Vision, Focus, Drive: Ingredients of Successful Professional Services Sales

By Robert Prieto and Marcia Earle

“Nothing happens until a sale is made.” But sales do not happen by themselves and they don’t happen regularly without an enabling context that drives organizational focus and establishes the imperatives to drive transformation. Like all transformative efforts there is no one formula for success but there are basic ingredients common across all successful efforts.
We explore key elements associated with establishing the imperatives prerequisite to a marketing and sales focus in a professional services organization and using those imperatives to put in place a transformative vision that becomes a core element of the organization’s culture. Next we explore the elements of organizational focus which are essential for realizing that vision and the tools and techniques that help drive this transformation and institutionalize the marketing and sales-centric focus. Finally, we look at improving, getting the fundamentals right and addressing an ever-changing competitive landscape.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781387417957

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Vision, Focus, Drive: Ingredients of Successful Professional Services Sales

Vision, Focus, Drive: Ingredients of Successful Professional Services Sales

By

Bob Prieto & Marcia Earle

Copyright

© 2017 by Bob Prieto and Marcia Earle

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, except as permitted by Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

First Printing 2017

ISBN 978-1-387-41795-7

Published by Lulu

Bob Prieto

PO Box 906

Jupiter, Fl 33468-0906

[e-mail]

Printed in the United States of America

About the Authors

Bob Prieto’s career has spanned engineering, construction and project development but always with a strong emphasis on strategy and growing the businesses with which he has been associated. During his 20 year career at then-Parsons Brinckerhoff he led the front end of the business driving a 17% CAGR over that period. During that period he had the opportunity to define corporate development for a leading professional services firm, working with a team of outstanding professionals including his co-author.

Bob is a member of the National Academy of Construction and several other industry groups. He holds BS and MS degrees from the NYU-Polytechnic School of Engineering. He is an author of several hundred papers and eight prior books.

Marcia Earle’s experience includes a 23-year career at then-Parsons Brinckerhoff. She founded the firm’s career track for marketing and sales professionals, ran the corporate marketing group, managed strategic planning and annual business/ marketing planning, and worked in PB operating companies. She joined HDR in 2006, serving in regional marketing and national strategic sales.

Marcia is active in the industry but sets aside significant time for volunteer interests including the American Cancer Society and FIRST® Robotics. She holds a BA from Cornell University and an MS from Pratt Institute.

Forward by Bob Prieto

It has been a dozen years since I first tried to write a marketing book to share my insights on what it takes to build and sustain a strong marketing and sales focus in an engineering company. That initial attempt was founded on compiling and editing over 200 marketing memos I wrote during my time at what was then an employee-owned engineering firm. But despite the valuable thoughts contained in those Marketing Memos, something was lacking and after several failed attempts to improve the product I put it aside.

Time has passed and my perspective has grown. I have had the opportunity to see the good, bad, and ugly in many other organizations in our industry and to see those practices which survived and spread and those that didn’t. In this book I have the opportunity to provide my thoughts on the ingredients of a transformational marketing and sales culture and organization as well as touch on the more tangible aspects of those transformational efforts.

To ensure that a practical work results from these efforts I have joined up once again with Marcia Earle who was a key lynchpin in translating concept and strategy into practical implementation. In the writing of this book she has done what she has always done, keep me grounded.

While this book draws on experiences and insights gained from my career in the engineering and construction industry, its suggestions and advice are equally valuable to professional service organizations of all types.

I hope you find this book a valuable addition to your bookshelf and more importantly, a key ingredient in transforming your companies.

Chapter 1 - Vision

Introduction

It was Thomas Watson Sr., president of International Business Machines (IBM) from 1914 to 1956, who coined the phrase, Nothing happens until a sale is made.  That statement remains as true today as it did at the time it was first said. But sales do not happen by themselves and they most certainly don’t happen regularly without a broader enabling context being established.

That context drives the organizational focus and establishes the imperatives necessary to drive transformation. Like all transformative efforts it is very much art versus science and there is no one formula for success. But there are some basic ingredients that are common across all successful efforts.

In this book we will begin by exploring some of the key elements associated with establishing the imperatives which are prerequisite to a marketing and sales focus in a professional services organization and using those imperatives to put in place a transformative vision that becomes a core element of the organization’s culture. Next we will explore the elements of organizational focus which are essential for realizing that vision. We will explore some of the tools and techniques that help drive this transformation and institutionalize this marketing and sales-centric focus. Finally we will look at improving, getting the fundamentals right and addressing an ever-changing competitive landscape.

Throughout the book we will draw heavily on the contemporaneous words and advice that first appeared in the Marketing Memos written while each of us was at Parsons Brinckerhoff. But we will equally draw on our broader industry experiences since that time. These experiences include our own observations from a myriad of teaming partners that encompass the biggest and best across the engineering and construction industry.

Establishing the Imperative

Grow or Die!

That was the imperative established by our mentor and boss and it left little to the imagination. Just as IBM’s Watson said, Nothing happens until a sale is made, Parsons Brinckerhoff’s CEO Jim Lammie underscored the importance of sales by establishing that growing sales, not merely sustaining them, was essential to organizational life.

Sales speaks directly to the top line of the firm, without which there is no bottom line to fuss about. The growth of the top line, with appropriate execution of the attendant work, provides the momentum and resources that allow professional service organizations to:

Attract the best and brightest

Retain and reward them

Build organizational capabilities and excellence

Continuously improve

Grow the enterprise’s value for the benefit of its owners

Sales provides the spark and fuel for this virtuous cycle.

The imperative required to establish a marketing and sales-centric transformative vision for the organization goes well beyond insightful slogans. It requires organizational alignment, executive leadership at the highest levels, and the development of a compelling vision. It also requires top level frameworks and processes that keep sales at the forefront of what the organization is becoming.

Becoming conveys the very transformation that is sought; one which recognizes that not only are we changing our own organizational capabilities and focus but that the competitive and market landscape itself is in transition. It is a case of not only the goalposts moving but the playing field and at times the rulebook itself changing. The market in which we want to change our position is plagued with uncertainty but our new-found imperative to establish a marketing and sales-centric transformative vision does not allow us to have the certainty we might otherwise desire.

A marketing and sales-centric transition relies on a compelling vision of what we would like to become, a focus on the key differentiators our clients want, a demonstrated ability to deliver that differentiation, and evolving, action-oriented systems that drive us to continuously improve our ability to win.

The imperative for transformation must be equally founded on a strong desire and conviction that change is essential to survival, the unacceptability of the status quo, and at times an almost unhealthy level of self-confidence, almost bordering on arrogance, in our ability to win.

Actualization of the imperative requires us to:

Articulate the transformative vision marketing and sales requires

Focus on those elements of marketing and sales which will deliver the greatest impact

Drive the transformation forward with strong and improving systems but always with a high degree of passion and perspiration

For me (Bob) this imperative was established the very first day working for Jim Lammie. At the ripe old age of 29 I had finished HR orientation and reported to his office as I had been instructed. Jim was in what I later discovered was his typical mode, heads down surrounded by multiple piles of paper and a green Flair pen in hand. As I walked into his office I told him I had finished orientation and asked what he would like me to do now. This was the question of a 29 year old whose time horizon meant I was asking what he would like me to do that afternoon.

Without looking up he said, Grow and diversify the firm. But in my 29-year-old brain I was still focused on something more immediate so I asked him, What else? Now he paused, put pen down and looked me in the eye saying, If you do that, it will be quite enough. I grew up professionally at that moment and the imperative for growth was clearly established.

The Transformative Vision Marketing & Sales Requires

Vision statements have become all the rage. Too often they seek a degree of political correctness or pacifying generality that makes them almost useless in creating the context for the passion and perspiration that real transformation requires. While they provide organizational context, the visions at the heart of transformative marketing and sales organizations are usually much simpler, such as the grow or die imperative laid out previously or, at a particular point in time with some big prospects on the line, Beat Bechtel!

Effective transforming visions for the marketing and sales organization have at their core one simple concept: winning. It can be stated in many ways and often with too many words but simply it must be about being better than the competition, increasing your market share and improving the marketplace’s perception of you.

To be truly effective the marketing and sales organization needs to expand its boundaries such that every single person in the firm feels invested in winning and celebrates each significant victory as if it were their own.

Transforming visions must be well founded. Realities must replace perceptions. This requires an initial introspection to ensure we truly know who, what and where we are. What is our market share, by segment, geography and size of opportunity? Are these respective positions improving or degrading? Are there consistent leaders in these segments and how do they differentiate themselves from us? How do our clients perceive us and equally how do our competitors and potential teaming partners perceive us?

How do we perceive ourselves? How do our strengths meet our client’s emerging needs? How do we make our differentiated strengths ever more compelling while diminishing the perceived value that our competitor’s strengths represent?

How do we translate this enhanced understanding of who we are and where we stand in meeting our client’s emerging needs into a compelling vision?

Just as planning is often more valuable than the resultant plan, the deeper understanding of ourselves and the changing competitive and client landscapes provides the insights necessary to translate the developed vision into focused action by the marketing and sales organization.

At an early point in our careers, becoming the preferred provider of infrastructure services worldwide was the vision statement underpinned by the marketing and sales organization’s focus on grow or die.

Teamwork

We often said, Business development is a team sport.  Understanding and serving our clients is too complex for one person to do alone. Yes, there’s usually a leader or key person the client sees as their point of contact with your firm. However that key person needs a team of people with multiple points of contact throughout the client organization in order to understand fully the nuances of the client’s needs. We call this a client team and we talk about them later in this book. Client leaders also need a support infrastructure of people and tools to carry out efficiently all the communication we’re advocating. Much has been written about proposal production and sales systems so we’ll stay away from the nuts and bolts of those topics and concentrate on the mindset we found essential to deliver this support function effectively and efficiently.

As an aside, many of today’s account management systems are process heavy, detracting from the real value a client team can bring.

I go where the puck is going to be

Way back when, I read an excellent column by Oren Harari, which I remember because I think Oren Harari was a smart guy and I read everything I can that he’s written, and for the quote from Wayne Gretzky at the end of the column.

Gretzky explained his great success in hockey as follows:  . . . everyone else on the ice goes where the puck is . . . I go where the puck is going to be.

When we worked together on PB’s strategic plan, I had Gretzky’s sentiment in the back of my mind.  Individually and collectively we constantly needed to be thinking about and looking for signs of what’s going to be.   What is may be gone in a minute or transformed into something else.

Harari also urged readers of his column to, Assume that all processes, products and services are experiments.  A great example from that era from our support group was the transformation of how we used images, especially during the era when traditional photography was giving way to digital. We started out with an unkempt slide room.  An employee team