I was recently asked how I learned about the difference between stakeholder communication and stakeholder engagement. I remember the moment as if it were yesterday even though it is almost 17 years ago. I was a VP and Business Partner for a boutique consulting firm. Every partner was responsible for significant revenue generation.
It was 5:00 PM on a sunny afternoon. I was driving home from work and talking with a client by phone. “It’s all set,” he said, “she gave me the ‘go ahead’ today and first thing in the morning we can write up the SOW. Let’s talk at 8:00 tomorrow morning.”
“She” was his boss, Sherry, and “he” was Matt, a client who was about to award me a $1.2 MM contract. At the time I was responsible for both business development in my accounts as well as leading design and development of training curricula for large corporate clients in the pharmaceutical industry. My sales commission on the deal alone would be 25%, with additional commission paid when we completed the work, and more still when I facilitated the training programs. I spent most of my drive home on Rt. 95 through Philadelphia thinking about what I would do with that money. If you know Rt. 95 at rush hour, you know I had lots of time to think about spending my commission.
I was excited as I got ready for work the next morning. I got back on the road and at 8:00 dialed Matt’s now memorized number. He answered his phone and said five words that I can still hear today. “Colleen, we have a problem.”
The project I had worked months to win was to design and develop a comprehensive business acumen training curriculum for Managers and Sales Representatives for one of the largest pharmaceutical companies. I had worked hard to build the relationship with Matt, meeting with him many times to establish my personal credibility in this skill set, our team’s capability to do exceptional design work, and the expertise of our principals to facilitate the management-level audience.
Matt led Management and Leadership Development for the training department. His boss, Sherry was a tough lady. She was fiercely loyal to her people and distrustful of most vendors. She didn’t like the consulting company with which I had recently merged my training company. There was a long history between them that I had overcome in order to win this contract. She had previously been strong-armed to engage them by senior leaders outside of her department. She didn’t like being told who to hire.
I knew that to be successful in this account I had to overcome that barrier. In fact, my number one account strategy that year had been, “Neutralize Sherry.” I figured that I would never get her to actively support us, but if I could stop her from actively working against us, I’d be able to gain some traction in the account. It took months to get to where I was at that moment—or where I thought I was. I laughed nervously, “What do you mean, ‘We have a problem?’”
Matt told me, “It’s Bill. He got Sherry’s ear late last night and scared her off from working with your company. He told her she was taking a huge risk working with an ‘unknown’ vendor who hadn’t proven themselves even on small projects. He said it would be an huge risk to hire you for such a major contract.”
Bill was a mid-level manager responsible for implementation of technology-based training programs. I had only met him once and he wasn’t involved in the development of the business acumen curricula.
The account manager in me kicked in and I began to analyze where I had gone wrong. I had identified and met with all the key decision makers, positioned our value effectively, priced responsibly, and built enough of a relationship with Sherry where she wouldn’t veto us as their partner.
What I hadn’t done well, however, was identify all of the key stakeholders. Stakeholders aren’t necessarily decision makers but they do have a vested interest in the outcome of a project and I had completely missed this nuance.
I’ve learned the importance of effectively identifying and managing stakeholders, as well as decision makers, the hard way. They have an interest and possibly even an investment in the outcome of work completed by your organization. Their engagement or lack of engagement can have a marked impact on your success. Yet there is frequently a lack of discipline applied to communicating with and engaging stakeholders. I’ve learned that the best way to identify stakeholders for a strategic project is to follow the project itself by answering three questions:
- Who will provide input to this project such as information, people, funding, or materials?
(Bill didn’t fit here as he wasn’t providing any form of input.) - Who will be on the project team or sponsor or champion the project?
(Bill didn’t fit here either because he wasn’t involved in the project work.) - Who will receive deliverables from the project or be affected by the output? (This I where Bill fit. Since his team would eventually need to manage the implementation of any technology-based solutions, they would be impacted by the project.)
As it turned out, Bill wasn’t a major player in the decision-making process but he was Sherry’s direct report. Sherry only needed one valid reason to tell the leaders recommending us why she selected another vendor. Bill’s comment was enough to cause her to question the decision to approve us as the vendor partner for this large contract.
Acknowledging this mistake on my part was humbling; losing the contract was heartbreaking and embarrassing. It was particularly difficult to call our managing partner with the news that we wouldn’t be booking that revenue. Ultimately, I was able to work towards a solution that was acceptable to Sherry, Matt, and Bill. We would start small and prove ourselves. They would engage other vendors as needed to stay on track with their timeline. If we lived up to our promised value proposition, we could look forward to additional project work on the curriculum. We did just that and managed to successfully win $800,000 worth of project work piece by piece. We built most of the curriculum and overcame the perceived risk Bill had created for Sherry.
Even though I ended up with a nice commission it was a hard lesson to learn. Back then I really didn’t think in terms of stakeholders, I thought about decision makers. Understanding how to identify all of the stakeholders and the role and influence they can have on strategy execution has had a major impact on my approach to my work. While at times it may lengthen a sales cycle, actively working with key stakeholders can remove significant barriers in execution of key initiatives.