Boston, Massachusetts
It is 9.00am and Warren Christopher gazes out of the window of his corner office. He has just got back from Sydney and is a little jet lagged. His presentation to the Sales Achievement Club had been exceptionally well received. The leading sales lady, Jane Evans had told him it was exceptionally motivational.
His assistant, Alison walks in and asks, “Are you just gazing out the window or are you doing your strategic thinking?” Warren smiles, his assistant can make these comments but no one else on his staff would take the risk. He has a flinty reputation at City Solutions since being hired by the founders – all brilliant scientists – who needed some ‘business direction’.
“Strategic thinking, of course. Why am I here? What is the meaning of life etc?” Or, more specifically where is the revenue going to come from for next or rather this, year? Last year was OK, he had achieved his numbers for the year but new sales were below expectations. He had to figure out how to get his products sold internationally and into new industry segments where they should do well.
The Budget Process
He looked down at the budget submissions. The paper from Client support was tight and well thought through. As he expected there was no slack but his head of department, Rick, knew the matrix he used for aligning revenue to costs and using this saved them both a lot of time and grief. He made a couple of minor alterations just to show that he had been through it. He called Rick in and went through his thoughts and both understood but left unsaid that the changes were the ones Rick had left for him to make.
The quant’s submission for Research and Development was rather heavily padded. He re-worked the numbers in a few minutes to make it realistic and wondered again why these brilliant mathematicians could not produce a sensible budget submission first time. Still, that’s why they hired me he thought and walked down the corridor to discuss the changes with the founder who was happy to agree the proposed changes quickly so he could get down to some real work.
Professional Services was straightforward, direct link from revenue through utilization rates to headcount and therefore costs. Even a child could do this but just for the sake of form he made a few small changes and emailed the results back.
The two more difficult areas were marketing and sales. Warren hated marketing and the lack of measurement around the ‘investment’ as his Marketing Director always referred to it. He always referred to it as ‘profligate spending’ but saw it as a necessary evil. Warren had given ambitious plans to his Marketing Director for this year. Geographic expansion and new industry expansion were his targets and he knew it would be expensive – penetrating new countries would cost huge amounts of money, market research, trade shows, advertising, seminars and maybe a local office. Trying to open a new industry sector at the same time would double the spend and they probably did not have the resources or the money to do both. Despite his expectations Warren had been truly astonished at the proposed marketing budget.
He sinks into a gloomy reverie until his assistant announced an incoming telephone call. It was an old friend and he immediately cheered up even though Gavin was trying to sell him his new service. Maybe this could be the answer.
He puts down the telephone just as Gary Johnson, his sales director walks in for his budget review session. Warren lets Gary get his excuses out the way for the disappointments of last year but is rather surprised that he does not volunteer that his star sales lady is leaving. Alison had told him earlier. Perhaps Gary did not understand how quickly internal communication could work when there was hot news to impart.
Gary pitches the new strategy of using an external lead generation service and Warren allows him to go through it. At the end they haggle a little over the new targets and Warren suggests that he call Gavin regarding lead generation. “It’s your decision Gary but you might consider this outfit. You should approach this with an open mind and evaluate a number of options.” Gary understood that this meant, “evaluate options but come to the right conclusion.”
Gary walked out of the CEO’s office and called Gavin.
Inside, Warren set to work on the proposed marketing budget.
The lead generation service would allow him to do ‘practical market research,’ the electronic equivalent of knocking on doors and seeing if prospects wanted to buy something. He could use this to cover new countries and new industries and get immediate feedback. He could then focus resources on the areas that had the greatest opportunity by whichever segment. Warren relished the opportunity of being able to react much more quickly.
He would still do trade shows and seminars but with proper campaigns around the events to ensure maximum value is extracted with email messages before and after.
However, what Warren likes best about the lead generation service was that he can measure the results as often as he wants.
Giving is better than receiving because giving starts the receiving process…