It’s an adage that everybody sells. We all present, persuade, and trade value for value, in every operation of our lives at work or otherwise. We may prefer to look at those areas more like the stuff of love songs and chivalry, but an economist would recognize in our most mundane moments the art of a deal transpiring. Sales leaders make this point to deaf ears. Sales is dirty, ugly, and not for everyone—you’re born able to do it, or you’re not. And if you are, you’re somewhat morally suspect.
Yet, a person that can’t do the things salespeople are required to do every day: communicate effectively, think critically, problem solve, hypothesize shared solutions, adapt and innovate, lead, analyze, network, resolve conflicts, learn continuously, and demonstrate value, is like someone in the 90s who can’t use Microsoft Office or email. In this market, they’re effectively obsolete. Dan Pink’s book, To Sell is Human, situates that insight in the context of elastic skills—competencies that are adaptable to and can be applied across various fields, roles, and industries. Unlike specific technical skills, these are softer, more general capabilities that can be transferred and utilized in different contexts.
Similarly, what business leaders often want, but don’t get, from their organization is a performance culture. We want people to work like owners, see the big picture, own the domains, projects, and initiatives they take on, and focus on outcomes—specifically outcomes that have a value to the company’s end purpose and need for growth. When Grow or Die came out in the 70s, it resonated with the market not because it was a new idea, but for giving words to what we all already know about a commercial enterprise. If a thing doesn’t contribute to revenue or growth, it’s killing us, or at least slowing us down.
Performance Based Culture—The World’s Simplest Approach
A performance culture in a firm or workplace might be perceived as having a lot of working parts: clear expectations, goal alignment, recognition and rewards, training and development opportunities, accountability, continual feedback, and results orientation. That sounds like a recipe for organizational transformation that could take years, tremendous cost, and lost opportunity in the meantime, which is the opposite of performance. There’s a simpler approach.
A performance culture is one in which there’s a direct link to revenue and growth from each staff member in any area of the firm’s operation: sales, support, product development, branding, creative, service fulfillment, and technology roles included. A performance culture is a unifying force. At its highest expression, the firm can look at the current contributing value of each “chair” in terms of a revenue percentage. If a role doesn’t contribute at all, what’s the point? Each member of the team already contributes. What’s the number that can be standardized across the org and attributed to each team member?
Performance cultures are often positioned as command and control structures AGAINST a more human, empathetic, approach that aims for a culture of engagement, collaboration and participation. Nothing could be further from the truth:
On rigid hierarchies, for example, one COULD find that merely giving a manager or leader a number that equals the whole department’s contribution belies the actual contribution. Perhaps supervision isn’t much of a contributing requirement. Perhaps it is.
On empathy and humanity, one could argue that what we want from each employee is for that person to reach their full potential. That’s another way of describing human performance. We can all be better performers, in our lives and specifically our work. That’s normal. Giving it a number makes it LESS amorphous, subjective, and indeed painful. It gives us something to crow about, model, maintain and exemplify if the number is high.
On engagement and collaboration, firms struggle to create “company culture programs” through new intranets, internal newsletters, and extra events, but a firm in which one’s standing is objective and in one’s own control and possession is one in which engagement is less of a challenge, and collaboration becomes obvious.
Alignment—It’s Action, Not Theory That Counts
One of my areas of focus as a professional is Sales Alignment, and yet it’s a fraught term in business, like Agile Practitioner. It sounds like another abstraction designed to sell consulting hours. That’s because when companies kick off an alignment initiative, two things tend to fall by the side of the road. One: we think we’re talking about sales+marketing or sales+something else. Two: we stay in theory—educating teams on what the sales team does and how we close deals, and leaving it there, with our thumbs crossed, waiting for it to matter.
Alignment is actually bringing every operational domain in a firm into alignment with each other, and all such domains, departments, divisions, teams, etc. into alignment with the revenue and growth function of the enterprise. We don’t climb that hill as quickly, easily, or willingly, because it sounds impossibly steep. Often the fear of transformation or of rocking the boat of company culture keeps us tame and conservative in the face of the tremendous opportunity. A few PowerPoint presentations later and we say, “There. That’s done. Hope it was worth it.”
The requirement for actual alignment is not theoretical, hypothetical, or abstract. It’s not hype, nor the hyperbole we’ve often heard: “We’re running a BUSINESS you know. I don’t think you get that.” Who does? Meaning how many of your team have actually RUN a business at scale and understand the moving parts that well? Perhaps most of us are a little like the kid who thinks his parents make a million dollars a month, a house costs a few thousand, and it’s not much of a struggle to think about the future—where we’re going and where we’ll be in five years, ten, and twenty. If we haven’t done it, it’s understandable.
The way to ENROLL an organization’s members, across multiple teams and departments, isn’t more presentations. It’s involvement in the process. Cue the bells of dread. “They’ll HATE that.” But that’s not been my experience at all. The teams I talk to say the process is “eye opening”, “enlightening,” “exciting,” “motivating,” and that they’re excited about “pitching in.” It’s the exact opposite of what people THINK they’re going to say at the outset. So what’s different? Here’s the recipe:
Put a Whole Organization on a Sales Footing—Tap Their Expertise
There’s a principle in adult learning. First, learning isn’t theoretical. It’s defined as the ability to do something you couldn’t do before the learning experience. The operative principle for adults is that we have an existing body of experiences, in life and work, perspectives, insights, and potential contributions that are not only not fully tapped in strictly defined tasks and roles, but shape incoming information.
When those individualities, insights, and perspectives aren’t tapped in the process of learning, the adult learner retains less, and transforms less of the information into actionable insight. The advantage of knowing this is that those perspectives are elastic and highly extensible, including extensible to the revenue and growth functions of the firm. They’re therefore extensible, tangentially or directly, to selling.
When adults are asked to learn, including learn a new way of thinking or doing things, much less a new way of approaching their work roles—which are often tightly rather than loosely defined—making that transformation passive, top-down, take it and go home, ensures verbal assent and not much outcome relative to effort. Leveraging their existing elastic capabilities taps into intrinsic motivations.
How do we know that? Look at what any given adult, executive, professional says they want to accomplish if you sit down and ask them to think long. Then look at the best predictor of their future state—what they’re already doing. Forgive the issue of “not enough time” and even “resources.” We tend to find time and resources for the things we’re most motivated to take on and solve.
In other words, the disparity is that we tend to do those things we like or feel motivated to do. What are we doing at any given point? Whatever pays off. We’re getting something out of the things we instinctively select to accomplish. Our motivation is tied up in the things we are doing, not the things we intend to do, otherwise we’d do those instead.
This is good news, because our firms are replete with highly-informed subject matter experts (SMEs), people who don’t sell but have contact with customers on a routine basis, and people who are presenting to, persuading, and collaborating with colleagues at multiple levels. All of those are potential contributions to revenue initiatives.
We want a sales presentation, so we go to the sales team. We want a new message, we go to the brand team. We want marketing collateral, we go to that team. Those decisions aren’t wrong, but we tend to treat them like self-sufficient silos despite hearing from their leaders that resources are always a challenge, they don’t have ALL the ideas, and they could use contributions from the broader firm.
Your Organization is Full of Stories
Think of it in the context of stories.
Your client management team probably has a couple of stories per week they could tell us about an organization that has scaled with your firm’s help or a firm for which you’re doing more than you ever were when you started.
If you have an engineering team, for example, they are continually transforming your clients’ experiences. They’re aware of a host of optimizations your firm has innovated to serve clients better.
Your service delivery team, if their head is in the game, could regale you with stories about the last time you solved a major problem with a client that had far-reaching effects. Problems you troubleshooted, took on, and solved for a client that competitors would have flailed attempting.
Are these stories being captured on a routine basis? Is there an internal email distribution list that ensures these stories cross the desks not only of the sales and marketing teams—and vendors like MarketSmiths who write for them, cull and bring the most useful of these to the public—but also the broader staff you want to motivate and get excited to evangelize for such a fabulous place to work: a firm fixing things, making them better, reducing friction in a market, or overall delivering an exceptional product in a caring, human, and empathetic manner? If not, why not?
Imagine, now you put a metric on that, and a monthly award/reward. One story per week from each department—the best one you have, with all the parts:
- What was the hurdle/challenge for the client?
- What were the stakes for the client (if it didn’t succeed)?
- What if any hurdle/challenge was there for us?
- What did we do to solve this problem?
- What is the end (great) result for the client?
- What service offering from our website does this story tie into?
Each month, a story that was utilized in some way, by marketing in promotion, by sales in going after a deal, by branding in telling the company’s overall story, nets a benefit for the whole department that submitted the story. Everyone gets something, because, in the words of Pink Floyd, “it could be a monster, if we all pulled together as a team.”
That’s just one example of getting a firm on a sales footing. Anyone can tell a story or learn to, without feeling like they’ve joined the sales or marketing teams. It’s the most human thing there is and the most empathetic. It’s primordial. We’ve been telling stories since we climbed down from the trees and built fires in front of caves to drive away the snuffling sounds in the night. Stories nurture a community. We tell them for comfort, to enjoy and be inspired by heroism, to see all challenges as something we can take on, and to see ourselves as resilient in the face of them. Stories light us up, they fire up our audience—our public, and they join us together. Think of that as alignment.
If we left it there, we’d be staying in theory, for one reason. Sure, we’ve got all these stories, but who’s gonna handle them all as they come in and turn them into something the firm needs to plug into growth, revenue, ROI?
Content Alignment is the Missing Puzzle Piece in Sales Alignment
When a firm puts everyone on a performance footing, everyone becomes a contributor and a potential SME. We also get endless topics, one of the key challenges of ongoing content generation. Topic generation is a job, and most of us don’t have the bandwidth if we’re running a department where we want to be strategic, creative, and accomplish endless projects with lots of moving pieces. We need help with the lift.
Even a single writer, freelancer or in-house, would struggle taking on a dramatically enhanced opportunity to reach the public with content on the heels of authentic alignment and performance culture in a firm. They’d be overwhelmed.
Yet, content alignment is the thing we all want. We all wish the insights, information, and perspective we put in front of the market would align with the total creative and industry intelligence in the firm, reflect our highest and best insights, and be told in a unified voice that sounds like the voice of the firm. We wish we could hit this consistently, at scale, in any volume, every format, from thought leadership talks and presentations to product descriptions to sales collateral.
The key to solving that is not a writer—it’s a firm. Specifically, not a general marketing agency, web dev firm, or content freelance platform. It’s a firm that does one thing with a layered approach. Its business is copywriting, and its approach is to stack an internal SME with experience writing in your industry and who collaborates with your internal SME or point of contact, a writer or multiple writers from a collaborative environment where all writers are on staff and write for some of the best-known brands and enterprises on earth, and a content strategist and editor who (instead of amping up the editing and revisions your department heads would have to do on nights and weekend, slowing the train and pulling them out of the headspace they need to be on-game for strategically guiding their departments) ensures the content lands on desks ready to deploy.
Yeah, right. I can hear you squinching up, because that doesn’t exist. Well, it does, and those brands I mentioned aren’t imaginary. When Tim Ferris’s 4-Hour Work Week came out, it talked about the gig economy and the ability to extend one’s efforts with freelancers. And yet, what we’re talking about, in that context, comes with the baggage of recruitment, some freelancers flaking out, and a continual second job of managing an extended team, not to mention the editing and revisions you just decide to do yourself. The opportunity cost of the best minds in a firm doing that, instead of being strategic and creative is uncountable—even if they take it on internally. We’re losing the most effective minds in our firms to “fixing” things that shouldn’t need fixing.
We’ve built this firm, MarketSmiths Content Strategists, on the basis that content should flow like water. We don’t want to go down a hill and carry it up from a stream or well bucket by bucket. We want it to be a utility, we turn it on or off, up or down, hot or cold, like water from a faucet. If that didn’t work for us, we wouldn’t exist. The loop of alignment of the firm with revenue and growth, and alignment of content with the firm as a whole CAN and IS being closed every day here. I’d like you to consider the value of that to your firm, and then get a call with us, bring your team, and give us a project that’s been on your “always intending to do” list for a while, and let’s show you the joy of “done, next, what else have you got?” Are you game?
Reach out to MarketSmiths via the quick contact form on our website at and don’t put it off. You say you want your whole org on a revenue footing? Let’s get the plumbing going, the water flowing, and make it that much easier to tap the latent brilliance locked up in your org that isn’t yet reaching, connecting with, and inspiring your public to action.
