“The war of the worlds” novel in 1898 was science fiction, but today in business the battle is real and unabated…and rarely debated!

In business, the ‘worlds’ include suppliers, their sales people, their internal divisions, their customers, their customers’ customers and the staff of their customers. The reference to ‘war’ relates to the various ‘worlds’ being at odds with each other, to the point of becoming enemies and doing harm to each other. For example…

• The staff that make up the sales teams of supplying companies often feel alienated from management, and indeed many managers harbour the view that sales people are indifferent to key marketing objectives. It is almost as if the staff and management occupy different worlds, rather than working for the same organization. Aside from positive contact at occasional social events and annual conferences, for the greatest amount of time each year the two entities have little meaningful involvement…and so both parties fail to understand each other, to the point where they feel estranged and unrelated in terms of aspirations, progress, problems, etc. Management is the main culprit, without doubt, especially when it comes to effective and consistent communication, the setting of behavioural standards, the provision of quality training, feedback on company progress, the promulgation of success stories, asking for the opinions of staff, etc. Staff should perhaps insist on receiving such a service from management, however they don’t…because they fear being seen as trouble-makers, and besides what medium exists for them to talk to management? The best leaders literally involve all staff as part of the management team, arranging continuous and varying forms of contact, discussion, project work, assistance, etc. Most companies arrange enjoyable conferences to atone for the agony during the other 362 days!

• In many companies, sales and internal staff are each guilty of wishing that the ‘others’ would understand ‘us’ better, instead of promoting team work, which is what the best managers do. Most sales people feel penalised by ‘other staff’, and the ‘others’ feel sales people are too demanding.

• Many customers see the sales people of suppliers as being ‘worlds apart’ from what they really need, and often say to each other ‘I wish they (the suppliers) would get rid of their sales teams and pass on part of the savings to help build our margins.’ And although the customers regularly and regrettably see lots of supplier sales people, they very rarely see the better-paid and arguably more valuable managers of supplying companies! The guilty managers are perhaps too busy to influence customers, just as they are obviously too busy to lead their sales people to be more valuable at market level. A major customer in one market said to me recently ‘most of our suppliers have no idea about our kind of business, in the sense that they have never worked in our businesses and they never seem to study what we do, what we are aiming to achieve, what problems we face, etc., and so they are more of a hindrance than a help’ A retail customer said to me ‘most suppliers treat our business as a dumping ground for their product. Not only that but we carry 24,000 lines and we have 11 staff, and so if you divide the number of lines by the staff you don’t come up with expertise on how to sell each supplier’s products to our customers. They should be focusing on that but they don’t; they just use traditional advertising and merchandising, none of which has any real impact on improving our retail sales.’ The best suppliers, in markets where products are used or resold, put most effort into determining how customers can achieve success with their products, and they do this by studying the most successful customers.

Last week, I was asked by a leading company to facilitate a meeting with progressive customers that represent a key distributor channel they need to perform better in. The attendees were open, questioning, also critical in a constructive way…and the executives attending were equally candid and very professional. A host of ideas were discussed, and both parties learned more about each other. New actions will happen soon, so that the company and customers will enjoy ‘the best of both worlds.’