Selling Your Wow Project
From SandboxWiki
From "The Wow Project" in Fast Company magazine, April 1999 Full article at: The Wow Project
Selling Your Wow Project
If you read the literature on project management carefully, there is one word that I guarantee that you won't find: selling. People in the world of project management talk about everything else -- from PERT charts (PERT stands for program evaluation and review technique: I got my master's degree around this), Gantt charts, and time lines, to "specification creep" and "risk-management methodology." Rarely, if ever, will you hear those people talk about the need to sell your project. The assumption seems to be that, like a better mousetrap, a worthy project will sell itself.
Although the project-management experts may not appreciate the need to sell, there is a group of businesspeople who do understand the critical role of selling projects. They are the people who inhabit the "real" professional-services firms: Every management consultant, every ad-agency wizard, every stock-market jock is a salesperson. They're selling their strong point of view, their recognized expertise, and their scintillating services to customers on the outside, and they're selling their reliability, dependability, and talent to colleagues on the inside. It's just another part of our old friend the Brand Called You. (See the August:September 1997 issue of Fast Company.) Your project and your brand go hand in hand: Both depend on your ability to sell yourself and to sell your project. If you want your Wow Project to happen, you have to learn how to sell it -- smart, hard, and from beginning to end.
A PWPL has to master two essential sales skills: pitching and community organizing. The art of the pitch boils down to what we call "the two-minute elevator spiel." You're on your way to your office, and you're riding the elevator. The doors open, and the CEO gets on. As the doors slowly slide shut, she turns to you and asks, "What are you working on that makes a difference to this company?" Her eyes bore into you. You're alone in the elevator with the biggest of the big cheeses, and you've got two minutes to tell her exactly why your project matters. So what is your pitch?
Sure, you've got butterflies in your stomach and a hammer in your heart -- but the elevator pitch isn't really about dealing with pressure. It's about communication. And caring. Can you take the hopelessly complicated set of problems that you're juggling in your project and reduce those problems to three bullet points that anyone can immediately understand? Better yet, can you dispense with PowerPoint slides altogether and sum up your project in the perfect metaphor? For example: "By the time we're done with this customer-satisfaction project, we'll be so close to our customers that they'll be our bungee-jumping buddies." You'll know that you've nailed the perfect metaphor when the T-shirts arrive for you and your team with the words "The Bungee-Jumping Bunch" silk-screened across the chest -- courtesy of the CEO herself.
The other essential skill of the PWPL is community organizing. It's an art that flourished in the 1960s under the tutelage of legendary activists such as Saul Alinsky, who wrote "Rules for Radicals" (Random House, 1971), and Caesar Chavez, who was the founder of the United Farm Workers. The lessons they taught also apply to your project. Community organizing is all about building grassroots support. It's about identifying the people around you with whom you can create a common, passionate cause. And it's about ignoring the conventional wisdom of company politics and instead playing the game by very different rules.
For example, conventional wisdom instructs would-be PWPLs to get top management to give their projects early "buy-in." The standard line says, "Get the boss's support, and you've got the go-ahead you need." Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Never go to the boss too early. And never go to the boss before you've done your grassroots organizing to build the community support that you need to make the project a reality, a cool thing that cool people want to be part of. Community organizing doesn't mean looking at the organizational chart to see what the boss thinks. It means looking around you to see whom you can convince to sign on; looking below you to see whom you can enlist in the cause; and looking around you to see who's in a key area and who can contribute expertise. Don't worry about the boss's approval. Get the community organizing done, and by the time you go to the boss, she'll recognize that you've already gotten approval from the cool parts of the organization.
The second political mistake that you can't afford to make is to spend precious time and scarce emotional energy worrying about your enemies -- and if your project is genuinely a Wow Project, don't doubt that you'll have enemies. (Project axiom: Anything worth doing makes the establishment mad.) Forget your enemies. (The hell with 'em!) Concentrate on building support among your friends. Get strong endorsers who will lend their names and their clout to your project. Remember: You will never be able to change your enemies' minds. The best you can do is to surround them with your passionate, determined supporters.
