It's No Secret that in a Highly Turbulent Business Environment - Sales, Marketing & BD Roles are Irrefutably and Completely Pure “BS”!

Turbulence in the science of fluid dynamics is the oldest unsolved phenomenon in physics. In fact, the world's legendary true polymath and virtuoso artist, Leonardo Da Vinci once produced a three-dimensional drawing depicting a water jet impacting a water pool sometime during the 16th century Renaissance era - only to now be the world's first important and documented attempt to illustrate and investigate turbulent fluid flows. Putting it simply, a physicist's effort to develop deeper understanding on 'turbulent' behaviours of water molecules is?focused on the study of the velocity streamlines produced by a flow from a channel into a body of water (which also creates water ripples or transverse waves that disappear as quickly as they form).

Now, if we consider the mimicry of quantum mechanics of 'turbulence' in context of management science and given that in today's highly intensified business environments, the resultant quantum state change caused by high velocity streams (or ripples) of volatile and uncertain nature of market cycles and economic trends have rendered the word ‘challenging’ to be an extremely mild term to describe the brutal constraints and restricted boundaries all business organisations have to face daily in their quest of achieving substantial growth and maturity.

Nonetheless, besides having to grapple with prevailing common and perennial business hurdles, the postmodern post-pandemic era economic situation is novel to many business enterprises despite such dire scenario being applicable to almost every large and small to medium sized organisations in most markets and geographical regions. Dismayed by the inefficacies of conventional strategy wisdom and slow pace of business renewal or recovery, many businesses and corporate organisations continue to falter in terms of understanding the underlying and pertinent implications of 'turbulent' economic behaviours to their business strategies.

More so, anecdotal evidence I have gathered from my professional tenure in the Oil & Gas and Energy sector over the last two decades or so also suggested that much too often, even the exceptionally stable long-established and mature companies (both local and international) tend to completely yield to the daily pressure of achieving immediate-term financial results, particularly in context of dealing with intense competition and especially when facing with protracted calamities of external environmental and economic 'turbulence'.

What’s more, in the advent of such events, it almost a common 'behavioural' tendencies for senior business leaders and experienced competent managers to forcibly relinquish strategy foresights and commitments of strategic long-term goals and objectives the company sets forth to do in the first place! And to add more 'outliers' to an already tricky situation amidst the high ripple effects of externally driven 'erratic' disruptions to the business, respective leaders and owner-managers would opt to substitute predetermined highly accurate tactical growth penetration strategies with unproductive, mediocre (or less) transactional business pursuits and superficial client engagement activities.

Take for example, in such a scenario a regionally operated international company - let’s call it ‘1Co.’ - we get to see the occasional evidence of its senior management frantically chasing executive level meeting pursuits and avenues on short notices with relatively unacquainted client organisations (and possibly even from an unfamiliarised market/territory) whilst omnipresent threats of acute and chronic ‘signs of crisis’ affecting daily business running persisted (or to a certain extent, remain unattended).

Although it's not at all about whether the timing is inappropriate and/or the client's acceptance of meeting schedules are unattainable, conversely speaking and as a matter of grave concern I would personally like to raise is that the 'non-presence' of value driven proponents to a purposefully detailed and strategic contact (and content) engagements plan would ultimately act as a neodymium magnet (i.e., strongest permanent magnets in the world) to unaccounted risks which in turn, would render the company to be susceptible to the dangers of a plausibly impending spillover client-relationship crises!

Furthermore, such an act of blatant and rampant disregard to deliberate meaningful 'key client' interactions via accurately defining and quantifying productive business prospecting activities which inevitably impact the corollaries of effective multi-tiered communications arrangement and relationship-building processes, impose a major detriment to an already acquired (if any) level of client’s trust and credibility.

And though the perceived ‘net-working’ intent may have been in most cases honourably executed, it is almost affirmative and with a high degree of certainty that?cognitive inertia?and?structural intelligence?gathering, and information interchanges performed during such sales-advocacy and meeting-strategy altercations were merely attained at the lowest impact and on the ebb. Consequently, despite ‘1Co.’ and the existing client being on familiar terms, it is also quite common that during such ‘premature’ meetings and interactions, the client would withhold constructive feedbacks (or refuse to share any significant learning curve experiences with the ‘vendor’ in attendance) lest having revealed too much discontentment over unsettling perception on legacy issues and concerns.

As a result, the position of authority and expertise in demonstrating ethical obligations and value propositions are at a loss if not entirely misinterpreted by the client as impropriety. Moreover, when dealing with key clients which happen to be nationalist organisations (with uniquely distinct behavioural and cultural dispositions) such as the national oil corporations (NOCs) within the ASEAN region for instance (and in particular), instigating corollaries to perceived impoliteness through analogous ‘vendor-intransigence’ and mannerisms that begets plausible confrontation is a serious matter that needs to be 'mindfully' deliberated beforehand.

So, what now?

In my honest opinion, the causal realities of this ‘lacunae’ of organisational learning orientation (LO), especially at leadership functions and with respect to managing time-bounded ‘situational’ sales penetration scenarios must be promptly intervened if not eradicated via illumination of meta-strategy reorientations with core focus on driving institutional strategy components of firm orientation (FO): (i) structure, (ii) preparedness and (iii) inertia with #StrategicRegeneration momenta as the proponent to achieve strategic Selling with Advantage.

The main reason being, respectively ‘reactionary’ organisations can only overcome negative outcomes to aforementioned insinuated premeditated strategic sales management incompetence by ‘radically’ shifting its strategic goals & objectives toward a more accurately ‘geared-up’ value advantage position and maintaining professional decorum via renewal of hostilities associated with bad decisions and poor understanding of its sectoral ‘gemba’ (or marketplace).

In fact, this follows that in every compelling situation when Sales, Marketing & BD activities are to be performed, every erudite business organisations must be accustomed to actualising highly ‘meaningful’ client engagements with mandated robust and full-bodied form of “BS” antecedents!

Why, is BS useful?

Mind me, the connotation of?BS?in this case (and perhaps to some) would suggest the implicit criticism or reactionary emotional disaffections of having to manage and go through ‘current’ (or prevailing) intolerable business growth pressures and unendurable market sufferings…. However, the real denotation of BS in context of our topic of discussion imply the organisational?savoir faire?with ‘Behavioural Science’ in order to allow firms to ‘meaningfully’ adapt and effectively respond to existential and situational crises environments whilst still getting to “keep one’s eye on the ball” on driving organisational transformations in terms of evolving the business with ‘future’ breakthrough initiatives and customer-centric business strategies.

And similar to the fluid dynamics study of understanding behaviours of turbulence velocity streams and the downstream implications of transverse waves, the parallel distinctive characteristics of implications of economic turbulence towards profound behavioural changes in Customer Centricity (CC) and B2B (business-to-business) strategies must be extensively understood, communicated and absorbed by each and every mature business organisations.

BS in context of strategic sales management?

Behavioural Science (BS) helps incorporate the deeper insights on underpinning behavioural dispositions and predispositions of client-vendor relationships in terms of delivering actionable granular level strategies and tactics with uniquely higher efficient decisional frontiers to effectively approach every Sales - (a) discovering, (b) prospecting, (c) advocating, (d) proposing, and (e) closing cycles and phases.

Purportedly, what this now could mean to companies like ‘1Co.’ is that - the amalgamated strategic selling approach with BS?'nolens volens'?would indeed be the company's first line of defense for healthy client engagements by virtue of getting its leadership roles and organisational actants to actively and intrinsically change the subpar and conventional way they behave and interact with key (and targeted new) client organisations.

However, in actual business management practices and praxis, I feel there needs to be more to it than just that... In fact, I believe the assimilation of BS into strategic decision-making must be compelled to deliver higher strategic outcome expectancy and results effectuation vectored towards accomplishment of tangible Selling Advantage and CC.

This is owing to the fact that, in retrospect and contextual relevance to what we have observed in today’s highly turbulent business world since the last 36 months of COVID-19 pandemic led economic disruptions, many (if not most) mature organisations are yet to be ‘consciously-competent’ to realise (or formally institutionalise) structural integrity in its strategic decision management and decision-making processes in spite of the clear and present danger of recurrences of kindred events and crises.

Conversely, my fear on a more related note and in specific reference to strategic sales management, the outliers to mass behavioural and decisional changes in client organisations (in tandem with the vendor organisation in context) remain as a ‘stratagem void space’ not too many business leaders are willing to address and allow ideation and incubation of ‘sense-making’ discourse over designing (specifically and case-to-case) effectively decisive pathways for resourceful, resultful and sustainable CC strategy paradigms.

Perhaps, as a kick-starter to future discussions on how '1Co.' and growth-appetent business organisations alike can foster higher efficacies of 'Selling Advantage', developing a more sensible BS approach to engaging key clients with genuine 'empathy' and 'altruistic' leadership values in delivering authentic CC would make complete sense wouldn't you think so?

Henceforth and complementary to BS and the extant literature, from my vantage point perspective, for Sales, Marketing & BD roles to deliver a more precise and accurate impact in companies facing highly turbulent business environments:

• It’s important for the organisation to have unified and unerring motivation and establish 'absorptive' communications with consensus and credibility on 'recognising' respective key clients' socio-economics determinant of their anticipated forward-moving strategic shifts. This is because sometimes it’s just not possible for them to restart their business yet etc. Hence, in preparation of building a meaningful relationship and trust - do not assume anything before digging for more 'sense-making' information.
• The organisation must ensure that deliberated strategic client engagements activities and territory planning initiatives must be time-bounded and proactively actionable with unrestricted access to readily available strategic resources. This is because if strategy choices for CC engagements are not 'rationally' actionable and accessible it’s just no point to pester the client with reflexive unintelligible 'nudge' and persistence on demanded audience as it would not significantly 'move the client's needle' or change anything.

In conclusion, now after fully reading this interpretive literary composition, as some of our (i.e., the readers) thoughts and opinions would probably be inclined to welcome the contextual notion that “A smart BS will evoke a smarter BS”, the arising and purely circumstantial question I would like to pose (and hopefully gain some industry peer feedbacks and opinions) is - "Would companies with persistent 'biases' in the (i) integrity of its internal culture and (ii) organisational aptitude and behaviour significantly benefit and continue to thrive with BS 'aided' strategy deconstructions to facilitate strategic sales management protocols with its key clients and external environmental stakeholders?"

Thank you in advance for your courteous illumination and wisdom.

Bibliography:

Iannarino, A. (2022). Elite sales strategies: A guide to being one-up, creating value, and becoming truly consultative. New Jersey: Wiley.