Using the Hedgehog Concept to Find Your Business Sweet Spot

A Discovery of Our Own


At an annual leadership meeting we challenged ourselves to learn three important things about our company – things that would reveal our inner hedgehog. The Hedgehog Concept, as presented in the work of Jim Collins in his bestseller "Good to Great" is based on the famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox” by Isaiah Berlin in which he drew his story from an ancient Greek parable: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”.

The sleek and cunning fox relentlessly pursues the hedgehog with a series of rash of strategies aimed at at sure demise for the hedgehog, while the hedgehog waddles around appearing to be oblivious to the advances of the fox. Stepping back and observing the daily dance, it looks like the fox will be the sure winner. The fox is clearly dressed for success – he is sleek, beautiful and clearly an agile  planner. He tracks every movement of the dowdy little hedgehog and with each pounce believes his moment of victory has come.

Meanwhile, the hedgehog goes about his business of being a hedgehog. While he may be aware of the fox, he is totally unconcerned and perhaps a little amused at his dogged persistence and utter failure. Being a hedgehog, he will simply curl up in a ball with spines pointing outward and wait for the danger to pass.

The lesson we learned was to choose our specific path in business – between that of a fox who is talented in many things and the hedgehog who is talented in one big thing. In truth, we are both. Yet the lesson of the hedgehog is way too powerful to ignore and indeed it led us to our own hedgehog concept – three important things we learned as a result of this lesson.
  1. What drives our economic engine?
  2. What are we passionate about?
  3. What can we be the best in the world at doing?
The answers surprised us.

We typically pride ourselves in our four core competencies: reaching senior-level decision makers, situational fluency, needs-based probing, and creating urgency to close sales. Over the years, we have developed a number of really unique processes to teach and develop the skills required to get past the gatekeepers, identify when and how an opportunity exists, fully qualify the opportunity, effectively resolve objections and create that sense of urgency in the customer to take the next steps.

Of course, we knew that we were the best in the world at providing fully qualified leads to our clients. And, we were passionate about both the work and the value it brings our clients. It is at item #3 that we were forced to take a deeper look as we asked ourselves, “What specific measure substantiates our claim to be the best in the world at lead generation?” Is it that we can prove beyond all doubt that we find more leads than any other comparable company? Is it that we can prove that the measured return on investment of the leads we generate is greater than those generated by our competitors? Can we demonstrate that our people have better dialogs than everyone else?

We determined that there is no measure to prove we are the best at generating leads. Research suggests that 70% of all leads generated by marketing are long-term opportunities and are not followed up by sales anyway. While it’s true that we may maintain the dialog over time, nurturing the opportunity until there is an urgency to act by the lead, the fact is that we don’t always hear about the lead that turned into a sale then or later.

We became willing to set that measure aside and take another look at what we can be the best in the world at doing and prove to ourselves and our clients that we are the best. And so began our enduring relationship with the hedgehog.

Our hedgehog concept is to be the best in the world at events, with a steadily increasing qualified attendee ratio.

We brought our knowledge and skill from decades of lead generation calls in the high tech space to the IT event space, where results are more easily measured and we can directly influence the outcome. Registrants either attend or don’t attend an event. We struggled at first because the passion was not there. It was not until we seized upon the opportunity to qualify the registrant in the same way so that we could qualify the lead,  that we realized we were onto something bigger that we could be passionate about. And it was finally when we confronted item #3 that we truly got  really excited.

What is the measurement that proves we are the best? Certainly not the number of registrants. Before we started to engage our hedgehog, we operated like most other  companies providing event registration services – we measured our value by the number of registrants. To be the best in the world, more would be required of us. We changed our focus from registrants to attendees and ultimately recognized that the measure that matters most is the number of qualified attendees for each event.

We came to view the event as an opportunity to bring buyers and sellers together. Of course, not every registrant attending an event is actively looking to buy. Based on research that at any given time 10% of the market is in a buying process, it seems reasonable to expect that 10% of attendees might be buying too. With 50 attendees, we challenge ourselves to find 5 buyers – a 10% qualified attendee ratio.

Since these early efforts to find our inner hedgehog, we have continued to evolve our hedgehog concept and develop the processes that support it and to educate our clients on the unique value it brings to the market.

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