Archives for category: Customers
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The Sales Opportunity – How You Doin’?

October 6, 2014 //
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When you’re selling, the ‘sale’ is the ideal situation, the end result you’re aiming at. ‘Opportunity’ is the unit of currency that you measure your life by. It represents the collection of granular, discrete items that govern our selling lives and keep us awake at night. This is ironic when you consider that the word ‘opportunity’ means a situation or position that is favorable, rather than unfavorable. If we qualify them properly, we should only have opportunities in our forecast that are opportunities in the true sense of the word.

Managing a sales opportunity, especially a complicated opportunity in a business-to-business situation where the ticket price is high, the process is a series of longish steps, and many people are involved in buying what you have, is about constantly asking yourself one essential question ‘how am I doing?’ More specifically, ‘how am I doing in this opportunity?’ compared with the other competitors eyeing the prize, and compared with the other possible outcomes – apart from you winning – that could result.

There are a number of facets to this question, such as the following:

– what’s the opportunity like?

– how can we win it?

– how can others win it?

– how can we counter them?

– what’s going on inside the buying organisation?

– what’s going on inside the heads of the important people in the buying organisation?

– what is the set of information we need to make the best decisions and what do we need to do to win?

With every important new piece of information about the opportunity, and everything important that happens in the opportunity, you need to pose – and answer – the big question, tweaking your plan of activities for winning accordingly. It’s like plotting your way around a golf course or your ship back to the harbour.

Good opportunity management is about enabling you to respond to the question ‘How you doin’? with an ‘At the moment, I’m doing well, thanks!’ answer.

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Categories Customers, Sales

Wants and Needs

September 29, 2014 //
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One of the first things I learnt in economics was the difference between needs and wants, and how price indices were calculated using a ‘basket’ of essential items, items you needed to buy on a regular basis.

A want is a nice to have. It’s something you’d like, something you may even lust after, but you don’t need it. A need is something you must have, and if you don’t get it, something else you don’t want to happen will happen .

As marketers, we need to develop and highlight products and services that people need. If people want them, but don’t need them, we don’t have compelling products or services and we don’t have a sale.

As sales people, we need to create or accentuate need in the minds of the buyers, as they won’t buy unless they have to, unless they need to, unless they see a return on their expenditure or a problem taken away.

We all should gravitate towards needs, scarcity and value. We should eschew wants, dearth, and lack of value.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Nice to Have Means Don’t Have

September 24, 2014 //
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If you’re in marketing and sales, your product will generally be perceived in one of two ways. It’s either a ‘nice to have’ or a ‘must have’. A must have is just that, something your buyer must have, and ideally by a certain time. These are the two conditions of the ‘opportunity’ holy grail known as BANT, where N is need and T is time.

I used to work in the email security business. Talk about a must have product. IT managers would call up on a daily basis either worried about the latest global virus to hit or because their network had just turned toxic from some ‘trojan’ and they didn’t want to be caught again. It wasn’t uncommon to hear them say things like ‘the CEO wants this sorted by the weekend or else, can you help us?’.

A nice to have is something you can live without. It means you don’t have a problem that needs fixing. You can sit on it for a while, do nothing – the secret, sneaky competitor of the sales person – or even try and fix it yourself. The way to figure this out for your product or service is to put yourself in the customers’ shoes and say ‘OK what will happen if we don’t do this?’ If nothing major will happen, you have a nice to have.

If you have a product or service that is perceived to be nice to have, you have no opportunity, you have no sale, you have a problem. Then you need to start building a must have case, such as ROI, TCO (total cost of ownership) or the lost revenues or savings from delaying a decision.

If you have something that people feel they can’t do without, it is indeed a thing of beauty.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Number 1 Rule for Your Website Home Page

September 22, 2014 //
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What’s the number one rule for the home page of your website? It’s a pretty obvious one, but you’d be surprised at how many websites fail when tested against it.

When you go to a website for the first time, you want to know one thing: What do you do?

In other words:

– who are you?

– what do you do?

– how will this benefit me or my company?

This should not be difficult for you to address, regardless of your business.

Put it in a prominent place on your home page – or your landing page for whatever demand generation exercise you’re doing – so people can form a quick opinion as to whether what you have can help them. Otherwise they’ll leave frustrated. Why else do you think people typically abandon a home page way more than 50% of the time?

Don’t forget that you know your company well; how could people not know what you do? But you haven’t seen the website for the first time in a long time…

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

Urgent vs Important

September 17, 2014 //
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One of the first business lessons I learnt was about prioritising between urgent and important.

In a busy business there are 10 important things you should do every day, and yet you will only properly address 3 of them. Something has to give.

Of all the things you need to do, what are the important ones? What are the urgent ones? Are any both? Are any neither? If they’re neither, well that’s obvious. If the thing you need to do is urgent, but not important, you shouldn’t do it. You should delegate it or discount it altogether, but communicate to the would-be beneficiary the reason for your decision as early as you can so they’re not left in the lurch.

So that leaves you with the important things, and let’s assume for now you have all the important things on your list, including the things you’re avoiding, afraid of, or don’t want to do. While it makes loads of sense to break big things into smaller pieces in order to make progress, the temptation is to do the small important things first, to get them out of the way, because you know that you have to do the big important thing anyway so it will get done come hell or high water.

This approach puts you under unnecessary pressure, affects the quality of your work and turns your long day into an even longer one, which you can sustain for only so long. So how to rank the important things, some of which might be urgent? Some ‘managing up’ is required here, because your boss might be leaning on you for the output that she or he feels is the must important and pressing. What should drive the ranking is the only criterion that really matters, namely the value to your customers. You need to communicate early and often with your boss and make them aware of what is driving the order of the things you need to do.

And what if you can’t separate that handful of things that are all of equal weight and all help your customers be more successful? Well, then you need to get help or suck it up, safe in the knowledge that you are driving up your value as you drive up the value of the people who are the reason you’re in business.

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Categories Customers, General, Strategy

A Gap in the Market

September 12, 2014 //
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Congratulations, you’ve discovered that great idea that no-one else has thought of. You’ve seen a gap in the market and you’re going to develop your product or service and make the gap yours. It’s your ticket to fame and fortune.

The most important question to ask yourself as you prepare to devote the time and energy to your project is this: there’s a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap?

You need to estimate your addressable market. How many people – consumers or individual users within your business – are potential buyers of what you’re going to offer? How much would they pay for it? Would they pay on a one-off basis or would they subscribe every year? If it’s a one-off purchase then you’re starting from scratch every January 1st. If it’s a subscription model, then you can already rely on revenues come January 1st. This audience multiplied by the price is your addressable market size.

Now, how much of that market can you win? What’s your realistic market share? This market share is your total revenue from the venture. Is it enough to make it worth your while building your product or service, promoting it, and supporting it when your customers start using it?

If the likely income doesn’t outweigh the likely cost, you don’t have a market in the gap and you need to re-think.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Give Me Something Meaningful

September 10, 2014 //
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I have a mobile phone subscription, as do many of you I’m sure. My mobile phone company sends me a monthly mid-period statement to my phone of how much stuff I have left, depending on whatever bundle or package I have. I don’t know what my package is exactly. It’s cheap and cheerful, much like its owner.

I’m looking at the statement right now, and I have 98 minutes left across all networks, which is good. I also have 998MB of data left, which presumably means my allocation is a GB, because I don’t use it much outside of a wireless network.

Guess what? It also tells me I have 44,989 texts left this period. Yes, you read that right, 44,989 texts. WTF!! Clearly there is no or negligible cost to the company of processing a text message, and I can send them free with viber and whatsapp, including send photos and movies. But who in the marketing department decided that it would be a good idea a) to place a limit on this, b) to set it at 45,000 texts per month and c) to communicate how many I have left, when if I texted constantly for the period in question, 24/7, I couldn’t get through them all.

Give me something that is meaningful, something that I value. Otherwise you’ll make me angry. And you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

The Wonder of Airline Food

September 8, 2014 //
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As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of packaging, compactness and travel (here and here). The secret to good business travel lies in a combination of these 3 concepts. By good, I mean efficient, effective, optimised travel.

I’ve never really bought into the long haul travel idea of taking a pill and sleeping through the journey, especially the west to east flights which tend to be overnight. For me, even though you might be shattered, you miss one of the main joys of the trip.

Airline meals on long haul flights are a wonder. Compact and bijou, they are breathtakingly well designed pieces of real estate. Everything is compartmentalised, allowing the cabin crew to offer even those of us in cattle class options for our main course and to slot in a heated meal accordingly. The output is tasty, well thought out food combinations, hygienic and with the minimum of packaging, most of which can be recycled.

Aircrafts are all about the trade offs between space, weight and power, and so you can fit maybe 40 meals into a chilled cabinet on wheels that can’t measure much more than 30cm x 100cm x 75cm. Amazing.

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Categories Customers, General

Great Products Don’t Need a Manual

September 3, 2014 //
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We have a vacuum cleaner, as I’m sure you do. It’s quite a well-known brand with a purportedly heavy emphasis on product design. I hate it. I won’t list the myriad reasons why I hate it, because that would be beyond dull. I will mention one though, to illustrate the point of this post.

You have to take off the dust container to empty it, which as far as I’m concerned requires a degree in advanced engineering. There are two buttons to push with helpful arrows on them, which seem to want to work together but which fight with each other and act in opposite directions so that within a matter of moments you’re wanting to wrench it from the base and cast it over your garden wall.

Mrs D bought the vacuum cleaner, and loves it, naturally.

But my point is this: great, well designed products don’t need a manual. Manuals always make me hark back to the bad old days of IT, which are still here, where some smart alec would answer your ‘how do I’ question by telling you to ‘RTFM’, which stands for the profane version of ‘Read the Flipping Manual’.

I don’t want to read the manual. I shouldn’t need to read the manual. Apple have been producing great products since the i-Mac and before. I can remember getting two documents: one is a quick start guide where in 5 easy steps you can learn how to plug in your device and power it up, ready for use; the other is a manual that you only ever need to refer to if you have to troubleshoot or you want to learn some ninja inside moves.

Every product designer should be asking themselves this question: how can I make this product so easy to use the user can just switch it on and pick it up as they go? Try setting that challenge to the folk that produce TV remotes. You might as well lock them in and throw away the key.

Vacuum cleaners can be funny though. Here’s the funniest joke from 2014’s Edinburgh Fringe.

 

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing
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