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On Tactics & Strategy

For years I've heard numerous agency principals dismiss their competition with the line, 'They don't do strategy.' I long ago developed a reflex to this statement in the form of the question, 'What is strategy?' While there's been little consistency in the answers I've received there has been almost universal consistency in the long pause that precedes the answer. The pause tells me that we haven't spent much time contemplating this oft-used word.

The best description that I've been able to cobble together is this: Strategy is an idea that describes a journey to a position of advantage. What I like best about this definition is it explains that strategy can be conveyed as a simple idea. 'Take that hill,' 'Demoralize the competition,' 'Own 'service''. Some see strategy as the position itself (I wouldn't argue with this), and others see it as the steps required to get to the position (tactics, I would argue.) But at it's best, strategy can be summed up briefly in an over-arching idea that describes the position of advantage and begins to implies the tactics, or steps required to achieve it.

You can often determine a person's strategy, or lack thereof, from their tactics - sometimes immediately, but almost always after observing enough of them. If you observe enough agency business development people at work, you'll usually see that no strategy is described through their tactics. There are two reasons for this.

There is No Strategy

High autonomy creative people are strategically challenged because they crave the new and the different. I've written about this a few times. Focus, to them, comes at the huge opportunity cost of ignoring everything but that which they are focused on. For someone who is wired to explore things that are new and different, ignoring such a large world of possibilities is challenging. It's hard for creative people to choose a strategy, and this more than anything else explains the poorly positioned creative firm.

The Strategy Is Not Being Lived Through the Tactics

High-drive salespeople can have a hard time executing to a strategy when results are not immediately forthcoming. They may do better at agreeing to a strategy than their creative counterparts, but high-drive people have a need for results now. In agency business development where the goal is a small number of large new clients (usually not more than a quarter) the sales cycles are long and results are far from immediate. The successful business development person must keep his strategy in mind (usually, to position the firm as the expert in an area) while pursuing his lead generation and qualification tactics. And he must have patience sufficient to keep employing tactics that are not likely to produce immediate results in a space characterized by long sales cycles.

High-drive salespeople get off to a rocket-fast start on the tactics, but they tend to change tactics quickly when their need to win is not realized as fast as they require. Left to their own devices they will quickly employ new tactics, often before they are soundly thought through. It only takes one or two tactical mis-steps to get you moving away from your strategy. High-drive people can very quickly find themselves employing tactic after tactic in order to hear 'yes' while sacrificing the strategy of properly positioning the firm in the mind of the prospective client.

Within agency business development, however, this type of person is rare. The more common scenario is someone with a low sales drive who can execute against a strategy with patience, but has far too much patience and is too willing to live with something less than great outcomes. We're all so different. Some of us need bridles and reins, others need carrots and sticks.

The most strategically challenged are those who have very high scores in both autonomy and sales drive. These people tend to be smart, they generate a flurry of ideas and they're 'get it done' folks who implement tactics quickly. But the strategy, if it exists, is often a compromise (more language than real focus) and the tactics tell the truth about whether the strategy is really being lived. Being smart, quick people they easily rationalize their frequent change in strategy or tactics, seeing themselves as capitalizing on opportunity rather than deviating from the plan. While from the consultant's perspective these are high maintenance clients, it's not all bad. The flip side is that just because someone can think strategically and stay focused, it doesn't mean they can employ the tactics with the pace required for success.

Not all of us can think strategically, and not all of us can execute against a strategy with that delicate balance of patience and pace.