Corporate management specialist Mario Pretorius uses a thought-provoking agricultural metaphor to press home the importance of ‘grading’ both your customers and your offering in order to achieve the right mix for success. “Take time to understand your flora and your diet,” he counsels in this tip. GK
Plant seeds; trees; and vegetables.
In farming terms, trees yield more than annuals. Yet they take longer to get to production – a deficit in a fast-changing, result-hungry world.
Once vines are established, at considerable cost, the grapes grow season after season and the tending is much less than the initial effort. Some olive trees are still in yield after a thousand years. Trees are eventually less effort than vegetables.
This is how customers and offering must be graded. Your hunters are constantly sowing seeds. Their choice of mix determines the ultimate success.
‘Vegetable’ client are perhaps small orders, easily won. It takes a lot of veg to feed the organisation. Each customer cycle needs the same process and this can be burdensome.
Higher value customers may take much longer to wean off their current supplier and to establish firmly as a ‘tree’. The bigger the customer, the longer the sales cycle and the more people, resources and effort is needed. In the wooing phase, no monies flow, no margins are made and no commissions are paid.
There is a golden mean between veg and trees right now. It will change in future – and you want to end up with many more trees.
Getting this wrong has obvious consequences; the onset of frost may kill off the small plants, while not enough trees will curtail the growth. Too much focus on obtaining trees may stress the cash flow and demoralise your front-liners.
The secret is to sow widely and choose carefully. Some clients are not worth having.
At TeleMasters, all Lawyers and Call centres are suspect; anyone in a hurry, or pretending importance, falls off the prospect list; enthusiastic clients raise serious suspicion; and conservative industries are trees that grow far too slow for our sales cycles. Franchises are low yield; vegetables, and owner-run businesses are a top priority.
Take time to understand your flora and your diet!
This tip is an extract from the manuscript of “The Unconventional CEO: Common sense outside of conventional Management thinking” (by Mario Pretorius).
