Wardley Mapping for Sales Teams — a little bit of context
In business, as elsewhere, everything evolves. New knowledge, technologies and practices emerge. Some will prove beneficial and early adopters will use them to gain a competitive advantage. Further adoption drives competition and products are developed to meet the needs of the market. Eventually, the product becomes ubiquitous and there is little or no feature differentiation in the market. The component has become a cost of doing business and commodity products or utility services emerge offering high levels of operational efficiency, standardisation and low failure rates. This process is described in detail by Simon Wardley in his book on mapping.
The purpose of this article is to give a bit of context in preparation for deeper dives into the application of mapping in sales. Future blog posts will look at Wardley mapping in more detail, and in particular, how they can be used to support sales strategy, developing pursuit and capture plans, as well as developing the sales organisation.
The evolutionary process described above is a result of the individual actions of market participants i.e. buyers, sellers, influencers and regulators. The market participants may or may not be aware of how their actions impact the evolution of components and thus change the landscape that they are operating within. With awareness of the landscape and forces of change (climatic patterns in mapping speak), winning strategies can be developed to beat competitors.
We’ll start with the basics and build up. In this article, we’re going to explore the evolution process of a technology that everyone in sales is familiar with — CRM.
Tablets: From clay to silicon
Starting with a component of CRM, contact management. The earliest form of contact management may well date back to 3,200 B.C. when writing first emerged in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest recording that could (nobody knows) fit the bill is a clay tablet containing a sentence that translates to something along the lines of “29,086 measures of barley were received over 37 months, signed Kushim”i. Clay was replaced with paper and things stayed this way for centuries with tweaks like journals and cards. Then information technology exploded onto the scene and everything changed.
Custom-built mainframe applications allowed the automation of some contact management tasks. These applications were only available to large businesses and the government due to the enormous costs involved. You needed a mainframe and an IT team that could design and implement and support a solution. Users of these systems needed to understand how they worked to make proper use, or rely on a go-between to assist. They accepted that things broke sometimes but that overall the new tech gave them a competitive advantage in the market.
In the 1980s, contact management products started to appear. ACT! lead the way in a rapidly growing market. It started to become normal for sales organisations to use a contact management product, and sales folk would be disappointed if they turned up to a new job and had to revert to an antiquated IT or paper-based system. The market was big and the competition was fierce, with competitors in an arms race of feature development to secure their customer base. Customers came to expect these products to work and it was disappointing when there was a failure, though not a total surprise.
During the ’90s, contact management effectively became a commodity. There was no differentiation between products, switching costs for contact management were minimal (flat-file exports could be done by anyone). It was incredibly easy for a computer to manage contacts, log calls, meetings and notes. Contact management became ubiquitous, and product support could be done by the sales team with the IT department only needing to provide the initial installation, network and backup facilities.
Back to mapping. Using a Wardley map we can show this story in Figure 1 below:
What we see here is a model of the evolution of contact management. The map is anchored to a user need, Customer Intelligence, for businesses or government users. The vertical axis represents the visibility of a component in the value chain, i.e. the closer to the user the more visible, while further away components become less visible. The horizontal axis is used to show the evolution from brand new, never been done before (Genesis) through Custom built and Product to Commodity/Utility.
I’ve highlighted a few points on the map;
- Point 1 — Contact management enters the digital world as custom-built mainframe applications.
- Point 2 — The black block represents inertia, something that is blocking or preventing contact management from evolving. In this case, the cost was a factor, and the advent of new technologies (personal computers) opened up a bigger market and therefore enabled the evolution of contact management products (point 3). Sales practices co-evolved with the technology and the shift from point 2 to point 3 coincided with a shift from database led marketing to outbound telemarketing.
- Point 4 — CRM becomes ubiquitous as ERP vendors began to include contact management as a freebie. Contact management was simply the cost of doing business.
- Point 5 — When a component becomes a commodity, it’s characteristics change. It becomes standardised and reliable which creates the conditions to innovate using the standardised component. Point 5 represents this, with new concepts and experiments being tested in the market, eventually leading to CRM.
The rise of CRM
Contact management was a given for businesses during the ’90s and became a component of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), starting the process of evolution again.
In figure 2 we see the evolution of CRM based on, among other things, a commodity contact management component.
- Point 1 — Early CRM systems were bespoke, integrating data from various applications. Failures were common in one or more of the component systems, but this was accepted in return for gaining a competitive advantage.
- Point 3 — Siebel Systems developed sales force automation products and released the first CRM product in the 1990s, competitors entered soon after and the market flourished. However, there was a common form of inertia (point 2) that is often seen in successful companies. It goes along the lines of, “we’re unique and so need a bespoke system”. This is nothing new and it can take many years for the landscape to shift. Bespoke CRM systems were still being developed for years after the first products entered the market. (I last came across a bespoke CRM system in development during 2014/15). By the late ’90s, pure-play CRM providers were facing competition from the established Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) players (Oracle, SAP, Peoplesoft etc.). This led to an arms war of feature differentiation, and soon CRM systems incorporated functionality for every customer touch-point as well as automation, detailed analytics and reporting.
- Point 4 — The 2000s saw CRM become a commodity. Salesforce offered a utility platform and open-source alternatives (e.g. Sugar CRM) emerged with very little to differentiate the core features of these offerings. There was inertia (point 5) from CIOs and the IT departments. Lack of control and security concerns were raised, while the Sales and Marketing teams just wanted the functionality without the hassle of IT. There is no reason to build custom CRM systems today, and there is no reason to buy a product and ‘own your own’ now that commodity/utility offerings are established. CRM is a utility and it is undifferentiated. The focus for the business is on the use of the system and getting better value. It is seen as a cost of doing business. There is an expectation that systems will be highly reliable and failure is no longer tolerated.
- Point 6 — The future of CRM is here i.e. CRM, as a component of other higher-value components.
New forms of customer engagement and customer intelligence
The broader Customer Relationship industry continues to evolve and we can map out where we are today. With customer data held in utility cloud services, we are seeing the use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to improve the customer experience and better understand buying decisions. Bots are dealing with simpler customer enquires, even recommending which wine you may like with your meal (ii).
Figure 3 is a simplified map of a call centre system. In this case, the customer was looking for ways to understand the sentiment of users and non-users of their service. User interaction for the service was primarily through a call centre but they had a large web-presence and were experimenting with social media tools. Also, the customer was part of a much larger organisation with many other customer contact points. They didn’t want to rely on surveys and wanted the ability to escalate if the sentiment was negative to resolve issues quickly.
- Point 3 — A utility CRM system provided workflow, correspondence, data storage, data integration (from and to many data sources relating to user interaction) and compute (technically these are sub-components of CRM but we no longer care as CRM is a utility and we use it in a standardised way).
- Point 5 — Cloud-based machine learning and artificial intelligence were used to train an algorithm to understand the sentiment from sample historical records.
- Point 1 & 4 — Voice recognition uses CRM data and AI to interpret user sentiment.
- Point 1 & 2 — Social CRM tools gathered data on non-user sentiment to understand perception in the wider market of potential users.
- Point 7 — These new technologies rely on the industrialisation of the underlying components, one of which CRM which in turn relied on the industrialisation of contact management. The custom-built Sentiment Analysis component uses tried and tested AI, and we know that in the future products will be available and at some point, a commodity version will be available (if not already available — this was a few years ago). We also know that as these components commoditise, they will be used to build new components in future.
Summary
The purpose of this post was to give some context to Wardley Maps. They are a model of a domain or problem area, and like all models, they are wrong but sometimes useful. Combining the visibility of components in a value chain with the movement of evolution gives insights that can be shared and discussed in a team.
I started using Wardley Maps for sales in 2013 and later for the overall strategy and have found them to be incredibly powerful and the benefits are many. I’ve used them to develop strategy, evaluate business opportunities, decide on whether to bid and guide the pursuit and capture of complex deals. In particular, they offer a way of determining a purpose and gameplay, which can be a rallying point for you and your team.
i Krulwich R, 19th August 2015, National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/whos-the-first-person-in-history-whose-name-we-know
