FiberGeneration

Sun Tzu & The Right Fights

Note : This post is the first of a series about winning in Business when you are a challenger willing to become The Leader. It is based on my experience as Business Development Manager and Product Whatever Manager at Agilent Technologies, from 1999 to 2003. Any startup or any small player serious about its business should be able to apply the following strategy to become market leader. Simply because it worked quite well during the hard times of the Telecoms Industry downturn. Why the heck would it fail during the Web 2.0 gold era ?!!!

In late 1999, Ned Barnhold, CEO of the HP' spin-off Agilent Technologies, announced his decision to penetrate the telecoms networks' installation & maintenance testing marketplace, for the company to become market leader within the next two years. Born as a pure " R&D and Manufacturing " oriented vendor, Agilent was the undisputed Test & Measurement worldwide leader on those segments, by far. The company was serving all the big players of the Bubble : the Lucents, the Alcatels, the Nortels, etc. Every single network equipment manufacturer was buying Agilent' s lab. and/or production tests solutions.
On the outside plant side, no one relevant actor was using Agilent branded testers : Agilent was a challenger on the Installation & Maintenance (I&M) markets.

So, Barnhold' s decision to focus on I&M was... a challenge ! An exciting one, for those of us who were directly involved with it. Enter the Musketeers and all that stuff which did our life for the next three years or so (and still does, for some of us ;-).

To achieve this goal : become #1 on the I&M market place by 2002, starting from (almost) scratch, we called on Sun Tzu and his proven methods for winning a war - ooops, sorry : for winning in Business.
We picked the one quote which replace MBAs diplomas in the Real World : “Know the enemy better than you know yourself, and the outcome has already been decided.”, and we built the whole strategy from it. We looked at ourselves (Agilent per se, the structure, the people, the use and habits, the way of doing business, etc.) and our competitors, selecting one of them as our * enemy #1 * (that was before 9/11; today, I rather use another terminology, e.g. " rival number one "...). We came up with the conclusion that to become the market leader in less than three years time frame, we had to concentrate our energy on our sales channels. Hence the name of this strategy as a whole : Winning Sales Channels Attributes - I will come back to that one in the final post of this series (well, teasing is an operational marketing tool, right ?).
In order to reach this ultimate objective, we decided to put together three sub-strategies (note : only three) :
• The Right Fights : to win a customer
• Bid2Win : to win tenders and deals
• Be Friend of Technicians : to win speed in new product generation

I have mentioned the Bid2Win in a previous post (see here), however I will come back to it in a couple of weeks. Next week, we will discuss the last one " Be Friend of Technicians ", which is about talking directly to the end-users of your products in order to get their feedback...

Today, I am going to describe you the Right Fights strategy : how to grab market share by winning customers. Here is it :
• A Right Fight is NOT about winning a deal.
• Find weakness in leader’s strength.
• Attack where the leader is unprepared, appear where you are not expected.
• Choose when and where to fight.
• Limit the time and the place of the attack.
• Need at least 75% more strength at the time and place of the attack.
• Fight to win the leader’s position, not only the order – acquire the benefits of leadership.

Then, we looked at the respective behaviors of an industry leader and its challengers :

What is the Leader doing ?
a. Appropriate Strategy : Defend against all threats. The challengers will determine where and when to pose a threat.
b. Appropriate Tactics : Focus attention on existing customers. Listen for potential, developing threats. Counter all threats early.
c. Resource Deployment : Bias resources toward the biggest accounts and the biggest product lines. Deploy more than enough resources against each threat to insure the win.
d. Competitor Knowledge : Broad and accurate intelligence to identify potential threats early.
e. Expected Outcomes : Maintain very high market share, and the economies of scale that creates.
f. Failed Outcomes : Loss of market share. Loss of leadership position.

What is the Challenger doing ?
a. Appropriate Strategy : Choose when and where to compete. Win virtually all of the contests you enter. Do not compete if a win is not certain.
b. Appropriate Tactics : Focus attention on new target customers. Operate just beyond the edge of control. Enter chosen contests with fanatic will to win.
c. Resource Deployment : Bias resources toward the most important contests that can be won with certainty. Put more than enough resources on the few most important contests to insure the win.
d. Competitor Knowledge : “Know the enemy better than you know yourself, and the outcome has already been decided.” Sun Tzu
e. Expected Outcomes : Take market share from larger competitors. Attain high market share and the economies of scale that creates.
f. Failed Outcomes : Loss of market share. Very disappointing financial performance. Disaster, loss of the business.

Last, provided that we had only a couple of years ahead of us to achieve our CEO' s objective, the sense of urgency was a key element in our decisions process. Here are the four points which lead us to the final decision :
•We had to accelerate our learning.
•We didn’t get the chance and the time to learn by doing every mistakes by our own again.
•We had to learn form the successful and the unsuccessful fights the organization was going to fight.
•We had to learn from the mistakes of our competition.

So we have setup the “ Right Fight Process ”, consisting of the three steps in use by all armies in the World since General Sun Tzu (circa 500 B.C., by the way): Brief - Execute - Debrief.
Here we go :
#1. The Think-Tank Team identify fight (i.e. competitor' s installed base, or green field)
#2. Define the opportunity for the company (i.e. the potential)
#3. Set operating model to “not business as usual” (i.e. set business as unusual as the rule)
#4. Understand customer’s business and competitive situation (i.e. do your homework ;-)
#5. Define Team, owner and roles (team, team, team)
#6. Find THE potential customer champion (i.e. find the guy who will make you win)
#7. Make sure the customer problem is understood (i.e. ask questions, again and again)
#8. Build business case for the customer (with the customer)
#9. Build the battle plan (without the customer ;-)
#10. Visit the customer w/ proper Team (do not forget to apologize for not being here earlier)
#11. Anticipate and plan contingencies (i.e. Plan B, Exit Plan, No Way Plan)
#12. Deliver the plan to the customer (i.e. execute)
#13. Offer demo (i.e. demonstrate how your product can solve the customer problem)
#14. Deliver the perfect budgetary quote (i.e.
#15. Follow-up w/ customer.
#16. Do not forget to take the order!

As we were based in Germany, the Right Fights Process was summarized on two short/easy-to-use/user-friendly tools : a Q&A form - the " Right Fight Spec Sheet " - to be filled by the " Fight " owner, and an MS Excel spreadsheet - the " Right Fight Score Card ". Those tools were created to allow the management to quickly get the whole picture of the " fight " (by the way : we didn't say " deal ", see the difference ?).
The Right Fight Spec Sheet consisted of a crisp & clear list of items grouped by topic (simple, huh ?), with " Yes / No " tickle boxes. Filling in the form was way faster than a survey on the web (well, as long as Windows didn't crash - ooops, sorry, bad joke ;-). Here is an example of the questions / topics / items - comments in italic :

About the Competition :
Target rival #1 in the considered region. Yes / No. " Beat the best and you will beat the rest " was our motto.
Hurt competition. Yes / No. Our aim was to become #1 within the next two years. It couldn't happen without hurting our competitors.
Disrupt/confuse competition. Yes / No. Thanks to General Sun Tzu, this is a strategy the challenger can use with great effects.
Fight that will drive you to the position of leader. Yes / No. The question was : is the fight bringing us one step further to reach our goal to become #1 in less than two years.

About the Customer Relation :
Increase the sense of loyalty. Yes / No. Was there a need to increase loyalty at the specific fight location.
Fight that enhance the image. Yes / No. Was it a fight that would enhance the image where it was desperately needed e.g. become friend of technician.
Fight that lets us become friend of the technicians. Yes / No. Would the fight help us * Musketeers * to achieve our goal to become friends of the technicians.
Long lasting effect. Yes / No. Could we estimate how much revenues the fight would bring us in the long run.

The score card was even simpler to use (please don't think that we were all damned bozzos : we were in a hurry, so we had to create and use fast tools ;-). Put in some rough numbers and names, press the "enter" key, and boom, you got this nice palette of colors : green, yellow, red. Sounds familiar, huh ? Green for " Let's go fighting ", Yellow for " Let's wait for more information ", and Red for " Let's stay at home for the time being " (or something like that meaning that this fight is definitely not a fight to fight, right ?). Here is a real example, dated 2001- there is no more confidential data in there : all the service providers listed have either disappeared or merged with another one, the internal organization has been completely modified, and the people are either gone or working elsewhere in the company.

Oh, there is one more thing (okay, this post is not about Steve Jobs; however I strongly believe that he is using such of strategies quite well ;-)
Before going outside to knock at your target customer' s door, you still have to plan your mission. Putting together the strategy is one thing, implementing it is a different story - although a good plan means easy implementation. Hence the mandatory mission planning, that we the famous Agilent Musketeers called : " Combat Mission Planning ", according to the Top Gun terminology. You can use the following plan as a template for your next mission - ooops, sorry : your next customer call ! :

a. Define the mission objective : A mission objective is a clear, measurable, tactical statement of a goal that can be achieved by those people responsible for its execution.
b. Identify the Threat : Once you have a clear mission objective, you have to analyze thoroughly the competitive threats to your outcome
c. Identify your support assets : Once you have your mission statement and knows the competitive threats, scour your internal assets for the one thing that might make or break the sale.
d. Emphasize your strength and their weaknesses. Never engage in a costly frontal attack when you can outflank the competition and still win.
e. Set your timing : Once the plan is in place, the only thing left is to find the optimal moment to strike: Identify your optimal mission timing.
f. Plan for contingencies : It’s far easier to work out your options in the quietness of your office than in the hectic battlefield.

As a conclusion, just this : the Right Fights strategy, together with the other two "Bid2Win" and "Be Friend of The Technicians", helped Agilent Technologies to be ranked #1 Test & Measurement vendor by Frost & Sullivan in 2002. Right in the middle of the Telecoms downturn and the turmoils it caused in the entire industry. It demonstrates the effectiveness of our decisions, the first one being to rely on proven methods based on Sun Tzu' s principles. In my humble opinion, applying this strategy during * good days * is even more productive.
Of course, I will give you a real case example of a successful fight soon : back in 2001, Agilent took over one of the World' largest optical network carrier out of the hands of its rival number one. A quick, smart, successful strike. Unfortunately, it didn't last long : the downturn hit this carrier hard ! Anyway, that was fun. Stay tuned, and Carpe Diem.

Me and Mrs. Agilent

Some of my beta-readers (there are beta-testers for hardware/software products, so why not ?) made the same comment : I am often referring to Agilent Technologies. Well, I agree with that. And if I didn't, a customer feedback is a customer feedback : you must listen to it.

So, why do I write about Agilent so much ? Simply because I have learned a lot with this company. The six years I have spent within the HP and Agilent world have been the most exciting I ever lived in my professional life. It was the pre-Bubble time, the Bubble time, the post-Bubble time. It was the Hewlett-Packard time, the HP/Agilent Technologies 'split time, the Agilent time. It was the " small department within a large division " time, the " 60-people-startup-kind-of division " time, the " 90% laid-off " time...

I want to share my experiences of this very particular period with you. I want to give you real-life materials. I want to offer you proven tools for successes in the High Tech world. That is why I will write a lot about Agilent !

Just This (8)

Mason Street, San Francisco, CA, March 2001.

Effective Customer Interviews

Two days ago, I met with the CEO of a small company somewhere nearby Paris, France. This 5-years old company does GSM interface for sensors and stuff like power or gas consumption meters. I will tell you more later on this company and its patented technology, which allow the transmission of SMS messages (alarms and/or remote data measurements) in explosive environments.
For the time being, I just wanted to highlight this : on the 2-hours meeting, I had less than 20% of the air time. I let the CEO speak, on purpose : I was there to sell something (consulting services). And it worked quite well, provided that I achieved my goal : to send a proposal.
No special trick here, just the application of * standard * technics for customer interviews. Although I am doing sales since more than 15 years now, I have to admit one thing : I have learned a lot with HP/Agilent Technologies. Especially during the Musketeers days - see the recent post here.

Here are the five steps to follow for an effective customer interview, based on the workshop delivered by Deltanet Consultants : Briefing, Ingroup Formation, Information Gathering, Interview Summary, Debriefing.
It works perfectly well, even when you go alone (then you'll play the all-in-one Interviewer, Note Recorder, and Time Keeper ;-)

• Briefing : Religiously devote 30 to 60 minutes for a briefing before every interview. Attendance should be mandatory for anyone from your company who will be in the interview. The objective is to review what is known about this customer and the interview subjects, and to align the minds of the interview team members just prior to the actual interview.

• Ingroup Formation At First Physical Contact : Begin to build the ingroup at the first point of physical contact. For example, when driving in to the customer’s facility, capture observations such as the designation of parking places, location of visitor parking, ease of finding the receptionist, feelings generated by the appearance of the facility, etc. These kinds of observations will form a sense of the style of the company. They will give the team members an inventory of items to use to form the ingroup.

• Information Gathering : This is the meat of the meeting. The operative word is communicate. Use your skills and processes to maximize communication.

• Interview Summary : Summarize the mutual benefits from this meeting for the customer and the team. It’s the first part of the last step in the effective communications process. It’s where both the team and the customer representatives bubble up the important issues, clarify, amplify, and record a summary of the information exchanged during the interview.

• Debriefing : This is the summary for the benefit of the team. It’s the last part of the last step in the effective communications process. It’s where the team reinforces the important issues, clarifies, amplifies, and finishes the record of the information exchanged during the interview. The debriefing notes should be integrated into the record for the interview, but clearly differentiated from the verbatims taken during the interview.

For more details, please contact Hal Stitt at Deltanet !

Thanks (for) Giving me one more day !

Why do I publish this blog onto that Web 2.0 Blogosphere stuff, on Nov. 24 ? Well, simple. It's ThanksGiving in the US. Nobody's at work. No one to watch the newest blogs on Technorati or BlogRolling. A perfect timing for churning a few things over the week-end, so when Corporate America will come back at work next Tuesday, FiberGeneration will be ready for the show ;-)

Blogging !

Tomorrow is Day One of FiberGeneration. After six weeks of beta testing, tuning, churning, it's time to launch this blog in the Blogosphere. For Eternity (I mean, until I decide to switch it off ;-), for Ever (I mean, as long as it will have readers), or for a while (I mean, until I see that nobody reads it ;-).

Blogging is a real job. Before signing up my subscription at TypePad, I read lots of materials on the subject. So I was aware of the fact that blogging is a real job, when you want to be serious about it. It takes time to be serious. Find new ideas, share your knowledge, surf the Web, read online news, post comments on others' blogs...

Hence my decision to set a weekly "blogging day" into my agenda, starting next Monday. This new periodic task will join the other ones, which all have their own special day along the week. There is the "reading day", the "calling customers" day, the "visiting customers days" (no typo ;-), the "coaching my Belarus friend through Skype day", the "thinking-different-out-of-the-box days" (same), the "ooops I'm late day" (well, this one isn't a weekly one, by chance ;-), the "empty-slot-for-unexpected-stuff day", and the "doing business as unusual all along the week days"...

Just This (7)

Montgomery Street, San Francisco Downtown, March 2001.

Slideshare

Among the Bubble-like number of Web 2.0 start-up companies burgeoning every week, Slideshare is worth the try. The YouTube for PowerPoint, Slideshare allows users to share their presentations. At the moment, no privacy : every single uploaded file is public, so beware when considering using Slideshare for your business. On the other hand, it could be a nice way to make the World know about your job...

Of course, as on the other file sharing websites - Flickr, YouTube, etc - there is a lot of crap stuff done by supposed-to-be-the-next-new-economy-icon. However, many established companies and startups are using Slideshare to publish their business-oriented ppt.
A pretty nice example here...
Oh, by the way : Slideshare is also a wonderful tool to spot people creating their prezos with MS PowerPoint and those playing with Keynote...

A comic life

Thanks to a recent post from Guy Kawasaki on his blog, I recently discovered a new way to present a story. Comics ! As a professional presentation designer, I like it. As a Macintosh (power) user, I love the Comic Life app from Plasq : it brings a new life to photos, pictures, and all those jpegs files which sometimes sleep deep into our hard drives ;-)

Here is my first attempt to write something "different". Of course, it's about the Agilent Musketeers. Of course, that was my life.

ps : My special thanks to all the people you see in this comic story. My bosses Robert & Frank, my friend Peter, my goofy friend Handy, plus Phil, Steve, Frank B., and the Agilent ONT team. It has been an honor to work with you, so, I am pleased to offer you the Eternity of the Blogosphere ;-)

Just This (6)

San Francisco, Nob Hill, February 2001

The Right Fight

French adventurer and television presenter Nicolas Hulot, also one of France’s most influential ecologists, has launched its lobbying campaign for the French Presidential Elections, scheduled May 2007. So called " Le Pacte Ecologique " ( " The Ecologic Pact " ), this campaign is pretty much on the same wavelength than Al Gore' s " Unconvenient Truth ".
Something' s happening on this Planet, finally. No matter our political colors, there is only one thing that matters today : Save the Planet, for the sake of our children' s children.
For my fellow French readers : please go here to sign up the Pact and watch (and listen to) Nicolas Hulot explain why we are all in danger.
US residents and al. : please don't forget the Stop Global Warming Virtual March here.
Thank you so much, on behalf of Mother Earth.

Cover Letter

I have spent the last two days doing cold calls, sending brief yet convincing (at least I hope so ;-) email messages to a multitude of companies, none of them on the same market segment, by the way. It reminded me a cover letter I've sent to a recruiter three years ago. The job was Operational Marketing manager for a French firm willing to expand its business in the Gulf region. Provided that I both like Marketing and the Gulf, I thought I should apply. So I created the flyer below. That gave me the opportunity to be short-listed right on the spot. Conclusion : when doing a cold call or applying for a job, always do your best to * appear different * : it will increase your chances to be selected.

ps : I didn't get this job in Dubai. Reason : the hiring person at this French firm was looking for someone with a strong technical background in software. That is something I don't understand when the job is about marketing. Marketing is done by marketeers. There are Product managers to provide them with the technical stuff, correct ?

Just This (5)

Downtown San Francisco, California, July 1996.

Tribute To An Idea

For those of you who are still willing to do some business in the Telecoms Test & Measurement arena, here is the presentation I did last year at Sunrise Telecom (the T&M vendor, not the Swiss telco - unfortunately ;-)
Shall you find in this document a couple of ideas for a new (ad)venture, feel free, and God Bless You !

post-scriptum : there is absolutely NO confidential information in this document any longer. In fact, Sunrise Telecom never applied the proposed strategy.

Download SalesMeeting_ProposalOTDR-Nov05.pdf