How to 'Sell' Your BI Efforts to Stakeholders the Right Way
Hint: It's not as easy as you might suspect.
A common challenge cited by improvement professionals is being able to ‘sell’ your improvement efforts to others. These ‘others’ can include a variety of business-wide stakeholders, from the frontline all the way to company management. And if you ARE the management, it can also include the board of directors, whose blessing you might need to seek in order to invest into an improvement program.
So how do you ‘sell’ (or ‘market’) your program properly? There are many approaches. Some people would make a presentation. Others would develop a full-blown board paper. It all depends on your context.
However, there are important principles that apply regardless of the situation. These normally help you ‘market’ your program in the right way.
1. Give it a brand
This one comes from the world of finance and investments, where projects are customarily given nicknames, in order to preserve confidentiality. Project ‘Eagle’ or ‘Red’, or ‘Leopard.’ Another sphere where group efforts are commonly branded is the military. Operation ‘Enduring Freedom,’ or ‘Desert Storm,’ or ‘Iron Justice.’
The reason you want to give your collective improvement effort a name is because it helps create an identity around it. It’s also just easier to introduce the program name once, and then refer back to it afterwards, rather than keep telling people about ‘this improvement thing we’ve been doing.’
A brand name makes the effort seem more serious. Like it’s something that’s been put together with proper thought and care, rather than a loose set of ideas that someone’s dreamed up and tried to give a half-hearted effort to implement. With a brand, improvements come across as a proper, well-integrated program of works.
Of course, when branding, it’s good to come up with a name that is evocative of the associations you want the program to have. No good calling it something meaningless, like Project ‘Cucumber,’ or something with a totally wrong association, like Project ‘Doom.’
Make it stand for something. Like Project ‘Lion,’ if you’re trying to increase market share (‘King of the Jungle.’) Or Project ‘Advantage,’ if you’re after improving your unit cost position relative to competitors. Or ‘War on Waste’ for a process efficiency program. You can definitely come up with something good using this train of thought as a starting point.
(Project ‘Penny Pinchers’ is probably not a good name for any type of program, regardless of your situation…)
2. Articulate the value
We’ve seen many cases where improvement programs are described using all kinds of wonderful-sounding, but extremely high-level words, but which don’t convey any real substance.
Examples include:
‘Achieving lasting competitive advantage over our peers.’
‘Becoming known as an industry leader for innovation and efficiency.’
‘Developing bullet-proof value proposition for our customers and stakeholders.’
‘Establishing ourselves as the best place to work at for our current and future employees.’
These goals all sound great. But they don’t really tell you anything. You can ask any company in any industry, and chances are, all of them would say that these statements describe their aspirations, too. This (be definition) means that descriptions like these aren’t specific.
What can be specific is something like the following:
‘We will bring our line’s defect rates from 3% last year to 0.5% over the next 18 months through projects X,Y,Z.’
‘This will help reduce our raw materials cost by $10 million, because we would need to buy less of them for the same quantity of final products.’
‘In addition, we aim to renegotiate the price we pay for these raw materials by 6-8% through testing a wider base of potential suppliers. The range is based on recent (informal) market testing, adjusted down for conservatism by 35%.’
‘We also plan to improve our Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 3-4 points driven by the 15 activities our customer excellence team is planning to implement.’
Now THIS sounds like someone’s done a proper job thinking about, and then articulating, the value your BI program is aiming to capture. If you’re the intended audience, which version of the narrative would be believe has more chance of success in actually being delivered?
An important caveat here is that articulating the value of your program of works is not always easy. It requires a multidisciplinary set of skills. For example, if you come from hardcore engineering background, things like EBITDA or NPS might not be intuitive for you.
However, you do need to develop sufficient skills (and overall financial and business acumen) to be able to articulate value in this way. Otherwise, it would just be too hard to convince your stakeholders that what you’re doing is worth supporting. And that you understand clearly why these are the right activities to be investing your time and energy into.
3. Demonstrate involvement
One other thing that normally helps convince stakeholders to support your efforts is to show some ‘social proof.’ It’s a lot easier to get behind something that other people already think is worth supporting. Much easier than if it’s just one person’s (potentially crazy) idea.
This, of course, requires some preliminary legwork. The overall name of the game here is ‘Consensus Building.’ You want to speak with many of the people who will be helping with your program, individually, explaining what you’re trying to do, taking and incorporating their suggestions and feedback, checking whether they would be supportive. It’s not easy, but it is an important step to take.
Once you’ve done it, you then need to ‘market’ all of this effort in the right way. So when you present your program, you can do something like the following:
Show photos of people from across the business participating in your preliminary discussions and workshops.
Take print screens or photos of the actual charts and data analyses (or other materials) used in those discussions.
Use quotes of what people said, in terms of both the parts they thought were good, and also the risks and support they might have called out.
Summarise the numbers to make it even more tangible, for example saying that you’ve ‘conducted 30 hours of brainstorms, workshops and consultations, which included inputs from 15 different team members, across 8 different departments.’
If you presented this much social proof transparently, it becomes very difficult to say ‘no’ to supporting your program. There would need to be a really good reason for that. And chances are, you would have already thought (or suspected) of that reason while doing your consensus-building activities. So you would have prepared counter-arguments, or pulled the pin earlier in the process.
In any case, it’s always a good idea to show a broad base of support that already exists for what you’re proposing to do. Just makes your case much more convincing and harder to resist.
4. Don’t forget about the costs
The final bit that really helps to ‘sell’ your BI program is being explicit about the costs involved in implementing it. And when we say ‘cost,’ it doesn’t include only the dollars.
Examples of what types of costs you should include in your case:
The dollars (obviously.) How much money your company would need to spend to support your program. It also helps if you are able to split these costs into one-off items (e.g., capital investment into new pieces of kit) and recurring cash outflows (e.g., salaries of extra customer support reps you are proposing to hire.)
Time. Chances are, everyone whose help you’re going to need in driving your program are busy with their ongoing daily activities. So they would need to re-prioritise their tasks. And that is an important time investment that the company needs to be comfortable with making.
Management focus. In order for BI programs to run well, management needs to be fully behind the effort. And that means, they also need to be updated on the progress and areas where they might need to support or intervene. This, in turn, might require inserting additional (BI-related) agenda items into their existing regular meeting. That is also a cost.
Political capital. There will most likely be detractors hiding somewhere in your organisation. Someone will need to talk to them and try to convince them to ‘play ball.’ That requires expending (or investing) political capital. The people who might need to invest that capital need to know that this might be required. It’s best to make them aware of this at the outset (to the extent you know.)
Being upfront and transparent about the costs helps put your stakeholders at greater ease than they would have otherwise. It shows them that you’ve truly taken the time to think the program through. And that it’s not all going to be rainbows and butterflies. It will take real costs to make it happen.
The other thing this helps your stakeholders with is calculating the ROI (return on investment). By understanding the costs transparently, they can weigh them against the benefits (which you would have also articulated as per one of the previous steps.) It then becomes a much more simple decision in terms of whether the program deserves to be supported.
Takeaway
In a nutshell, marketing your BI program well takes some real effort. It’s not just a powerpoint presentation you can make the day before you’re due to talk to your stakeholders. You should budget appropriate time and energy to do the preparatory legwork well. If you do it, marketing will come much more easily when the time comes to presenting.
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