Archives for category: Customers
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Statistical Sophistry

June 17, 2016 //
2

Statistical sophistry? What on earth do I mean by statistical sophistry, other than repeating it for improved SEO purposes?

Well, one of the first things we should all learn about statistics is that you can pretty much use them to illustrate any point you like. People use them all the time, because they add a layer of credibility to an argument or case. We’ve all heard the phrase that 48% of all statistics are made up on the spot – feel free to insert your own stat as you read this – but the dangerous thing about statistics is that they can be created, skewed and twisted to serve any purpose. You only have to ask the global political establishment.

Then there’s the sophistry. They used to bandy the term about in Ancient Greece to draw the differences between genuine philosophers and thinkers and the sophists who argued for the sake of things, using trickery, guile and superficial nonsense to dupe their audiences. I originally typed ‘dope’ there my mistake; maybe the typo is more accurate.

The key to interpreting all statistics is to look behind the numbers. What do they really mean? How were they arrived at? What was the sample size? How rigorous was the analysis? How objective was the work, or was it done to justify a preconceived view? Often you can’t answer all these questions, but it still pays to look behind the numbers and peer into the ‘why is information being presented to me in this way?’ abyss.

Just because you use a stat, doesn’t mean it’s true. People who use statistics responsibly and clearly are edifying and educating us. People who use them to distract or obfuscate are not. It’s up to us to keep our wits about us to distinguish the true philosophers from the sophists.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

A Sense of Urgency

June 15, 2016 //
0

A sense of urgency is the secret weapon of the self-starter. A self-starter adopts a sense of urgency because he or she understands that time is the most precious commodity, and wasted time can never be won back.

I try to instil this in my kids, with almost unwaveringly poor results. Whenever they’re asked to do anything around the house, or to get ready for school, they seem to head into a neutral gear, returning the aside I made to them once: ‘yes Dad, I’m on a sponsored go slow…’ They don’t buy into the concept of the sooner you start something and the quicker you do it, the quicker you can get onto something else. Either that, or they fly through jobs in a slap-dash fashion that necessitates a rework and the accompanying retort: ‘if only you’d done it right the first time, you’d be done by now…’

It’s all about balance. A sense of urgency – in work or play – combined with the right level of quality gets things done in the most effective way. Emptying a dishwasher, putting everything in the right place with no breakages and a sense of urgency gets the job done correctly in the least amount of time. This sense of urgency, using the dishwasher example, pushes us to group items for the same cupboard or shelf into one trip, so that we minimise aggregate journey time.

Of course, I’m not suggesting we fly around our daily work and house tasks like people possessed all day. Everyone needs downtime. Don’t get me wrong, I love to relax, and taking time out from work and play is key. But you can still relax well, relax effectively :-).

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Outside In

June 10, 2016 //
0

Are you an ‘outside in’ person, or an ‘inside out’?

I’m not talking about advanced forehand strokes in tennis here; I’m talking about how you approach things in the world of work and life.

I’m an outside in kinda guy. I like to start from the outside, getting the big picture, understanding the whole, before I work my way in to the specific problem or task at hand. I do this because I need the context first. I need to know how what I’m trying to do connects with and affects the other pieces of the big picture. I find it difficult to do something in isolation.

Lots of people are inside outers of course. They move in the opposite direction to outside in folk and I suspect they also have different personalities, different jobs and different ways of working. They don’t need the context, they don’t want outside factors to impair their judgement, and away they go.

Both approaches have their pros and cons though, and I also suspect each type of approach is better suited to a particular job.

Which are you, an inside out person or an outside in?

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning

A Firm Handshake

June 6, 2016 //
0

What is it with a limp handshake? When someone greets you with a wet fish for a handshake, it’s sometimes hard to shake off the first impression that someone is weak, diffident or not interested in you.

A firm handshake costs you nothing and sets off that first-time greeting or regular hello on an equal footing, no pun intended.

Notice that I’ve titled this post ‘a firm handshake’, not ‘the firm handshake’. I’ve written before about my love for the definite article, but here its sister the indefinite article is better. There is no single firm handshake, unless, I guess, you’re a practising member of a quasi-secret society.

Any kind of firm handshake will do. It doesn’t have to be a bone-crusher. Go into the greeting with something in the mid-rage of grip solidity and adjust according to the grip you’re given.

Incidentally, if you do come across one of those people – male or female – who has to grab you like a vice every time, or you simply have smaller hands, then I find that slightly pointing the index finger takes the knuckles on your hand out of alignment and alleviates the pressure. Then you can eyeball them with your favourite ‘I’m onto you matey’ look.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Sales

From 0 to 10

June 3, 2016 //
0

They say that getting to $10m in revenues is the hardest stage for a B2B company. Why is that?

Well, it’s a combination of factors. In the early days you’re still tinkering with your business model. You’re still figuring out product-market fit. You’re not sure what to concentrate on, to whom, and where. You can’t reap the benefits of scale.

Perhaps most importantly, though, you’re in a real life situation, and subject to the normal pressures of working with other people, both in your company and outside your company. You’re trying to develop something that’s going to have the right appeal to a sufficiently large enough market, yet you probably have a small number of customers who exercise a disproportionately large influence on you, in terms of how they want you to develop your products and services.

You’re torn between giving the paying customers what they want, which is essentially something that’s customised to their requirements, and developing something that does the job for the maximum part of your addressable market, but which doesn’t immediately translate into positive cash-flow. This is especially true in software.

Any company can sell an idea and get funding, possibly running into the millions. Any company that can get from 0 to 10 million – in revenues – and beyond is a different proposition, an animal that has risen above 90% of the other animals and proven itself. It will still have challenges, but it’s done what many have tried and failed to do. It’s a player.

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Categories Customers, Planning, Strategy

Ignoring Your Customers

May 23, 2016 //
2

Have you heard the joke about the lady who gets a sneak preview of heaven, gets showed around, loves it, and then when she dies and goes to heaven, finds it to be a wretched place? When she asked what happened to the place, she was told, ‘Ah, well, before you were a prospect, now you’re a customer.’

I thought this practice of ‘offer only available to new customers’ – ie up yours to current customers – was dying out. If it is, no-one has told the internet-based car hire aggregator I’ve used every month for the last 15 months or so. They were happy to email me regularly with special offers that weren’t all that special, but at no time did they invite me to register with them for additional discounts. You would have thought that after booking with them – giving my email address – that they would want to further bind me in with genuinely good offers, but no.

Their reservation process failed me recently, so I went online to use the help and chat areas, and also to search for my reservation, of which there was no record. It was then that I saw I could actually register with them to manage my bookings. Once done, I discovered that I could have earned significant discounts after a certain number of reservations that I had passed months ago.

You can’t tell me that it escaped their notice that I had made a bunch of bookings and would appreciate a reward for my loyalty, thereby further endearing me to them.

They didn’t, I would have, so now I’ll try someone else. They’ve had their one chance.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

Hate Waste

May 16, 2016 //
0

I hate waste. Not using all of something where you have put in time and money to create it makes no sense to me. It’s all about striving for the 100% use of assets.

This is why I reheat tea and coffee I’ve been too busy to drink. Sometimes twice. Why not? It’s all about the efficient use of materials.

In my home we throw out a very small proportion of the things we consume. We’re lucky we live in a country where you can recycle many materials, and we compost both our fresh food and our cooked food (separately, of course). You’re working with the circle of life that way, not against it.

Where I’m most precious about waste, though, is with time, that most precious of commodities. I try to not to waste the time of others either. This is why I make my posts the length they are. I shoud be able to get my point over within a few short paragraphs. Many more would be a waste, and – who knows – you may hate waste too.

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Categories Customers, General

Are You Working In or Working On?

May 11, 2016 //
0

Always a good one this, to remind ourselves periodically. Not just for entrepreneurs or people that have their own business. For people who are employed, people who are volunteers too.

Are you working in the business or on the business?

Are you fire-fighting or planning?

Are you thinking long term or pre-occupied with the short term?

Are you stuck in the weeds or looking over the parapet?

Are you servicing the business you won without also looking to snare the next piece of business?

Working in the business means we’re simply getting by, doing what’s in front of us, addressing the tactical. Working on the business means we’ve an eye on the future, we’re looking at opportunities, we’re being strategic.

It’s the opposite of the golf shot. As Gary Player once said, ‘If you look up too early you might not like what you see.’ In our working and private lives, if we look up too late, well, you get the picture.

Working in or working on? Eventually, there’s no ‘in’ if you don’t do the ‘on’.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Alight Here for Confusion

May 6, 2016 //
0

The London Underground is a beacon of clarity in visual communication. The tube map, using the supreme Gill Sans typeface beloved of regional British railways in the art deco years, is a masterpiece of design and possibly the easiest-to-comprehend legend for a major city’s underground system in the world.

It makes it easy to move around the capital as both a tourist and a newcomer. OK, so sometimes it’s faster to walk over ground after you’ve factored in the subterranean distances you might cover changing lines – especially to the Central Line which is not so much in the bowels of the city as the bottom of the toilet pan itself – but that doesn’t matter. You can plot your journey from A to B with ease.

Except when you get to B that is, and the voice on the speakers instructs you to change at the next stop for another line or ‘alight here’ for somewhere well known and adjacent.

Alight? What is that all about? Is something on fire at this stop? Why do we settle for a word so arcane that we might as well be dismounting from our trusty steed? What’s wrong with ‘exit here’ ‘or leave the train here’ for Madame Tussaud’s or some such place? I can’t think what percentage of tourists have ‘alight’ in the armoury of their second, third or fourth language, but it can’t be many. It creates confusion. I’m all for the Reithian principles of educating one’s audience by driving the language in 6th gear, but not when it comes to the binary process of ‘help me decide if I get off here or not’.

No, the audio dimension of the London Underground falls short of the visual aspect. B-minus, could do better.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language

10 Years

May 2, 2016 //
0

I’m quite pleased with myself. Today marks the point where I’ve gone 10 years without missing a working day due to sickness.

The last time I got sick was a rather nasty dose of viral meningitis. As luck would have it, it was over a bank holiday so I was only absent for work for 2 days. I can’t remember the last time I was sick before then. Alright, so I might have left work twice at around 4pm with a migraine, but not even a half-day ‘sickie’ has blemished my work attendance record for the last decade.

I’m not breaking any kind of health record here, and I’m not saying I’m the healthiest person that has ever lived either. What it boils down to is – yes – being fairly healthy, but more importantly it’s about culture and work ethic.

I’ve not had to suffer working in a large or public sector organisation where people play the system and take a sickie as if it’s their fortnightly right. These people are not invested in their organisation and those kinds of places would drive me mad. And as for the ‘oh, I’m staying at home, I don’t want to pass it on through the office,’ puh-lease. Those folks – and the colleagues and bosses that encourage them to do that – well, let’s just say it’s a different culture. The kind of culture that doesn’t think it’s their problem when billions of dollars of national productivity are lost annually through sickness. Plus, it’s no accident that incidence rates of sickness are far lower among the self-employed.

Many’s the time I’ve had a bit of ‘man flu’ or have poorly rebounded from a night of moderate imbibition, but you go in, you suck it up, take your meds and get on with it. If it’s a genuine illness – and I think meningitis scores quite well against that criterion – then, fair enough, stay away and get better. But if it’s not, then come on, gone are the days when organisations had the buffer to cover for a sick person. We’re all busy, we’re all maxed. Work is a team game and your colleagues are relying on you.

So I’m raising a glass to another 10 years of sickness-free work. Only the one glass though. It’s a school night and I don’t want to have to take a sickie tomorrow…

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Categories Customers, General
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