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Hawks, Seagulls, and Mice
Paradigms for Systematically Growing Revenue in Business Markets

1. Introduction
Tolstoy writes in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Similarly, every good sales and marketing team developing a business market appears to be good in a similar manner, yet each challenged sales and marketing team is challenged in its own unique way. Hawks, Seagulls, and Mice examines the approaches executives use to overcome the challenges they face in increasing revenues or improving the revenue-generation function within business markets.

This is a book of paradigms, or thought structures, and their application in business by executives in order to address revenue-generation challenges. As the business challenge to be addressed changes, so does the relevant paradigm. There is no single paradigm for all revenue-generation challenges. Fortunately, there are a handful of relevant paradigms that executives rely upon when addressing the array of challenges they face generating revenue.

Hawks, Seagulls, and Mice reveals and codifies these paradigms in a cohesive management approach that leads to the systematic improvement of sales and marketing in business markets. We explore the challenges executives face in managing sales and marketing, the criteria they use in making decisions, and the trade-offs inherent in selecting one approach over another. Some of the concepts expressed in these pages leverage discussions from other contexts, others are intuitively used by working professionals, and a few may be new.

As we examine the paradigms and their applications, we see a shift in the relevant approach as executives move toward further refining the sales and marketing effort. Each area of improvement can build upon previous improvements. As such, many of the paradigms will derive from insights revealed in the application of another. The paradigm an executive uses is selected according to its ability to address the specific challenge that the executive perceives as presenting the largest impediment to improving revenue generation.

To explore the paradigms executives use to systematically improve the revenue-generation function, we begin with identifying the business market landscape. Our research has made it overwhelmingly apparent that business markets cannot be grouped into a monolithic category when it comes to identifying approaches to systematically improve revenues. Whereas some thought structures, such as the coupling of business benefits with personal emotions, are common in all business markets, their application and means of communication will depend upon the type of business market discussed.

Once the business market landscape is mapped, we move on to explore how companies move around the landscape, compete within specific spaces, and improve their performance within their space.

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