Business Improvement vs The Power Of Denial: A True Story

In my personal experience, the key to business growth is in aligning your customer-facing teams psychologically and functionally, and in maximizing every facet of your sales and marketing productivity, all along the buying journey. Speaking of which, for a number of years now have I championed the very tangible business benefits that Smarketing? has brought to sales organizations across a wide variety of industry sectors. I have shared the amazing success stories of current and past clients, stories of revenue increase of up to 433(!) percent, of more effective collaboration across organizational silos, of achieving a more collaborative and "can-do" business culture, of better staff engagement and of delighting customers with superior experiences.

However, I recently realized that I may have focused a little too much on our clients' business outcomes and that I perhaps have not made enough of their business leaders who were critical in leading their transformations.

Even more so, I have perhaps neglected to talk about business leaders who got in their own way and in the way of progress.

Even more so, I have perhaps neglected to talk about business leaders who got in their own way and in the way of progress.

Throughout my time in business it has been evident to me that there are many marketing managers and many sales managers who are simply content with operating within their KPIs, within their day-to-day jobs and within their organizationally separate silos.

To illustrate my point, take as an example my personal experiences with a global IT giant, a three-lettered household name in mainstream information technology.

My initial encounter with this organization was through a local sales enablement manager who was working for the Australian subsidiary of this European-headquartered giant (she has since moved on to another employer). She contacted me at the time because she was looking for someone competent to run a specialist workshop on sales and marketing collaboration.

We discussed her situation and her motivation for wanting this particular workshop. After a while, it transpired that she had become frustrated with the salespeople, who she felt was largely ignoring and under-valuing the effort that her sales enablement team had made to help lift sales. During that conversation I could feel her hurt and her deep personal disappointment. Her pain felt all the more acute to me as she had neither the authority, nor the budget to remediate her situation. She was stuck between a proverbial rock and a hard place. I really wanted to help her and so I offered to make my own approaches to decisions makers in this organization.

However, this was harder to achieve than it first appeared as it turns out that this particular corporation is - in my opinion - insanely matrixed. Not only are the various business units delineated along many product lines, but, making it more complicated to navigate, its marketing function is horizontally integrated, i.e. working across the various business lines. (N.B. Just in case you are wondering: I would have suggested that they align their business units with specific market segments and along customer profiles instead.)

This structure made it almost impossible to find someone in this organization willing and able to become interested and to make a decision to act.

Incredibly, the few locally-based department heads who carry a global remit seemed to be disinterested in local matters, possibly due to the enormous scope of their role. To paraphrase one such leader's response when I approached them: "That's a local matter. I look after global."

"That's a local matter. I look after global."

It seems to me they were - in other words - saying : "Yes, I realize it's a problem, but I don't get measured on solving that one. So go away."

OK, so I needed to find someone in the right jurisdiction AND with the authority to make decisions. It appeared that this person did not exist locally. So, I needed to reach out into the wider region, i.e. into Asia-Pacific. It turned out that the regional marketing head is based in this organization's APAC hub in Singapore.

After some attempts I managed to make contact with her and received an initially positive response. Still, it took more than six months for the two of us to physically meet in the Sydney office on one of her trips to Australia. We finally had a chance to explore what could be done about the issue that the sales enablement leader had complained to me about earlier that year.

Here is what happened in my short meeting with the lady from Singapore during her visit to Sydney: She listened politely for a few minutes and then said something like this (I am paraphrasing here): "You are absolutely right. The lack of collaboration between sales and marketing is a big problem."

Hooray, I thought, we have a breakthrough.

Then, she continued, saying this (again, I am paraphrasing): "But, we are a very mature business. We are probably one of the most integrated organizations in the world. My marketing people attend sales meetings all the time, we work very well together."

And that was the end of that conversation.

You see, from her perspective in far away Singapore, the world looked fine. Or, at least that was what she wanted to believe, or it was what she was being led to believe.

Sure, it is possible that my powers of persuasion had let me down on that day. Perhaps the challenges that the sales enablement manager had complained to me about were a local problem only, possibly too small to see all the way from Singapore. However, the fact that she had acknowledged that the problem exists and that - in fact - it is quite common, but then denied that it existed in her organization, left me with a particular impression that day.

Forgive me, dear reader, if I may appear a little unkind in my reaction to her response at the time. You see, I couldn't help but be reminded of the famous children's story by Hans Christian Anderson, called "The Emperor's New Clothes" in which an emperor lives in denial that he is - in fact - naked, as he parades before his subjects.

On that day the lady from Singapore did not strike me as a true LEADER wanting to change things for the better. Instead, she struck me as someone who preferred to play it safe and pretend that everything is normal, a bit like the emperor in the children's' story.

It's a pity because imagine what a huge impact that lady could have had on her organization if only she had the courage to say out loud that the emperor is wearing no clothes.

This is a multi-billion-dollar organization, so even the tiniest improvement, say in the range of 0.001 percent, it would have made a huge difference to the business and quite possibly to her personally. She could have become a hero and have gone places, if only had she zigged, instead of zagged, when she had the opportunity.

That is the end of my slightly long-winded story about the (destructive) power of denial. My point is that - in my experience - no situation will be significantly improved without a LEADER with the courage to challenge the status quo and to drive change.

No situation will be improved without a LEADER with the courage to challenge the status quo and to drive change.

So, think about this carefully: Are you a LEADER, or a denier?

- END -

About Peter Strohkorb

Peter Strohkorb is the CEO of Peter Strohkorb Consulting International, an international Smarketing? expert, published Author, an international Speaker and Executive Mentor, as well as an Executive MBA guest Lecturer.

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