ask a fish to climb a tree. You can learn more about styles and their relative strengths and weaknesses by playing around with the World’s Fastest Personality Test. Or, you can compare the style of a candidate with the needs of an open role by test-driving the PSIU Talent Management Suite.

#3 Skills

Skills are the technical capabilities the candidate brings to the table. For instance, if you’re hiring for a sales role, the skills question you’re seeking to answer is, “Does this candidate have high sales skills or the natural ability to develop those skills?” My preferred method to assess for skills is to have the candidate audition for the role. It’s not enough that they tell you; they need to show you. This is why athletes do try-outs, aspiring chefs cook up a meal for the owners, and actors audition for parts. It’s a skill test. In the example of the sales hire, I would run a mock sales call and see how the candidate performs.

Note that many skills can actually be trained and developed rather quickly but style and values are much more ingrained. In practice—especially when up against project deadline and resource pressures—most of us tend to sacrifice values and style fit to find someone who has past experience (a proxy for skills). I’m just as guilty of this as anyone. But every time I’ve hired like this out of […]

I saw this image circulating around social media last week and I had to roll my eyes:

It’s not because I don’t believe in the values of “new management” thinking. Quite the contrary. It’s that making the shift from “old management” thinking to “new management” thinking is not a problem to solve. It’s a polarity to manage.

A problem is something to be dealt with or overcome. A polarity, on the other hand, is something to be managed on a continuum. Basically, anytime you are dealing with things that seem at odds with each other or paradoxical, you’re dealing with a polarity and not a problem.

Take the first line in the viral image above as an example. Are employees your biggest risk or your biggest asset? The answer is both! Hire the wrong employee or lose control of your HR compliance function and it won’t be too long before you’re served a very expensive and frivolous lawsuit. On the other hand, if you treat your employees like they’re not your greatest asset — like they can’t be trusted to use their common sense or act in the best interest of the company — then you’re going to engender a lot of resentment and apathy.

This meme, which is generating thousands of likes and shares, portrays New Management Thinking as the solution to the problem of Old Management Thinking. It’s actually not the solution. There is no problem to solve – just a polarity to manage.

Don’t treat polarities as problems to be solved or pay the price. Why? Because when a team treats a polarity to manage as a problem to snuff out — chanting all the while “Down with hierarchy!” “Down with meetings!” “Out with the old and in with the new!” — one polarity will be emphasized too much and the organization will experience even bigger problems.

A team like this wastes an inordinate amount of time and energy on the wrong things, leading to a lot of activity and little effectiveness. Their misguided efforts also make it harder for the good and necessary aspects of the opposite polarity to exist within the organization. The end result is an organization that is less resilient and adaptable to change.

As a leader, being able to discern the difference between a problem and a polarity will help you to build a culture that makes the right decisions about the right things. This is true even if, from an uneducated eye, those efforts can sometimes appear to be in support of “old” ways of thinking. But they are not old ways of thinking! You are just boosting up an aspect of a polarity that is needed in your organization at this period in time. Later on, you may boost up “new” ways of thinking, depending […]

Should you run a top-down or a bottom-up organizational design?

Choosing “top-down” means giving the roles at the top of your organization significantly more control over key decisions than those lower in the hierarchy. Choosing “bottom-up” means having little to no centralized control so that those doing the work are free to organize, make decisions, and perform as they best see fit. Both camps have their own justifications.

The extremists in the top-down camp believe that an autocratic, hierarchical style of command-and-control decision-making is necessary for an organization to be successful and fulfill its purpose. In this case, strategies or plans are first conceived at the top of the organization and then cascaded down into the organization for implementation. When decisions from the bottom need to get made, they must first go to a qualified manager for approval. Deep down, the proponents of a top-down structure believe that if there isn’t an appropriate level of centralized control, the inmates will soon be running the jail and chaos will reign.

The extremists in the top down camp believe that without a high level of centralized control the whole enterprise will quickly fall apart.

The extremists in the bottom-up camp believe just the opposite — that most forms of hierarchy are unnecessary and inefficient (if not outright evil). Their view is that a top-down hierarchy separates authority from those actually doing the work. Therefore, at its best, a top-down approach leads to cultures of disempowerment, resentment, and bureaucracy. At worst, it gives birth to autocratic tyrants who wield unchecked power, enriching themselves and their families at others’ expense.

The extremists in the bottom-up camp believe that most forms of hierarchy lead to tyranny.

So who’s right?

Well, if you were to gauge the current zeitgeist in business and popular culture, you’d get a strong sense that the bottom-up camp is right camp to be in. Best-selling books and viral articles get published regularly that bemoan the old paradigm of top-down command and control as “so-last-century” while promoting an emerging new paradigm of self-managed, egalitarian organizations without bosses, titles, or anyone telling you what to do. Ahhhh. So refreshing.

But is it true? Let’s see…

Reinventing Organizations from the Bottom Up? Not Quite.

In a recent New York Times interview, Tobi Lutke, CEO of Shopify, used the term “trust battery” to refer to something that we’re all familiar with but we may not always articulate well: monitoring the current level of trust between people.

As you undoubtedly know, there are few things that can hinder success in an organization as much as a lack of trust. Using the metaphor of trust battery is a clever way to think about and communicate the importance of trust in your organizational culture and using it can make some hard conversations easier too.

Here’s how the trust battery works…

Every time your work with someone, the trust battery between you is either charged or discharged. When the trust battery between you is high, then the work gets done smoothly and quickly. When the trust battery is low, everything deteriorates.

When you start working with someone new, like a new hire, then the trust battery between you is charged at about 50 percent. You’re not really sure what to expect but you also give the benefit of the doubt and try to keep an open mind. Over time, if your interactions are positive, the trust battery fills up. If not, it drains.

Depending on its level of reserves, the trust battery can drain slowly or quickly. If you’ve worked with someone for a long time, have many positive shared experiences and a high degree of trust, then even if this person starts acting differently, the trust battery will drain more slowly. “Hmmmmm, Sam doesn’t seem like himself lately. He’s always been on time and now he’s late. I wonder what’s going on with him? I better check in and see if he needs anything.”

On the other hand, if it’s a relationship with low trust reserves already — like a new hire who clearly doesn’t cut it or a long-term relationship with a history of negative behaviors — then that battery drains very quickly. “Damn that Sam. He’s never delivered and he never will. He says one thing and does another. Why hasn’t he been fired yet?”

The trust battery works between groups too. For example, in your own organization, have you examined the trust level between sales and marketing? How about between customer service and engineering? Or between the CEO and the rest of the company? If you sense that the trust battery is running low between groups, I can almost guarantee that your company it not executing to potential – and it would be wise to take corrective action.

To be sure, we all have an intuitive sense for this already – it’s just how humans work. But calling it out makes it easier for everyone in your culture to understand and model. It also makes having difficult conversations easier […]

Balancing multiple competing accountabilities is hard to do. … Take away his incentives…wait…whaaaaaat did I just say? Let me explain.

One of the key concepts of Organizational Physics is that growing your business from the Nail It to the Scale It stage usually requires a change in organizational structure.

Changing structures, roles, accountabilities, and reporting relationships is a big undertaking. It’s a pre-requisite to scaling up but it can be hard to get it right. It also takes time and energy to integrate the new design.

When a growth company doesn’t yet have the resources to hire out its full team for the new structure, it’s a common practice to assign multiple roles or “hats” to existing leaders.

The idea is this. Until the company can afford to find and hire a dedicated replacement, a few leadership team members are assigned accountability to execute across multiple functions at the same time. Once a replacement can be made, the hat is taken off and given to the new dedicated replacement.

Some common examples of hat wearing that I see in companies in the Nail It stage include:

• The head of Sales wears the hat of head of Marketing. Once a head of Marketing is hired, the head of Sales can return to focusing 100% on sales.
• The CEO wears the hat of head of Strategic Alliances. When the business warrants a dedicated Strategic Alliance role, the company makes that hire.
• The head of Admin wears the hat of head of Recruiting and People Development. When the company has the resources, it creates two distinct roles: one for liability prevention and one for recruiting and cultural development.
• The head of Software Engineering wears the hat of head of IT/Tech Ops. Once the company has the resources to hire a dedicated head of IT/Tech Ops, the head of Software Engineering can go back to focusing fully on driving external software development.

There are other examples. Obviously, hat wearing isn’t ideal. In all of these instances the organization is violating a principle of structure. This is because they’re combining effectiveness roles with efficiency ones, long-range roles with short-range ones, or roles that need more decentralized autonomy with those that need more centralized control.

In other words, while hat wearing can be useful and necessary, you should always view it as a temporary measure. It sacrifices some focus and energy in the people wearing the hats (and the company as a whole) in exchange for short-term cash flow savings and buying time to find the right new hire or promotion. Basically, only deploy hats when cash or time is too tight.

That said, if you are deploying multiple hats, you should keep in mind a simple concept that will increase organizational […]

“We believe that the future standard for all executive teams will include a head of Customer Success who’s on the same level as the head of Sales, Marketing, and Demand Generation.” – Aaron Ross

If you run a software-as-a-service (SAAS) business, you might already know about the core concepts behind Aaron Ross and Margaret Tyler’s book Predictable Revenue. Aaron Ross learned his craft as the head of customer acquisition for Salesforce.com and this book seems to have become the hot new bible for scaling up the revenue side of a SAAS business.

The main theme of Predictable Revenue is that the single most important thing a SAAS business can do to scale revenues is to segment its Sales roles into distinct focus areas and also to create a new role in the organizational structure called “Customer Success” that is dedicated to making existing customers successful and driving renewals.

Lately, I’ve been getting asked frequently in my consulting practice about how to structure the Customer Success role. My sense is that there is some confusion out there about the distinction between Account Management and Customer Success. In this article, I’m going to show you how to use the principles of Organizational Physics to actually structure the Customer Success role so that your own SAAS business has the greatest probability of realizing its potential.

Role Segmentation: Always a Good Idea

Predictable Revenue argues that the major role of Sales is actually four roles that need to be segmented in the organizational structure:

• “Inbound Lead Qualification” to qualify new leads coming into the business;
• “Outbound Prospecting” to create and qualify new sales opportunities and then pass them to Sales or Account Executives to close;
• “Account Executives or Sales” that close deals and carry a quota;
• “Account Management/Customer Success” which is a role dedicated to making existing customers successful and driving renewals.

Does it make sense to segment these different sales roles? Absolutely. In fact, you should define and segment all of the major roles and most of the minor roles in your entire business — not just sales.

Segmenting by roles greatly supports scaling your business. It helps to create role clarity and accountability. It allows the right style of people to focus on the most important things for their roles. It significantly improves the hiring process. And with the right management process, it can significantly increase execution speed.

Predictable Revenue encourages the segmentation of sales roles earlier than one might think and I totally concur — but again, for all roles. Technically I would start to think through your organizational design and role segmentations in the mid- to late Nail It stage of business development. Heck, it doesn’t even cost anything to segment by roles if you don’t have the budget […]

I earn my living as a scaling coach to expansion-stage companies. One of the advantages of my position is that I get a deep, inside look into different industries and businesses. While no two situations are exactly alike, I have seen a consistent yet under-reported issue out there that keeps 9 out of 10 companies from getting out of start-up mode to the next level.

What is it? It’s a breakdown in Product Management.

Assuming that you already have a sound strategy and execution framework in place, if you can get your Product Management function right, you’ll solve a lot of problems inherent in scaling your business. You will also have a much easier time increasing revenue growth, execution speed, agility, and profits. If you don’t get Product Management right, scaling to your potential will be much harder or even impossible.

Before proceeding, I need to call out that the problems and solutions described in this article are only applicable to a company in the late Nail It to early Scale It lifecycle stage of business development:

The Organizational Physics Strategy Map. To scale successfully, you’ll need to rethink and redesign Product Management between the late Nail It and early Scale It stages of business development.

In the early start-up stages of a business, Product Management doesn’t need to be a well-defined function. It’s just something that is organically “managed” by a product-savvy entrepreneur. At this stage, there’s a drive to find product-market fit and not much else matters.

But once product-market fit is established and the company is ready to scale up by adding new product lines, customer types, or markets between the late Nail It and early Scale It stages, that’s when Product Management should be rethought and redesigned. This article will help you do just that.

Is There a Breakdown in Your Product Management Function?

It’s pretty easy to spot a breakdown in the Product Management function in your business. Assuming that your business has already aligned around a clear growth strategy and execution framework, some symptoms of a Product Management breakdown will show up when there is one or more of these conditions:

• Poor coordination between sales, engineering, manufacturing, and marketing
• Haphazard quality in new product releases
• A struggle to translate customer needs into a delightful customer experience
• Growing revenues but little or no profits
• Finger-pointing and blame between departments
• Perpetually late product development
• A strong technical product but poor product marketing or vice vera
• A lack of organizational clarity on the short- to mid-range product roadmap
• A visionary entrepreneur who is stuck managing product details

Now, you’re probably thinking that I’m attributing a lot of internal corporate issues to a breakdown in just one function. And […]

Photo credit: AudienceView.

It’s a classic tale. Your company’s driven, visionary founder manages to lead your start up to takeoff and hit rapid growth mode. But then something happens, and everything starts to bog down. Those former start up struggles and early wins turn into a whole new set of challenges: running the business at scale.

At about this time in an organization’s lifecycle, conversations in the board room and around the water cooler start to focus on the founder. See if you’ve said or heard any of these before:

• Our founder has great energy and ideas (along with some really dumb ideas) but we still can’t seem to get our act together.
• It’s no secret our founder isn’t an Operations person.
• We need to either replace our founder or support her with someone experienced who can run day-to-day operations and keep the trains on time.
• What we need is a President/COO. Then the founder/CEO can be Mr. Outside and the President/COO can be Mr. Inside.

Does any of that sound familiar? I bet it does. On the surface, having a President/COO can make a lot of sense. Every organization needs stability, structure, and experience if it is going to scale up. The approach is certainly popular. “President and COO” titles are so common—throw a stapler in the air at your local office park and you’re bound to hit one on the head.

But hiring a President/COO to solve the “founder” problem typically brings just a new set of problems, setbacks, and even disasters. In many cases I’ve seen, the new President/COO was a sure bet on paper but failed to replicate past successes in a new environment.

In another common scenario, you’ll find that soon after joining, the new President/COO will get into conflict with the founder/CEO about who really runs the business. When this happens, the culture quickly erodes into “old guard” vs. “new guard” and execution speed bogs down across the board from all the in-fighting and politics.

There’s also a little appreciated but equally severe problem that happens when the founder leaves the business too soon, now that “the professionals are in charge” or because “it’s just not that much fun around here anymore,” and the company fails to capitalize on its true potential over time.

While hiring and integrating capable senior leaders into the organization is needed and necessary to scale your business (I’ll show you how to do this here), the popular approach of having a President/COO to oversee business execution usually turns out to be a fix that is much worse than the original problem.

I’ve coached many founder-led, high-growth companies to increasing revenues and profits without a traditional President/COO and without mistakenly consolidating business functions together. I can say with confidence that there is a better way to build great leadership to […]

“What’s the difference between an organizational structure and an organizational chart? Do you need one or the other—or both—to manage your business?” I get asked different versions of this question a lot. The distinctions are subtle but important. Knowing the answers—and approaching your organizational design the right way—is mission-critical to scaling your business.

The short answer is this. In most cases, if you’re entering a new stage for your business—scaling beyond start-up mode or embarking on a new growth strategy—you’ll need a new organizational design. And when it comes to organizational design, you really only need two things:

1. A well-designed organizational structure
2. A “role-centric” human resource management system (HRMS) that mirrors the structure

That’s it. You do not need a classic org chart—that constantly-changing and almost instantly-out-of-date diagram that shows names, job titles, and lines of reporting responsibilities. The org chart tends to quickly become obsolete and leads to a counterproductive focus on who’s where in the organizational pecking order…

You don’t need this. Photo credit Pathfinder.

Trying to maintain a classic org chart—or, heaven-forbid, to redesign your business based on one—causes much more harm than good. So drop the classic org chart and instead embrace the principles of effective organizational structure combined with a role-centric HRMS. Here’s what you need to know…

Are You Attempting to Redesign Your Business from an Org Chart?

It should be intuitive that, in order to manage and scale your business, you need a sound organizational design. As I’ve written in “The 5 Classic Mistakes in Organizational Structure: Or, How to Design Your Organization the Right Way,” everything has a design to it. If your business design sucks, then your execution will too.

Changing an organizational structure can be very challenging because there’s a lot of inertia tied up in the status quo. Individual perceptions of job status, internal politics, titles, compensation, and desired career paths can make changing your structure seem complicated, if not daunting. Many companies set themselves up for failure by attempting to redesign the organization from an existing org chart. When this happens, it sounds something like this…

“OK, so what if we have Sally and Mike report to Jeff, Jeff report to Ron and Ron and Helen will split reporting responsibilities? That could work. Wait.. what… Helen is leaving now? Damn. OK, how about if instead Peter takes over for Ron and Ron can head up the new product line? No, that won’t work because Ron’s ego is as big as the Grand Canyon and he’ll feel like he’s taking a step backward. Shit. This is complicated. I guess we’ll just stick with the status quo, even though we all know it’s not working well at all.”

If you ever find yourself in a […]

Sales vs. Marketing. Who’s the Ape? Does your head of sales think your head of marketing is an imbecile — that they just don’t “get it” and aren’t doing the right things to drive qualified leads for the sales team? Or perhaps your head of marketing looks down his nose at those “apes” in the sales department who constantly demand more results but don’t understand the strategic aspects of real marketing, not to mention the time and money it costs. Sheeezh.

You may not be surprised to hear that this tension between sales and marketing is common. The truth is that, by nature, their functions will always be in tension or conflict. One is short-range-focused, with a drive to close qualified leads NOW. The other should be long-range oriented, developing the brand and product offering to meet evolving customer needs in the future – not just this quarter’s targets. That conflict is never going to go away. And the point I’m going to make in this article is that it can be harnessed.

There is an easy way to address the conflict between sales and marketing and make it constructive for both growing sales and building the brand. It does, however, take awareness and discipline to do it well. The solution is to refocus and get alignment between sales and marketing on the most important question every business must answer: Who is your primary customer? You might think this is obvious, yet a surprising number of B2B marketing companies overlook this step. Or don’t do it adequately.

Who is Your Buyer Persona?

A “buyer persona” is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer — the real buyers who influence or make decisions about the products, services or solutions you market. The buyer persona sits at the nexus between sales and marketing. Defining or redefining the buyer persona is a high-leverage activity that takes the strengths and insights of both marketing and sales. It allows them to come together, focus on what’s most important, drop what isn’t, and then get busy driving sales and building the brand.

Why is this? Well, if you can get alignment between sales and marketing on who the primary customer is, then everything else is tactics. The tactics refer to the best approach to reaching this primary customer, and this is open for trial, error, and team learning. The tactics may change, the shared goal remains the same.

If you don’t have clarity and alignment on who the primary customer is, however, there will be rampant disagreement across the board. The sales and marketing teams will fight about the little things because there’s no alignment on the big thing. And even if your current marketing tactics are working relatively well, they won’t be […]

Key Takeaways:

• You don’t build a great culture through intention alone. You build it through a culture system.
• You can’t dictate culture. But you can design for it. A strong culture system is designed around four key elements: Values, Rituals, Stories, and Consequences.
• To build a better organizational culture, use the culture system framework to focus your energies on improving the weakest element, then improve the next and so on.

When Intention Isn’t Enough

It’s 9am on Monday morning at ACME Widget Corp. The management team is gathered in the 1st floor conference room waiting for CEO Jack Ryan to arrive. A rumor is buzzing around that Jack has spent the past weekend at Culture Summit 2.0, some sort of “interactive experience” where business leaders learn from culture gurus how to build a thriving organization.

A few minutes after 9, Jack, calm and present as always, enters the conference room and gives his hellos. As he is taking his seat, Sally in Marketing says, “Jack, there’s a rumor going around that you attended a corporate culture workshop this weekend? How was it? We’re all curious to know…”

Jack doesn’t answer right away and instead takes time to visually connect and smile at everyone around the table. Finally he speaks. “This was one of the most transformative weekends of my life. It really reinforced for me the importance of values-based leadership and I’ve got a lot of new ideas to try. But the main thing is this: going forward my #1 commitment is to ensure that we truly become a values-based organization. That’s what I’m most committed to and excited about as a result of this weekend.”

Now imagine you’re in that circle and you hear Jack say this. How do you respond? I imagine that outwardly you might nod your head and even give a verbal “right on!” But inwardly? Might you have some skepticism that any CEO might succeed at this — despite a personal commitment to personal growth and values-based leadership?

“C’mon,” you might think to yourself, “What about Marie in accounting? Wasn’t she just a nightmare who ate away at the company culture for 6 years? What’s going to be different this time? We’re swamped and who has time to really focus on and enforce values? There’s no question I’d like to be part of a great culture; the hard part is actually making it happen.”

At the same time, try to imagine being Jack. Can you empathize with his desire to truly lead by values? To build a transcendent organization that makes a positive impact on the world, kicks ass in the marketplace, and has the culture you’ve always wanted to build — one you’re truly proud of?

Intuitively we all understand that building a truly values-based organization can be a life-changing experience for everyone involved. […]

Sometimes the best way to understand what NOT to do in an interview is to go through a bad one yourself. I’ve definitely had this experience. It occurred when I was interviewing for an entry-level sales position with a fast-growing telecom company in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the time, I was 26 years old, had just shut down my first startup, had burned through all my savings, and was in desperate need of a job.

A friend of mine told me about the firm one night over beers: “Hey Lex, I know you just shut down your startup. Sorry it didn’t work out, man. If you need a job to pay the bills, they’re always hiring where I work. It’s not the best job in the world but the money can be good if you work hard at it.”

The notion of hard work and good money sounded like a pretty good opportunity. I needed something I could throw myself into until I found my footing again. So I called the company the next day, told them I was referred by one of their existing reps, and set an appointment for an interview. To prepare, I practiced my spiel about why I’d be a good fit for their organization, polished up my resume, put on a suit, and went in with a mix of hope, anxiety, and chutzpah.

I arrived at their offices and approached the front desk. The receptionist, middle-aged and blurry-eyed, looked me up and down skeptically and, with a hint of exasperation at having to deal with me, said, “May I help you?”

“Ah yes, I’m here for an interview for a sales position. My name is Lex Sisney.”

She glanced down at her calendar and shook her head: “There’s no interview today. You first need to take the written test.” She reached into her file drawer and handed me a 50-question fill-in-the-oval-and-make-damn-sure-you-stay-in-the-circle scantron test. “If you pass the written test, then you’ll be invited back in for an actual interview.”

I thought to myself, “Really? Why didn’t they tell me this on the phone? I’ve got to take some psychobabble test before even speaking with someone? And is this the kind of place I want to work for? WTF. Well, I guess I need the money so I better play along.” Out loud I said, “OK, let’s take the test.”

“See the clock over there on the wall?” she said. “You have 30 minutes to complete the test. Have a seat under the clock and the time will begin. Do you have a #2 pencil?”

“Uh, no, I’ll need a pencil please. Do you have one?” She rolled her eyes and reluctantly handed one over like it was her last meal. I took the […]