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It was in 1977 when I developed the first draft of what is today our
Power Base® Selling program. It consisted basically of qualifying accounts
using quantitative criteria, establishing executive level relationships,
formulating competitive strategy, dealing with objections, trapping, closing
and loss recovery, along with one other very new and controversial topic: politics.
During the 1970s, sales training mostly focused on interpersonal skills
and sales basics, like how to make a sales call. The concept of sales process
that began with should we compete and can we win, and ended with closing and
preparing for loss recovery was unheard of by companies. Politics, on the
other hand, was more than unheard of, it was flat out alien!
People not only misunderstood organizational politics, but viewed it as something
negative. Executives would say to me, “We avoid politics in selling and within
our company.” Ironically, it was these people who were most often victimized
by politics. I knew that to succeed in creating positive awareness and
receptivity, we would need a way of depicting politics that would enable
people to understand and manage it from a sales point of view.
In the mid-1970s, I had been taking copious notes on every competitive sales
cycle that I was involved in, as I was committed to find the answer to a
haunting question, “Why did we lose this deal,” or “Why did we win this deal?”
It was then that I realized that competitive selling required a process and
that if you skipped steps in that process you had to go back and make them up,
often with great difficulty. At the same time, I began to see the difference
between influence and authority, as I had been tracking customer individuals
who were influencing decisions through other people, well outside the purview
of their authority. It was fascinating!
To make some sense of this new discovery in sales process and having been
trained in engineering, I thought of it in terms of Newtonian Mechanics. Influence
was depicted through a pulley system that provides mechanical leverage. In this way,
a person without great strength or “authority” could move a heavy ball uphill. When
that ball was sent rolling down the hill to collide with a competitive ball, it
did so with considerable momentum. Newton developed the concept of conservation
of momentum, meaning that in a closed environment (like an account), if my sales
momentum increased, it had to be at the expense of the competition. Thus, the
connection between understanding and leveraging customer politics and gaining
competitive advantage was established for me.
Still, the question remained – how do I codify organizational politics and establish
a language to make it manageable for salespeople? I began with the term Power Base:
the influential body within an organization. It consists of a tightly networked group
of individuals that work within a department, business unit, division or corporate ranks.
In addition, I found that Power Bases can exist situationally where an important project,
acquisition or decision would give birth to a temporary Power Base that crossed organizational
lines and was far more fluid than an organizational Power Base. It was all becoming clear,
but my earlier account observations, where I had been taking copious notes about who was
communicating with whom, who was influencing whom, suggested that a Power Base had a
nucleus around which other people orbited. I knew that the nucleus was difficult to
see, as its power was so great that it could never be seen usurping another’s authority.
Observation after observation told me that this nucleus was a master of the Indirect
strategy, often working through and behind others, well behind the scenes. My analysis
began to speak volumes to me about the principled nature of this center of influence and
its mission driven orientation that led me to the concept of Personal Agendas, in terms
of an individual’s organizational or professional aspirations within a company and how
to advance these aspirations from a sales perspective. I thought over and over again,
how do I refer to this very special person, as referencing a nucleus or center of influence
just didn’t do it for me.
It was late one evening in 1979, prior to starting the company in July of that year, when
it finally came to me. My flight out of Logan Airport in Boston had been cancelled due
to weather and I was sitting on the bed of my hotel room at the Hilton eating a club
sandwich and working on the development of what would become Power Base Selling. On
the TV was a detective movie, which provided background noise, as I puzzled over the
issue of what to call this nucleus of power. About half way through the movie I began
to notice that a certain character was personifying many of the personal traits that
I had observed relative to the center of influence of a Power Base. He was a detective
by the name of Le Renard, which is French for “the fox.” At that moment, I knew that
our center of influence, the nucleus of the Power Base, was the Fox.
Not necessarily at the top of an organization, rarely surprised by events and able to
work in exception to policy is our Fox. A fox in the wilderness will, indirect by
nature, rid itself of fleas not directly by scratching and biting, but by biting
onto a stick and going for a swim. As the fleas run to escape the water, they move
up the fox's back and onto his head, down his nose and over to the stick. When the
fox observes the fleas on the stick, he simply releases it.
Finding Foxes within accounts makes selling fun, while significantly driving up
win rates. It is often a pleasure to work with such people, as they are rarely
egocentric, very good listeners, possess high standards of personal integrity
and are very mission driven.
In 1990, I published my first book, Power Base Selling,
and introduced the world to the Fox of organizational politics – a concept that
perseveres today.
That is how the Fox came to be. I hope that you have enjoyed this personal
account of what 30 years later has become mainstream in the world of selling
and politics.
With all my best,
Jim Holden
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