Archives for category: Communication
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Adventures in Travel – Not – Part III

August 8, 2014 //
2

Do you ever fly with ‘low fare’ airlines? I do, frequently. We are blessed with 2 in Ireland. One’s called Aer Lingus, the other is called Ryanair.

Aer Lingus used to be quite up-market. It still is up-market to the US, but has joined in the race to the bottom on the cut-throat European routes. The pilots are good too. As my son said to me a few years ago when he was 9 years old, ‘Daddy, can we fly Aer Lingus? Their planes land like shadows.’

Ryanair competes on price and punctuality. When it’s not punctual, you feel cheated, violated almost. The pilots are learning their trade while at Ryanair I think. The landings are as if they lose interest at an altitude of 2 metres and drop you onto the tarmac. Our landing the other day was bone-shakingly hard, even by Ryanair standards. We are talking a free chiropractic session thrown in for the fare.

Vertebra realignment anyone?

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Customers, General

Adventures in Travel – Not – Part II

August 6, 2014 //
0

UK train travel is legendarily expensive, and usually fashionably late.

I had occasion to travel from a major city to London the other day. It’s a major inter-city service, chocka-block full, where not to reserve a seat means you’re making your own seat.

There was no wi-fi on the train. Yes, you read that right, no wifi. This is 2014, in the first world. Heck, they’ve had wifi on Irish trains for years!

I find that unbelievable. For an international visitor, business as well as tourist, you rely on a reliable wifi service. Not to offer one, as part of such an expensive service, boggles the mind.

The train arrived fashionably late too.

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Customers, General

Adventures in Travel – Not – Part I

August 4, 2014 //
0

In the old days of travel, you never really knew when the bus was going to come along. Yes, there was a published timetable, but it only ever bore a passing acquaintance with reality. They came when they came, that was it.

Nowadays, as I observed in the UK recently, you have electronic signs telling you – presumably via GPS – when the next bus is due to arrive. I think this is supposed to manage your expectations better, but it still has only a passing resemblance to the agreed passage of time. This has the opposite effect of what is intended. Sometimes a bus will be 25 minutes away for half an hour, by which time you know it has been cancelled because the next one has turned up.

At other times the bus might be 8 minutes away, but the subsequent minutes are long ones, it being 2 minutes away for 2 minutes, then 1 minute away for 2 minutes, then ‘due’ for 2 minutes. Somewhere there’s an awful lot of rounding going on.

It’s progress, Jim, but not as we know it.

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Customers, General

Blog Post Length

August 1, 2014 //
0

Where do you stand, dear reader, on blog post length? I won’t tell you how many online column inches have ben devoted to this. The consensus is that it doesn’t matter, it depends. One thing they all seem to agree on, however, is that longer posts get linked to more often.

The conclusion they draw is that longer posts are therefore better. I take issue with this and offer a different explanation. The reason is tl;dr syndrome. Too long; didn’t read. People are busy, too busy to read long posts, so they just scan them.

This is how it goes: “Boy this is a long post. It’s good though, at least what I’ve read of it sounds good, but I can’t read any more, so I’d better share it anyway.”

So you get this kind of social media message: “Very interesting, important article on blah blah blah, worth a read.” Does this create a kind of social media maelstrom of mediocrity?

Better to create a blog post that people have time to get through properly, no?

 

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, Language

You Seldom Hear Seldom

July 23, 2014 //
0

Language change is neither progress or decay; it is simply change and is happening all the time. New words are constantly being coined and come into regular use, while some gradually disappear from favour with equal frequency.

One such example of the latter is ‘seldom’. It’s a handy word, being shorthand for ‘not very often’ and keeping sentences simpler because you don’t need to build a negative in. For example, you could say ‘you seldom hear that’, which is a good bit easier and more economical that ‘you don’t hear that very often.’

One occasionally hears middle-aged or older folk using the word, but never young people. Despite belonging to the former group, I don’t think I’ve ever used the word. It seems old-fashioned and a touch quaint to me, which befits its somewhat ancient and quirky origins.

I put it alongside that other old-fashioned word which also saves you a negative, namely ‘lest’. I give it as another example – lest you forget :-).

 

 

 

Tags
Categories Communication, Language

Latin and Greek clues to prepositions

July 16, 2014 //
1

One of the joys of having studied Latin and Greek at school and college is that sometimes you know what a word is even though you’ve never seen or heard it before, even if it’s on its own with no guiding context.

The example I always used to give was ‘autobiography’, composed of 3 Greek words: auto, meaning self; bio, meaning life; and graphy, meaning write. That’s an easy one though! Prepositions can give excellent clues as to what sense to make of compound words. To digress for one moment: the word preposition itself, somewhat deliciously, also contains a preposition. Anyway, take a Latin word like fero, meaning carry. It gives you all manner of compound words like infer, transfer, offer, differ and so on.

There must be a hundred prepositions in use; they’re jolly handy. Most of them give obvious clues, like inter of international – between, trans of translate – across, with the juicy bonus of the ‘late’ part being from the same root word as fero, and tele of television – also across.

I thought I’d share a few others with you that are perhaps less obvious and more obscure.

Epi (Greek for on as in on top of), which helps with the words epitaph, epigram, epidermis.

Peri (Greek for around), giving us the fabulous peripatetic, periphrastic and – unlucky for some usually in this context – peridontal. See how the second half of the word stays with the Greek and uses dontal for tooth, rather than the Latin dental? Cool isn’t it?

Ante (Latin for before, not to be confused with Anti which is against), giving us antediluvian, antecedents and anteater – just kidding about the last one…

Cata (Greek for down), hints at the meaning of catalogue, catastrophe and, somewhat uncomfortably I would imagine, catheter.

Cum (Latin for with), giving us a host of words beginning with co-, like collusion, convention, composition, colloquial and so on.

Ultra (Latin for beyond), leading to ultrasonic and loads of aspirational business product and service names like ultraflex.

The classical scholars among you will have noted that many ancient prepositions have multiple meanings in English. I have, for this post however, tried to stay with the main meanings. You could also make the argument, and be on pretty solid ground, that for every example I’ve given there are as many others where the preposition means something else.

It’s simply a guide. The only way is to immerse yourself in the language(s) and you’ll be the richer for it :-).

Tags , , ,
Categories Communication, Language

It Depends…

July 14, 2014 //
0

I’m all for clarity of communication. I prefer it to innuendo, nuancing and saying one thing and really meaning another. I guess that would make me a poor business person or negotiator in some parts of the world. I’d have to work harder to make progress in those more inscrutable, deferential and stratified societies.

When I can give a simple answer to a simple question, I will. The trouble is, in much of our working lives – and a lot of our family or private lives – the questions are rarely simple, even though the answers might be.

That’s why my favourite answer  – the one I almost always fall back on – is ‘it depends.’ You’re not fudging your answer. You want to give a good answer so you use it to buy more time and seek qualification to the original question so that you can answer it as well as you can.

Here’s an example:

‘Should we hire this person?’

‘It depends.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, it depends on our plans for the role that this person would be filling. If we are looking for someone who has done the job before and who will hit the ground running, then yes I believe we should. If the role is a stepping stone to a more strategic role where someone is looking for ways to evolve the department and where that someone will need to bring broader and softer skills, then probably not.’

Have a try yourself tomorrow with your customers, partners and colleagues. You’ll be surprised how many times this holding answer allows you to give a better answer later than an inaccurate answer earlier.

I guess it makes me more diplomatic than I thought :-).

Tags ,
Categories Communication, General, Language

Meetings, Bl**dy Meetings

July 9, 2014 //
0

“Meetings, Bloody meetings!” So goes the refrain – and the heading – in the hilarious management training videos from John Cleese’s company in the 1970’s. A well-run meeting is a rare and beautiful thing. A poorly run meeting – well that’s the norm in most companies. They become a forum for delaying or avoiding decisions rather than arriving at them.

In the sales world good, well-qualified meetings with customers and prospects who have budget, the power to make decisions, a need for your product and a timeframe for making a change are worth their weight in gold. Poor meetings are a waste of your time and their time – and time is the most precious resource. They’re not even good practice.

Many managers work off the principle that the more qualified meetings you have, the more deals you’ll close. It’s largely right of course. Take two sales people with identical abilities, identical opportunities, but one with twice the opportunities of the other, and one will close 12 deals and the other will close 6. The more calls you put in, the more conversations you have, the more meetings you make, the more quotes or proposals you submit, the more deals you win, as long as you’re following a defined sales process.

It’s not only about working harder to be more successful though. It’s about working smarter, and coaching people to work smarter.  If you want your team to be more effective – ie more successful – and you’ve identified that your team needs more meetings, there are a number of things you can do to increase the performance of your sales team without having to add to your sales team. Here are ten of them:

– Is a face-to-face meeting necessary? Would a (video)conference call do? Could we do a web-based meeting?

– what’s the travel time like to meetings, from meetings, between meetings? Could it be better organised?

– could our sales team be better split geographically to optimise the number of meetings?

– is our team properly prepared for the meetings, so that they can close deals with the minimum number of meetings?

– what are the behaviours that drive more meetings? Better leads, better telephone work, better sales skills, better emails and collateral?

– who’s doing well at meetings that we can celebrate so that others can learn from their best practice?

– who needs coaching or other support to get more meetings?

– what sales technology can we use to help us manage the sales process?

– what sales technology can we use to optimise meeting routes and geographical clustering?

– what sales technology reports on meeting productivity can gives us insight to make improvements and correct poor behaviours early?

Maximising your customer contact and minimising your non-contact activities help you maximise your sales success. If your business is relatively high deal volume and small deal size, you need to make this your mantra. Meetings, blessed meetings!

 

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, Customers, Planning, Sales, Technology

In a Perfectly Connected World

July 4, 2014 //
2

In a perfectly connected world, where we are all devices and / or IP addresses on the Internet in the so-called ‘Internet of things’, there would be less arguing, fewer disputes methinks.

“Oh, so you think you’ve been doing the dishes more often than me and you put the kids to bed the last 3 nights, do you? Well let’s take a look at the dashboard, shall we? Look, here we can see that I have clearly washed up the last 5 times, and in fact you put the kids to bed the last 2 nights, not 3, and I did the 4 nights before that – hah! Total domestic activities are 561 minutes for you since the start of the week, and 974 for me. You’ve done 1274 parenting minutes, I’ve done 1478, so there!”

I think we’re a long way away from Minority Report and the Department of Pre-Crime, but total 24/7/365 transparency of what we have done must be within the lifetime of at least someone’s reading this. We should be able to report on everything that happens in the past. This will have huge ramifications for society and things like big data. For example a region would know that 1,825 cases of rape were reported, but a further 6,467 cases occurred but were not reported.

This must lead to a safer, truer society, but at what cost?

 

Tags
Categories Communication, General, Technology

Being Off The Grid

July 2, 2014 //
0

When it comes to experiencing things, there are two kinds of people. The first type is those who, if they can’t actively follow something live, they follow it online while they’re doing something else. For example, getting updates on the Wimbledon semi-finals while you’re at work. The second type is those who, if they can’t experience all of it live, they want to shut the world away and experience it later, recorded, and have their own ‘private live’ – albeit somewhat delayed. The example of this is someone who doesn’t want to be disturbed with any updates on an event, and who rushes home unmolested by real-time devices or intrusions to watch or listen to the recording.

I belong to the former group. I can’t see the point of experiencing an event in a sterile environment that’s live only to you. It’s asocial rather than anti-social. Being off the grid – and staying off the grid, which some people prefer to do – is pretty hard to do, especially in this connected world we inhabit. If we haven’t bothered to configure our settings, our laptops and mobile devices get pinged all the time by social media updates. Our instinct is to check the ping, even if we’re on silent – I’d better check, it might be important – and before we know it, our concentration drops for a moment, we read the update unwittingly, and the surprise is gone.

From a sales and marketing point of view, we have customers and prospects who embrace always-on technology, and some that don’t. We also have customers and prospects who are the first kind of people and some that are the second kind. As sales and marketing professionals, we need to try to allow customers to interact with us by whichever means they prefer, which might be exclusively one, or both.

Ask yourself this question: if I work in a predominantly digital environment how should I serve my customers and prospects who prefer to be off the grid, who respond to traditional rather than digital forms of communication, who don’t want to be contactable sometimes? Do I actually want to serve them at all?

 

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »