Reframing Business Development With 20 Ways Of Being

John Watson is a sales and marketing coach and fractional chief marketing officer with over 25 years of experience. He helps people design, build and grow companies as their partner in business development. He’s the author of Being Profitable: A Business Development Roadmap. He works to reframe marketing, fundraising and organizational development as a sequence of 20 core intentions for leaders to focus on. John’s first company AIM helped charities and not-for-profits with donor development and direct response fundraising campaigns. He credits those early experiences for his focus on enrollment, relationship development and retention-focused practices.

I want to shift the sales, marketing and organizational development conversation, so it starts with core intentions and donor centric practices. I also want leaders and directors to get more involved in directing their business development investments as too many abdicate their leadership role to marketing and technical experts because they don’t understand all the new technologies.

More at https://accruemarketing.com/ 

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
Welcome to the Non-Profit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou, founder and president of Center Vision Leadership Foundation. We work with leaders building synergy with their teams around a really great vision. Now, that’s a great principle, but we need to know a lot of things to be able to do that effectively. My guest today has some really good specialized knowledge that’s going to help you in ways that you probably didn’t know you needed help in. And so, my guest today is John Watson, and his title of his interview is reframing business development with 20 ways of being. But John, introduce yourself, and then we’ll go into the topic. But tell people a little bit about who you are and your passion for this topic.

John Watson:
Well, my name is John Watson. I’m the president of Accru Performance Marketing. And I’m a consultant, marketing coach, fractional CMO. I work with a lot of small to midsize organizations, including multiple charities. I’ve done this for about 30 years. And so you can call me a data nerd. It’d be a kind of an easy way to sum it all up.

Hugh Ballou:
Data nerd. And so you didn’t, did you start out with marketing or did you do something prior to that?

John Watson:
I started out pretty much as a data jockey. I was an analyst, a data analyst. And when I first got into marketing in the sort of mid nineties, My primary job was analyzing, you know, marketing campaigns and really looking at, you know, planning them in the first place and doing the post campaign analysis. And that’s really what brought me into the industry was the realization that people were not using their data. They were not really analyzing their performance particularly well. And most of the campaigns that we analyzed were pretty dismal in terms of their performance. So it got me really interested in why that was the case and what we needed to do in order to make the campaigns more effective. And this was largely charities that I started with. It was just a very eye-opening to see just how foreign the data aspect of fundraising was.

Hugh Ballou:
So we have some misunderstandings or lack of knowledge or myths. One of the myths is, oh, we can’t spend money on marketing in nonprofit. And I say, no, we can’t afford not to spend money on marketing. So one of our messages is to help nonprofit leaders realize that it’s really a business. It’s really a business we’re running. It’s a tax-exempt for purpose. And actually, it’s a lot harder than running a for-profit business because you got all the regulations. So let’s talk about some terms. We kick around the terms of PR, marketing, and sales. So enlighten us on those terms, and why are they important?

John Watson:
Well, I think they’re not important. I think what I would like to do is for all of those terms to go away. I think they’re largely misleading and people, the definition of them is so broad and so non-universal, right? They’re almost useless terms. And so what I prefer to do is call it development, right? In a charitable context, I would say donor development and not just from an acquisition point of view, but from a relationship development point of view. So I tend to think acquisition and development as the term that I would use either for a business or a charity. And it’s really, what are you doing to grow your organization or grow your capacity to develop relationships? And I think when we talk about sales, marketing, PR, all the individual tactics, we quite often lose sight of the purpose, the reason we’re doing them. We get sort of focused on the activity rather than the outcome.

Hugh Ballou:
That’s easy to do. What do you measure and how do you measure it? And what does it matter? And so we can get really buried in the data, can’t we?

John Watson:
Yeah. I mean, it’s super easy to get lost in data. There’s so much of it. It’s dizzying, right? And it really, you have to sort of discard the vast majority of it and focus simply on the key metrics that actually make a difference, right? Which brings us right back to the outcomes that we’re seeking to affect. You know, and then in charitable terms, that’s usually inspiring people, you know, making them aware of you in the first place and rolling them in the possibility that the organization represents and then turning them into some sort of a promoter, right? Either as a providing funds or their time in terms of volunteering or, you know, whatever they can do to actually support the organization. You know, the interesting thing I’ve always appreciated about marketing from a charitable context is there’s no product, so you have to sell the idea, you have to build the relationship, because that’s all there is. Which makes it the purest form of marketing, really.

Hugh Ballou:
It is. In any kind of enterprise, you attract money because of value. And so the value we have is the impact on people’s lives. And I think part of what you do is helping leaders of any kind quantify those results so people who want to support it understand that. So there are multiple ways to support the mission, but money is kind of like the gas that drives the car, that propels the car.

John Watson:
Well, I always remember when I, when I first, when the thing that I see all the time with nonprofits is, you know, you have to spend money to make money. So they, they focus all on acquisition and then quite often the retention program is really anemic. And so we say we’re gonna spend money to acquire the donors, but then we don’t spend the money to keep them or develop them, or we do, but it’s sort of not, it’s a half-hearted effort. It’s just, it always seems to be out of balance, the acquisition side versus the development side. They’re developing the relationships and growing the donor. And that’s often where the biggest fallacy comes in, because that’s, it costs so much to acquire, and then you sort of drop the ball. And so a big part of the exercise is putting the money where it has the greatest effect.

Hugh Ballou:
Yes. And actually, it’s investing in the right place. And we don’t understand the investment side of this. We think it’s expense when it’s really an investment. So, I’ve heard that if businesses had as much customer turnover as non-profits have donor turnover, they would be out of business. So, that part of the retention is customer, it’s a donor relations. That’s so important. So, what’s the meat of this whole process? You want to acquire and retain donors. Is this about relationship or what?

John Watson:
It’s all about relationship, as it always is. I mean, it really comes down to the nature of the business or the organization, right? So you have very transactional organizations and you have relationship-based organizations. And when you are a relationship, like a central, you know, conceptually everything is built around the relationship. You have to focus on what does that even mean, right? What does that look like? What are the stages of relationship development and how do we cultivate that? How do we nurture that, right? and realize that it’s not just about giving us money, it’s about other ways of providing support, right? And that’s the other thing I find people do is they get so fixated on the donations, they forget that there’s all kinds of other things that people can do to support you, right? And we don’t necessarily create a palette of options of different ways of receiving support. And so, you know, in normal, in business terms, that would be the various calls to action or an offer hierarchy, right? And in, I don’t think it’s any different in the charitable context, right? What is the offer hierarchy? What are the various means that people can step up and support you? And if they’re not, if you’re not clear on that and not cultivating each of those different options, then, you know, you’re really missing out on most of the opportunity.

Hugh Ballou:
So, the stats about burnout with nonprofit leaders is huge. And my position is we create that ourselves because we haven’t learned delegation and we haven’t learned to put processes in place. So it would occur to me, your process is an essential one for long-term sustainability for any kind of organization. So for that leader that’s overburdened or overworked or thinks they are, what are your advice for how to empower this kind of strategy in their organization?

John Watson:
I think the biggest, it’s a complex question. The, you know, whenever you, delegation is, you know, call it leadership, call it delegation. I think the biggest problem with a lot of the development is people get too fixated on the tactics. They’re really not, they’re sort of, you can delegate tasks or you can enroll people in helping you achieve outcomes. And I think that’s, you know, we tend to favor the former because it’s easier. We can, you know, I want you to do this specific thing versus how might you assist me in achieving this outcome? Right. And I think being really clear as the leader in terms of what outcomes are really essential, invites your staff and invites your vendors and invites your donors to actually step up and contribute in a much more thoughtful ways. You’re inviting them to, to participate in the process rather than just receiving a task. right, or a specific simple request. And I think part of what cultivates the relationship is exactly that, is inviting collaboration, inviting participation, rather than just, you know, delegating a simple task or asking them to give you simple, you know, here’s some money. It’s how might you show up and contribute beyond these simple completions, right? And when you start doing that, you’re taking the burden off yourself. I mean, you have the burden of collaborating, but you’re, you know, by enrolling all of this support, you’re not responsible for it all yourself. You’re responsible for leading, guiding, inspiring, and enabling, as opposed to completing everything.

Hugh Ballou:
You didn’t get all those great soundbites, don’t worry. If you go to theethenonprofitexchange.org, it’s .org, there’ll be a transcript for this episode. And look for the episode that’s titled, Framing Business Development with 20 Ways of Being. So, you can find these great soundbites in the transcript. So, John, say more about your title with the 20 Ways of Being. Expand on it. Is that a title of your book?

John Watson:
The title of the book is Being Profitable. And the emphasis is, you got a copy?

Hugh Ballou:
Oh, sure.

John Watson:
Sorry. Thank you. This is the book. Okay. It’s the emphasis is on being right. And sort of this speaks to what we were just talking about is, is instead of, we tend to get so fixated on tasks, right? We’re going to do this direct, just direct mail, or we’re going to do call outs, or we’re going to do social media, or we’re going to do whatever content creation. rather than thinking about what’s the goal here? What are we, what’s the way of being that we’re trying to support and amplify through our channels, right? So they’re not just tasks that we’re completing. They’re part of our organizational culture. They’re part of how we show up and how we’re trying to inspire, you know, reach, engage and enroll people. Right? And rather than treating them as independent tasks, they’re just part and parcel of our culture, how we show up. And so the ways of being, I’ve put together a column. If you think about what ways of being are at the core, their core intentions, right? I have an intention for this outcome to occur. Who do we need to be in order to achieve that outcome? And so I’ve created this pathway roadmap of of different 20 core intentions that invite us to consider our way of being as an organization as the means to focus the leadership conversations on how we might achieve those outcomes through these ways of being. And they’re put into a logical sequence. divided up into three steps of design, what’s the process we’re trying to create, or what’s our purpose. Build is really all about infrastructure, system development, and grow are all the amplifications where we start to put our system into action. But they’re all sort of, one of the things that I try to do is to get through my book and through my practice is to get people to stop thinking tactic and thinking outcome. And if I want that outcome, who do we need to be as an organization to achieve that outcome? And then you can start looking at all the various tactics through that lens. It’s not just about the tactic by itself. The tactic is a means to achieve or for us to show up a certain way in order to realize that outcome. And so it shifts the whole conversation into a leadership conversation as opposed to a simple delegation conversation. And it really is all about inviting collaboration. It’s about being clear on the core goals and then inviting your team and your suppliers and your donors, everybody basically that says, how can you How do we go about achieving each of these 20 outcomes or core objectives? And you roll them out in a logical sequence, and it changes the conversation entirely. It really moves it away from tactical execution. Well, you’re still always going to do tactics, but instead of jumping to tactic, we’re starting with why. We’re enrolling in and making everybody clear what the purpose is, what the target outcomes are. And then, you know, it’s about not just executing the tactics, but how do we execute the tactic in order to reinforce and achieve those outcomes? And that’s an entirely different way of approaching most of what we do on a regular basis.

Hugh Ballou:
That’s amazing. I was looking for words. That’s amazing. So, that’s sort of a how-to guide in a… That book doesn’t look very thick. So it’s not a very long read. So that’s a step-by-step. If I’m hearing you right, that’s a step-by-step guide. It’s a how-to guide. It is. And everything you described is such an important aspect of leadership that we need to grasp.

John Watson:
The reason I put the book is thin on purpose. 20 steps is a lot of steps, right? That’s 20 different conversations, and people are busy, and so the purpose of the book was to try to get people not to get bogged down in it, but to really go, well, I get it, there’s 20 conversations, I don’t have to, what I usually encourage people to do is to read the whole thing to get the context, and then go back to the one conversation that makes the most sense now and dig into that. And then over the course of however many months or years, you just revisit the particular conversation that you need to lead. And so it’s purposefully meant to be simple. It’s accessible, quick read, so that you’re not gonna get bogged down in it, because it’s not about you becoming an expert, it’s about you being an effective leader, facilitating a target outcome.

Hugh Ballou:
That’s amazing. I didn’t know that this kind of resource existed. So give us an example of one of those conversations, would you?

John Watson:
The first one, my favorite one, is sort of a derivative of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. My favorite one has always been start with the end in mind, right? And so that end in mind is quite often missing from most of the conversations, right? Which sets us up to struggle. So the first way of being in the book is clarity, to be clear. So if we’re not clear on what our goals are, what our intentions are, what the outcomes that we’re in service of, then we’re sort of very likely to go off track. And the second one is commitment. And so I can’t commit to something that I’m unclear on. I can’t commit to something that I don’t understand, that I haven’t really analyzed and looked at the risk and costs and sort of made a decision that this is worthy of my time and energy and investment. So you can see how I can’t commit to something really without being clear on what it is I’m trying to achieve and whether or not that’s appropriate. So every single one of these core conversations rolls out in a logical way. One enables the next. And so what we often use the book as a diagnostic framework as well, because when you have a well-established system, you can start to look at which way, which of these are we failing at? What’s the point of failure? And you work your way back. It’s like, okay, well, what are the steps prior to that, that we missed or skipped or that are anemic that we need to address in order to address the fundamental problem? Why are the performances set is lagging?

Hugh Ballou:
You know, I’m thinking as you describe this, this would be a good cohort for a group study for nonprofit leaders to get a group together, read the book and have some dialogue on it, or maybe even do it with your board of directors.

John Watson:
The whole premise of the book is to try to change the conversation at the leadership level and because it affects everything. And so, It’s really meant to be something that you could do yourself, that you could enroll your executive team in and invite your board into. If you have a coach, you invite them into the conversation. Your agency, if you’re working with a fundraising organization, really it’s a matter of inviting the leadership team together to say, how might we achieve, be clear on what the goal is and how do we achieve these outcomes?

Hugh Ballou:
Yeah, yeah. I was going to be on selling a bunch of books for you, but of having a group look at it together, because this topic creates a lot of anxiety. And you have such a calm, matter of fact, way of presenting it. It’s like, I want to call you up and run it by you so you can calm my spirit. But you’ve thought it through, and you’ve sort of handed, you have handed, they answer to people. If people want a quick answer, we got to read and digest it and then try it out. So it sounds like, I want to go to your website too, because you have free eBooks and resources on your website as well. And so your website is accru, A-C-C-R-U marketing.com.

John Watson:
There’s it’s a crew as in like accruals accounting. So ACC R U E R U E. I’m sorry.

Hugh Ballou:
I left out the E sorry. Um, so I’m, I’m saying it verbally because some of our, um, people are on the podcast. It’s audio only. So, uh, tell us what we’ll find when we go to your website and where the resources that would help us.

John Watson:
The primary resources are the eBooks. There’s 20 free eBooks to download. The book is right next to it, Being Profitable. You can see there’s a free sample of the book for the first chapter. There’s 20 different resources in there. I try to reframe the marketing conversation. In the context of charities, it’s written for businesses. There’s a tremendous overlap with subtle variations in language. The insight section on the other side of the menu there is a blog. There’s 45 some odd long articles there on different facets of leadership and business development. And so the website is really set up for organizations that don’t have a lot of internal capacity in the development space or the sales and marketing development. It really is meant to be a primer. There’s all kinds of, like the website is extremely deep and it’s largely set up to be a resource to help people learn.

Hugh Ballou:
That is amazing. So, in all of the 435 episodes we’ve had, I haven’t seen this depth and it’s laid out so logically, John. This is so helpful. So, hold up your book again. I want to make sure that we highlight the book because that is like a major course people can take sitting in your chair at home. It is a how-to book, but it’s a really important aspect of leadership that we really need to focus on and master. So what’s the, we’ve covered a lot of stuff in this short podcast, but we’ve got your website, it’ll be on the link and your podcast, if you’re listening to this on a podcast, it’ll be in that information. So what’s the most important thing that you think people should do with this information next?

John Watson:
I usually invite people to do an audit of their program. An audit is a scary word. Call it a review, call it a data assessment, but I usually encourage people to dig into their donor data and say, let’s look at, really understand our campaigns, our donor relationships, and start mining, really understanding the relationships. Looking at the full life cycle of the relationship development, map it out as a process, use the data to support what’s working and how well is it working or not working at each of the steps of the donor’s journey. And then from there, it really is very, and you can use the book as a sort of a guide to look at what the journey might look like. And you can sort of say, well, we have these elements in place, but we have these ones are missing or not relevant to our business. And then once you start to sort of look at it in that holistic context, And with your data, you can see very clearly what is working and what’s not. And then from there, you can look at each of those conversations and say, all right, well, what would we need to do in order to take more proactive role and actually facilitate that donor’s journey through our organization? And how do we go about cultivating that in a more thoughtful and proactive way?

Hugh Ballou:
This is awesome. John Watson, thank you for being our guest today on The Nonprofit Exchange. You’ve given us some essential information to go forward. Thank you so much.

John Watson:
Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.