"It ain't what you don't know that get you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." - Mark Twain.
Let's Talk about The Brain First, Shall We?
Let me be blunt to respect your time.
1) You think you see the impact of digital transformation, but you likely do not.
2) You think you have expertise in digital transformation, but you likely do not.
3) You will likely disagree with what I'm sharing with you right now.
4) If you have not stopped reading, you are probably skimming down to see what's coming.
How do I know this?
Do I think I am a know it all, and smarter than you? No, not at all. I have to wrestle with those same issues and the reason this is on my blog not my company sight is that most people wont see it, let alone talk about it.
Oh, right. I didn't pay out the blunt comments. How did I know?
1) You can't see the full impact of digital transformation because you have a condition called change blindness.
The phenomenon is simple - seemingly obvious changes to peoples surroundings go unseen my most people. Here is a short link to one of the very first experiments proving this phenomenon in 1998.
So you accept that you probably have change blindness.... and that it is normal, meaning - we all have it, right? 2) Lets go to the harder topic of challenging your expertise in digital transformation.
I'm going to provide more evidence here.
Exhibit A. The Dunning-Kruger Effect.
In the 1990s two phycologists produced a study that's more or less about my people ignorance. Essentially, the survey had students take tests and asked those participant how they thought the did on those tests. What these charts say is that while all of the test participants thought they performed about the same (black chart) they performed wilding differently. In fact, people who failed always over-represented their score while the people in the top if the class always under reported their expectation.
As a professional researcher myself, I am extremely aware first hand about how my past published research has been so wrongly understood and misrepresented into pointlessness that I strongly urge you to read credible sources of their work. http://haines-lab.com/post/2021-01-10-modeling-classic-effects-dunning-kruger/
When did I have my "Dunning Kruger" moment? When I was at Forrester, some of my peers published a book called "Digital Disruption." I rolled my eyes around it as more hype that's common in the tech industry. It took an engagement I was working on for NetApp to really get the full significance. One of the things that I loved doing while at Forrester was treading my peer analyst as "perpetual focus groups" (the ones who focused on covering the issues of actually roles and not tech trends like some others do). My assignment was to do a one day bootcamp to help NetApp's field force get more comfortable selling to the cloud. In preparation (I role play with top reps constantly to make sure I understand the subject matter) I realized that the type of stakeholder there were used to calling on (Infrastructure people) was actually threatened by the value proposition and the primary customers were application people - whom almost no Netapp people had ever spoken to before. That is significant. So I called James Staten, who was without a doubt, the best analyst covering cloud at the time. James told it that this gap is even bigger than that and the Forrester research team was struggling to covey how big the gap was. What he told me was that if we took the most innovative, leading edge traditional transformation leader from the most leading edge industries (finance) - that fringe group would not recognize anything in a pure cloud shop.
To cross check this, I called my friend who was a sales leader at AWS. He told me this phenomenon (we didn't have a word for it then... today, I'm calling it digitally disrupted) was so pervasive that the bar far the worst sales performers came from IBM, Microsoft, or other tech businesses and they were looking to hire outside tech all together. This got my attention. That was in 2012. What I've seen and have been paying attention to sense is startling.
Exhibit B. 90% digital failure rates
The numbers, from credible sources, that have tracked project failures consistently over several decades highlight that digitals transformation efforts have failure rates as high as 90%. Failure rates defined as initiatives that failed to reach their stated goal.
We I ask audiences to self report who've led successful transformation efforts - I always get most of the people in the room raising their hands. It's just not possible. So, given that this blog is being read by an audience - statistically most if that audience will falsely report. I personally have led successful efforts and ones that have failed. I'm happy to be scrutinized for my validity. If you believe you have the same level of experience with digital and distal transformation to skip passed this post, then you are likely to be 90% wrong.
3. I don't know if you are still disagreeing with me or not.
Here is my experience from the other side of the table. This picture is from 2014 with VP level executive from companies like: HP, Avaya, Symantec, IBM, Haworth, etc. The purpose of this session was to address some difficult topics. Eerier, I'd shared a thesis that these companies didn't understand their customer well enough. That was met with a lot of hostility and they were asked to prove me otherwise. The goal was not nor every to challenge any one persons role, but merely get to a topic that needs discussion with one spending all of the time getting people there.
I can't help it if you do disagree. I really hope you don't because I need your help. I need to find ways to talk about these kinds of things in productive ways.
4. I hope you read with me here before skipping too much ahead.
I'm writing this for help. I need more eyes on this digtally disrupted problem, I need more engagement to help in create better aide that talk about this. I feel a huge sense of urgency for it, berceuse I fear we're heading for a major extinction event in sales and marketing.
I founded the Sales Enablement Society as both an experiment and a proof of concept (it it was successful). I would lean into the digital disrupted truths I learned, while practicing the research I published at Forrester, and setting it up to work only through persuasion (or sales skills). What did I think would happen? The before and after case study of objectives and accomplishments in one year is almost impossible to comprehend and exceeded even my more aggressive goals. Not only was they way it worked so well crafted and aligned to the lessons learned from the "pure breed" cloud companies, but most of the work was done out in the open with full 100% transparency. Yet, even have a conversation with people involved as a compare and contrast is difficult to even start. James Staten was right, yet again.
While that's frustrating in the "can't get this think I see so clearly in my head out on paper" kind of way, what's hard to watch are the directional choses they are making (which don't align with the mission) nor position themselves to weather to coming wave.
What's the flood that I'm concerned about?
Everything we know for sure about "Go to Market" is 80% likely to be wrong. Failing to address this reality is going to lead to more of what we have today.
This is very real.
So much "analog" thinking is being baked into the overall system. It's creating conformation bias everywhere. Here are a few examples.
1) Calculating TAM by product not by problem
2) A blunt calculation of a sales role (often called a "capacity rep") that's a simple calculation of average deal size. 3) assumptions that sales funnels actually look like this
4) Volume-based, sales velocity models
5) Awash of tracking activity so much so there is little space to even talk about customer verifiable actions. Let alone some incredibly out of touch and disturbing trends including:
Trying to elevate sales methodology discussions to "the c-suite"
Beating the "sales coaching" topic like a dead horse
Hype around "orchestration" without really understanding its meaning
Dusting of ancient texts to revisit "buyer journey"
Doubling down on models creating in the late 1890s
In 1998, when I was the VP of Product Marketing and Management - we were talking about "buyer journey" and found it was inadequate. Customer Relationship Management at the time was a business process, not another name a thing people put names it.
How much has product development changed since 1998. What about finance? Or manufacturing? Pfizer was able to develop a vaccine for Covid in 9 months and there are three private companies with space programs. Things unimaginable in 1998. Yet, the thinking about sales and marketing has not changed, in a lot of ways it's regressed.
Technology doesn't do anything but scale bad process. So it's bad. Big deal.
Well, it is so bad that it represents an existential threat for your entire company. A possible extinction event.
Ok, let's you and I align. I understand I challenged you a bit, but - I think I shared what's on my mind, so were equally exposed. Agree. Let my lay out my extinction case here for you.
Background and orientation: Good research is normally 10 years ahead of the market.
Here is a truth. Gideon Gartner started this whole syndicated research space in 1979. This advisory service model was deeply tied to Wall Street covering vendors and distilling trends. Picking which vendors would win in this hard to understand but growing industry. Two of my former bosses worked in this industry -at Yankee Group, an early competitor to Gartner. Dale Kutnick, who went on to found META Group and George Colony who started Forrester. Both would have heavily influences on my thinking.
From the 1980s till the dotcom bust in 2001 - these firms both worked to take position and shape markets. Gartner took the standard to define markets and submarkets. A core report each service would publish was called a "SAR" (Strategic Advisory Report"). These reports were very dense, thorough, but so good. I was working as the Director of Product Marketing at Allen Systems Group. We were in the IT Help Desk space and developed a concept called the "consolidate service desk." We had subscriptions to both Gartner and META Group at the time. The analysts at META Group really knew so much more about what it all meant than those at Gartner and we developed a whole strategy and story around it. I was unable to get our company behind it (too much traditional thinking) but... the strategy was picked up and execute with great success by Peregrine. So, clearly both were valuable. Why was META Group so different? I got fired from my job at Allen Systems Group (I was 26 at the time) for pushing that concept too hard and not having the wisdom yet about driving change. However, I went to get a job at META Group - a passionate believer in what the company did - starting out as a sales executive. More on this story later. By 1999 I was the VP of Product Marketing and Management at META Group. We had seven core services (business units) and there research was driven around core problems individual roles had. For example, there was a role inside a company who focused on the Data Center. In 1999, that meant the mainframe. Whenever one of the topics we'd invest to cover hit "the mainstream" (such as being covered by CIO Magazine) we would pounce that topics "dead" and push the research focus to more leading edge issues and different monetization strategies. Why did we do this? Well, it's how Dale chose to differentiate. He believed he was offer better advices to Wall Street analysts by helping them predict which trends would emerge, and which were "bull shit" (a term he would us all of the time). All META Group reports were harshly debated in a research meeting he led. It was highly structured agitation. I loved it because it was all about merit.
In contrast, Forrester really exploded on the scene during the dot com cycle. George has a different lens that Dale. He focused on "What it Means". He likes to make these ideas accessible so his focus took a slightly more "journalistic" approach. There is still research, but a lot more focus on the structure. Forrester grew so much during the first dot.com rush berceuse people wanted to understand - in simply ways - the meaning of "click and mortor" or how to communicate these ideas to big companies. Meta Group was acquired by Gartner in 2004. Forrester has barely weathered the 2001 dot com crash and had grown through acquisitions (Something the META Group did not really do as it was very focused on organic growth). Some of the big ones included GIGA Group (With a very early version of a group source model which was widely derided at META Group) and Jupiter Research. I joined Forrester in 2008 as part of an acquisition outline for my "Sales workbench" intellectual property that never materialized. So, I combined: my experience as a customer of research services, with what I learned from META group, and my experiences building a different kind of application of syndicated research, and pitched a new role / business unit for "sales enablement." Between 2008 and 2009 I published foundational reports based on the type of research rigor I'd learned at META Groups that a) laid the vision to support the role: "Engineering Valuable Sales Conversations" and b) the quantified the economic value of the problem "Uncovering the Hidden Cost of Sales".
During my tenure at Forrester, i was at the nexus of a lot of variables. When I'd first published the first foundational report, there pockets of people (mostly in the services and technology space) talking about it. I'd run into
vendors and "digital disruption" is no mere buzzword; it's a phenomenon encapsulating the seismic shifts in today's technological landscape. As defined by Forrester Research in the 2010s, digital disruption paints a vivid picture of a world in flux, shaped by the convergence of factors like the widespread adoption of mobile devices, the democratization of technology, cutting-edge digital technologies, and the explosion of big data and analytics.
Reflecting on Societal Revolutions: The Historical Blueprint
Each era brings its revolution, and these shifts serve as hallmarks in human progress:
The Agricultural Revolution: This was where it all began. The domestication of plants and animals not only altered our diet but also our way of life. It sowed the seeds of civilization, leading to the birth of cities and communities.
The Industrial Revolution: Marked by the roar of machines and the establishment of mass production techniques, this era transformed the global economy. Markets expanded, and industries blossomed, setting a new rhythm for businesses and societies alike.
The Digital Revolution: Here and now, we are part of a paradigm shift unlike any other. This revolution is more than just about gadgets and networks; it's about experiences and ecosystems. Driven by digital technologies, it's altering the way we live, interact, and, crucially, how businesses operate.
In this context, it becomes imperative for businesses to understand that conventional strategies, though successful in the past, may now be obsolete. We're in a new world order, and a fresh perspective is essential to navigate it effectively.
The Ripple Effects: How Industries and Markets are Pivoting
Digital disruption isn't just a theoretical concept; it's very much tangible, and its tremors are felt across sectors:
Reinventing Business Paradigms: Traditional industries, from healthcare to retail, find themselves at crossroads. Either adapt to the digital tide or risk irrelevance. New strategies are emerging, with businesses keen on leveraging digital tools to enhance customer experiences, streamline operations, and create novel value propositions.
Emergence of New Frontiers: With disruption comes innovation. As old markets transform, new ones are born. The app economy, for instance, was unthinkable a few decades ago. Today, it's a multi-billion-dollar industry. Such is the potency of digital disruption.
Implications, Insights, and Instructions for Businesses
Choosing the Right Narrative: Recognizing and acknowledging the digital disruption phenomenon is step one. Embracing the term, as underscored by Forrester, acts as the metaphorical compass for businesses. It's the guiding light, the beacon pointing towards the future.
Anchoring in Authority: Mentioning established names like Forrester not only adds credence to discussions but also emphasizes the gravity of the situation. Businesses can better frame their strategic decisions by leveraging such established insights.
Building the Future Playbook: The reality of digital disruption sets the stage for more profound discussions. It offers businesses a platform to advocate for more tools, investments, and strategies tailored to the digital age.
So What?
The Digital Disruption era isn't just another phase; it's the new reality. For B2B businesses, the implications are profound:
Strategic Evolution: As the commercial landscape shifts, B2B strategies need to keep pace. This means re-evaluating sales, marketing, and partnership tactics to align with the digital-first world.
Empower with Research: Anchoring arguments and strategies in robust research, like that from Forrester, ensures that businesses remain on solid ground, lending their plans the weight of authority.
Equip for the Future: As the business terrain becomes increasingly digital, the tools to navigate it need an upgrade. Investments in new technologies, platforms, and training become paramount.
In summation, digital disruption offers both challenges and opportunities. For B2B businesses, it's a clarion call to evolve, innovate, and lead. Armed with insights, grounded in research, and powered by the right tools, they can not only navigate this era but also define it.
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