Archives for category: Communication
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The 7-Step B2B Product Launch Process

January 25, 2016 //
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The product lifecycle can be a complicated beast and varies significantly within industries and regions. Not only that, the roles of people in an organisation who either contribute to or manage the product launch can differ quite markedly too. So, with that preamble done, am I drowning a whole series of process-forming posts before I’ve even started?

Not really, no. While job titles and jobs may vary, there are still some generalities and best practices that work for companies selling stuff – products or services – to other companies.

I see 7 broad stages to the B2B product launch process, and I’ll devote my usual post length – long enough to get your attention but not so long as to distract you from other priorities – to each one of them.

People have written 250-page books on managing the product launch. Then again, they’ve done the same for the B2B marketing process, sales cycle, and customer buying cycle, which are other B2B topics that I have addressed before with a total series length that wouldn’t stretch to a chapter.

But these aren’t text books. They’re the distilled experiences of mistakes I’ve made, lessons I’ve learned and the wisdom of people greater than I. I hope you enjoy them.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Personalisation vs Context

January 22, 2016 //
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True personalisation?

True personalisation?

I got this in my Facebook stream the other day. I can’t deny it’s eye-catching. It’s clearly a clever bit of code that allows an advertiser to drop each FB user name into their image.

It’s personalisation of a sort, but is it really personalisation, or is it simply clever code? I suspect the latter.

Context marketing has been around for a while, and is now getting some major attention as marketers get more sophisticated and better at deciding what content they can serve up to whom, when, rather than sending everyone everything.

But this isn’t context marketing, although it’s definitely targeted to me. FB is a hugely growing channel for B2C ecommerce, but as far as I’m concerned, although I’m the right person, it’s not the right content for me and it’s not delivered at the right time.

I still like it though :-).

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy

Minds

January 20, 2016 //
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The next time you find yourself gossiping about someone, or getting sucked into a reality television program, or letting destructive thoughts about that so-and-so invade your good humour, remember these words from Eleanor Roosevelt.

“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”

Rise above it all. The air’s nicer up there. Easier said than done of course, but you gotta keep trying, keep pushing.

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Categories Communication, General

Short Term – erm – Memory

January 18, 2016 //
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Short term memory. Lots of people complain that they have short term memory, fear that they’re losing their marbles.

Nothing of the sort. I forget things I heard in the recent past, but it’s not because I have short term memory issues. It’s because I haven’t engaged my brain properly.

There are plenty of self-help books to improve people’s recollection of names, people, events. The key thing to do is to listen – actively. There is of course a difference between hearing someone and listening to them, between seeing someone and looking at them, watching them. When you actively listen, when you put something small on the line that makes you establish a connection and fire a few more synapses than normal, you remember something, for a long time.

I can remember the names of attractive women I might have met only briefly at a party three decades ago. I can do the same with telephone numbers and car registration plates. Why? Because I had an interest in making the connection, so it elevated the information to a different part of my mental filing system.

So, if you want to get better at retaining information, concentrate more. Concentrate on actively listening and watching and making the right connection.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Sales

The Day Book

January 15, 2016 //
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I use a day book for work and play. It’s full of my appalling scrawl, which only I can read, occasionally. I like to take notes; it helps me commit things to memory.

Some people prefer to abandon paperwork altogether, preferring to keep their notes digital. I like to have my book with me and scribble away, unless I’m taking meeting minutes, in which case I will go digital too to save on time and avoid duplication.

Writing, or at least holding a pen, helps me think, and helps the thoughts flow and find meaning through meaningful connections.

My day book is my bible. It would be almost as bad for me to lose my day book as it would my laptop. I don’t like other people writing on it. I was once in a meeting with someone senior who I had only met that day, and who wanted to answer my question with an illustration. In a weak moment, I said he could use my notepad. He turned the page to the next double spread and scrawled away in the middle of it, a small two-by-two matrix he could have easily verbalised for me. In later days I ‘fenced off’ his scrawl and wrote notes from later meetings around it.

Here are some of the things I do to make my day book as useful as possible.

  • I use an A4-size lined note pad, with bound pages that can’t be easily ripped out or fall out. I find the smaller ones mean I don’t take enough notes
  • I always write the date down for each day I use the day book. This helps me retrieve historical notes if I need to refer back to them
  • From a self-preservation point of view, it’s sometimes useful to take records of important conversations, in case you have to say ‘no, actually you said this and we agreed this then’
  • When I scribble down an important point, I put an asterisk next to it. Then, when I’m gathering together my thoughts or action lists, I can quickly scan through my notes and harvest the important bits
  • If I have an unrelated thought of something I need to do, perhaps something personal like pay an important bill or phone someone about an important matter, I write it at the top of the page, above where the lines start
  • When I have a completed an action, I cross it out. If I’m updating a to do list, I cross out the previous one and add the outstanding actions to the latest list. That way I don’t have random actions that I may overlook littering my day book
  • I make all my notes bullet points, using either a further indented bullet or a curly arrow for a sub-point or the causal effect of my previous point. This has the effect of increasing white space around my notes and stops the text looking impenetrable
  • In the inside front cover of the day book is my email and address and mobile phone number, for the kindly soul who finds it to contact me so I can get it back
  • When I finish a day book, I carry the old book and the new one around together for a ‘transition’ week. I then store the old day book on a home office shelf, next to the previous old one, and keep them for a number of years, as if they were financial or legal records

Day books are great. They’re your indispensable companion for the weeks, months and years.

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Categories Communication, General

Enough to be Dangerous

January 13, 2016 //
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Ah, it’s a terribly fine line sometimes. A coin toss if you will. A little knowledge can be all you need to get you started, get some forward momentum and learn as you go. Sometimes it’s all the time you have, otherwise you miss the boat.

Then again, it’s not coincidental that we use the phrase ‘enough to be dangerous’.

A couple of decades ago, a friend of a friend of mine went to live with a Spanish-speaking family to improve his basic language skills. In his first week there, they went out to dinner together. The daughter was 17. During the course of the conversation something was said to make her blush. He wanted to ask her if she was embarrassed.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know the Spanish for embarrassed so took a guess. Worse still, his effort – embarazada – means pregnant. Not good. The father went apoplectic and he had to leave the family shortly thereafter.

Knowing enough cuts both ways. Ask yourself this, do you feel lucky? 🙂

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Intensity

January 8, 2016 //
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Do you know what really helps accelerate the sales cycle? Intensity.

Oftentimes you’ll hear about sports people – players or pundits – talking about having good intensity, or lacking intensity when their performance was flat. Intensity is about being fully engaged in the sale, and fully engaged with the customer, for want of a better word.

Intensity in a sales and business context is a word similar to the phrase ‘rightful impatience’, which a former boss of mine used to use. And you can add to that adjectives like enthusiastic, passionate and committed.

When you have the right intensity, you’re ‘in the moment’ more often with your customer, in sync with their requirements, their hopes and their concerns. This has the effect of bringing them more swiftly on the journey towards buying from you. You’re sweeping them up with your emotion, in a good way, a way that is focused on the mutual goal of their satisfaction.

In a selling relationship, it’s often not okay to be intense. This is a characteristic that some customers find difficult to work with. However it’s good to have intensity in your approach. There is an important difference here. Good intensity make good things happen more quickly.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Workflow – Work Slow

January 6, 2016 //
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Sometimes, when you’re too busy to see the work for the trees, it’s difficult to take a step back from what you’re doing and analyse if you could be doing it better.

Process is so important to what we’re doing. You have to get the right steps in place and then make sure you’re doing the steps in the right order.

When I was much younger I was staying in my Uncle’s pub for a while and I was washing his car. After a few minutes he came out and said, ‘what are you doing?’ ‘I’m washing the wheels,’ I replied. You see, the wheels are the fiddly filthy bits that I wanted to get out of the way first.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but now the water’s filthy for washing everything else. Start with the windows and glass first, then go from the top of the car down to the bottom. And start again with clean water.’

Process. You have to get the order right, and you have to do the right things too.

Workflow, as the name suggests, is about the flow of work, the process you go through. If you don’t get the workflow as good as it can be, you work slow, or you work poorly.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Strip Out Negativity

January 1, 2016 //
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My Mum has recently acquired two baby tortoises. They’re about 3 months old and both of them would fit on a dollar bill with plenty of room around and between them.

She’s called them Yin and Yang, because they’re quite different in personality. In fact they’re opposite, which makes their names pretty inspired I think.

It got me thinking about how you have to look at the other side of something to help you fix the first side. There are often two sides to every story or situation so it makes sense to look at both.

I blogged recently about staying positive. Of course, one of the best ways of staying positive is to remove the negative, to strip it away so that it becomes emasculated and weedy.

Staying healthy in body and mind, in business and in leisure, is a lot about stripping out negativity. Negativity is like a weight around your neck, pulling you down into the vortex. Free yourself from that weight and rise up. Fire up the hot air balloon and chocks away, to mix one’s aviation metaphors…

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Categories Communication, Customers, Strategy

The Demotion of Emotion

December 30, 2015 //
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When you’re in a discussion about something, and in descends into an argument, it inevitably becomes emotional. This is especially true and unhelpful in business.

In these situations you tend to get a lot of ‘heat’ and not much ‘light’. In other words, there’s too much emotion and not enough inspiration.

I have a short temper and I find it’s easy for me to let a discussion descend into something unhealthy. There should be no room for emotion when you’re trying to fix or improve something, yet we find it very hard not to give it a seat at the table.

I find it much easier to do in business, but you have to demote emotion and recognise it for what it is, an instinctive response to change, stress, and a loss of control. The better you can remove emotion from the equation, the easier it is to get the right answer, to get the sums to add up.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Sales, Strategy
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