Corporate (fill in the blank)…

Ah, “Corporate”; aka “headquarters”; aka “home office”; aka “staff”… all words of stimulation, true?  How do you fill in the blank “Corporate X”?  How do you respond when you hear someone from headquarters is coming out to meet with you?  Does it bring to mind a mood of celebration?  Or doom, HaHa! 

To be fair, I spent most of my career in the field.  I can’t really relate to HQ with any meaningful, personal experience.  As an outsider to headquarters, when I was informed of a visit from the home office it usually wasn’t cause for a celebration. 

I remember my first exposure to a “corporate review”.  The Chicago office had finished our fiscal year under quota; definitely not a cause for celebration. HQ sent a senior executive to interview each sales rep individually to see if there was a people problem or a leadership problem.  I had just started as a “National Account District Manager”, one of the first eight people in this new role at the company.  When my corporate review started I thought it was a good idea to explain to the senior executive how my national account sales process differs.  He cut me short, “Gary, we know what you do…”  Ouch. 

Fortunately, I survived that review and the next twelve months turned out to be a break-out year for me.  Was the HQ visit a catalyst for my success?  Well, it probably didn’t hurt: 

But all things finally began to move when the threat of help from headquarters was received. 

Norman Augustine 

In the sales profession we have pursued a variety of strategies when selling to big companies; tops down; bottoms up; access through their consulting firms, accountants, bankers, etc.  In some cases, selling to corporate begets us a competitive advantage with selling to their business units.  That was the catalyst to my break-out year following that visit from corporate back in the day. 

Brunswick, a Chicago corporation, was fending off a hostile takeover (popular in the early 1980s).  To raise capital and fund an aggressive stock buy-back, they sold their medical division.  The problem (for them) was their medical division was running payroll for all the other divisions.  The advantage for my company (ADP) was we processed their “Corporate Payroll”.  I leveraged that access to sell all of their divisions a payroll solution, my first “big deal” as a NADM. 

Throughout my career, I also experienced the other end of this corporate-field spectrum.  Rick Page in his book Hope is Not a Strategy wrote about that side of the equation: 

Having business at one business unit not only doesn't help me at the next one, it can actually hurt me.  They hate each other so much that if one business unit is for me, the others will be against me.  But they are all united in one value:  They all hate corporate. 

Yes, there have been many battles over the years between business units, aka the “field” and headquarters aka “corporate”.  Which one “breaks” things?  Which one “fixes” them?  Paul Dickson offers: 

Question: How many executives does it take to change a light bulb? 

Answer:   Two. One to assure the staff that everything possible is being done, while the other tries to screw the bulb into a water faucet. 

I may not have always “hated” corporate.  But when staff showed up from headquarters to conduct a review I always made sure our lights were operating properly. 

GAP 

When life gets tough we could get a helmet… or… we could leverage the peace and share the power of a positive perspective.