Archives for category: Customers
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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

The Me in Engagement

January 4, 2016 //
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You hear the word ‘engagement’ all the time in business. ‘How will we engage on this deal?’ ‘We’ve got to get the customer engagement right,’ and so on.

It’s an unhelpful word to my mind. It’s not a customer-centric or friendly word. It’s all about ‘me’.

There’s a ‘me’ in engagement and it’s my view that the word makes us think on our terms and not on our customers’ terms. I don’t feel like I have the problem correctly framed nor the priorities right when I’m using the word engagement.

We engage our enemies in battle, because it’s about us and we want to win. We don’t engage (with) our customers, we want them to win.

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Categories Customers, 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

Stay Positive

December 23, 2015 //
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In business and in life it’s important to listen to sporting leaders. Those at the top of their game tend to have a whole support system to help them be the best they can be, among which is usually the professional psychologist.

That’s why you always hear them saying things like ‘we’re taking it one game – or shot – at a time, we’re not getting ahead of ourselves, we’re staying in the moment, we’re staying positive.’ Being positive is a conscious, current thing.

These people understand the power of the human mind, and the things it can do when it’s harnessed in the right way. Why risk unleashing its negative forces when you can benefit from the positive forces, forces that affect in you in a good way?

Fear and safety have a lot to do with the negative side of the human spirit. All the more reason, then, to stay positive, look on the bright side, consider the upside and banish fear and comfortable mediocrity.

Stay positive. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing

Find Your Place on the Tech Curve

December 21, 2015 //
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Where are you on the technology adoption life cycle? When a new thing comes along are you first on the bandwagon or do you wait and see or even never adopt?

Pioneers like Geoffrey Moore in his Crossing the Chasm book classify a number of profiles occupying their own place in the distribution of technology adoption: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards. Innovators are the geeks who will experiment with something even before it’s been finished. Early adopters are just that. Then you’ve got the 2 giants of the bell curve, the early majority and the late majority, finally, you have the laggards, late to technology if they use it at all.

Think of something like an iPod, iPad, 3D printer or driverless car. You may not know any innovators – under the terms of this definition – but you probably remember who was the first person on the street, in the estate, in school or in the office who had one. Maybe you were that person. As the old adage goes: ‘how do you know when someone’s got an [insert new gadget]?’ ‘Because they tell you.’

Once you’ve found out where you are on the tech curve, you can understand that place for what it is. Then you don’t get the hang-ups or envy when someone has something new. Your time will come, when you’re ready.

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Categories Customers, General, Technology

OSX EL Capitan and the Preview App

December 18, 2015 //
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Every organisation at some point gets too big and hulking, loses touch with what made it great and is forced into a radical rethink or imminent decline. Sometimes it’s a series of points that when added together tip the see-saw.

That moment has come, I think, for Apple with the release of its 2015 operating system, OSX El Capitan. As a company that competes on product leadership, it was never that great at staying close to customers. It got away with this because its stuff was so well designed, so intuitive and so damned beautiful. You didn’t need a manual.

El Capitan has been a bit different, though. Stuff hasn’t worked properly and fixes haven’t been forthcoming. Since I put EL Capitan on the machine that’s created this post, the default application for reading pdf documents – Preview – opens them as completely blank, most of the time.

Lots of us have complained via the discussion boards and so far, most unusually, no fix has been announced or even acknowledged. It’s not the only problem either.

Is Apple losing its touch? Or is it symbolic of the decline of laptops and computers in favour of mobile? After all, Apple is now a mobile phone company. Either way, there’s something rotten in the state of California.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Strategy

In Praise of The Guide Runner

December 4, 2015 //
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Is there a more noble and altruistic profession than the guide runner? This is the person who trains and races with a visually impaired athlete, tethered to them and driving, encouraging and helping them stay on the straight and narrow, locked together.

I put them on a par with other selfless members of the caring professions. The guide runner has to be a faster runner than the athlete, but subjugates his or her own ambitions for the good of his or her ‘customer’. Sure, they get to bask in the shared glory of a podium finish, but the sharing isn’t even, nor should it be.

This smacks to me of true dedication. I think – although I don’t know – that the guide runner is much more to the athlete than simply a guide runner. The nature of the job demands much more aspects to the relationship.

And then, as quickly as you can say ‘knife’ – as my father used to say, a phrase which always struck me as somewhat arcane – your customer can drop you, in search of a new partner, some new chemistry.

You must feel like a football manager at times, never more than a couple of poor results away from the professional guillotine.

 

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Categories Customers, General

Hindsight Schmindsight

November 30, 2015 //
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Hindsight is a wonderful thing, or so they say. What seemed so unfathomable before it happened is the blindingly obvious conclusion now that it’s happened. And don’t we just love it when people say ‘well I could have told you that would happen.’?

Here’s my take on this. When we look at what happened with the benefit of hindsight, we see a linear connection of causal events. It’s a straight line going backwards.

When we’re faced with what’s about to happen, it’s not linear. It’s multi-linear. It can go a number of ways, and it’s unclear which way will turn out best for us. Maybe all of them will, maybe some, maybe even none. The multiplicity of choices we face with every passing second is the constant. We’re lucky we have the freedom and the intelligence to make them.

We’ll always have hindsight, and sometimes we feel like we have insight and even a bit of foresight. But you can’t turn time back and give it another go. With every fresh project you have to keep moving forward. Consider the information, make your best decision, and go.

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

Warts and All

November 25, 2015 //
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No company is perfect. When you work for an organisation you know about – or tend to hear about – its issues, problems, flaws and so on. You know what it’s really like under the hood.

All organisations are plagued with a lack of resources necessary to do a perfect job, which is why the perfect job doesn’t exist. The more resources you hire, the more you need.

It’s easy for us to get consumed by the things that our product doesn’t do well, or at all. We know the full story in most cases. It’s us who have to deal with the internal horror shows, and patch things up behind the scenes.

I used to know a lady whose husband worked for an aircraft manufacturers. He wouldn’t fly on the planes his team had built. He had seen the compromises, the short cuts they had made.

It’s our perspective on the warts and all, after all, because we have to work on the warts. We don’t see the full picture. We don’t appreciate the checks and balances being performed in other parts of the business.

Our customers certainly don’t see the warts, until they buy and start to use the product. And even then they might not see them, because they may only use part of the product. No product is perfect, but if your product does all the key things well, then that’s what makes your product successful.

You see, warts and all ain’t so bad. Only from your perspective.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy
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