Information to research, part 2

(piano music) - [Instructor] Capturing information about stakeholders may be fairly straightforward for some CSMs, because there may be only one or two people involved. For other larger and more strategic initiatives, it may in fact be the hardest part of the research to complete, because of the confusing array of individuals, teams, departments, and sometimes even third-party organizations who are all involved with the initiative in some shape or form. Because of this large variation in numbers of stakeholders, it's difficult to give a one size fits all advice as to how much time to spend on researching and documenting information about stakeholders. Each CSM will need to make their own decision about how much information is necessary based upon their experience and the perceived needs of the particular initiative. The most obvious group of stakeholders to research are customer stakeholders. It is worth noting that the most important customer stakeholders for the account manager and others involved in the selling process may be the same as, or different to, or a subset of the most important customer stakeholders for the customer success manager. This will be determined by whether or not the same person or people within the customer's organization that determine the need in the first place and worked with the CSM's company sales team to negotiate and agree the deal are the same person or people who are still involved now at this later stage in the lifecycle in the planning and implementation of onboarding and adoption of the products and services and in measuring and evaluating outcomes. If they are the same people, then this may well make it a little simpler for the CSM. As of course, they should be able to get a thorough briefing on the stakeholders from their colleagues and sales. If they're not the same person or people, or not all the same, then the CSM will have to do what they can to find out about any additional stakeholders that the sales team have not met. Of course, just because they haven't met these new stakeholders, does not mean that members of the sales team don't know anything about them since it may well be the case that these stakeholders and their role in the initiative might have been discussed with those other stakeholders that the sales team have met. In any case, as well as learning who they are, what their title, and general role is, and who they report to, plus of course, what specifically they're responsible for within this initiative, it is also good for the CSM to find out how much involvement each stakeholder has or already had in the initiative to date, and their attitude towards the initiative. EG, how supportive or unsupportive they are and any useful information relating to stakeholder management. For example, their communication preferences and how easy they are to work with. Hopefully you will recall our discussion on business capabilities in module two, business fundamentals. If so, you will remember that business capabilities refer to the ability of a business to perform a task in order to obtain a result. And that they are generally referenced at three levels: higher level, mid-level, and low-level. With the low-level capabilities containing whatever combination of people, process, and tools is utilized within the performance of the task. When performing research for a new engagement, it is very useful for the CSM to start thinking about documenting which of the customer's business capabilities at a high, mid, or low-level will be impacted by changes caused either directly or indirectly by the initiative. By directly impacted, what I mean is that one or more of the products or services within the solution you are providing will actually be used within the capability. Either creating a new capability or by replacing some or all of the tools within an existing capability. Knowing which capabilities are directly impacted goes a long way towards understanding who within the customer's organization will require training, support, and communications around these products and services. By indirectly impacted, I'm referring to capabilities that lie adjacent or at least near to one or more impacted capabilities and this proximity causes an impact to these capabilities as well. If you recall back to module two, as well as discussing capabilities, we also discussed Porter's value chain as a great tool that can be used to understand how different aspects of the customer's business combine to generate customer value. This is what we're discussing here when we are researching indirectly impacted capabilities. You may recall, that an example we used during module two was of the provision of new sales software for the sales team that would enable them to generate customized orders whilst they were onsite, in the customer's own offices making the sales team more productive. In doing this, we noted that this may have knock on or indirect impacts to the production department and the distribution department since these departments may also have to increase their productivity to keep up with increased sales generated by the sales department. In this example then, from the perspective of impacted capabilities, the high-level sales capability will be directly impacted and specifically, the low-level customized order taking capability will be directly impacted. And we've also noted, that the high-level production and distribution capabilities will be indirectly impacted and perhaps more research might need to be done to define which low-level capabilities within these high-level capabilities will be indirectly impacted and in what ways they will be indirectly impacted. (piano music)