Sustaining

Transitioning from launch to sustain

To keep your product, program, service, or system aloft over time, you have to shift your mindset from launch to sustain, that is, from start-up mode to systems mode. Instead of solving the immediate problems with the offering, you have to widen your view to include the offering as it works in the world. If you’ve successfully researched, designed, and tested your offering, it’s almost certain that it solves customers’ problems. If you have a great marketing plan, your customers will almost certainly find out that your offering exists. But if you want to be able to widen the customer base and impact an ever-expanding pool of people, and, further, to be able to walk away from your job and not have your product, program, service, or system collapse or atrophy, you have to put in place systems that will make your offering self-sustaining, even after you leave. That’s what the final part of delivery, sustaining, is all about.

Introduction to Sustaining

After careful launch, the Delivery phase needs a glide path into sustainment mode. The good news is that the public sector is full of sustain-mode experts. After all, people who self-select to enter public service believe in institutions and value the work they do. The public sector has no lack of institution-builders. In fact, that’s what we’re best at: creating systems that are self-sustaining and solve real problems for long decades. The four business systems that entrepreneur Allan Dibb identifies as most crucial to long term success are:

1. Marketing system: generate a consistent flow of leads into the business
2. Sales system: lead nurturing, follow-up and conversion
3. Fulfillment system: the actual thing you do in exchange for the customer’s money
4. Administration system: accounts, reception, human resources and so on: support of all the other business functions¹

The public sector already has the administration system built, so it’s the other three systems that have to be tailored to your offering. We covered the marketing system in an earlier section, while your fulfilment system should be completely addressed by your design and user testing. That leaves the “sales” system, which presents a particularly thorny problem for the public sector.

What is sales in the public sector?

The concept of “sales” in both the private and the public sector can be confusing. In the private sector, “sales” frequently refer to the literal, single moment in which money changes hands for goods. But as discussed in the Marketing section, a larger and more valuable interpretation of “sales” is the overall, lifetime value of a customer. That is, the amount of goods or services they might consume over the course of their entire relationship with an organization. That understanding of sales does two things:

1. It lengthens the relationship with customers to a timeline that is more resonant with a government timeline, that is, a human lifespan.
2. It widens the idea of value from singular and transactional to multiple and relational.

Both of these points move the idea of sales more comfortably into the public sector realm. As pointed out in the Marketing section , individuals and government offerings are intertwined throughout a lifetime.

That being said, when your purpose is to administer an entitlement, to invest in incredibly early-stage research, or to provide objective evidence, all of which are very common tasks in the federal sector, then the idea of “sales” seems a non-starter.² Your work does not fit into a traditional business concept, and so all of the grounding, practical intelligence that comes with an understanding of your sales is inaccessible to you.

But this attitude is self-defeatist, and we need not take it up. As discussed in the introduction, in the public sector we can think of sales as “sign ups”, “readership”, or “information distribution”. Sales are the most basic way we know our delivery mechanisms are working and that our offerings are resonating with the public.

That being said, the biggest barrier to understanding whether our delivery and offerings are working the way we intend is that, very often in the public sector, we do not track sales. In fact, very often we don’t even define them. We ignore them. And in doing so, we defeat our own purpose.

The good news is that defining sales is not only the last part of your Delivery phase, it’s the first part of your Measurement phase. Hooray! It’s all coming together.

Defining sales when you have no sales

In the course of your Discovery work, you defined your problem space [link to Discovery guide]. Your problem space was not the exact, literal problem your offering ended up solving, but was instead the space in which you knew customers of your organization were struggling, or where the organization had a lack of information regarding the customer behavior or need. In your research, you explored this problem space and came up with a direction.

During your design phase testing, you scoped that direction into a product, program, service, or system, or a series of these things, that came together as the offering you make to customers to solve part of the problem space you explored. In developing this offering, you devised experiments to see how it worked for users [link to testing section]. In response to those experiments, you made changes to the offering so that it worked better.

To define sales for delivery, bring together the benchmarks you created for the offering. That is, marry the problem space you solved for, and the items for which you tested, and step back. As “sales” is defined as “lead nurturing, follow-up and conversion”, this forms the beginning of your sales definition. Consider a straightforward example:

Your program maintains a database of current and past grants and cooperative agreements. In your discovery phase, you investigated how customers interact with your database, and found that you had many frequent users, but the power users ran into a wall when they wanted dynamic, granular information about the items in the database. So you developed a criteria of information held in most or all of the grants and agreements, and built an API for that data so customers can retrieve it.

In this scenario, your definition of “sales” would be the number of customers calling the API in a given timeframe.

This one is obvious. In the private sector, your job would now become to clear any barriers customers might have to calling the API. This would be your singular focus; you would tune all your marketing to this goal, and you would develop features in response to it. In the public sector, we should share this drive and focus, if we can.

Take, however, the same scenario in a more realistic public sector setting:

Your program maintains a database of current and past grants and cooperative agreements, but you’re not part of the technical database team. Instead, your work involves educating the public on what grants and agreements are offered. To do this, you maintain a public-facing website that explains the grants and agreements types and the submission procedures for each. For you, “sales” is more about educating the public, rather than counting an interaction.

The problem is, “education” sales are harder to count than API call numbers. That’s okay. With a little work, you, too, can count your “sales”. Here are few ways:

• Use analytics numbers like “time on page” as a proxy for comprehension.
• Use tracking analytics to understand where users go after they leave your page to see if their next move is salient to your work or not.

Be warned: although good starting points, these are both pretty superficial numbers. User comprehension is much more complex than simple measures like these. To dig deeper, consider:

• Implementing a simple survey at the bottom of each of your pages asking users if they understood the material or not.
• Starting with the known users from your database-maintaining colleagues, find out the names of folks who use your content, then perform some basic user research [link to Discovery Operations guide] to find out how the content works and does not work for them.
• Starting with your federal colleagues, talk to them to find out how you might connect your content with their offerings to create user journeys that are more meaningful for customers. Then, track your user journeys using the analytics software.

In the private sector, you would build out these sales elements with layers of offerings that wrap your customers in folds of education. You might create webinars, courses, and mock-submissions. You might create an interactive submission manual, hold conferences, or start running innovation summits around your subject matter, all with the goal of involving more customers in your education vertical. In the public sector, we would be well-guided to do the same, where we have the opportunity. If your “sales” is to educate the public or make data available, you must quantify that in some way. There will never be perfect numbers, but there are proxies for it. Define those proxies and start tracking them. Let others critique and engage with them and evolve them forward as you need to. This is how you understand whether or not your delivery and offerings are actually working for your audience.

Conclusion

It’s common in the public sector to find ourselves delivering things we know have value, but to step back from defining that value because our offerings do not fit neatly inside a traditional business sales structure. When we do that, we not only abdicate our offerings’ value to others, who may or may not agree that they have value, but also cut ourselves off from the most obvious means of understanding whether our offerings, and delivery of those offerings, are functioning as we intend.

This section provides you with some simple scenarios to start from. As general guidance in figuring out your sales, consider the following questions:

• What is the purpose of my offering, really?
  • Ask yourself: What do I think my offering does?
  • Ask your colleagues: What is your professional perception of what my offering does?
  • Ask your customers: What is your perception of what my offering does?
  • Do these all agree, more or less? If not, go into the Discovery phase [link] and reconcile. If they do, move to question (2).
• How do I quantify that, even as proxies?
• At what timescale do these quantities hold true? Are these quantities for the next quarter? For the next fiscal year? For my overall offering? Decide the timeline on which you’re operating, and track your “sales” for that term.

From defining sales to measuring effectiveness

Looking back on the Delivery phase, you’ve used training to both make the final, user-centered changes to your offering and to facilitate a change management process that results in organizational acceptance for your work. You’ve marketed your offering to the highly defined, highly receptive and in-need audience for which it is primarily built, and carefully and quietly launched your work into the world. You’ve built on your Delivery and Design work to build your Sales funnel, so that you build long-lasting relationships with your audience that will result in your offering truly solving for and responding to their needs, even as those needs and audience change over time. And you have established a means by which to measure these sales, which is the crucial first step to understanding the real-world impact of your work.

To understand impact, you widen the lens of measurement even further to encompass the largest-scale mission that your offering undertakes. This is the first step of the measurement phase: defining the big why. Take a step back and appreciate all that you’ve done so far, and get ready for your next big move: the Measurement phase.

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