Beyond The Plan: Why Listening to Your Sales Team Fuels Business Success

Hello and welcome to the show. Today we're going to handle the final part of the conversation on business strategy, whether you should have a DIY approach, You know, just focus on tactics from the day-to-day or whether you need to take a structured approach where you sit down and you'll try and plan everything out from the gecko. Now is this business strategy necessary? Because there's some people who just wake up, this is a good idea and then you get about just trying to make it work.

And in fact, I have tried to do business with some people like that in the past, some folks that thought I'll be nice to come up with business courses. And you know, I just wanted us to think through things little bit. What might sell, what might not sell, What are the cues we're receiving from the market? What do you think might be profitable and not hard, best we go about it. But they just wanted to hit the ground running.

So yes, there are those folks who say, you know what, I've woken up, it's a good idea. Let me get going. And there's some people who are like, guy, calm down, lady, calm down. Let's, let's, let's think about this. Let's come about the best way to go about this. Now, is strategy absolutely necessary? Now, in a certain sense I would say yes, because there are people who've just gotten up and tried to make something work and then from there you end up building something brilliant as time goes along.

But I'll say for most people, yes, strategy is necessary because the average person is going to waste time rambling and going from this thing to that thing to another, even when something might have been working, you know, or or not, you know, if you don't have any well thought out strategy or execution framework. So I'd say for most people, yes, some sort of strategy is necessary. Do you have to sit in the boardroom and then call investors and business partners and things like that?

You know, maybe not. I guess it's OK to just wake up in the middle of the night and then talk to your wife, your spouse and say, oh, you know what I'm thinking about this. I'm thinking about that. Or you call up your brother or your sister or talk to your uncle and auntie. So sometimes, maybe that's the level of the beginning of level of strategy that you need. But we all need to engage in these sorts of exercises from time to time.

Now the next question can all strategy be planned? And the answer to that is no. The reason why is because we're human and nobody has absolute foresight. You have no idea about how things are going to turn about. Concerning your wonderful business idea, there are some people that have come up with business ideas that involved lots of human interaction. But there was no way that people could have foresaw what was COVID a couple of years ago and that trashed lots of business ideas.

And in fact there are people who had brilliant ideas for restaurant chains and things like that that just happened to be opening at the wrong time. So there is very little, there's no, nobody has absolute foresight. So not all strategy can be planned. Some strategy is reactionary or emergent strategy. Emergent strategy is what happens when you have a business plan, you have an idea, you try and go into the market, but then you get some feedback from stakeholders or customers, you hit some hiccups, you make some mistakes or whatever.

But the bottom line is this. As you're interacting with people and other forces on the ground, on the day-to-day implementation, you get some ideas that kind of hint on whether you should try things one way or try things another way. Now can sales and business development inform strategy? A crucial question that we have to tackle. Because after all, on this podcast, our primary preoccupation is with sales and business development, because that's my area of speciality.

And the answer is yes. Now, the reason why sales can help inform your business strategy is because sales people are the ones who own the customer relationship. They're the ones who are interacting with the customers every day. They're the ones who know first hand what's going on with market trends and things like that. So if you sell human hair and your corporation is in Lagos, there's a limit to how much you can know unless you're talking to the people who are actually on the streets, people who are trying to hawk the hair in university campuses or stores and things like that.

They're the ones we're going to know what the actual trends are. They will get those feelers first before you do in headquarters. So sales people often have get a sense of what the current actual market trends are. And from sales activities, it's able to expose the assumptions that people have more coming up with strategy documents. And then from that whole interaction between sales people and the market, whether it's they're interacting with actual customers or with distributors or whatever, you can now discover more workable or more feasible solutions to whatever business problems that you have.

So my recommendation for the future, for those of you who are building big businesses, you're no longer a one man show, a one woman show. My opinion talk to your sales folks. You need to talk to the boys and the girls. You need to figure out what's moving, what's not moving. This one is moving. Why is it moving? This one is not moving. Why is it not moving? We need to gather input from them, figure out what's working,

what's not. It'll get you a sense of what to improve and what not to improve now. So we might think that all of this is unnecessary, unnecessarily theoretical, this whole thing of whether to have a strategic approach or whether to do it, you know, tactical, you know, day by day. But actually, it's not. Now let me give you a fictional example. Now, this example is not entirely fictional because there is a business that is similar to this in real life.

So let's say we have a fictional business and we're going to call it Amala Palace. For those of you who are not Nigerian, Amala is a local, should I say cuisine open to cuisine that's too fancy. It's it's a kind of meal. It's made out of yam. What would I say? It's made from the the skin of yam, or it can be made from these things, Not corn. What do you call it? Is it Millet? Yeah, Millet. The Millet looks like corn. Different kind of other varieties of mils.

Well, anyway, that's where you make amala from, basically. So you take it, you make it into a nice thick paste, and then you eat it with soup. Pretty much. So that's it. I'll say it's similar to what's it called. OK, let me see. Americans, is it tapioca? OK, I'll say similar to tapioca, I think that's my guess is the closest thing I can come up with. So let's say someone wants to set up this business in Abuja called Amala Palace.

And the idea is to compete with several kinds of establishment that are already on ground. Because in Abuja here we have a place called Ujjua, Lehba, Ujua, Lehba. Not in Lagos, but in Guerinpa, in Abuja, where they sell amala and you know, swallow, so amala, pounded yam, stuff like that. I mean, that's the joint you want pounded yam. You want hot amala with good soup and fish and everything. That's where you go. Then there's also iya Oyo, Iya Oyo is in, It's in Abuja.

It's, let me say, utako. I can't remember what that part of town is called, but it's close to Utako. So it's in Utaku and it's the same sort of thing, but online culture like, but you can also get rice and beans there in the yo-yo. Then there's also Javnik. Javnik is much more upscale. No one is in Garuke. OK, maybe not upscale, but I mean, you know what I mean? There's air conditioning, there's TV, so you don't have flies and maybe somebody's cat walking through the eating area.

So. So let's say you come with Amala Palace and you want to compete with these sorts of places. And the idea is that you're trying to look for affluent customers because people who go to a jury leg bar, it's a nice eating experience, but people are there for the food and then they're not there to form, you know, And the same thing with ER or your people are there for the food. So whether people who drive Mercedes Benzes or people who buy simple to it as people come there for the food, they're not really, they're not.

They're not about forming. There's no social signaling, no social jostling or things like that. And it's the same thing with Germany. People go there for the food, nothing else. But maybe you think we can make a market for this thing where cute guys and cute girls come and they eat amala in a nice place. Let's get affluent customers, things like that. And then for Amala Palace, they decide to invest in ingredients and to invest in ambiance and to invest in marketing and then all of that.

And let's say they do start the business and then they receive some positive reviews. But then it turns out that they actually is, you know, they have a small clientele base. Maybe not many people want to pay for exclusive fine dining Amala experience. Maybe it turns out that it's sort of like a niche market. Maybe what happens is that people who really want to eat Amala just go to Ojai Lekbar, they go to Yahoo, or they go to Germanic.

So, but The thing is, all might not be lost because if they have interactions with the customer facing staff, that's the people who own Amala Palace. They might discover that they're doing not too bad, but that is because there's a surge for delivery orders. So let's say you set this place up in Geruke and people who are coming in for fine amala dining experience are not many, but maybe the people who work in Zenith Bank, not far from there.

Let's say you pick a a place next to Germanic, Germanic and Gariki. So there's, I think there's Zenith Bank close, I think there's Access Bank, There's an MTN office, OK, not Access Bank and you get the point. So maybe you have office staff and they're placing orders. So dining experience. This thing is not working. But delivery orders might seem to be working. So this might now inform the new corporate strategy. They might have to reorder the website, change the menu, try and highlight all the ordering promotions, try and target it towards busy professionals and people who have families instead of trying to market to cute guys and cute girls who want to form and go and sit down and eat fancy amala with French sounding names.

And maybe they might now hire more couriers, you know, more bike people to deliver, Then that might lead to an increase in overall revenue. So this is a fictional example about how paying attention to the frontline staff, people who have customer interactions and people who have responsibility for sales can inform the business strategy that you have Now. Like I said, this is purely fictional, but it's kind of similar to a company that I know in real life.

The Lady Northern lady was open up the business and the whole point of the restaurant is, well, is it really a restaurant? I'm not really sure how to describe the place. Well, the whole point of the place is this. People are supposed to come there. It's supposed to be an exclusive environment you call in to to have a dining experience, you know, you and your guests, you know, things like that. So it's kind of open to the public, but it's not really open to the public because like if you know, you know and then you,

you call in. So that's the idea. Now they have a busy kitchen. The kitchen is always busy. People are cooking late into the night, but it is not because people are coming in for this exclusive treatment. Like, hey, you know what, Hajia, how you did, Please reserve a space. I'm coming in with 20 people. It's busy because people are placing lots of orders. They're calling to say cook for 20, send it here, cook for this place I need there.

So for that business owner or any business owner like her who is in this kind of situation, you don't have a choice to make. What are you going to do? I'm going to keep this place open to try and see how you can run this, this exclusive dining experience. Why are you just going to give up and say, look, the kitchen is already busy because we have lots of orders, so let's just double down and let's see how many orders we can get out every day.

So these are the sorts of questions that people practical. You can see it's not theoretical, even though my amala whatever is fictional. You can see that these are practical questions that business owners face every day. So yes, wake up in the morning, talk to your your partner, talk to your husband, to your wife, talk to your family members, talk to your banker, talk to your coach and try and figure out what the business strategy is.

But then also pay attention to what's happening on the ground. Sometimes what's happening on the ground might be a sign that you know what have all things to go this way. But actual demand is going this other way. So that's all for today folks. Remember to connect with me on LinkedIn. My name is Tavishima Ayede. I'm the host of the podcast. You can confirm the spelling of my name from the link where you're currently listening to this episode.

Also, connect with me on WhatsApp. The phone number is 08064662140 and the country code is +234. Thanks for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys at the next episode.