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Nothing Beats Face to Face

January 11, 2019 //
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Remote working, teleconferences, videoconferences, skype calls: they are the new norm, with many companies now embracing the idea of some of their staff working from home or satellite offices some of the time.

It’s very efficient too, for both parties, cutting down on overheads, time and travel, and reducing the effects of poor weather on schedules. You have to work harder to overcome the communication and confusion issues that can arise when you’re not in the same physical room as someone, but that’s OK.

However, to get the best out of working relationships, the absolute best, nothing beats face-to-face. You’ve got body language, facial expressions and the sheer presence of someone next to you on your side. If you want to sort out a disagreement, or clear a misunderstanding, get people together. When it comes to sales and marketing of products and services that carry a decent value, and a decent trust element, nothing beats seeing the whites of each other’s eyes.

It doesn’t have to be face-to-face all the time, simply once in a while will do it. Last month I caught up with 2 groups of people I’d been meaning to catch up with for a long time. Now we’ve met, we’re more front of mind for each other, the priorities have risen up the stack and we’re moving projects forward.

Like I say, even when or if we become used to hologram drop-ins and clone stand-ins, nothing will beat face-to-face.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Technology

When is a Sale a Sale?

January 9, 2019 //
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I saw the headline of an article the other day, and clicked on it, because it looked of interest. Except I had clicked on for the wrong reason, or at least my analysis was wrong.

The headline was: When is a Sale a Sale? I thought it was a cool article about defining when you have successfully closed a sale; some new insight on sales methodology. What we would call closing a deal in B2B. Is it a sale because the customer commits to the order verbally? Is it the receipt of the PO or the contract? Or is it the payment of the invoice or the handover of the cash?

In fact it was nothing of the sort. The article was a consumer-focused piece about what constitutes a selling event, the other kind of sale. It was about the retail industry trending towards a state of permanent sales and how difficult it is now to differentiate a true sales event and a retail status that is claiming ‘special’ sales status when it really isn’t.

Not to mention how difficult it is for retailers to get out of that sales spiral and protect their margins.

So, two different kinds of sale, and I clicked through under false pretences, but an interesting skim-read nonetheless.

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

Seventh Year of Blogging

January 2, 2019 //
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Well, a happy new year to you, if you, like I, follow the western Gregorian thingamabob.

2019 marks the seventh year during which I’ve blogged – not yet my seventh year blogging if you follow the distinction – since I put my first blog post down in September 2013. Since then it’s been a 3-times-a-week, Monday-Wednesday-Friday thing, regular as clockwork.

By the end of this year, I’ll be about a dozen posts short of 1,000 blog posts. Once you get into 4-figure territory, that probably puts you in the top 1% of bloggers in terms of output. I don’t think I’ve ever been the top 1% of anything, yet I’m willing to bet that it will feel exactly the same in early 2020 when I hit that threshold.

If you’ve read at least one of my blog posts in each of those 7 years, then I thank you, and I also admire you in equal measure.

If you’re still reading at this point, I’d like to wish you a most healthy and prosperous 2019. May it bring you almost all, but not absolutely all, that you hoped for. Stay hungry – not literally.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Why Are You in Business?

December 28, 2018 //
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When we’re taught the rudiments of writing a press release, we’re sometimes encouraged to get to the ‘five w’s’ in the first paragraph. Who, What, When, Where, Why?

Why is often the last W to be addressed, and it’s probably the most important W. Why are we doing this? What impact are we hoping to have?

I remember an ad campaign for a national newspaper a few years ago, for a broadsheet rather than a tabloid, which was all about the why. I thought it was a great campaign. The answer to why is this happening or why did this happen is the most informative answer.

Why is a very pertinent question to ask in business as well. Why are we doing this? Why are we in business? This is a concept popularised by Simon Sinek in his book Starting With Why. I hadn’t heard about the author or the concept until a good friend told me about it some time ago. It’s a really simple and profound way of thinking about your business or your organisation and what its purpose for existing is.

I love the concept, but I haven’t read the book yet. It’s sitting digitally on my Kindle, working its way up my list and I’ll get to it over the holidays. What we do is something every company knows. How we do it is something that a smaller proportion of them knows. Only the very special ones understand, throughout the organisation, why they do what they do, why they’re in business in the first place, and that’s where great organisations should start. If you don’t have the time or the inclination to read the book, take exactly 5 minutes to watch this abridged TED talk, it’s well worth it.

Then you can ask yourself the question why are you in business. And if you don’t have a good answer, maybe start a new organisation with a new answer.

 

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Value Added Tax

December 26, 2018 //
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Value Added Tax, now there’s a misnomer if ever there was one. Is it a tax on value added goods, or in fact almost anything of value? Or is it the tax itself that is adding value? It’s confusing. Is it virtually fat-free milk or virtually fat-free milk?

We pay tax on our income, we pay a national insurance contribution, and depending on the country we reside in we pay a range of other taxes as well, like the Irish ‘universal social charge’, corporation tax, property tax, community tax and inheritance tax. Nothing wrong with tax of course, as long as national and local governments are providing good value in the form of social services for the income they make. There’s that word value again.

Scandinavian countries pay very high taxes, but people are very highly paid too and those countries lay on a superb array of social services.

Value Added Tax, or VAT for short, is a huge earner for governments, and an increasingly large number of different goods and services get drawn into the VAT net. How long before children’s items and basic items are forced to join the fold?

The level of VAT varies too. In Ireland it’s 23% for example. In the UK it’s 20% but a glance at the history books will tell you that it’s been creeping up from a low of 8%.

But really it’s the name that jars with me. Before VAT was called VAT in the UK it was called purchase tax, which is much closer to the mark.

I think I’ve always preferred the US term ‘sales tax’. Because that’s what it is. Simple, really. It’s no longer a tax on ‘value added’ good and services, it’s a tax on most things that are sold.

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Categories Customers, Sales

New Biz or Existing Biz for Scaling SaaS Companies

December 24, 2018 //
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A while back I wrote a post called Churn or Growth for Startups, and referenced the excellent content from the VC blogger Tom Tunguz. The answer was churn.

What should be the focus for the SaaS company looking to scale its business and grow at a rate that attracts heathy valuations and juicy multiples for an IPO or an exit? It’s grown by bringing on new companies and keeping them, so surely it should keep adding new logos, right?

The beauty of the SaaS model is that on the first of the year you can count on the revenues for all your customers who are renewing their annual commitment. Going from $80m to 100m in one year may seem like a giant jump, but the successful SaaS company has close to the €80 coming in during month 1, so it’s not such a big leap and, indeed, many such companies see themselves growing at phenomenal annual rates, far in excess of the 25% in my example.

The scaling company should focus on keeping and growing its existing customer base.

Have a look at this post from Mr Tunguz, which he said in an email recently was far and away the most popular post he did in 2018, 10 times more popular in fact than the next most popular post. Which is intriguing, since the post he links to is from 2016…

So startups should focus on preventing churn, and more established companies should focus on renewals, which is to say they should focus on preventing churn…

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Average SaaS Customer Length

December 21, 2018 //
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I was asked the other day what the average SaaS customer length is. I responded confidently that I thought it was about three-and-a-half years. My customer disagreed, though not without some uncertainty, and felt it was longer.

So I checked online, as you do, and I couldn’t find my three-and-a-half years statistic anywhere. Perhaps it was a customer I’d worked with previously that I was misremembering as an average. Anyway, I couldn’t find an average figure for customer churn anywhere. That’s because it depends.

It depends, of course, on the amount of customers you lose, otherwise known as your churn rate. Your average SaaS customer length is 1 divided by your churn rate. So if your churn rate is 5% per month, your average customer length is 20 months, which isn’t great. If it’s 10% per year, then your average SaaS customer length is 10 years, which is a whole lot healthier. Naturally, you can only make these calculations with a good body of data and some history behind you.

If you’re new to the game, then you need to do some research around average churn for the sector you sell into, or the size of company you sell into. To generalise grossly, churn rates tend to be lower the larger the customer you work with, since the deals tend to be bigger, more complex, more embedded, with a higher cost of sale, to generalise on the reasons as well.

If you want to read more on this, you might find this article, this one and this one useful.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Strategy

Old Habits Die Hard

December 19, 2018 //
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One of the most difficult challenges with sales training or sales effectiveness – and in fact any kind of change – is overcoming engrained behaviours. It’s only through repeated application of the new way, with all the pain and discomfort that comes with it, that the new way eventually becomes the accepted way and a second nature thing.

I was reminded of this recently in my table tennis endeavours. I’ve been playing competitively for decades, and I’ve always concentrated on putting the ball in different corners to move my opponent around. It is deeply and completely subconscious, after a million-plus repetitions.

I’ve been studying a lot of table tennis matches on youtube over the last few months, as I look for new ways to compensate for my gradual decline in fitness and sharpness due to Father Time’s relentless advances. I’ve noticed that a lot of the top players hit a lot of shots into the crossover, which is the awkward spot on the right hip – of the right-handed player – between the forehand and the backhand, effectively jamming them up.

This is not new. One of the first things we were taught as kids was hit to the corners against a short opponent, and into the middle for a tall player. Maybe twenty years ago our local club had a coaching session with a guest coach who again stressed the crossover tactic and quoted the statistic that the then star player in England, Desmond Douglas, would hit up to 40% of shots down the crossover.

I’ve been trying this with renewed effort over the last few weeks and – it’s really, really difficult! The sport is very quick and you don’t have much time to plan and execute. I find myself instinctively following my subconscious, time and time again.

The answer? As with sales, I need to practice more, and compete less, to untrain and retrain myself.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

350% Difference between Branded and Generic

December 17, 2018 //
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It’s well known that you pay more for branded products than their generic or knock-off equivalents. You get what you pay for, as the saying goes, but also you’re investing in the brand’s equity and goodwill, which comes at a price.

I was in a homeware specialist the other day, looking for an ‘Egg Perfect’, one of those clever things – or clever yolks as the Irish would say, and I like the pun in this context – that you pop into the water with your eggs and it tells you when they’re done to your preference by changing colour.

The price was €9, which I thought was a bit steep, but i’m familiar with the brand and they last ages, so I bought it. On the way home I dropped into a local store that sells almost literally everything. I’ve blogged about it before, in fact. They too had immersive egg timers, the generic versions. The price? €2.

So the branded version was 4-and-a-half times the cost of its imitator, a 350% difference. Which, I suppose, is not as bad as the difference between a Gucci handbag or a Rolex watch and their me too counterparts.

The proof’s in the pudding, so we’ll see how the two of them perform over time. Still, I did feel pained when I saw the €2 version. That’s a difference of about a pint and a half between the two of them.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

In Praise of Dublin’s LUAS

December 14, 2018 //
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I had occasion to go to Dublin for a lunch networking meeting the other day, which was nice. I was due to meet at 12 across town and the train got in around that time so I jumped in a cab.

We flew through the city, since cabs can use bus lanes and there’s plenty of them in Dublin. We got there in about 15 minutes, 12 bucks very well spent. Sometimes traffic can be snarled in Dublin, even for cabs, but at 12 noon it was surprisingly light.

After a very pleasant meeting I realised that I only had 40 minutes to get to my train. I was going to jump in another cab when a colleague mentioned that thanks to the newish LUAS extension I could now get to the station in the west of the city. I walked ten minutes to the LUAS stop and figured out my route and my fare. I got in a LUAS train in south central Dublin, went 3 stops to north central Dublin and then walked 5 minutes to another LUAS stop, which wasn’t the closest but I wanted to keep moving in the right direction.

I got on the second LUAS train at 16 minutes past the hour, and 4 stops later it deposited my at the intercity train station, at 25 minutes past the hour, giving me more than enough time to get my train at half past.

A great, fast, efficient service, at least from my experience of one data point. And all for the pauper’s sum of €2.10. A city which has a cheap, fast and efficient public transport system is a global city, in my view.

 

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Categories Customers, General
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