No Revenue, No Problem?

by Paul Travis, Interim Management Executive

One decade ago, all over again

Is anyone else’s radar going off?

At the turn of the millennium, eyeballs were the metric that drove value — not dollars — which led to many companies to walk like zombies into the water, wishing upon a star, until they drown. Lots of money was made in the stock market, and then lots of money was lost.

Now we’re seeing Twitter, Facebook, along with a gaggle of would-be’s, with astronomical growth in subscribers/members/eyeballs and no clear path to profitability (ahem, one of my strong suits).

The latest to go down was www.tr.im, which like TinyURL and SnipURL, shortened long web addresses down to something easily typeable (also fit conveniently into Twitter Tweets where every character is almost 1% of your message!)

Lots of users but no revenue model…

Wake up, people — that’s an ingredient in your recipe not to forget!

[Contact me right away if you're experiencing this condition].

This post has been republished from Paul Travis’ blog, Marketing 2020.

Photo by playerx

Interim Sales and Marketing VP: Richard Brune

I help transform companies and sales process and methodology and help with sales metrics and profit and loss. I have over 25 years of experience building and managing consumer brands and products selling to all retail channels: department stores, mass merchants, clubs, specialty stores internet and broadcast media. As a OneAccord partner I can fill a position for an emerging or SMB company as interim VP of sales or I can come along side the leadership on a project to develop the sales and revenue generating growth of an organization. The value that OneAccord brings is that we have the experience having walked in the shoes of the client. We’ve held the executive leadership positions and are willing to come into your organization to not only strategize but execute the deliverables. We are scaled nationwide so we have the resources and expertise that is needed and can work collaboratively providing our clients with a wide range of revenue focused expertise. In addition OneAccord partners tell the truth about where a company is and where it needs to go.

Richard Brune is a interim sales and marketing VP for OneAccord with a strong track record managing some of America’s most recognizable consumer brands. Mr. Brune has an unbroken record of substantial sales and market share increases with such brands as Stanley Tools, Hartmann Luggage, REI Inc., Swiss Army Brands and licensed products with Eddie Bauer and Disney. Richard has a proven ability to develop new markets and expand existing ones. He is an effective leader with the ability to build highly productive and motivated sales teams. A bottom line executive with the ability to reduce operating expenses while continuing to enjoy growth and profitability.

Richard Brune can be contacted at richard.brune@oneaccordpartners.com

Common Objections to Interim Management

Interim Management Question: What are common objections from clients to Interim Management and how do you overcome these objections?

Objection: I have to hire someone after you leave which means we’ll be starting over from scratch.

Response: OneAccord provides a ‘front-end’ Revenue Review that is completed by 2 or 3 CEO-pedigreed Principals with proven revenue growth history. This work, coupled with their subsequent Rapid Revenue Plan will ensure the initiatives they implement produce results. And, OneAccord will not ‘leave’ an engagement until the transition to new, capable leadership is complete.

Scott Philips
Interim Management Executive, OneAccord
scott.philips@oneaccordpartners.com
(503) 913-2705

Objection: AS CEO I’m concerned about the impact of OA on our culture…

Response: OneAccord is there to deliver impact on transforming the revenue culture of a company for a finite period… typically 6 to 9 months. It’s important for the CEO and his management team to acknowledge that CHANGE is needed and to commit w OA leadership to defined roles to affect the necessary change.

Cultural change is always challenging. BUT the breakthrough is realizing there’s opportunity and seeing results.

The purpose of OneAccord’s principals is to help a company’s organization get through the change cycle of their business and transition the benefits of our experience, talent and skills to the company’s stakeholders. Our seasoning has brought us much hard earned wisdom in evaluating difficult changes and the effect on people’s lives in and out of the business. We strive to bring that perspective to the relationships and work we create with our client companies.

Peter Klinge
Interim Management Executive, OneAccord
peter.klinge@oneaccordpartners.com
801.755.6820

Objection: We could never have an interim overseeing our overall game plan, because they’d leave with our entire customer list!

Response: As mentioned in Leadership on Demand (www.Leadership-On-Demand.com) which I co-authored with Charles Besondy, interims are professionals, just like your accountant and your lawyer. Just as you’d not expect them to keep your confidence among competitors, good interims provide that same discretion. An interim CMO or CRO is working at the strategy and process level, not on any particular account. In fact, you incur greater risk any time you face disgruntled/outgoing account executives who not only take their (electronic) black book but also muddy the water with their comments to the rest of the staff!

Paul Travis
Interim Management Executive, OneAccord
Paul.Travis@oneaccordpartners.com
www.60-Second-Marketing.com
Tel: 206.910.2222 | Skype: PaulTravis

Objection: It costs too much.

Response: It’s true – our work this is not inexpensive. But because our work is interim meaning short–term and the fact that we are focused on lasting trans-formation at the top and bottom lines, the returns we provide through our mutual effort during and after the engagement far out way the investment over time.

The advantage to you is a low risk controlled change that registers as sustained profits in a number of levels;
1. Leadership excellence
2. Process improvement
3. Sustained growth
4. Revenue acceleration & profits

The real advantage is the long-term growth and profit your company will gain due to our short-term engagement.

Objection: We’ve tried consultants before.

Response: Our real difference is we not only assess and develop a plan, but come align side, roll up our sleeves and work with you until sustainable change is owned by the leadership and employees across the company.

The advantage of this for you is; we are able to walk away and you receive the full benefit of lasting change.

Because the organization is 100% involved with the change process (top down) it (the company) now has the ability, through modeling, to produce ongoing needed change while continuing to grow and drive profit

Objection: Our company is different.

Response: We draw on our 40 plus stable of tenured leadership and C-level principals. Our first goal is to match your culture and needs to those of our OneAccord principals. This ensures the very best experience, needed tools and cultural fit for your engagement.

The advantage to this means we mesh quickly to your culture and business needs which allows us to move to solutions much quicker.

The real benefit of this is of course savings of time and money – at the very front end – which is exactly why we make sure the culture, experience and engagement fit is spot on.

Objection: I don’t have the leadership in place to support this.

Response: We believe people are your most valuable resource. We are always surprised at the talent we find inside the individuals on staff. One of our best values is to help you identify and grow.

Allowing the right people to rise as leaders sends a clear message through the organization – new energy is released, new ideas are born and leadership transformation begins.

To have a united, focused and energized leadership team takes the pressure off you! You in many ways will be freed to do strategic, visionary and key guidance activities.

Objection: These kind of initiatives never last.

Response: Our overall transformation goal (or specific project goal) is to build and install processes which have identified owners who carry authority, responsibility and show the desire to maintain and even improve the processes over time.

Top-down / bottom-up Ownership is key to the success of all of our engagements. The advantage of sustained change is that you can now shift your attention as a key leader to future growth and profits and rely on “employee ownership” to sustain your processes.

Letting go of the daily tactical challenges fees you to tap and release the leadership value which is called for from your position.

Lasting change is about buying-in from top to bottom. Our processes provides buy-in from leaders to teams and individuals. – There is nothing more powerful than a volunteer army! Can you imagine the success we’d have if this was true in your company today?

Eric Fry
Interim Management Executive, OneAccord
eric.fry@oneaccordpartners.com

Interim Management Executive: Eric Fry

I specialize in organizational transformation and cultural empowerment. I do that specifically through identifying and closing performance gaps in the area of planning, structure, people, and processes. Ultimately what that does is it increases productivity, profits, and increases overall value of the company.

Eric Fry
Interim Management Executive, OneAccord
seattle@oneaccordpartners.com

Interim Management Executive: Casey Leaman

I help companies define and execute their sales strategy and structure and implement a sustainable sales execution framework. I have extensive experience in high tech and international expansion. As a OneAccord partner I can fill a position as the Interim VP of sales or business development for a company with $5-100 million in sales or I can come along side the leadership on a project basis to develop a sales strategy international expansion plan.

The power of OneAccord is the depth and breadth of our sales and marketing expertise as a team combined with our collaborative culture. What this ensures for the client is that the OneAccord resource working with them will be the best fit to drive their revenue growth.

Casey Leaman
Interim Management Executive, OneAccord
casey.leaman@oneaccordpartners.com
512.772.1806

Overcoming Pains Organizations Inflict on Themeselves

by Michael Pearce, Interim Management Executive

There are a host of pains organizations inflict on themselves that present clear and present dangers to their very viability. Among those we often see are:

• Goals and objectives that are out of sync with job descriptions and employee expectations

• Compensation plans that don’t reflect the will of the organizations executive leadership

• Management who believes it is their prerogative to manipulate sales compensation plans, changing quotas, territories and commission schedules mid-stream

• Sales automation/CRM systems that are installed to provide management reporting with sales productivity as a by product

• Few understand the complicated nature of channels, how to avoid conflict, and how to motivate organizations they don’t own, yet many businesses just can’t grow organically fast enough. Effective committed channels are a necessity.

So what can companies do?

• They must learn to hire for a season. Recognize that a significant percentage of employees will move on within a few years. Call it out confront it and embrace by designing the job description accordingly, and eliminate confusion and contention. Hire the very best for the tasks at hand. It’ll require a bit more thought and planning, but it’ll be worth it.

• Dedicate themselves to serving their employees and to making them successful; not managing them for compliance, rather leading them for significance; leading them rather than directing them

• Embrace technology. Many managers are digital immigrants leading digital natives. They resist it and demean it with comments like “I’ll never text”. We must immerse ourselves in it, admit our fears and frustrations, and join the ranks of the next generation who takes all this technology as a matter of fact and can’t understand why their management doesn’t.

• When we employ systems we must think first of the impact on the employee. Implement a CRM to make the sales people more productive, and have management reports as a byproduct. It’s the only way they will embrace it and the data will be accurate and timely.

• Hire scientifically. Success at a previous company is no guarantee of success with the next. It can no longer be acceptable to give an employee 9 months or longer to see if they will succeed. Thai’s as much as 1/3 of their tenure. They must be positioned to contribute much quicker.

• Build support tools like the company web site that personalize the web experience, allowing the inquirer to truly understand how your products and services can met his unique needs, and build it a way that leaves a thumb print behind so more and more can be turned into customers. It’s not the number of web hits that counts, it’s the number of customers that are generated.

• Have a mission statement that is meaningful, measure ideas against it, reward innovation, and create the opportunities that demand transformation versus incremental improvement.

• A soft economy can be the best time to gain market share. It’ll take a non-traditional approach, but embracing a win/win mentality, a servants heart for employees success, an acceptance that each employee really wants to make the best decisions possible, combined with an ability to accept effort and failure will help turn a business, even where the economy is having a negative impact, into a consistent winner.

Michael Pearce is an experienced interim management executive and has worked with several leading companies such as Citicorp, Boeing, Weyerhaeuser, Singer and EMC. His expertise is in building high performance sales teams and generating revenue and margins with repeatable, dependable, and predictable results. You can contact Mr. Pearce at michael.pearce@oneaccordpartners.com or at 425.830.4156. He also blogs at http://michael-pearce.blogspot.com/.

Photo by papalars

When to Hire Interim Management

There are specific situations that arise in organizations in which hiring interim management is most valuable to the organization. The book Leadership on Demand by Chuck Besondy and Paul Travis describes 7 scenarios when an interim manager can make a significant impact on the bottom line.

1. Significant revenue or marketing event is in jeopardy

A significant revenue event could include an upcoming valuation, fiscal year-end, or a pending merger. Bringing in an experienced interim executive can give the organization a “shot in the arm” to help meet revenue goals when they carry additional significance.

2. Totally new strategies or programs must be implemented or tested

According to David Altounian, CEO of iTaggit.com, “I’ve learned that interim leaders in marketing are particulary useful when we’re implementing a type of marketing strategy or tactic that is completely new to us”. When an organization is implementing a new marketing or sales strategy but lack expertise, hiring an interim manager with specific experience in this area can help successful implementation of the new strategy.

3. A gap exists in a key position

When a sales or marketing executive leaves your company, an interim executive can fill the position and maintain momentum until a permanent replacement is found. Since there can be great opportunity cost to leaving the position vacant for months, hiring an interim executive can be an ideal solution to fill the gap.

4. A specific skill set is needed, but not permanently

If you recognize that your organization needs a particular skill set, but the skill does not exist within the organization, an interim manager can be a great source for that skill.

5. Additional bandwidth needed, but not permanently

If your company faces a temporary need for additional bandwidth at the executive level, such as during a product launch or formulation of a new strategy, tapping an interim executive can be a successful method for temporarily increasing bandwidth.

6. Objectivity in a leadership position would be beneficial, especially during strategic planning

An objective and outside perspective can help an organization make decisions that are less affected by internal pressures, politics, and myopic thinking.

7. Hands-on coaching and training is required to elevate skill and process knowledge of existing staff

Bringing in an experienced interim executive can provide existing staff with beneficial executive coaching and training. Interim executives often have 20+ years of experience, and they can transfer their knowledge and advice to current executives.

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Drive Revenues With Executive Interim Management: Interview with Jeff Rogers, Co-Founder of OneAccord

Why does OneAccord exist?
It’s serving companies with a variable cost model, in project or interim, best in class people to to help companies with flat or stuck revenue.

What’s the mission of OneAccord?
The mission of OneAccord is to multiply business success, but do it through relationships, yet driving results. It’s not to write reports. It’s not to exist just to do strategy, but it’s to bring results for companies. It’s built on the relationship side, both internally on a collaborative model as well as what we do to facilitate working with the client.

What makes this the right time for OneAccord in the market place?
On the people side, there are more and more talented and savvy senior executives that are the market than ever before. Companies want a variable cost. They’re getting away from just the W2, long term, with all the associated benefits.

There’s a lot of mergers and acquisitions at the mid market level…so you have all these companies coming together. All of a sudden you have redundant management teams so people are getting popped out.

The gray ceiling, the reported age, where your viability in the market starts to shift, keeps coming down. They say it’s dropped a decade over the last few years. What that means is the average tenure has dropped. For an executive, the average tenure is typically 2-3 years. There’s a lot of great people who are at the peak of their knowledge and at the peak of their experience. They’ve got great convictions, they’re not political, they’re not trying to climb the corporate ladder, but they can bring tremendous benefit to companies. So those two influences of the right people and the right corporate environment make it great timing for OneAccord.

How do you see OneAccord developing in the future?
Fully built out we see OneAccord being about 500 partners,  multiple disciplines, but all around sales and marketing which is our expertise, serving as a catalyst for increasing top line revenue.

Jeff Rogers is co-founder of OneAccord Principals, which helps companies grow revenues with interim executives that can serve your organization on a project, interim, or permanent basis. He has been involved in both sales and management development for the last 25 years and has taught every aspect of selling: prospecting, presentation, closing, and answering objections. You can contact Jeff at Jeff.Rogers(at)OneAccordPartners.com.

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Hire an Interim Marketing Executive? 7 Ways Interim Management Can Help an Organization

Avoid Performance Gaps

The most obvious reason to hire an interim executive is to fill a vacancy when an executive leaves until a permanent replacement can be hired. Quickly hiring an interim marketing executive can reduce the negative impact in productivity often caused when an executive leaves a top position.

Save Money by Not Hiring a FTE

Your company may not need a full time marketing executive for the entire year. An alternative is hiring an interim marketing executive who has 20+ years of experience to establish a sales strategy for the year. You only pay him or her for a couple months while they lay out a strategy to take sales to the next level and then have a competent manager, who is less expensive, to maintain the strategy for the rest of the year.

Increase Bandwidth to Tackle Tough Challenges or Take Advantage of Opportunity

When facing extraordinary challenges or a tremendous opportunity, it can benefit an organization to bring on additional resources to temporarily increase bandwidth at the executive level. An interim marketing executive can work in tandem with the full time marketing executive to get things done at a key time for the company.

Get High Cost Executives for a Fraction of the Price

It can cost an organization a million dollars to hire an experienced and proven marketing executive to take your revenue to grow to the next level. Factor in the headhunter commission, the signing bonus, competitive salary and benefits, and the costs can add up. The alternative is to hire an interim executive to do the same thing but without a lot of the expense. An interim marketing executive who has a proven track record or growing a company by several multiples in revenue can be hired on to work a couple days a week and not require the bonuses, benefits, and finders fees.

Acquire Difficult to Find Executive Talent

An interim executive from a good interim executive firm often has 20+ years of experience at Fortune 500 companies. Often executives with this type of experience would be difficult to acquire for a small or midsized company. However interim executives with this level of experience are easily accessible, you just have to contact an interim executive firm like OneAccord.

Interim Management Executives are Often Overqualified

Often times a small to medium sized business will hire an interim executive with 20-30 years of experience at larger companies. In this case overqualification can be a good thing. Interim managers have a very steep learning curve, and their experience helps them make an immediate contribution. They also can mentor and train up younger executives at the company.

Avoid Public Scrutiny of Executive Changes

According to the book, Leadership on Demand by Chuck Besondy and Paul Travis, public companies are required to disclose changes at certain executive positions. Too many replacements of top executives at a public company can lead to speculation by stock analysts that there is trouble in the company and stock price can be negatively affected. Hiring an interim executive to work in an interim capacity is usually not required to be publicly disclosed, which can help avoid this type of scenario.

Photo by Barun Patro

Why the CFO Should Be Funnel Savvy

by Chuck Besondy

The revenue funnel isn’t the sole domain of sales or marketing. CFO’s should be as familiar with their company’s funnel structure and metrics as any sales executive or marketing executive. Here’s why.

1. Funnel modeling tools provide the best way for marketing, finance, and sales to talk the same language during planning and reporting.

2. The variables of the funnel make up the actual metrics of the revenue engine. These variables are the levers and dials over which management has control.

3. The funnel, over time, enables the sales forecast to be made with higher and higher degrees of accuracy.

4. Requests for more resources from Marketing and Sales can in part be justified or refused based on funnel economics

CFO’s should be trained in the use of sophisticated funnel modeling tools right along side their marketing and sales colleagues.

An excellent source of this training is the FunnelAcademy(tm), which includes comprehensive training on sizing a funnel and measuring progress. It also includes the most robust funnel modeling tool I’ve ever had the pleasure to use.

Chuck Besondy is a principal at One Accord Partners and is co-author of Leadership on Demand: How Smart CEO’s Tap Interim Management to Drive Revenue. You can read more about Interim Sales and Marketing Management by Chuck Besondy at his blog The Sales Funnel Fanatic.

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