Mapping a Customer's Decision Process

By Brian Bradley
The Mapping Alliance, Inc.
   A Strategic Partner of DSI

“Your best hope for a good outcome is a good decision process followed by good implementation.” ^[1]

Decision Mapping® -- a proprietary process technology developed by chairman Richard G. Hodapp of The Mapping Alliance, Inc. -- has been used by organizations to shape major decisions for more than 30 years. Among the notable successes of this approach are: IBM’s AS400, Procter & Gamble’s Customer Partnering, GE’s Global Service concept, Interface’s leadership in sustainability, Lockheed Martin’s award of the Joint Strike Fighter contract and even recent AIDS policy changes in Africa. In the words of Tom Laco, former Vice-Chairman of Procter & Gamble, “Decision Mapping® gives us a quiet competitiveness that positions us at the strategy level of our customers.”

Many clients have used Decision Mapping® for decades as their best practice for managing major business pursuits and key external decisions. This article offers an overview of the purpose and practice of Decision Mapping®.

A Map of How Organizations Make Decisions

Decision Mapping® recognizes that the company’s internal decisions are affected by the decisions of customers and other external stakeholders such as policymakers, partners, suppliers and unions. Decision Mapping® provides a business development team with a map of its customers' decision processes. This can create a fundamental shift in how managers see, understand and engage with the world outside their organization.

Decision Mapping® frames each situation as a set of decisions by external parties that must be made in order for your company to achieve its key strategic objectives. The elements of Decision Mapping® can be summarized as eight questions:

1. What customer decisions are you in business to affect?

2. What is the scope of these customer decisions?

3. Who has a role in these decisions?

4. What is the process by which such decisions are made?

5. What factors must be considered and managed to make these decisions?

6. What strategy resources must be employed to make such decisions?

7. What skill resources must be used?

8. What actions will be needed to implement such strategies?

Posing and answering these questions is not simple. Decision Mapping® is not a recipe but rather a process with many elements, and variations. It is a step toward modeling a complex situation as a set of decisions and being able to design strategies to effect change.

Creating Relevant Strategies

Decision Mapping® equips your organization with a practice for engaging your customers. It focuses, aligns and unifies your company’s attention and resources on the external environment where the decisions that are critical to the future growth and success of your company are being made. 

Decision Mapping® offers insights into the motivations of customers and implications for the organization’s own strategies and decisions for customer behavior. Mapping addresses questions such as: Are the strategic objectives of our company relevant to the key decisions that our customers are making about the future growth and success of their companies? What customer decisions are we trying to influence? Decision Mapping® helps shape strategies for interacting with customers and other stakeholders, addressing questions such as: Whom do we see? Whom do we send? When do we engage? What do we say?

Decision Mapping® changes the way managers view their customers and strategy. Instead of framing strategy making as a static process,  managers learn to see it as a dynamic process linked directly to affecting external decisions and generating immediate strategic thought, action, and the targeted deployment of strategic resources.

Many organizations make the assumption that if they hire the right people and the right management, these individuals will come equipped with this knowledge. Mapping clients don’t make that assumption. Only by giving the entire organization the consistency of purpose and the vision of customer engagement that can be set forth in a visual “Map” can you truly hold your organization accountable to achieve significant growth.

Theory and Practice of Decision Mapping®

There are three core principles underlying Decision Mapping®.

1. Decisions:  The external environment is always decision-based. So focus on the external and ask yourself, "What customer decisions are you aiming to impact?"

2. Map: The efficiency and effectiveness of a team - even the enthusiasm of a team to effect change - is so significantly different when it has a common external focus (the “Spot on the Wall” theory). The Map captures the elements and patterns of the key decisions and keeps the focus of corporate energies on the external decisions that must be affected.

3. Vocabulary: There must be a common vocabulary to keep the strategies and actions that flow from the Map clear, concise and transferable.

Decision Mapping® is introduced through a series of real-time conferences to map and win current opportunities.  A Test Mapping Conference for evaluation of Decision Mapping® is a 3-day, 3-team conference. Like every Mapping conference, it is real work -- not training -- designed to focus your teams on winning current business opportunities and making major policy and strategy decisions.

After a successful evaluation period, the Decision Mapping® process is licensed and internal experts are trained to make clients independent of our involvement.  While Decision Mapping® is not always about “winning,” it is always about influencing decisions, particularly those decisions that are critical to an organization’s growth and success.

Breaking the “Do Loop”

Relying on traditional selling, marketing and strategy programs eventually drives organizations into a “do loop.” This is an endless spiral in which decisions are based on price, service and relationship. As price competition increases and performance deteriorates, counting on your sales stars and rainmakers to be busy, stay busy and try to grow the business by being even busier simply accelerates the slide.

Decision Mapping® breaks the “do loop.” Managers do not see “selling” as selling, but see the total process as a dynamic system. They are able to understand how the external decisions of customers, policymakers and partners affect the sales process. 

The core insights derived from asking the eight questions of Decision Mapping® suggest that significant, sustainable, organic growth – leveraging your content and investment in internal processes – comes through defining your markets and customers as a set of decisions. Understanding the predictable aspects of these decision processes allows your organization to favorably influence those decisions.

Many organizations are more comfortable working on internal processes to drive content improvements, to lower costs and increase productivity. When considering an externally focused process such as Decision Mapping®, all too often the response is “our plate is full” with outsourcing initiatives, productivity projects and acquisition integrations.  We need leaders who understand that the only real transformation takes place by understanding decisions – customer decisions. For such leaders, Decision Mapping® offers an effective tool for understanding the scope and impact of customer decisions, and using this understanding to design and implement change.

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