Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference Speaker Interview: Infor

 

Bob Ainsbury

Vice President of Healthcare Strategy

Infor

 

Q. What is your role within your organization?

I am the vice president of strategy for the healthcare business unit at Infor, a three billion dollar company that is organized around 13 industries with healthcare being one of the top ones. In addition to overseeing the organization’s strategy, my team helped prepare the pre-sales consulting group to deliver expert information on the industry and our solutions to healthcare executives.  The expectations placed on this person in the field is that they will be the difference maker in a sales cycle when it comes to articulating the vision and value we can bring to bear on the prospects challenges.  That meant I had to give them the information, tools and skills to execute on that role.

Q. What were the biggest sales challenges that your company was facing?

Complexity, confidence and agility.

1)     Complexity – The healthcare business unit has made numerous acquisitions, and now that we are part of Infor, we have a broad range of relevant and interesting products. But, it also adds complexity making it difficult for the field to become experts on everything.  The other challenge is sorting through the potential for overlap, and understanding the product adjacencies that are common with multiple acquisitions.  Not only does this introduce complexity in the product mix, it also introduces complexity in the sales pursuit.

2)     Confidence – Confidence is everything. Every day, part of my job is to make sure that the sales organization is prepared and confident. This is particularly true in the healthcare market which is always changing and is in the national spotlight almost every day.  Very few markets have the public and private debate, legislative attention and uncertainty you find in healthcare.  Sales people are expected to provide a trusted advisor role, so we are always trying to overcome the question marks swirling around and confidently deliver a message that brings some clarity to the confusion.

3)     Agility – We are a mature and successful organization. In all honesty this is the strongest sales organization I have encountered in my career. They get it and I am always learning from them. However, because of the changing landscape I just described, what worked five years ago is not as successful today. We needed to change our approach, which is why we embarked on a new messaging development initiative with Corporate Visions. It was a very clear way to move in a very different direction, which got the attention of our salespeople. This gave them an approach to change the experience in front of customers, differentiate from increasing competition, and it has been a success.

Q. What are you going to be presenting at the conference?

It’s all about adoption of the new message.  You can make great changes to your story, but you have to make sure the field is using it.  You can think, ‘hey, this is really cool, everyone’s going to love it.’ But, just like we train our salespeople that customers won’t always understand your message right away…and make a decision right away… we had to accept that we had the responsibility of helping the field grasp and appreciate the potential positive impact of the new story. They need to own it and make it work for them.  So, we treated the message launch and adoption like it was a ‘sales cycle.’  We had to sell the field on the power of the story and the new skills. I plan to share examples of how we did that, giving the audience a chance to steal some ideas and learn from our experience.

One example I’ll share is what I call a “playground tactic.” The idea is that if you stand up to the biggest kid who is trying to bully you, not the smallest one, and take out the big kid first, you will be OK because everyone else will follow.  In this metaphor, the big kids are the salespeople who are the opinion leaders with the most influence and typically the most skeptical – they exist in every sales organization. Our strategy was to go to the big kids who can tend to be the mavericks in the bunch and win them over. And this helped everyone who tends to follow his or her lead.

Another approach is to behave differently. Sales people are often jaded when it comes to new messaging. So we knew we had to innovate in the sales enablement to get everyone’s attention and, more importantly, buy in.  In the presentation, I’ll talk about using video to launch the new message. Instead of sending out a PowerPoint or Word file, to bring the idea to life we developed several amusing and fun internal videos to demonstrate how to get the sales people’s attention. For example, we did the elevator pitch. Because part of this was how to pitch our strategy in the elevator, we filmed it in an elevator so the sales guys could see it being used. The goal here was to get the sales team excited and to make them more confident. We wanted them to be confident enough to be different, because using a white board and a napkin is not in the comfort zone for most of them. We wanted them to be confident that they can do it, deliver it and make more money.

Q. What are you looking forward to most at the Marketing and Sales Messaging conference? 

I really enjoy the work of Corporate Visions. I am looking forward to being with like-minded people who understand the lizard brain and don’t want to drone on.  I am really enjoying being an alumni and hanging out with these folks. I think the stuff Corporate Visions does is interesting and I think the people that find it interesting, I will find interesting.

——————————————————————————-

To contact Bob directly you can email him at bob@ainsbury.com. If you’d like to meet Bob and some of the other brilliant minds that have broken the status quo, aligned marketing and sales, and spearheaded lasting change in their organizations, please join us for our Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference, taking place in Chicago, IL, Sept. 18-20, 2012.  Register now!

Filed under: Uncatergorized Tagged: Bob Ainsbury, Infor, Marketing and Sales Messaging Conference