Page 39 - merged.pdf

Ten Greatest Bumper Sticker Strategies

Introduction

The sobriquet ‘bumper sticker strategy’ comes from the book by Michel Roberts,
Strategy Pure and Simple: How Winning CEOs Outthink Their Competition. It gives a
title to the concept that every business should be able to summarise, in a few words,
its direction, purpose and strategy in a single sentence.

Getting a team to work together towards an agreed common goal is difficult,
and the bumper sticker strategy helps with this process. The ones I have picked are
at corporate level, but sometimes bumper sticker strategies would be better expressed
at lower levels in the business as well.

Here is another use for the bumper sticker strategy. In complex sales campaigns
where a lot of people are involved it is helpful for the team leader to express the
whole campaign goal and strategy in a single sentence. It helps to brief people and
gives them a filter to put their comments through when any member of the team,
from technician to managing director, is communicating with the customer.

Suppose an account team is trying to sell a computer facilities management
contract to, say, an engineering firm. Further, let us suppose that the bidding sup-
plier is the market leader in the customer’s industry in the provision of facilities
management. But they are not the existing supplier, this would be a new customer.
The team will include technicians, support managers, finance people, other cus-
tomer references, the top management team of the supplier and so on.

All of these people need to be briefed on how to react during their, possibly very
short, meetings with the prospect. A bumper sticker campaign strategy such as ‘Come
out of the cold’ helps to remind the selling team how they are differentiating their
bid from the bid of the sitting tenant.