New Business Ideas 4 U

Posts Tagged ‘Book of the Month’

Losing All “A” Performers in a Small Office

This is a true story, and is offered to indicate how not doing what is recommended by Profs Becker, Huselid and Beatty can be expensive and serious for a company.

The office was a small sales office – around 15 people. The “A” job in the office is the sales and marketing manager. Why? Because the office was selling big ticket items – hopefully once in a lifetime purchases – and this manager is responsible for the total top line of the organization. Unfortunately, the “A” job was filled by a “C” performer and fortunately for both the office and the person, she was ‘promoted upstairs’ moving to a job in Head Office.

The recently appointed GM then set a winning strategy, and took over the role of sales and marketing manager, since Head Office would not allow the appointment of a replacement for the sales and marketing manager.  All other jobs in the office were “B” or “C” jobs. Interestingly, both I and the GM saw the job of Customer Support as a “B” job tending towards an “A”, while Head Office saw the job as , the company saw this latter as a “B” job, tending towards the “C” level. Just a necessary evil

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So what is a Differentiated Workforce?

A differentiated workforce is one where those jobs, and the staff members in them, who contribute most significantly to the successful achievement of company strategy get special treatment.

There’s a lot in that simple statement, so let’s explore it in a bit more depth.

Firstly, how about the idea that not all staff members contributes equally to the achievement of company strategy? The authors argue that there are “A” jobs, which they describe as ‘contributing disproportionately to one or more of the company’s strategic capabilities’. For example, in a pharmaceutical firm focused on new products, a strategic capability is likely to be R&D, with senior research scientist positions likely to be “A” jobs. In a sales oriented organization, key account sales positions are likely to be “A” jobs.

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In the last posting we explored the first of Rosen’s three phases for convergence marketing. Let’s now look at phases 2 and 3.

Phase 2           Compressing the Sales Cycle

This phase is based on the company’s respect for the potential customer. Rosen calls this ‘nurturing’ the customer, which uses elements of permission marketing. (Never heard of it? You should consider investing in a Marketing Update. Check the Update tab at the top of this page).

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One of the key values from the Book of the Month for January, Convergence Marketing, by Richard Rosen, are the original models it contains. Let’s explore one of these where he looks at the differences between the traditional model of advertising and the convergence model. Here is the model.

Rosen explains that the Traditional Model is based on the AIDA principle from the 1960s. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire,  Action, which he has renamed Awareness, Preference, Consideration and Sale for his own purposes.

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