21 Rules for Winning

In 1984 McDonnell Aircraft Company was in trouble. Visionary founder James S. McDonnell, "Mr. Mac" to the employees who both feared and loved him, was gone. The hard-nosed engineering juggernaut that had launched a string of innovative X-planes and fighters -- FH Phantom, F2H Banshee, XF-85 Goblin, XF-88 Vodoo, F3H Demon, F-101 Vodoo, F-4 Phantom II, F-15 Eagle -- and also the Mercury and Gemini space capsules, was beginning to struggle to win new programs in the Pentagon and in foreign markets.

A young lawyer, Capitol Hill insider and head of the McDonnell Douglas Corporation Washington office, Tom Gunn, was brought back to his home town St. Louis by Chairman Sandy McDonnell to fix the problem. In his first year Tom replaced more than 90 percent of the sales and marketing staff and instituted new business principles and practices that helped to rebuild McDonnell Aircraft Company into a winning team again.

(Years after his retirement the U.S. Naval Institute published Tom's recollections of this amazing story in his memoir which I heartily recommend... see Gunn Sights: Selling for High Stakes).

"21 Rules" is the deceptively simple, sometimes even pedestrian-sounding list of principles for winning that guided the transformation of the McDonnell Aircraft Company sales and marketing team and ushered in a period of incredible success that lasted more than a decade. Tom's "21 Rules" are listed here, and provide the framework for future articles in this blog:

Gunn's 21 Rules for Winning

1. Do everything that could or should be done to win.
2. Make all your presentations simple, fundamental and brief.
3. Line up all the forces involved in a complex decision to support your case and neutralize any important person or organization who doesn’t come around to your case.
4. Research every critical factor involved in a sale, carefully, unemotionally and responsibly.
5. Complex motivational factors are predictable and controllable.
6. For each significant customer, know what he thinks, how he thinks, what sort of information is best supplied to him, understand his past, present and future, understand where he is going and what our proposal means to his probable future.
7. Every key decision maker needs a champion to lead the way and do his work for him.
8. Always put yourself into the competitor’s and decision maker’s shoes.
9. Leave nothing to chance, make your plan consistent, flexible, upgradable, motivational, thorough and detailed.
10. Staff marketing strong enough to stand up to senior executives, program managers, engineering and others who command respect, totally self-motivated and self-reliant.
11. Engineering should engineer, manufacturing should manufacture, marketing should sell.
12. Marketers should know the product and know the buying process.
13. Marketers initiate, maintain, cultivate, expand and direct all other supporting organizations’ contact with the customer.
14. Marketing requires excellent communication skills, independence and success oriented leadership, maturity, judgment, fortitude and personal integrity.
15. Marketing plans are both thorough and concise.
16. New technology creates new requirements.
17. Deliver your message to each person affecting the complex procurement and not just to those who give you the best reception.
18. Assess the biases and inaccuracies of your proposal and the customer’s request.
19. Carefully interpret facts; never jump to conclusions – learn to listen.
20. Effective marketing requires the customer to hear, see, understand, be motivated by it, and retain key messages of campaign.
21. Ultimately present a proposal with a competitive price from which you are the logical winner.

In thousands of large meetings and small, in every role from corporate executive to personal mentor, Tom hammered it home: "The best listener wins."  And then he'd say, invariably:  "Now,  let's go sell some airplanes."

And we did.