Selling Business Model Innovation

"Randy has an extraordinary talent in making complicated and technical concepts and producing a compelling marketing strategy and marketing tools. His work has been spectacular."

--Michell Shames, Partner, Harrison Fiduciary Group

Presenting a new way of doing business is one of the trickiest problems marketing communicators ever face. You may think that selling a new faster better cheaper widget is hard. Now try selling CEOs on the idea that they should operate differently, adopt new workflows and methods, learn new practices, retrain staff, establish new lines of communication, create new organizational structures, enforce new policies, buy into new incentives . . . and so on.

At the same time, they should also abandon, at least partially, their existing assumptions about how their business or industry should work.

Furthermore, not all industries are equally willing to accept business model innovation. One of the most conservative -- and so one of the most difficult in which to sell business model change -- is pension plan fiduciary services. That was the challenge facing my client, Harrison Fiduciary Group. HFG’s two founders came from State Street Financial Advisors — its chief investment officer and corporate counsel. Rather than just advise pension plans, they would offload the fiduciary role outright -- and much of the risk and management burden that go with it.

Reducing business risk and management distraction is a concept everyone understands — across marketing communications domains. See how I applied that concept this time.