20-Forces hindering change

What lessons can masterclass innovation leaders teach customer engagement planners—your customers?

ARGUMENTATION

All good marketing uses some form of argumentation to persuade customers to buy, ultimately producing an agreement between buyers and sellers.

Good marketing often starts with a demonstration of need, evoking an immediate, visceral recognition of need among potential buyers as well as the poignant experience of relief—the result of using the featured product or service.

Effective marketing supports the recognition of need and the experience of relief with reasons to believe that the featured product or service will deliver desired benefits.

Brilliant marketing makes a compelling argument to buy, using the techniques of argumentation to “seal the deal”.

FORCE FIELD ANALYSIS

Argumentation in the context of marketing organizes the content of buyers’ experience in a coherent order, calling attention to what buyers already know from their personal experience. The failure to accommodate the felt-truths of buyers often induces fear, uncertainty, and doubt—no sale!

Often an effective sales person facilitates the buying process, addressing the felt-truths of buyers and providing plausible solutions and a network of help.

In this way, structured argumentation become essential to marketing complex systems and, especially, to business users—where the decision-making process includes many decision influencers. Structured argumentation organizes the collective experience of decision influence teams.

The best argumentation starts with a proposition that everyone or nearly everyone already understands and supports.

Innovation leaders “market proposed changes” into their organization, using the established norms and practices of the particular firm. Innovation leaders market change in a manner identical to how the firm (into which he or she has proposed a change) markets a new product. Innovation leaders package and position a new system as another new product of the firm, using all the planning and social norms of developing and launching a new product to external customers. Why? Everyone already knows the drill!

However, innovation leaders must get affected stakeholders on board about the need for a “new product” and what it will take to build and launch it—a new operational capability.

This figure below depicts a force field model—a powerful way of clarifying many of the forces that facilitate and hinder decision-making processes of larger firms, especially as it relates to complex business systems and strategic innovations within a firm.

As potential buyers or affected stakeholders of the innovating firm step into the felt-reality of a future operational capability, an Innovation Group will create a future-state scenario that addresses each and every consideration, “Yes, but…”, and likely complaint. This Innovation Group will use a number of tools, including a force field model

Innovation leaders use a force field to accomplish two outcomes: 1) Elicitation the myriad barriers that the deployment of a particular innovation would encounter; 2) Activation of a collective will to take on the project.

In small workgroup settings, an Innovation Group leads the discovery and documentation of all major forces that facilitate and hinder change: adoption of a future operational capability.

MARKETING FUTUREPROOFS

At some point in the process of consideration, buyers rationalize the pros and cons of purchase, and leans conclusively towards or away from the purchase commitment.

Interviews, ethnographic studies, and surveys of buyers who already bought a product or service can reveal a general consensus of what new customers want and will buy.

However, mere incorporation of this general consensus (in marketing communications) rarely proves sufficient to move large number of potential customers to buy.

Marketers must address all major forces hindering a sale and undertake measures to reduce or eliminate the effects of the sales-hindering forces.

To that end, marketers must create a marketing futureproof: a reasonable recreation of the prevailing forces that facilitate AND hinder purchase decision-making processes, organized as Socratic discourse or civil debate. With all the issues and facts set forth in a logical and coherent order; customers vote with their pocketbooks.

Innovation leaders lead affected stakeholders in a structured planning process to create an operational futureproof, using small workgroups of stakeholders to identify forces facilitating and hindering a particular innovation and define the small-scale projects by which the affected stakeholders envision themselves completing.

Thus, Innovation Groups operating within customer enterprises can speed the process of buying and deploying complex systems, reducing initial purchase cycles by 35 to 70 percent.

If you need help organizing and supporting Innovation Groups operating within your customer enterprises, call us. We can help.

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