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Insight: The Convergence of Strategies

Insight has become the buzzword for engaging today’s buyers. We are supposed to teach our customers—helping them identify new opportunities, areas to improve, problems they may not realize they have.

But we misunderstand a lot about Insight. For us to be successful, Insight requires a convergence of strategies—those of our customers and those for our own organization. Absent this, Insight has little meaning or value.

Our corporate strategies shape the Insights we provide. They identify where we are best, where we create the greatest value, where we are most differentiated, and where we can profitably deliver our products and services. Consequently, Insight becomes less a sales initiative, or even a marketing/sales initiative, but it becomes core to the way we execute our organization’s strategies. I’ve written about this in, “Sending Your Sales People Out Naked, The Problem With ‘Challenger Selling.'”

Too often, however, I see Insight Selling initiatives separated from the priorities and strategies of the organization. It’s a huge problem, we have no business—and should have no interest in anything that doesn’t support the core priorities of our organization.

But there’s another important dimension to Insight. It has to be aligned with the strategies and priorities of our customers. Regardless of how compelling our Insights are, unless they tie directly to the strategies, priorities, and investment strategies of our customers, they are a diversion of focus and resource, distracting our customer from the priorities that enable them to be most profitable.

So we have an interesting set of test around Insight:

If our Insights aren’t aligned with our corporate strategies, priorities; we will not be profitable and are unlikely to be competitive/differentiated.
If our Insights aren’t aligned with our customers’ strategies and priorities, we are irrelevant or adversely impact their sustained profitability.

Are you testing your Insights against those criteria?

This article was originally published by Partners in Excellence

Published: June 18, 2014
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Dave Brock

Dave Brock is the founder of Partners in EXCELLENCE, a consulting and services company helping to improve the effectiveness of business professionals with strategy development, organizational planning, and implementation. Dave has spent his career working for and with high performance organizations, ranging from the Fortune 25 to startups, including companies such as IBM, HP, Nokia, AT&T, Microsoft, General Electric, and many, many more. The work Dave does with business strategies is closely tied to personal effectiveness of the people in the organization. As a result, Dave is deeply involved in the development of a number of training and coaching programs.