The Serenity Prayer is the common name for the prayer by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr that reads: “Lord grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
This prayer popularized by Alcoholics Anonymous can be fitting in many other applications. In Sales and Marketing, I find the advice though often ignored, one of the simplest for marketing effectiveness. For example, I use the following matrix to categorize customers for given sales cycle.
- Engaged Customers with an effective Product/Service Match are a green light for closing or at a minimum staying with what you are doing.
- Engaged Customers with an ineffective Product/Service Match, either give back to product/development or bring a product specialist to customize product/service.
- Disengaged Customers with an effective Product/Service Match tell me that current sales and marketing efforts are sub-par or that this group needs to receive the message in a different way. Give it back to marketing and tell them to go to work.
- Disengaged Customers with an in effective Product/Service Match are not a lost cause depending on the size of the population. You may not want to spend a great deal of resources here, but it is worth investigating. This may that this is an over-served market, and by stripping features from your Product/Services, you may have an extraordinary opportunity. Gold can be found in the funniest places.
Looking at the four quadrants from a Lean perspective allows me to determine the type of work needed, and type of people to assign to the project. The matrix with a little Lean applied:
After doing this, I apply Lean this way.
- SDCA: Whatever we are doing is working, so we keep doing it and standardize it. We assign a team that has the following capabilities: loyal, committed, action-orientated, sense of urgency, responsiveness
- PDCA: We need to apply incremental improvement to the Product/Service offering, so we focus on issues. We assign a team that has the following capabilities: Intelligent, street-smart, people-sensitive, high integrity, problem solvers.
- PDCA: We need to apply incremental improvement to the Sales and Marketing efforts, so we focus on issues. We assign a team that has the following capabilities: Intelligent, street-smart, people-sensitive, high integrity, problem solvers.
- EDCA: We need to think out of the box and maybe a little design type thinking needs to be applied. We must focus on exploring possibilities and alternative solutions. We assign a team that has the following capabilities: Cerebral, independent thinkers, self-starters, tenacious.
This is a very simple way to organize and categorize our current prospects. It tells us what not to change, what to change, and maybe even not to do. Is this to simple of a prayer?
Comments are closed.