It’s easier to say No to some than others :Business Strategy /Financial Advisors

As we mentioned earlier, we are also looking to analyse the degree to
which opinions from certain influencer categories can be rejected or
sidelined. We have high hopes we can integrate this into our methodology
soon. Receive a press release informing you that a new car is being
launched and it is easy to ignore. Especially if it doesn’t fit with the current
direction of your decision-making. See an advert on TV for it and once
more it’s easy to ignore. Receive a letter from your accountant informing
you that this new car will save you considerable tax and it becomes more
persuasive. The accountant’s view is harder to ignore – at all sorts of levels.
Take this into a business setting.

Imagine evaluating an office refit incorporating new desks and workstations. Colleagues from another
department tell you that they’ve just installed the new desks and they’re
popular with the office workers. Reassuring advice but easy to ignore.
Your building facilities manager recommends three other styles that they
would approve of. More difficult to ignore because they have partial access
to the budget. The CEO’s PA tells you that undoubtedly one option is her
favourite. She’s a forthright lady. She has no official role in your decisionmaking,
she doesn’t have any access to the budget, but seeking her view,
and then choosing something else, will not do you any favours with her.
And she can heavily influence the CEO’s view of you. She brings to your
DME considerable political weight. You wish you’d never involved her.
When making strategic business decisions, the views of an industry
analyst, however expensively acquired, can always be ignored. The
views of your appointed management consultant less easily sidelined
(because of the internal politics that are inevitably involved), but the
opinions of the appointed systems integration firm, brought in to advise on
a new IT business infrastructure, can rarely if ever be declined. In bringing
in such a firm, the end-user company is effectively outsourcing the eventual
decision, even though they retain the ‘rubber-stamping’ duty.

Objecting to the SI firm’s recommendations can be a ‘make or break’ for
the relationship, and relationships at this level can be worth tens of
millions of pounds to both sides. Some advisors, once appointed by a
client, do not then take lightly to their views being questioned.
The difficulty of incorporating this ‘persuasiveness’ factor into our core
criteria is largely because such firms advise at two very different stages: (1)
at the open proposal stage where they have been invited in to competitive
tender, where their views can easily be ignored, and (2) after they have
been appointed where their views are given with the expectation of being
accepted. Depending on which stage we would be measuring affects the
criteria rating significantly. Until we have resolved this we cannot accurately
measure it.

You can clearly add more criteria of your own. But we have to balance
the thoroughness and credibility of our measurement with the reality of
our task. Ours is an imprecise science, and our eventual rankings affect no
one’s life or death. At the time of writing we think that six objective criteria
is an optimum number and we are expanding our research to this. If a
Player would rank at number 32 using one set of criteria, and move to 39
using another then so be it. Far more important is the question of how to
subsequently handle each Player, regardless of their exact position.

Some of you may decide to identify an influencer and then devise a way
to measure their influence, rather than agree how to measure and then see
who rates on that scale. If you choose the former, there’s a real danger that
you’ll select people who you naturally assume are influencers, and then
back-fit your measurement criteria to justify their inclusion. But we’ve also
found that simply applying our criteria in a blanket fashion to a small group
of people and then seeing who rates highest doesn’t seem to reflect reality.
The fact is that charisma, or at least ‘personal magnetism’, is an extremely
strong influencer characteristic within small groups, yet one that’s impossible
to measure from afar.