Archives for the month of: February, 2017
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The Five Pound Bag of Manure

February 27, 2017 //
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There is a phrase used colloquially in business: ‘trying to fit 10 pounds of manure into a 5-pound bag.’ OK, so the word manure isn’t usually used, but here it deputises nicely for its much more graphic and vulgar counterpart. You get the message; it conjures up a vivid image of what happens when we don’t prioritise well.

It’s a topic I’ve dwelt on before and it goes back to how well we manage our own time.

You can’t get everything done that you want to during the day, so list the things you have to get done and estimate the time it will take you to do each of them. Then rank them by importance, rather than urgency. Then work down the list and figure out how many you can do in the day. You’ll not get to the others. If item 1 is going to take you more than the full day, then you need to break it up into manageable chunks, which you can then re-rank.

Sometimes I pick off the smaller, less important jobs first, but this is high risk because then you might be looking at a very long working day since you have to get the most important job finished before you clock out.

If you don’t take a prioritising approach to your work, you’ll see your key projects drag on far longer than they should.

So should you be spending your precious time on the advice dispensed in this blog? If it helps you be more productive and successful, then of course.

That said, and from my own personal perspective, I don’t know how this blog gets done 3 times a week. Probably because I don’t view it as work. It’s more like living in another country. The longer you stay, the more used to it you become, and the harder it is to move.

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Categories General

Thanking Your Suppliers

February 24, 2017 //
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Here’s a thing. In business we’re maniacally focused on our customers. We even call them clients, or patients even in the caring professions. Everything we do revolves around them. We work hard to win them, and in the private sector we thank them, take them to lunch and send them corporate gifts. This is something I write about in my first ever blog post here.

I have customers in my business too, and I try to look after them so that there’s a fair exchange of value between us.

What I also really focus on as well is my suppliers. Often we treat our suppliers with a fraction of the care we provide to our customers. Whereas our customers are on the highest pedestal, our suppliers are often the afterthought in the basement.

Good suppliers are absolutely critical to your success, especially if you’re in an industry where you take what your supplier gives you and build on it or resell it for your own wellbeing. I don’t send Christmas cards to friends or family. They have plenty of them already. I send Christmas cards, each with a personal note, to all my suppliers thanking them for their service, help or support during the year.

Are you in the habit of thanking your suppliers? Do you award the best ones with a ‘supplier of the year’ accolade? If you do, you’re in a pretty small minority. You’re bucking the trend. When the world zigs, you zag.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Rarely What You Expect

February 22, 2017 //
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Things in business or life rarely turn out exactly as you thought they would. They’re rarely what you expect.

The other day I was working on a customer project that relied on two third party companies for help. My experiences of dealing with the two companies, and the opinions I formed about them, led me to the following conclusion. One company – let’s call it company A – was going to help me out and it was going to be a fruitful exercise. The other – which you’ve probably guessed is company B – probably wasn’t going to oblige too much.

As it turned out I was completely, 180 degrees, wrong. A didn’t go anywhere and B was superb.

It reminded me that even though you can go into things with a positive frame of mind, hoping that all engagements will work out for you, you can often get your assumptions wrong. While it’s great to act on a hunch in the absence of anything solid to go on, we have to check our facts where possible, speak to people and see things through. I’m sure there have been many times when I’ve said to myself, ‘why didn’t I get to this before, why didn’t I speak to them sooner?’ Is that true for you too? If so, it’s probably because things are rarely what you expect.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Nom de Plume

February 20, 2017 //
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When you decide to publish a book, and put it out there for the world to consume, critique or ignore completely – either consciously or unwittingly – you have to decide what author’s name you’re going to use.

At first glance this might be an obvious choice, namely your own name. Then again, you might opt for a nom de plume. So it’s a decision between nom de plume or not de plume, you might say.

When it’s your own name, the not de plume option, there is the advantage of leveraging off and building on the reputation and social media equity you already have. Sounds obvious. But, there is a surprisingly long list of reasons why you might want to go down the nom de plume path. Here’s 9 I can think of off the top of my head:

  • you can distance yourself from your actual name
  • it allows you to forge a new identity that’s different from your ‘real’ one
  • it keeps you safer in the event of adverse reactions, mushrooming fame or notoriety
  • you can stay under the radar
  • your actual name may already be taken
  • your actual name might be not be easy on the eye, tongue or ear
  • your actual name might not be memorable
  • you can make something cool up
  • you can explicitly or esoterically doff your hat to someone you respect and want to acknowledge

Of course, if you go nom de plume then you do have to overcome the advantage of not de plume and build a following out of nothing, which is a lot of work.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing

Single Point of Failure

February 17, 2017 //
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A regular refrain of mine on this blog is the single point of failure. Generally confined to transportation and infrastructure, it provides us with an instant reminder of how fragile the thread is that binds us to our daily lives.

We had a major burst water main recently in the local area. It took out the entire town and surrounding area, for more than 24 hours. No showers, no washing up, no toilet flushing. These are just household things, though, they’re easily manageable for a relatively short time.

But what about people running businesses? What about hospitals, veterinary establishments, garages, other things that rely critically on water? I hope they had – and have – a plan B.

Ironically, out here in the country, quite a few folk have their own wells, avoiding water bills and also drawing on Ireland’s plentiful – not to say incessant – rainwater supplies.

So, in some cases, the less civilised we are, in the sense of being city-tied, the more resistant we can make ourselves to the single point of failure.

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Categories General

Why Can’t I Demo Your Stuff?

February 15, 2017 //
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In this Internet-enabled age buyers often know as much as we do about what we’re selling. They’ve usually done their homework, researched the alternatives, and – most importantly – asked their peer group what their experiences of the alternatives are.

Gone are the days when we knew more than them and we could act like masons, jealously guarding our information and secrets. Customers now are used to self-serve and the most savvy companies are making it possible for buyers to buy their stuff with no or a light touch. After all, why step in front of a moving train? Why increase the cost of acquisition when they’re in buy mode?

Imagine how frustrating it must be, then, for B2B buyers of complex software systems who can’t demo your software on their own, without your intervention? What signal does it send to the buyer if it’s hard or impossible to try your software for themselves:

  • I’ll think your system is too expensive
  • I’ll not see the value unless you explain it to me
  • It’s too hard to use, too hard to navigate
  • It doesn’t look good
  • It’s clunky
  • It falls over

The list goes on…

The challenge for the purveyor of complex, comprehensive B2B software is to simplify it without compromising on power. The challenge for the purveyor of poor B2B software is to fix it before you’re no longer the best of a bad lot.

The provider’s response might be that they can’t sell to a buyer unless they understand the seller’s requirements and how the system can help them address those requirements better than anything else. This shouldn’t stop the provider using content, guiding the buyer to that conclusion and packaging a bunch demos of their software to back up each argument.

Low touch is the pathway to no touch.

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Technology

1000 LinkedIn Connections

February 13, 2017 //
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I reached a thousand connections on LinkedIn the other day. Given that I almost never connect with someone I don’t know or have not worked with, I consider this a function of my advanced years that I’ve been able to accumulate what is in theory a valuable network.

Of course, there are various tiers to this network. Some of the people in it I actually can’t remember, so I either worked with them very briefly a long time ago or I connected with them when I was under pressure to break my 2 cardinal rules. Others I know better, and others again are part of a small coterie I know very well and would reach out to for help or to give help.

Interestingly, I only realised I was on 998 connections after I had sent out 3 connection requests. I wondered who would be connection number 1,000. Number 999 would be in the top 3 of all my connections influence-wise, and would be a well known name in the Ireland business community. Number 1,000 was someone relatively senior in the UK with whom I have only recently starting working. Number 1,001 is a friend of a friend who has not accepted my request yet.

Getting to a 4-figure network, which I consider to be a genuinely powerful network rather than one of those that is ten times the size and built for the sake of quantity not quality, reminded me how little I currently leverage the network that I have worked so hard to build up over the last 10 or 12 years. I must do better with this important, sleeping giant of an asset…

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Technology

The Smart Smartphone

February 10, 2017 //
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The other day I went into my home office before starting work and noticed that one of my apps required an update before it would work. I think I was checking in for a flight. Anyway, I’m a bit lazy with updating apps, so I decided to update all 20-something apps that needed updating at the same time.

I plugged the phone into my computer and starting work, thinking nothing of it. Ten minutes later I get a message from my phone company that I have used up 80% of my monthly data allowance, and I might want to keep an eye on it…I did, I never exceed my data allowance.

Then I realised that – d’oh – I wasn’t connected to my home network wirelessly. The night before I was low on battery and, not wanting the battery to give up the ghost before the alarm went off, I switched off the wireless and the bluetooth.

Call me old fashioned but I would have thought that a genuinely smart smartphone would go through the following process in about 4 milliseconds:

  • Do you know what, this guy’s downloading a ton of stuff, he’s not connected to the wireless and his wifi is not switched on
  • Location accuracy isn’t great without wireless but I can tell from his GPS location that he’s at home, which is odd
  • I’m going to send him a quick message to let him know that he might want to activate his wifi and connect to his wireless to save on data charges…

Those kinds of situations where the phone never forgets but the human does…it’s not that much to ask, is it?

 

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Categories Communication, Customers

Revenue Avenue

February 8, 2017 //
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There’s a guiding principle for all businesses, regardless of their size, industry or stage of life. It applies across the business or for a specific project or initiative within the business.

What’s the revenue avenue?

By which I mean, what is the quickest path towards revenue? What do we need to do to get the sales? After all, nothing really happens in a business until somebody sells something.

Sometimes we can get too caught up in the planning, or do too much analysis, or maybe overcomplicate our strategy, making it too hard for ourselves. When this happens, we need to keep it as simple as we can and ask ourselves what we need to do to get it going, to get the revenues going.

It’s far easier to make decisions for the future of the business from a position of income. Always look to take the revenue avenue.

 

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Genuinely New Idea

February 6, 2017 //
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What do you do when you come up with what you think is a genuinely new idea for a business, product or service? Inventions, as we all know, are 1% perspiration and 99% inspiration, so you probably still have one foot in the starting blocks even though you have a great idea.

Maybe it’s such a great idea, so obvious that when you make it a success people will say ‘that’s so obvious, why didn’t I do that?’. Maybe you don’t know if it’s been done before and you’re anxious to get it off the ground before someone else who’s better resourced and financed than you comes in .

I’m not an expert in this area, as I tend to help people scale their start-up, which is a step or few beyond what I’m describing here. Nevertheless, there are two things you can assess pretty easily. First, does this thing, or something close to it, already exist? Second, is there a market for it?

If it doesn’t already exist, it’s often a good indicator of viability if your idea dovetails into some of the emerging mega-trends. You need to look out for articles like this one from people who know the field. Who knows, you might be nicely aligned with some of the future ‘big things’. There’s no guarantee that someone somewhere isn’t already developing precisely your new idea, and you could argue that if it’s been identified as an emerging trend you’ve missed the boat, but who knows, there might be room for more than one player in the truly hot areas.

Sometimes it’s a genuinely new idea that there isn’t a market for, and we’ve all had those, probably several of them. And perhaps it’s a genuinely new idea that we don’t have time to work on, because of other commitments. I had a genuinely new idea about two years ago. I researched it and nothing like it existed, which amazed me, because it seemed so obvious. Two years on, I’m still working on my idea, and it still doesn’t exist.

At some point, you have to forget the genuinely new idea and move on, or go for it. Nothing ventured…

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology
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