Why Sales & Business Development Professionals Must Learn to Think like SPIES.

I remember growing up being intrigued and hooked on 'spooks' stories and tales either by watching spy movies (courtesy of Messieurs Bond, Hunt, Flint and Solo amongst others), or role playing "The Goonies" after school hours with my best mates guided by every boy's playtime-bible, the classic and infamous "Spy's Guidebook" published by Usborne Books. Going as far back as I can reminisce, the dream to become a SPY has always been an avid boyish enthusiasm for all if not most boys, and to some, it even continued to evolve as the ultimate big boy's fantasy!

For a novice-spy-boy me then and regular adult citizen me now, the idea of being recruited as a spook (by renowned intelligence agencies such as the Brit's SS or GCHQ, Malaysia's DSID or the Yank's NSA or DIA amongst others) is far-fetched and impossible as you'd first need to be genius or/and highly trained military personnel of some sort. Nonetheless, the essence of a spy's 'decisive-ability' to think on his feet and 'rapid-resourcefulness' to adapt to his surroundings continue to captivate the remnants of my 'boyish-instincts' which have now transcended the bounds of my own creative-thinking capacity with 'real-life' profession in strategic sales management and mid-to-senior leadership roles.

Ironically, the characteristic manifestation of 'spy methods' in real-world business and strategic management applications are in fact feasible, measurable and realisable, particularly when it comes to deliberating prompt and decisive responses to rapidly changing external and economic environments. Now, why do I say this?

Well, prior to coming across the book “How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence” by David Omand (2021), it has never come to mind how the structured and time-tested cognitive skills of highly trained spooks could be fully replicated as useful-transferable business or management skillsets in dealing with today's highly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) business world.

Despite my familiarity with the military/warfare origins of strategy and VUCA acronyms, David Omand's insightful accounts and demonstrated past 'spy' experiences in managing VUCA environments and acute crises, to some extent provided useful discretionary advice and narratives on the coherency of 'rapid' situational awareness in managing fragmentary critical perspectives and decision frontiers prevalent to tactical sales management context of strategic issues exploration and exploitation.

The simple yet practical SEES (i.e., situational awareness, explaining the cause, estimating potential outcomes & strategic notice of future issues) framework Omand has developed to train spies and intelligence officers to systematically deconstruct cognitive bias and decision management helps promote agility in arriving at a more decisive and logical response to any given dynamic situations and circumstances. In essence and summary, the SEES method used by spooks incorporate 'deep-learning' and rapid analysis of compelling events by building proficiencies and absorptive capacities to promptly deal with intervention schemes and relying solely on availability of limited resources within their surroundings.

In context of Strategic Sales Management, the exceptional branching of strategic decision-offshoots stemming from radical or intermittent disruptions of the main strategy-axis of the firm's strategic orientation, and to some extent implicated by strong exogenic influences of markets and industry territorial orchestrations had great similarities with attested intelligence operative experiences in the clandestine world of SPIES.

This is so because the spheres of activity involving decision-making and strategic decision management in context of elucidating constructs for efficient strategy paradigms can be seen to frequently overlap and come into collision with necessitated 'reactionary' organisational dispositions to retain 'high prospect' opportunity pursuits. In fact, this sounded like a well-suited 'business context' illustration of what SPIES really do!

Besides, the notions on establishing 'holistic' periphery visions surrounding a compelling event help remove gaps in the analysis and clarification of 'useful' data and 'meaningful' information and thence increasing the 'preparedness' of sales & BD functions to proactively respond to discontinuous and indeterminate change.

The arising benefits of structured processual capability to accurately explain and estimate the plausibility and pertinent implications of swift and prematurely retrieved information on strategic opportunity pursuit from the multiplicity of tangible/intangible sources would effectively enable the navigation and intervention of impending revenue generation crises.

Therefore, in order to achieve productive strategic postures reorientations on 'dealmaking' change-continuity continuum proponents throughout the lifecycles of penetration, retention and conversion sales processes, qualifying strategic sales discovery, advocating and prospecting initiatives need to be supported by an accomplished degree of quantification of future issues that impose larger and/or longer-term risks on key sales/revenue pursuits.

Additionally, Sales & BD professionals must 'read' and 'recognise' weak signals which gravely afflict exogenous strategic shifts. Without which, inconsistent endogenic strategic planning impetuses would inhibit the successful navigation of business growth and/or recovery at the onset of acutely broad and adverse strata of crises.

This significantly entails Sales & BD functions to continuously attenuate miscalculations on strategy caused by the ubiquitous nature of external environmental turbulence and archetypal nature of organisational tunneling visions on conventional linear decisions. In fact, there are a variety of strategic management tools (i.e., PESTLE, scenario planning and strategic foresight amongst others) to help firms 'reconnect' decision management discords with clarity of anticipated sales strategy outcomes.

In today’s dynamic and uncertain business environment, this unique analogy of 'spy-thinking' enables firms to implement rapid decision-making with assimilated juxtapositions of time-boundedness and ambidextrous strategic choices, which ultimately help Sales & BD leaders quantify 'agency' to reform via substantiating the 'prevalence' of growth frontiers for successful 'closing' of 'hot prospect' strategic opportunities. Upon reflection, the criticality of assimilating #strategicregeneration approach on 'Selling with Advantage' strongly advocates avid Sales & BD 'spooks' to:

• CONTINUALLY visualise, verify & validate sources and scope of retrieved information on 'high-ticket' sales pursuit or opportunity based on strategic growth/maturity regeneration horizons defined by industry/sectoral landscape (i) pull of the future, (ii) push of the present and (iii) weight of the past. This is in line with capturing the paramount intent of driving efficient and effective policymaking and value creation on solutions offerings.
• CUMULATIVELY gather useful/additional information from external and adjacent collaborators (i.e., suppliers, channel partners & competitors amongst others) and business-confidants (i.e., advocates/supporters/coaches) via 'serendipitous' and 'tactical' networking complemented by key client relationship management protocols. This would help foster efficient strategy paradigms for longer-term survival via contingency logics of strategic postures reorientations during crisis interventions.
• COHESIVELY establish and deploy real-time focus and integrated action plans with multi-level inferences on conditional plausibility of highly anticipated compelling events. This in turn, fosters higher efficacies of business growth transformation via firm structure, preparedness and inertia reorientations with proficiency and aims on future strategic orientations.

Bibliographies:

Omand, D. (2021), How Spies Think: Ten Lessons in Intelligence, Penguin Books.

Ansoff, H. I. et al. (2018), Implanting strategic management, Springer.