Archives for category: General
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Before You Start, Measure

May 11, 2015 //
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When you’ve decided to make a change or kick off a project, it’s easy to want to dive straight in and get started. After all, looking ahead is the right way to approach things; you can’t change the past.

I used to work with a company that used to make quarterly marketing plans and against each campaign they’d put the target number of leads, opportunities and revenues. They would do this every quarter, but they would never look back to the previous quarter to see how they actually performed against target. They would sweep things under the carpet and move forwards.

Before you start, you need to measure where you’re starting from. Sounds super obvious, doesn’t it? Yet, not enough companies do it. Sometimes they can’t measure the key things, other times they can’t be bothered.

Knowing where you’re starting from allows you to review and measure how far you’ve come at a later date. Instead of drawing up a plan every quarter, figure out how successful the last quarter really was. Then you have the information you need to learn from it and make a better plan next time.

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Categories Communication, General, Planning, Strategy

Lead and Lag Indicators

May 6, 2015 //
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Most companies tend to study the traditional barometers of performance, such as revenues, revenues as a percentage of targets, and quota attainment as a percentage of salesperson sales quota.

These are your classic ‘lag’ indicators. They lag because they typically come a few days after a reporting period closes, with the lag occurring as companies wait for the final numbers and do their calculations.

Lag indicators are concrete, illustrative and unchanging. But they also indicate performance in a period in the past, one that you can’t change or influence.

Leading indicators do what you think they might, namely give an indication of future performance. The size of your sales pipeline, for example, gives you a sense of how close you are to achieving your sales targets, given what you know about your sales cycle and your conversion rates.

Other lead indicators might be behavioural, especially if you’re looking to measure the new behaviours you want to see if you are to change the way you do things.

This is the power of leading indicators. You don’t have to wait for the lag indicators to see if you’re making progress, because then it might be too late. You can monitor the leading indicators and either confirm you’re on track, or make the necessary alterations and correct your course before it’s too late.

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Categories General

Conditions for Change

May 4, 2015 //
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Whenever you try to improve the way you or your company does things, you’re into the business of change. More importantly, the business of changing behaviours, those engrained activities that increase comfort and save time, without necessarily upping productivity or success.

An awful lot of initiatives to change the way we do things come unstuck, and if you believe the research, the success rate can be as low as 30 to 50%. Why is this? A bunch of possible causes contribute. People are set in their ways, or they actively resist change, or the company doesn’t get a host of other things right.

To look at this the other way, and from a more positive angle, there is some first class research from McKinsey about what conditions need to be in place for change to occur successfully. In short these are:

1) A purpose to believe in. Folk have to buy in to what you’re trying to do

2) Reinforcement systems. Front line managers have to coach to the new behaviours

3) The skills required for change. We learn by doing, and doing repeatedly, to acquire the new skills

4) Consistent role models. Seeing people you look up to doing things the new way pays dividends

So there you have it. Easy to blog about, harder to do. Get buy in, reinforce what you’re looking to see, practice makes perfect, and let the leaders lead the way. For more on this excellent research, have a look here.

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Categories General

Analysis Catalysis

May 1, 2015 //
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You used to hear the phrase ‘analysis paralysis’ all the time in business. The inability to make a decision in favour of hiding behind a surfeit of analysis was a common attribute of poor operational business.

You tend not to hear the aphorism that much these days, at least not in the last 5 years or so. Now we’re all about big data. We have more data, but we have better analysis since we can corral computing power, sometimes from global networks and forces, to crunch a monumental amount of inputs and come up with meaningful, helpful outputs.

Now we’re all about analysis catalysis. Since we’re only as good as our data, our ability to maintain a high quality of it and interrogate it in the right ways is the catalyst for solid, informed decisions. Sure, we can still rely on our gut from time to time, but now we can test repeatedly and get extremely fast feedback on our hunches.

Analysis used to cause inertia. Now it causes energy.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Strategy

Square Hole, Round Peg

April 29, 2015 //
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You know the phrase, ‘square peg, round hole. It’s used to describe a lack of fit between a person and their role. It’s a good image, both visual and memorable. The thing can’t or won’t fit – if you allow the poetic license that the peg must be of a similar size to or larger than the hole.

Fit is important. Cultural fit is hugely important, and fit to the functional demands of the role is relatively important too.

So should you be looking to fill all the round hole in your business with round pegs? Of course not! Round holes and round pegs are boring, predictable and there’s no room for innovation and thinking outside of the box – or the hole in this case.

When you have some round pegs in square holes, you create space for expansion into the corners. You provide some wiggle room, some room for manoeuvre, development and growth. You’ll get something extra from your people, something unexpected, something unplanned.

Square hole, round peg. Try it sometime.

 

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Categories General, Strategy

A Cluster of One

March 30, 2015 //
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Clusters are good. A cluster of the same type of companies is good for the companies because a critical mass of talent is developed, increasing the local pool of expertise to draw on. Good for the employees because they can get promoted either within their company or in other companies and don’t have to relocate themselves or their families. Both parties have choice and flexibility. There is safety in numbers for both.

A cluster has to start somewhere, however. It has to start with a cluster of one. One company has to take the plunge.

I live about 20 minutes’ drive from Galway in the west coast of Ireland. It has a small software ecosystem, much smaller than Dublin’s, but this ecosystem is being gradually added to as more software companies either start up or base their European Headquarters in this attractive city.

Recently, there was an enormous news story about the world’s most valuable company – at least at the time of writing it is – announcing plans to build a presence in the little town where I live. The land in question is as big as the entire town. As you can imagine, my town was simply agog with the news: the possibility of jobs, the stimulation of the area, the supply-side economy and property prices were all on people’s lips, not to mention the almost planetary magnetism of a world-renowned company coming to town.

The cluster of one has begun. I see the cluster being swelled by several more companies – providing either competing or supply chain services to the first mover – until perhaps in twenty years there is a corridor of similar companies dotted along the 25 kilometres between our town and Galway.

It’s good to move to a cluster. And when one happens to begin on your desktop, well that’s either great planning, great serendipity or great insider knowledge. Having lived here for a good number of years, I can only claim option 2 :-).

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Categories General, Planning, Technology

Start-ups Have to Start

March 27, 2015 //
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There’s an old adage that nothing happens in a company until somebody sells something. In fact, it’s also true of you, when you’re trying to sell yourself or your idea.

I do a bit of work as a mentor in the technology sector and so I come into contact with quite a few very early stage companies. In the tech sector in Ireland there is plenty of support, guidance and funding for building your software product. Once you’ve built your product, and you have to start selling it, in other words commercialising your idea, the funding is not so forthcoming.

This is a problem, because many of the people who have the idea for and develop their software product also have a lack of knowledge and confidence when it comes to selling it. Start-up companies can avail of a few meetings with sales and marketing mentors like me, but that’s nowhere near enough. They either need to start full-time selling themselves or else find the funds to get someone with the expertise to do their business development. They don’t have the money to do that, and the business development specialist is probably not going to work for free, or even equity, if they can’t see the promise of steady sales. Which brings it back to the fledgling business owners, who have to do the work themselves.

Start-ups have to start, but if they’re not capable of starting, then the money already invested in them, by them or others, is wasted. We need to train our entrepreneurs to sell, or else fund the sales expansion efforts and increase their chances of turning their idea into a functioning, growing business.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Keyboarding Oversight

March 25, 2015 //
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A while back, we were doing the rounds of secondary schools with our first born to see where he’d like to pursue the most important decade of his life, educationally speaking. We’re lucky in that we live in a small town but we have 3 secondary schools to choose from, each of them different in their own way.

I asked each one of the about the provision of keyboarding – or typing as it was known to me when I was in secondary school, and back then it was only girls that were allowed to do it… – lessons for kids. Guess how many of them provide such lessons?

None.

I was astounded. I have grown up as the generation who were already passing through or past secondary school when computers came in. We made it up as we went along and after 3 decades of muddling through I can do about 30 words a minute using about half of my available digits. I cross hands and lose millions of split-seconds a year in productivity and effectiveness. I neither have the time nor the inclination to learn to type properly. It would be like a ‘righty’ stopping all work for 3 months and learning to play golf left-handed.

For kids who are 12-18 in today’s era, keyboarding skills are crucial, vital even to productive education and careers. Sure, you can learn online with software and commitment, but these skills are best taught by disciplined, patient teachers. Sure, the qwerty keyboard might be replaced by something revolutionary and probably ‘swipey’ at some point, but right now, it’s what we have and I want my kids being taught a key life-skill at school.

It’s madness I tell you, madness…

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Categories Communication, General, Technology

The OTE in Promote

March 23, 2015 //
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There is a term in sales remuneration called OTE. It’s a three-letter acronym – aka TLA 🙂 – naturally. OTE stands for On Target Earnings or On Track Earnings, though I prefer Opportunity to Earn myself. In sales jobs you can have a base salary element and a commission element that together give you your OTE if you hit your sales quota.

In a previous post I talked about the importance of having a product/market fit. Once you have that, then you need to scale your business so that you can capitalise on your potential. Your ‘opportunity to earn’, therefore, is to be found quite literally in the word ‘promote.’ To attract the right customers in the right numbers, you need to effectively promote your business.

If you’re a business owner/manager with a successful product, you want to take your business to the next level and you think the key is something to do with this marketing lark, here are some things to think about.

– Do you know your market? Can you profile it, describe it, and define it, tightly?

– What slices or segments make up your market? Remember that you can slice the market ‘pie’ according to things like region, industry, size etc, but also according to what is important or needed by customers. How you segment your market is crucial.

– Which segments of the market do you want to sell to? Even though you want to grow, you can’t be all things to all people. Well, you can, but not for long.

– What are these buyers like? What are the buyer ‘personas’? How do they prefer to buy?

– How will you position yourself to these segments? Positioning is the third leg of the segment-target-position stool on which will sit much of your go to market plan. By ‘position’ I mean your messaging, or how you describe your value to customers.

– Does your brand truly reflect where you’re going, not where you are or where you’ve been?

If any of this is alien to you, invest in someone to help you figure it out. It’s the key to unlocking the OTE at the end of promote.

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

The One Thing You Need For a Successful Business

March 20, 2015 //
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The one thing you need for a successful business is this (no drum roll necessary) …

Product/Market Fit.

You’d be surprised – actually you might not be surprised at all – how many product-based companies don’t have it, or can’t get it.

Product/Market Fit is this, put simply: people want your stuff. A lot of people. In fact, they don’t simply want your stuff, they need your stuff, and a good number of them would be up the creek without a paddle if you took it away from them.

You need Product/Market Fit for your business to grow, and people won’t invest in your business unless you can demonstrate you have it. Conversely, if you’re looking to join a successful company, and this is perhaps the most obvious thing you’ll read this month, join the one that you’re sure is shifting product.

If there’s no market for what you sell, or plan to sell, there’s no business for you. Too many companies find this out too late, usually after they’ve built their product. “Now, who can I sell this to?” In other words, do the marketing first, not afterwards.

 

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