Archives for category: Marketing
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What is a Product Roadmap?

June 27, 2016 //
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What do you understand by the term ‘product roadmap’? There are lots of definitions, some narrow and some broad, some internally focused and some market- or customer-focused. And how detailed should a product roadmap be? Should it pin your detailed colours to the mast, or should it be high level, allowing you room for manoeuvre?

I think that over time B2B customers have become somewhat desensitised towards product roadmaps. This is especially true in the software industry where the sheer complexity and number of moving parts, combined with the influences of individual customers, conspire to make roadmap projections aspirational at best and at worst downright misleading and fictional.

The pressures on the business in a dynamic landscape are changing all the time, and I’ve seen businesses where products or product enhancements have arrived 2 or 3 years after they were advertised to come on stream.

But back to product roadmap definitions. The one I use when asked this question defines a product roadmap as a plan of product or platform developments, delivered through a release mechanism – which could be a few or several times a year – through properly managed projects and programmes. After all, you’ve got to be sure that all the parts of the business can fulfil their element of the whole product solution. In other words, the roadmap should really be about when new releases are delivery ready, not sales ready. By all means seed the market, and build the demand to allow for the natural lag of a sales cycle, but publish your roadmap based around genuine availability.

Customers love to see detailed roadmaps, but only if you actually can commit to the associated timings, otherwise the trust quickly evaporates. Just like in sales, you’re only as good as your last quarter. Software development never seems to build in any buffer for the inevitable bumps in the road – probably because the front of the business is pushing for the earliest possible delivery date – and when those bumps occur, it’s very hard to get back on track. That’s why I fall back on the principle of under-promise and over-deliver to customers, and pushing back to the business. The customer comes first, so I’m in favour of high level roadmap pronouncements that strike the right balance between demonstrating progress and allowing wiggle room, so you can be on time, on brief, and maybe even on budget.

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

Statistical Sophistry

June 17, 2016 //
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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 //
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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 //
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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

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

Are You Working In or Working On?

May 11, 2016 //
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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

Dumbing it Down

April 29, 2016 //
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As marketers we can occasionally be accused of ‘dumbing down’ content or messaging. Dumbing down has a pejorative connotation these days, as though we’re being condescending or patronising to our audience by using words and language they understand. Sort of lowest common denominator stuff.

As craftsmen and craftswomen of words and pictures, our role is not to dumb it down. Our role is to communicate clearly. It’s about simplifying something complex, arcane or esoteric and making it both accessible and memorable. We should strive if at all possible to distil what we want to convey into one key message. Sometimes we only have that one chance to resonate with someone important to us.

This is because we remember some of what we hear, more of what we see, and the most of what we do, hence the need for something direct, engaging and simple. Our less understanding colleagues may feel that we’re ignoring the detail, avoiding industry jargon and acronyms that they can use as crutches, but that doesn’t work with our prospects and customers. They’re invested in something and they want to see some of that detail and erudition come out in the communication, but it’s lost on those we’re seeking to influence who are nowhere near as invested as we are.

Don’t think dumb, think simple. It’s not about ‘how can I oversimplify this’, but ‘how can I simplify it’. Dumb is foolish; simple is smart.

Simple really :-).

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Categories Communication, Language, Marketing, Sales

Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch

April 25, 2016 //
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‘Culture eats strategy for lunch.’ I love this phrase!

I hadn’t heard it in a while and was reminded of it recently in a meeting. It makes me laugh out loud when I hear it. It’s both pithy and witty. I don’t know if Peter Drucker did first coin the phase, but I think the sentiment rings true.

But why does culture eat strategy for lunch? My view on this is as follows: if all of your staff behave in the same way, and have the same attitude, and these behaviours are consistent with corporate culture, then whatever they execute is going to be done consistently too. They’re all pulling in the same direction, for the same things.

Strategy is only as good as the success, consistency and constancy with which it’s applied. When the culture’s not right, you don’t have everyone buying into the way things are done. It’s half-assed execution.

Culture is a bit like the goodwill you get from a brand. It’s hard to quantify but you know it’s important, you know it has immense value, and you want it for yourself or your business.

And that’s why culture never goes hungry.

 

 

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Categories Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Productive B2B Buyer

April 18, 2016 //
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A few years ago, I used to work with a company called The TAS Group. They invented something called the Sales Velocity Equation, a metric for sales effectiveness.

It was a really simple and powerful way of thinking about how effective a sales person or organisation you are. In a nutshell, your sales velocity for a given time period (let’s say a quarter) is proportional to the total number of qualified deals you work during the period, multiplied by the average deal size, multiplied by the percentage of deals that you win, the total then divided by the average sales cycle length for those won deals during that period. It’s all about speed, the implication being that if in the next period you can improve the factors above the line and reduce the sales cycle length, your speed – or sales effectiveness – increases. Good, huh?

On a number of occasions I suggested that the natural corollary to this is the buyer velocity equation, but my thoughts were not bought into, which is fair enough. I think it still has merit though.

If you’re a B2B buyer – and I suppose you could think too about yourself as a B2C customer or consumer, offline or online, though it’s nowhere near as elegant – you want to be as productive a buyer as you can.

It follows, then, that your productivity within a certain period is a function of the number of projects you have tabled, the average size of those projects, the amount of projects you get off the ground, and the length of time from project conception to project kick-off, or even to project completion. The greater the projects volume and project size, the greater the percentage of projects you get off the ground, and the quicker you get them off the ground, the more productive a buyer you are.

Make sense to me anyway. In the same way as the sales velocity equation, it helps you strip away the waste and the unnecessary and focus on the small number of important levers of success.

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Strategy

Damning the Critics

April 15, 2016 //
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It’s important to be able to receive constructive feedback. If you value other people’s opinion that is. If it’s destructive criticism, or you don’t respect the opinion of the person who’s volunteering it, why bother listening to it?

Staying with constructive feedback, the really important thing is to make a decision on that feedback. Do they make a valid point? Is incorporating their feedback going to improve what you’re doing? If it is, great, you have a better product or service.

If it isn’t, then damn the critics and go. Have the courage of your convictions. You’ll either win or your learn from your loss.

And, sustaining you on your journey are stories like the Beatles, whom record company Decca turned down, or Fred Astaire, who was told ‘can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a little,’ or JK Rowling, turned down by innumerable publishers and now the first female billionaire author.

Yes, damning the critics and doing it anyway. Feels good, doesn’t it?

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales
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