What I Didn’t Learn From Bjorn Borg I Learned From My Brother and From Startups (The Importance of Sales)

Last month I was bit dismayed to see that one of the great tennis players of all time, Bjorn Borg, was putting up his Wimbledon trophies up for sale to help with financial security for those close to him. Bless Bjorn and his family, but the news was a bit sad for me.

When I was growing up playing tennis, I identified more with John McEnroe, who was a lefty, serve-and-volley type, and phenomenally natural player (true McEnroe had a temper on the court). Borg, on the other hand, was a baseline player, more of a machine and a model of physical perfection, disciplined, and gentleman-like. Borg played with an exaggerated Western grip which facilitated huge, looping forehand swings, and topspin shots that were out of this world.

One of my first tennis racquets was a Bjorn Borg Bancroft racquet. I got it as a reward for selling probably hundreds of candy bars in the Little League. OK – I didn’t personally sell more than two of those hundreds of candy bars. My parents and my brother were the salespeople that should be credited for the sales. My brother, who has always been a genuine, people person, was eager to bring happiness to others door-to-door in the form of chocolates and his bright smile.

Prior to working directly in new sales (not existing clients) for a startup, I had a total aversion to salespeople. Salespeople were a bunch of scum suckers, slimeballs, and shysters looking to rip off innocent people. But working in a startup forced me to understand more about the craft, process mechanics, compensation structure and legal docs, management and measurement techniques, and styles of salespeople from a hands-on point of view. In short, I developed a deep appreciation for sales, and I came up with my own style of sales. I basically develop a sales style that is oriented towards helping other people first and then allowing sales to stem naturally from that (as opposed to forcing things unnaturally).

Digressing a bit, at Chicago’s b-school (before my sales experiences), I took a new business venture course from a visiting Harvard b-school professor. The Harvard professor taught the class with an heavy emphasis on the entrepreneur having strong sales qualities. I found this to be in stark contrast to the entrepreneurial finance course that I took from a Chicago professor which emphasized a more holistic look at a venture in its approach.

I never really appreciated the importance of deeply understanding sales until somewhat longer into my professional career. Now I live, breathe, and appreciate sales in all of my jobs, even when sales are not my responsibility. Cutting one’s teeth in sales has been one of my best professional experiences, and I would especially encourage those seeking entrepreneurial endeavors to try out the profession/functional role at least once. If you can get in a situation where you must both source and close the deals, that’s an ideal opportunity to pursue. Not only does understanding sales help one appreciate the "cash is king" mantra in a venture but also it helps one to understand other people better.

Hunting Versus Fishing Licenses in Consulting

An updated version of this post appears in The Consulting Apprenticeship.

This past week I was involved with a fairly typical discussion that occurs during the preparation phase for a management consulting project that includes a diagnostic or assessment phase. A goal of an assessment may be for a consultant to help a client quickly zero in on where major problems are and to quickly determine where to focus business improvement efforts. For an operations project that may span many business units and the work of thousands to tens of thousands of people, data collection and interviews play a critical role in the analysis. As one can imagine in analysis projects, if one gets garbage in, one likely gets garbage out.

In comes the role of the “hunting license”. As one can imagine, consultants may need to get very sensitive information (e.g., financial, sales, operational) in order to help a client analyze what is going on. When working in the trenches of a client organization, the individuals on the line may be reluctant to give the consultant information. If a consultant has be given an adequate hunting license, essentially an authorization by a manager or executive (e.g., CEO, COO, CFO) to obtain any operational data needed, a consultant can better navigate through the client organization and obtain information needed.

That said, consultants need to recognize that their hunting licenses do not generally mean that they have a right to “fish” (for information). When consultants seek information and/or question workers in the trenches, they should have a clear goal in mind. They should not randomly seek information just for the purpose of seeking information and in hopes that client problems will reveal themselves down the road. Seeking information can take up a client’s precious time and resources, so the effects of asking for substantial amounts of information should be recognized.

Sometimes avoiding fishing is not as easy as it seems, especially in cases where the problem may not be readily visible. That said, to avoid the pitfalls of fishing, a consultant should use a structured methodology for attacking a problem, and the methodology should be connected to end results (and/or prove, disprove hypotheses along the way) as much as possible. For example, in analyzing a backoffice operation, one may want to look at people, processes, and systems as the structured methodology. One may look at the roles people are playing, document the workflows people are using, and examine the computer support for various paper handling steps. To show how the connection of data to end results must be clearly understood, if during the backoffice analysis case I mentioned it is determined that salary information of the workers analyzed will be off-limits to the consultant, then the consultant may want to state that any potential problems about whether a client’s workers are paid competitively (thus potentially affecting worker quality and effectiveness) would be beyond the analysis.

Another way to avoid the pitfall of fishing is for the consultant to ask for information in a layered way. That is, before diving deep in every area of investigation, a consultant can ask for broad information first. Once a problem has surfaced, a consultant can then ask for more detailed information regarding the particular area.

So all in all, I would say the hunter instincts are good traits for consultants, but fisher tendencies need to be watched with caution or avoided entirely.

Random Thoughts on Enron Movie

This weekend I had a chance to see HDNet Film’s movie/documentary, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Great movie. Helps puts some perspective on the role of vision, morals, big business, and government. Now I want to read the book.

A few things that kind of surprised me about the movie:

  • I expected to see something about McKinsey per this story by Gladwell.
  • It was interesting to see the breadth and depth of connections of Enron to the power troubles in California.
  • The movie seemed to portray the accounting related to "mark-to-market" as evil – clearly the Enron interpretation of the technique was way too aggressive, but it strikes me  (on first blush) as incorrect to call the techniques used at Enron as mark-to-market. For Enron, it seemed more like something like "mark-Enron-assets-to-future-market-in-my-dreams".
  • The movie portrays the financial analysts on Wall Street as a bunch of idiots that cannot see through the tradeoffs of accounting techniques. But this is odd to me because, at many b-schools, one is trained to adjust for things like LIFO/FIFO inventory liquidations, restructuring/"big bath" one-time accounting charges, off-balance sheet items, etc. Investment bankers are trained to walk on water to be able to see through accounting stuff and boil things down to true economic impact. Now outright deception (by the company doing the financial reporting) is something that one can’t always control for, but it seems that there must have been something externally visible …

At least for some of these points, I reconcile it all in my mind that greed can drive people to be blind.  The reference in the movie to the Milgram experiment is also very noteworthy, but I tend to prefer the temptation explanation over the more pessimistic "we just do as we’re told"-Milgram explanation.