Archives for category: Communication
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Blog Length

August 9, 2019 //
2

What’s the right blog length for a post? Isn’t a bit like asking how long a piece of string should be, and that of course depends on the purpose for the string.

That said, there’s never a shortfall of best practice articles trumpeting the right length for a blog post. It’s an old chestnut, and it keeps changing. A few years ago it was about 450 to 500 words. These days, for long term SEO they reckon 1600-1800 words, which is clearly way more than 500 words, and waaaay more than my typical post. Perhaps the advice is not exclusively for blog post content, but you get the impression it is.

As with all things marketing, you have to keep your objective in mind. SEO is about attracting people to your stuff and building a following. I’ve always said that the purpose of my blog is rather self-serving, to keep the discipline of writing, in which case I can make them as short or long as I like. As it happens, they retain a striking consistency of length.

The current vogue for longer ‘anchor’ or ‘capstone’ blog post content doesn’t seem to hurt Seth Godin. An early inspiration for my own blog, Mr G seems to have garnered an immense following with a pithy style and length that hasn’t changed in a decade. Mind you, he has broken ground in marketing on numerous occasions and has a large bunch of other strings to his bow.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

Blogworthy

August 7, 2019 //
0

Often it’s just a nugget of information, a flash of a thought, or a sideways comment that provides the inspiration for one of my short posts.

So what is blogworthy? What idea, opinion or story is worth a pauldilger.com blog post? Firstly, it’s got to be robust enough an observation that I can spend a minimum of four short paragraphs on it. You can cast your eye over the previous 900-plus blog posts, but I don’t think I’ve ever written one less than four paras.

Secondly, I sometimes invoke the rule that if I don’t remember it, it’s not blogworthy because it’s not memorable enough for me to retell. I don’t often invoke the rule though, because I’m middle aged and my brain can’t retain thought like it used to, especially if I’m concentrating on something else at the time.

These days I almost always write down the blog title, on my phone or a scrap of paper. Usually the title on its own, sometimes an explanatory sentence or two if the title is a little cryptic.

Thirdly, if I can’t remember the central premise of the short descriptor, I don’t write it. How could I?

I’ve lost far too many blog post ideas to try and hold them in my head. When you’re nearing the 4-figure mark for total posts you can’t keep dipping into a finite well.

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Categories Communication, Marketing, Strategy

The Handshake

August 2, 2019 //
0

You can tell a lot from a handshake. First impressions and all that.

It’s not that the handshake is the only component of greeting someone. It’s the accompanying smile, the eye contact, the body facing the other person.

I once attended a corporate speaking engagement where the guy said the optimal time to clasp someone’s hand in a business handshake is 2 seconds. Anything shorter is a touch disrespectful, anything more is uncomfortable for the other person. Then there’s the angle of hand of the person leading the handshake. Palm down is a power play, palm up is subservient but also friendly.

As I said, it’s not only the handshake. It’s about eye contact, a ready smile, and physical engagement. I’ve seen people line up a handshake and actually be turned away for the moment of contact as they move onto the next person or thing. Not good.

When I shake someone’s hand, I extend my hand upright, with the arm at three-quarter length. A straight arm and they’re too far away, half arm makes them come into your personal space, another power play. My fingers are slightly splayed to stop someone gripping too soon and getting your fingers and none of your hand. I smile, face the person properly and apply a medium grip. If someone has a strong grip I increase my grip pressure; if a weaker grip I ease off on the grip. I don’t bother to adjust the angle of the power player’s or servile/friendly hand, as you’re advised to do. I simply go with it. Ladies and Gents, a medium grip is the minimum really. You don’t want to offer some a wet fish, and you don’t need a handshake like a docker’s vice to assert your personality.

Always good to say one’s name slowly to help the other person remember it. Telling them it’s good to meet them never hurts either.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

An Irish Secret

July 31, 2019 //
0

There is such a thing as an Irish secret, at least according to my in-laws. It goes something like this:

‘I told you that in confidence! No-one’s supposed to know, it’s supposed to be a secret.’

‘I only told my [insert family member of choice], honest!’

‘So?! Which part of secret were you not getting?’

‘No, no, I thought it was an Irish secret…’

‘Meaning?’

‘With an Irish secret you only tell one person at a time.’

Interesting concept. A secret is one of those absolute things. It’s either a secret or it isn’t. In reality, of course, it’s not absolute and you could argue there’s no such thing, unless only one person in the world knows and how plausible is that? Maybe you could argue that it doesn’t actually exist if only one person knows it – rather like the tree falling in the forest not making a sound because nobody heard it – and only becomes a secret once more than one person knows…

It appears from a communication point of view that there are degrees of information, from narrowcast or one-to-one up to broadcast, and secrets are no different.

If you’re genuinely the only person – or one of a very small number – that the secret-holder has told, and you keep your promise until the original secret-holder decides that the secret can be told, then you are a secondary secret-holder of high worth and value, in my view. Not easy, or sometimes desirable, to do. If the secret is bad, and someone has suffered adversely, then you can make the reverse argument and all bets are off.

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Categories Communication, General

Startegy

July 24, 2019 //
0

I feel sure, without any empirical evidence to back it up, that some of the greatest inventions, jokes, phrases and so on started their lives as a mistake. A transcribing error, a misheard comment, a miscommunication, or maybe misheard lyrics.

The title of this blog post is no typo, I meant to write it. But it did begin as a typo, when I was writing an email on strategy, and wrote startegy instead.

When you think about it, strategy is all about starting, about getting started. It can sometimes be daunting to ‘do’ strategy. There are processes to follow, people to involve, data to collect, decisions to be made. Then you have to execute on it, as strategy is nothing without execution.

If you’re stuck, start! Somewhere, anywhere, to get the process moving and make the early mistakes.

My typo reminded me that strategy is as much about doing as it is about thinking, planning and plotting. Startegy – the science of starting.

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Categories Communication, General, Strategy

Demand Degeneration

July 22, 2019 //
0

Ask any business leader what their primary business challenge is and you’ll often hear words like ‘demand’, ‘pipeline’ or ‘more, better leads’. There are very few businesses that can rely on a never-ending stream of inbound enquiries from prospects or customers looking to buy.

Generating demand is generally the domain of the marketing department, although in business-to-business environments it’s not uncommon for the sales people to be expected to find or develop about half of the demand themselves. Many businesses therefore take a well resourced, scientific and automated approach to being in the right places with the right content to engage those people looking to fix a problem or exploit an opportunity.

Despite what you might have read from the minority of practitioners who’ve written or published ‘how to’ books, blogs or videos on the subject, while the principles are straightforward the practice is hard, especially when the business has a relentless demand for high quantity, high quality expressions of interest to keep its costs of acquisition at manageable levels. What often happens is that instead of demand generation you get demand degeneration, by which I mean a lack or shortfall of pipeline for your products and services.

What are the reasons for this? As you might expect, they’re many and varied. Incorrect market sizing, poor segmentation, a lack of understanding of the customer, inferior or inappropriate content, and insufficient or manually dependent activities are some of the common reasons. There’s also a requirement to stay current with trends and technologies in demand generation, since ways of engaging with customers have a natural lifecycle that means they won’t always be productive and will be replaced by new ways.

It takes a relentless drive and relentless inquisitiveness to engender relentless interest in something. That’s a pretty tall order to avoid demand degeneration, and the good business will recognise this and have in place parallel activities like customer advocacy to keep the pump primed.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy, Technology

The Right Hockey Stick

July 17, 2019 //
0

“Daur “Hockey” Sticks” by Gary Lee Todd, Ph.D. is licensed under CC PDM 1.0

I’ve been in business for a good 30 years or so. For most of those years I remained confused about a phrase that a lot of my North American colleagues used.

‘We’re looking for hockey stick growth,’ they would say, ‘that elusive hockey stick growth curve.’ This image always left me flummoxed. After all, who wants to see a massive downturn in growth before you see the upswing? You might not survive the downturn…

I finally realised that I wasn’t thinking about the right hockey stick. In fact I was thinking about the right hockey. Hockey, or ‘Ice Hockey’, to give it its full name, is hugely popular in North America, and has a flat bottom part and then bends up in a straight line, the sort of sales growth envied the world over.

In Europe, hockey is field hockey, not anywhere near as popular in North America, and uses a differently shaped stick with a curved part where you hit the ball. Not the shape you want for sales growth…

Confusion over!

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Categories Communication, Planning, Sales, Strategy

A Few Words on CRM Systems

July 15, 2019 //
0

The goal of underlying sales and marketing technology is that it is the slave, not the master, to your organisation. Automating your processes will enable you to embed and reinforce best practices throughout your organisation. The collection and inputting of good data and managing interactions for the complete customer journey will ensure you have visibility into your organisation, give you the insights to do accurate business planning and allow you to demonstrate your compliance.

Customer Relationship Management (‘CRM’) systems fulfil these responsibilities for your organisation. They are the machine to power your business, but are limited by the fuel you give them – in this case the quality and accuracy of information you import, enter and store. You can customise many CRM systems to suit your own business processes. You can also enhance them by integrating additional specialist software from third party organisations.

The CRM industry is extremely cluttered and competitive. There is a vast array of CRM systems, which vary appreciably in cost, functionality, reporting, flexibility, ease of use and size of their third party software ecosystem. It’s important to select the system which offers the best fit to your requirements and the long term vision you have for your organisation.

These 8 aspects will give you a solid structure to define your technology requirements, before shortlisting the alternative providers:

  • Your objectives for the technology
  • The functions within your organisation
  • The tasks you want to automate
  • The information you want to record
  • The metrics you want to measure
  • The users you want to enable
  • Their requirements
  • Your budget to accomplish these things

Think about your requirements as deeply as you can before you take the plunge. Companies often find that once they start using an implemented system there are additional things they didn’t think about that would have further influenced either their choice of system or how they customised and implemented it.

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

Some Thoughts on Sales Management

July 12, 2019 //
0

The best sales managers don’t micromanage their staff nor obsess over the numbers all day. The best managers have the right people on their team, all consistently selling the same way. They maximise their teams’ selling time and minimise their paperwork. They do structured deal reviews on key opportunities, offering advice and direction where needed.

They best sales managers focus on the few key metrics that determine success for their business. They champion the right behaviours and values. They call out their top performers and celebrate the example they lead. They forecast accurately and confidently, allowing the organisation to plan accordingly. They have the right technology in place to automate good behaviours and free themselves up to coach their teams.

Here are 8 areas that I think are key to great sales management:

  • How to design sales quotas, sales compensation and resourcing
  • How to do deal reviews
  • Pipeline values, composition and movement
  • Buying process, sales process and how forecasting relates to them both
  • How to define the behaviours and metrics for success
  • Pinpointing areas for improvement in individual sales people
  • How to conduct sales meetings
  • How to plan for growth

I’m sure there are others you’d want to add, but if you can master these 8, you’re well on your way to being the best sales manager.

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Categories Communication, Sales, Strategy

Sales Skills

July 10, 2019 //
0

How good are your sales people? How do they manage the sales opportunities and their existing accounts? You won’t be surprised to know that sales people need skills for the whole customer journey.

Here are the first 12 aspects that come to mind when selling to a new customer:

  • How they prospect
  • How they qualify
  • How they prepare
  • How they manage the calls, meetings, presentations and demonstrations
  • How they challenge the customer and manage objections
  • How they strategise on the opportunity and the competition
  • How they navigate the customer organisation
  • How they stay focused
  • How they win the customer
  • How they negotiate
  • How they close
  • How they hand over to implementation, support and account management

Within account management, the business of selling to existing customers, another half dozen aspects emerge:

  • How they grow the account
  • How they ask for referrals within the customer’s business and outside it
  • How they make the customer an advocate for the organisation
  • How they renew the customer’s business
  • How they do account planning for their key accounts
  • How they do account planning for their other accounts

Command of these different areas corresponds directly to the trust that the sales person establishes with their customers and the esteem with which they are held in the organisation and their industry.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
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