For the past couple of years, I’ve been working on developing a business development “meta-model” that essentially becomes a templated system to build a business. I call this the IDEA Blueprint, which is an acronym for:

* Identify
* Develop
* Engage
* Assess

I loosely based the IDEA Blueprint on the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) Cycle proposed by one of my personal inspirations and the father of the Total Quality Management movement (TQM), W. Edwards Deming. In fact, those who are familiar with the entire TQM or kaizen world will see many correlations and metaphors embedded within the IDEA Blueprint.

The IDEA Blueprint first starts with my own contention that “marketing” isn’t a department within a business that produces pretty collateral for salespeople to use. It’s not an ad agency that works to build a snazzy, public-facing image. It’s not lead generation activities.

In fact, I contend that “marketing” is the very core of why a business even exists at all. It’s the essence of entrepreneurship itself.

Marketing seeks the answer to the question, “What specific problem are we solving for what specific customer?” What need or want are we satisfying with what we do as a business?

This cuts right to the heart of why any business exists at all. What is the driving motivation that keeps a founder up at night working to come up with the solution to his or her customer’s problem?

Sadly, this highly- directed intention gets watered down and lost as a business grows. Over time, the business evolves and grows. Unless there’s a much focused intent to promote the founder’s story throughout the business, a gap can develop and widen between the employees and their understanding of the business foundation.

The IDEA Blueprint is designed to capture that entrepreneurial essence, and then build a marketing process around an intentional marketing and selling effort that tells the same story as the founder would tell it to their own early customers. This consistency is a natural byproduct of standardizing any process.

So let’s get into each of the four primary areas or phases of the IDEA Blueprint.

IDENTIFY

So the first step is to IDENTIFY the Purpose and Goals of the business.

In many cases, the founder or leadership of the business has vague or unclear goals for the direction of their enterprise. Whether it’s a startup company or a mature one, there may be a vision or purpose, but unclear definition of a roadmap of exactly

This is where we get directly into the development of the fundamental Value Proposition for the company’s products and/or services. There’s a specific process by which I can distill the value proposition of the business down into a framework for packaging a story around the problem and solution set.

Then we IDENTIFY the Business Model itself. In many businesses, the model already exists by virtue of the business operation. However, by going through a business model analysis exercise, I contend that innovation can take place. In the event that the business is a startup, of course the business model may not be fully fleshed out, and this is the perfect way to build out that robust map.

DEVELOP

I contend that business development can be distilled down to two things… Stories and Systems.

The Stories that we tell to prospective customers convey the very basic ideas about why we believe our products and/or services are a potential solution to their problem. It’s the good old “state your hypothesis” from your school term paper days. This concept gets pretty deep actually. In fact, the entire discussion around corporate storytelling is one that I intend to fully explore as a writer and speaker.

As an entrepreneur, when I am selling, I am telling a story. I am conveying ideas to my prospect. My product or service doesn’t actually exist until I can successfully help my prospect invent it for themselves within their own mind. They have to envision their problem, and ultimately how my proposed solution will solve their problem, before they will pay me anything.

I can use all kinds of tools to assist me, but in the end, it’s my ability to tell the story that makes the difference. I can use million dollar video productions, PowerPoint presentations, websites, etc… but in the end it’s the vision we create in our prospect’s mind that makes or breaks the deal. I’ve sold huge deals by sketching on the back of a paper placement in a restaurant.

Now Stories are also told to our employees to convey the vision of exactly what we do as a company. We create and reinforce those expectations of “the game plan” with our team members in the way that we convey the ideas around what we do as a business, and specifically what our expectations are of what they do as individuals to help build towards that mission. Successful business owners are seen as leadership role models, and one can draw a very distinct correlation to the way they convey the mission to their team. A great legacy of storytelling among founders and business leaders exists, from John D. Rockefeller to modern mavens like Tony Hsieh.

Once we define our Stories, then we build out our Systems. These are the flowcharts of activity that we engage in to “do” the value-adding things that our business produces. These are the processes that we implement to deliver the final work product and support the overall effort. Accounting, manufacturing production, fulfillment, consulting, pencil sharpening, floor mopping, expediting, servicing… whatever.

Systems are also twofold… internal and external facing.

The external facing systems are the execution frameworks that we use to enable the marketing and selling process, as well as communicate with and deliver the Value Proposition to the customer. These are all the ways we find, win, and keep customers.

They’re the sequence of activities that we engage in to identify the very specific people with the very specific problem or need that was outlined in the IDENTIFY phase. Then it’s the manner in which we convey our Stories to those very specific people about why we believe our Value Proposition is the solution to their problem. These Systems encompass the channels through which we communicate with our prospects and customers, and the tools that we use to support those channels.

Then we have the internal Systems of actually delivering the products and or services that comprise the Value Proposition that we’ve sold. The internal Systems are the delivery side of the business… how we make and distribute the product… how we engage the customer to deliver the service. This is the make or break point of how we actually score in the mind of the customer. This is the critical nexus between how we set the expectations within the minds of our customers, and then how our business actually delivers on those expectations.

Did the product or service actually meet promise of solving the needs or wants that we established in their minds as a result of the marketing and selling Storytelling?

Did our team deliver the goods?

In fact, this gets into the actual traditional operation of the business itself. This is where the traditional business processes are operated and managed. Things like kaizen or lean are methodologies that are used to optimize how a business delivers products or services through those operations.

The point being, this is where there’s a direct alignment with how a customer sale transfers from the marketing and selling into the actual doing of the business.

ENGAGE

So once we’ve developed our Stories and Systems around the very specific Customer and Value Proposition, we must engage the Process and the Client. This is where we actually fire up the engine and drive prospects into the machine. This is where we convert those prospects into customers, and then deliver the Value Proposition to them – thus satisfying their needs and desires.

So how do we ENGAGE the Process?

Of course, this solely depends upon how we’ve build out the Systems in the DEVELOP phase. But in general, we find those very specific people who have the very specific problem or need that our Value Proposition seeks to resolve. Then we interact with those people, attempting to tell our Stories about why and how we understand their needs, and how our products and/or services will satisfy those needs.

Then once that prospect decides to take a chance on us… they’ve bought into the whole program so to speak, we now ENGAGE them with the Systems within our internal operation. We actually deliver the product and/or service based on those internal Systems.

ASSESS

When we build our Systems in the DEVELOP phase of the IDEA Blueprint, we intentionally design metrics into the whole execution framework itself.

Gone are the difficult measurements of the old way of marketing and selling. We’re actually able to quantify each individual activity of the things we do to sell our products and/or services. We’re able to measure the output of the process based on the actual activity that takes place in the middle vs. the traditional methods of sales management which only look at the end results.

This translates into an unprecedented level of financial control over resource planning and allocation based not only on the theoretical sales pipeline of yore, but beyond the pipeline and into how we actually spend money and resources filling that pipeline.

Of course, we also have the metrics and measurements of the things we do within our operational Systems to actually deliver the products and/or services. These are the internal measurements of productivity of the systematic process of the work we do within each and every department and operation in the business.

In the traditional process manufacturing realm, we’ve gotten pretty sophisticated with our ability to cut out the waste (known as ‘muda’ in the kaizen/lean world) in how we make things. We’ve enabled a very precise level of production that matches resource need to output on a continuous flow basis… also known as “just in time” manufacturing. Then we’ve gotten really good at logistical systems that distribute and deliver our products to our customers on a highly efficient basis.

Based on concepts like ISO certification, we’ve gotten pretty good at standardizing our operational processes, and measuring the output of those processes. We know how to continuously improve those processes based on the measurement of all the metrics in the middle.

But within the IDEA Blueprint, we don’t just do these things for our manufacturing and delivery. We don’t just measure the activities within our back end operating process. Now we’re extending the measurement all the way out to the very front to our marketing and selling process.

Furthermore, we’re incorporating customer Feedback into the whole sequence of activity. It’s not just an inward measurement of the things we’re doing in our operations, but a measurement of how the customer perceives the things we do as it pertains to how we’re delivering on the promises that we sold as a result of the Stories we told.

Improvement Cycle

Of course, because we’re measuring the entire business as a holistic, seamless system, we can also engage in an improvement cycle. We can refine and improve how we actually do things based on the actual numbers – but not just the numbers. We’re also incorporating the customer experience and feedback into our improvements.

So in essence, we’re now looking at our business as a single, thriving entity and not as discreet parts as has been the tradition. Think in terms of dissecting a frog… you can take apart each piece of the animal. You can have a leg, a heart, an eyeball. But the pile of separate parts does not make a frog. It’s only a frog when it’s a complete, functioning, living system. As soon as you start to take each piece off, it’s no longer a frog.

That’s where so much business development, marketing and sales theory falls short. No longer can we continue to view marketing and selling as some discreet piece of the business operation. It’s the essence of why the business exists. Business Process Improvement and kaizen efforts have only stopped short of the marketing and selling functions within a business because of how those pieces have been isolated from the rest of the operation… hence, the traditional battle between the technical folks and the sales folks.

So that’s it… a very high level overview of the concepts behind the IDEA Blueprint. There’s obviously a serious “drill-down” into each of these pieces, and I am presently working through getting those documented. There will be much more that’s forthcoming in various formats.

Also, I’m presently exploring actual commercialization strategies for the IDEA Blueprint system and have a lot of ideas.

Marketing Automation Integration

First of all, it instantly becomes a service delivery model for all these great new enterprise level marketing automation software tools that have hit the market. Or, taking it from the inverted model view, it can be an integration plan for a business looking to acquire marketing automation. That could be a direct enterprise effort, or it could be an integration effort with a service provider that uses the IDEA Blueprint as a model to implement solutions for their enterprise clients.

The IDEA Blueprint is a grand slam homerun fit for any effort to integrate a marketing automation platform because the tool itself doesn’t solve the problem of how the tool gets used. The marketing automation piece is just a segment within the whole IDEA Blueprint, but right now, I see an emerging market based on the awareness of how these tools can drive ROI for marketing and selling automation.

The problem with ANY automation effort is the process behind the automation itself. If the process doesn’t exist in theory or on paper somewhere, all the automation tools on the planet aren’t going to help you. The IDEA Blueprint is a systematic approach to building out that theoretical process before engaging the automation tools within the enterprise.

Corporate Storytelling

I believe that in 10 years, you’ll see more and more job titles emerging as a hybrid somewhere between the layers of executive leadership that’s essentially the role of “Corporate Storyteller”. You could say that’s also tied to “Strategic Planning”.

The IDEA Blueprint becomes a roadmap for building out the corporate story at many levels. It can be the guide path for an advertising agency, PR firm, or any other entity engaged in the services that relate to building out the story as it relates to a customer constituency. It can map the touch points for brand itself since the IDEA Blueprint specifically focuses upon building out the story, but then creating the nexus between the story, the customer, and the process of fulfilling the promises of the story. It’s the customer experience in a nutshell.

Startup Consulting/Venture Capital

Many startups have been the result of a technician founder, who may or may not be all that great at the marketing side… or the business development side as Michael Gerber so eloquently documented in his book, “The E-Myth”.

Whatever the case, the IDEA Blueprint actually becomes an entrepreneurial model, and even builds out past the recent efforts of folks like Eric Ries, who has made great strides with his Lean Startup model. Even Steven Gary Blank’s great effort to bring the idea of customer development into existence still falls somewhat short because it doesn’t actually translate the evolution beyond the “earlyvangelist” customer (beta) into the actual playbook of how we build out the marketing and sales process to achieve the “main street” phenomenon.

Even though customer development is billed as the precursor to Geoffery Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”, it doesn’t actually help a founder transition from his or her own early stage efforts in finding the first beta customers into building out a replicable, scalable marketing and selling process. And specifically, a process that seamlessly promotes and reinforces the same story as created by the founder as they told that story from day one.

The IDEA Blueprint brings the missing pieces to the table here. It becomes the game plan to transition the company from idea and beta phase, into the development and build out of every functional area of the business.

Take for instance what a VC group like Boston-based Open View Partners has done. Essentially they’re a venture fund masquerading as a management consulting company, with a strategy to invest in and build cooperative portfolio partners that each individually solves a piece of an early stage tech enterprise puzzle. By virtue of having content marketing and sales strategy experts as members of the top level management team, Open View Partners founder, Scott Maxwell, has demonstrated his understanding of the value of how the marketing front-end sets forth the pace of the rest of a business. How things get sold dictates how everything else happens. Scott Maxwell gets this concept, and the obvious success of his portfolio companies demonstrates that they’re already doing the kinds of things that are encapsulated within the IDEA Blueprint.

So then the IDEA Blueprint becomes a framework for any investor or group to ensure that any portfolio investment has not only a highly-focused business model, but a strategy and play book to build out that model into a fully functioning business enterprise.

I'm kicking around the idea of maybe raising an early-stage or strategic mezzanine fund... I think there's some real opportunity there right now.

So.... in closing I’m sure that I’ll think of some more ways to leverage the IDEA Blueprint, but at the same time, I have to actually focus on execution of at least one of them to prove the model works.

Maybe it’s just another theory destined to be buried and forgotten along with so many other business concepts. Or maybe the IDEA Blueprint becomes the Rosetta Stone that decodes the DNA of a successful business venture beyond inception. I’m already betting my entire personal career and financial future on it. But then again, I’m one of those crazy entrepreneurs. There’s nothing safe and sure about the things we entrepreneurs do.

But the dirty secret here is that I already know the IDEA Blueprint works because I didn’t invent any individual piece of the model – and I have implemented each of the pieces individually in previous business ventures. My specific innovation here is that of recombination. I know each part works because I have experienced the firsthand effects of improving each discreet, functional area. It’s all based on individual schools of thought leadership through each step of the business operation – from conception to adulthood. Marketing, sales, business administration, manufacturing, service delivery, finance, organizational behavior, and human psychology – these are all the vegetables that have gone into the soup.

Now I am looking for an opportunity to apply the full model to accelerate the growth of a business from front to back.

Any takers?

I'm open to any input and welcome any discussion. Hit me with some comments or questions below.