I was sitting with the team in a bar after a great workshop. You know the feeling: 100’s of Post-It notes, lots of flip charts, the frameworks click and you know you’ve identified the right project. The topic then turned to taking the next steps. Specifically, establishing the team and execution.
I always wince when we get here, because I need to tell the client that all his instincts will take him in the wrong direction. Research shows that less than 25 percent of the great strategy work initiated in large firms gets into the marketplace. It also tells us that smaller firms (<$680M in sales) see more than 75 percent of their work have impact.
This is the point when I take out a napkin and share five of the biggest blind spots that accomplished large company leaders have in executing growth programs.
1. Speed in Decision Making
In the large corporate world, decisions and decision processes are known for being conservative and carefully tested prior to implementation. Contrast this with the startup world, where decisions are lightning fast, and pivoting is a core part of the process. To thrive, the growth program’s decision overhead needs to be reduced to allow the team to stay laser focused on finding the value.
Pro Tip: this means creating safe zones for the team to work in with beta clients and partners under full disclosure Joint Development Agreements or JDA’s.
2. Moving from Data to Intuition
Enterprise teams thrive on data-based decisions and of course, it the data exists, it should not be ignored. Many times, however, a team is truly in a new product or service zone, not just for the enterprise, but for the industry. It is in this zone that the joint intuition of the team needs to be the guide.
Pro Tip: when a team is at the juncture of a key decision, start the clock and agree to a deadline when the call will be made. The risk of losing momentum is higher than moving down a side road in most early stage teams.
3. Specific vs. Generalized Customer
Product teams in large groups spend significant time setting up and validating customer avatars, i.e., a specific group of clients that receive a “name,” have a set of behaviors, etc. This enables the growth team to work with one very specific product or service for a very specific customer. Delivering results for the one target informs the offering, and allows rapid iteration for the next round. The issue comes when the team pauses to build an avatar and the team has a tendency to get bogged down.
Pro Tip: the key metric for these teams is time-to-customer results, and you as the leader need to be ruthlessly supportive in keeping them from doing “pre-marketing.”
4. Profit vs. Cash Positive Path
I side with Drucker on the point that all business development should be economically viable as soon as possible. The issue with most enterprise clients I work with is that they immediately expect their growth teams to support the full P&L (including full overhead) on deal one. It is rare indeed, and very likely you are not working on a true growth program, if deal one aligns with your core business P&L metrics.
Pro Tip: a much better measure is to engage partners and suppliers in a transparent cash positive model, where a joint project is defined and contributions are made to the project by participants at labor and materials, and beta tests are priced not per unit, but per event.
5. Velcro vs. Epoxy
It is very easy to overconstrain a growth team, especially when sponsored by an established product line, by demanding that it adhere to a long list of musts, i.e. use our suppliers, our designers, our factories, our distribution team, our QC, legal and finance groups. In general, this is subtle and well-intentioned guidance to be sure the team comes up with something that the product group can leverage. I call this “epoxying” the group to the existing business. It’s much better to view these as additive, and the moment the constraint does not support the delivery of customer results in the shortest time, the team leader has the freedom to “detach” (i.e. the velcro).
Pro Tip: a short list of “must have” leverage with the core business will speed the time to results by allowing the team not to second guess politics about what they can and cannot do.
By keeping these five areas in front of the sponsors and leaders of the team, you can avoid spending precious resources of time, money and stakeholder attention on things that just don’t add value in the growth program validation cycle.
Bonus Pro Tip: when reviewing projects with the growth team, always start the meeting by reviewing the cost of delay, i.e. what is the projected impact of this program, and how much does a day of delay cost us all.
Getting a team off to a great start, and foreseeing the potholes ahead is what the Right Plan, portion of my Right Project, Right Team, Right Plan triad is all about. If you’d like to discuss how to get your internal team off to a great start, or have a stalled team that needs a jumpstart, send me an email or call me at 847-651-1014.
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