How to Make an Impact in Every Business Conversation

Some people seem to be able to connect to anyone they talk to be it a CXO or a middle manager or a techie in a matter of minutes. Ever wonder why? There are from what I have seen, many factors that go into being so impactful. Some of them are:

• Doing your homework about the person’s background and concerns
• Linking your value proposition to their concerns in compelling fashion
• Saying something that provokes the listener to reconsider their own views
• Being a great listener
• Knowing how to paint a visual picture of what you are trying to say
• Respecting the other person’s viewpoint while…
• ….Knowing how to disagree if you have to albeit in an agreeable and constructive fashion
• Bringing energy and conviction into every interaction
• Being straight and keeping your commitments
• Etc.

In this article I am going to focus on a particular aspect that I have seen in every person who has mastered the art of business conversations. That is the ability to tailor the message to the frame of reference of the listener. This requires some explanation. Depending on our roles, each of us has a frame of reference i.e., a mental framework in which we fit everything we come across, interpret and make decisions in.

For example a CEO of a telecom in a mature market may be most concerned about ARPUs (Average Revenue Per User), keeping down total costs, employee productivity, minimizing churn, tapping into new innovations to drive growth (measured maybe as % of revenues from new VAS’s i.e., Value Added Services), minimizing voluntary attrition etc. These KPIs are clearly linked to each other in a complex web where the impact on one KPI has an effect on multiple other KPIs, which in turn affect each other. So they tend to think about multiple factors at the same time and have to be concerned about the impact of their actions on this complex web of KPIs. Their frame of reference resembles a Balanced Scorecard which is a web of KPIs impacting each other. They seldom have the leeway to focus exclusively on 1-2 KPIs at the expense of the others. The best CEOs would of course know how to simplify such a complex picture to specific actionables for their people but that is a different topic altogether. Here we are focusing on how we lesser mortals must approach conversations with such CEOs J, which is not quite as simple.

The head of marketing in the same company would have a different frame of reference where her focus would be a max of 2-3 KPIs from where she can use a Hierarchical Model of thinking to come down to a few specific controllable root causes which she would focus on controlling. In this case for example, her focus may be to achieve at least 10% revenues from new VAS’s (Defined say as VAS’s introduced in the last 12 months) and grabbing 2% market share from competition. She will then break these 2 KPIs down using a classical RCA (Root Cause Analysis) or some similar technique to figure out the key underlying factors she has to focus on. In this case it may be to ensure that ensure that the conversion of targeted ads for new VASs in their web / mobile sites is raised from 2% to 4%, training every dealer to be able to explain the new VAS features and maybe getting a certain number of influential people to tweet about the new VAS’s (Ex-cricketer Sehwag in India has become a marketing star thanks to his tweets so companies are lining up to pay him to “product place” themselves in his tweets). Point being that unlike the CEO who would be carrying a much bigger picture and hence a complex web in his mind, she has the “luxury” of focusing almost exclusively on the 2 KPIs she has been asked to drive.

 The COO in the same company would have a different take. Her frame of reference is likely to be Process Centric because her focus is on getting each part of the company to work effectively with each other regardless of function, location, time zones, underlying IT systems, cultures etc. So she would have in her mind a detailed process view, the SLAs (Service Level Agreements), hand off issues between departments etc. She is usually focused on improving performance against the SLAs, reducing the costs in the process, reducing manual intervention etc. Those are her hot buttons.

A B2B sales manager in the same company would have a different frame of reference altogether. He would tend to take a Day In The Life view. He would typically focus on how his day typically starts, how it unfolds and finally winds up. Maybe each morning he has a call with his reps before they hit the streets. Then during the day he may have follow ups on specific deals on behalf of his team followed by a few senior level sales calls with rookie reps to show them the ropes, sit in on a forecast / pipeline review, approve some discount requests and finally close the day updating the SFA tool on actions done during the day and assigning tasks for the team for the next day. Every week or month he may also look at some productivity reports or expense break up report or pipeline conversion report in a review, basis which he may take on some tasks for himself to follow up on or assign the same to some rep.

Each of these 4 examples typifies a different frame of reference. I have in my career come across mainly these 4 types. When selling, we come across all 4 types of people in different stages of a selling cycle. Once we recognize these archetypes, it is a lot easier to talk effectively to them. Why? Because, it is a lot easier to digest information if it already fits in with the way we process information. The key therefore is to know who is of which type and therefore tailor our message accordingly. A large telecom CRM deal I was involved in some years ago saw us come across all 4 archetypes as the vendor selection went all the way from the customer service lead for their largest circle to the head of marketing to the IT head to the CEO.

In this case, we started at the level of the customer service manager (you may not always get to control where you start so be prepared for various permutations and combinations of the 4 archetypes!). With him we focused on how his typical “day in the life” looked like now and how it would be different with our solution in place. We did not show or discuss any other extraneous bells and whistles which while attractive would have deviated from the core message. Once convinced, he took us to the CIO who took a very process centric view as he knew the complexities inherent in processes that spanned multiple systems. At the same time the marketing head got wind of the project and wanted to know how it would help him. This telecom was focused on rapid growth and wanted to acquire new customers rapidly so his focus was purely on acquiring new customers and spreading his dealer network for the same rapidly. Once we cleared that hurdle the CEO got involved and predictably, he had a very different take. He of course wanted all that his people had asked us for until that point but he was more consumed by the need to balance market growth and customer acquisition with investments in better customer service and IT systems to support the same, a consistent customer experience across channels and geographies, better dealer / employee training and retention, keeping down overall costs etc.

We won the deal because we customized our approach to each of them in turn. To the customer service manager, we showed what a typical call center agent’s screen would look like first thing in the morning, how calls would get assigned to them, how they would resolve the same, document the same etc. We also showed how he could monitor his agents better, how he could get up to date stats on status of service tickets raised and how he could gauge (and hence improve if need be) readiness of the call center agents. To the CIO we focused on a process flow diagram showing how a service ticket raised by a call center agent would flow to a back office for resolution back to the customer to inform them once resolved, how it may affect their billing system (in case of wrong billing), provisioning system (in case a service had not get properly activated) etc. We also had to show how the various IT components would fit together to orchestrate this dance. To the marketing head we showed specific features that would help drive rapid customer acquisition like capturing leads with minimal key strokes, using a KM (Knowledge Management) system to minimize training for new agents as they expanded their call center rapidly (they also had very high % turnover of call center staff) etc., as he saw these as key factors to being able to acquire customers rapidly. For the CEO the focus was more on how the same processes, dashboards and training etc., would be rolled out to the entire company to ensure consistency and how the same could be rolled out to newly acquired entities rapidly (they were acquiring rapidly in a fragmented market).

A couple of questions may arise such as:

• What if the archetypes are mixed in the same audience? – what has worked for me is to address the most powerful people in the room based on their frame of reference while having up my sleeve slides or responses to others who would be in the room whose frame may be different. If time does not permit answering their queries, I typically suggest that we take it offline and I make it a point to do so lest they later put a spanner in the works.
• Would this apply even outside the IT industry? I would think so because except the example I used, nothing is specific to the IT industry. The approach of people would be based on their roles. So the 4 styles should still apply.

To summarize, the 4 approaches are “Day in the Life”, Process Centric, Hierarchical and Balanced Scorecard. To reiterate, knowing the listener's style and adapting to it is only one part of the game. You need to ensure you get the other success factors right as well (that were listed at the start). Getting good at such conversations is not a black art. It can be learned quite easily. Practice is the key!