Archives for category: Planning
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Finish Early

February 3, 2016 //
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Some people have job roles where they’re in a lot of meetings. Typically managers of people have this issue. Back-to-back meetings, or worse still, meetings that over-run and put them behind all day.

I often find myself in a position where I need to create stuff. I need thinking time, planning time and writing time. Meetings are the enemy in this situation. Sure, they have their purpose, and a very useful one at that, when managed properly, but not if I need sustained ‘me time’ to get my work done.

My approach to meetings is under-promise, over-deliver. Ask someone for more time than you need – don’t go mad, it’s a balance between taking their time and taking liberties – and book that time in the calendar. Then, aim to finish the meeting early. 45 minutes is a good length of time to ask for a meeting. Even if you finish on time, in all probability they’ll have a precious quarter-hour before their next commitment.

There are few things better than a meeting finishing early and giving you some of your hour or day back. And you’re grateful to the person who organised or chaired the meeting for that. It shows you that the person values your time and doesn’t waste it.

Were you ever at a school that managed its timetable in 50-minute slots, and started each class at the top of the hour? Those little 10 minutes back every hour are great for getting fiddly stuff out of the way, running quick errands and getting your head right for the next meeting.

Aim to finish your meetings early. Control them so that they do. Tell the other people that you’re done and that you’re giving them back some of their day. They’ll respect you for it and will be more inclined to grant you their time again.

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Categories Communication, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Enough to be Dangerous

January 13, 2016 //
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Ah, it’s a terribly fine line sometimes. A coin toss if you will. A little knowledge can be all you need to get you started, get some forward momentum and learn as you go. Sometimes it’s all the time you have, otherwise you miss the boat.

Then again, it’s not coincidental that we use the phrase ‘enough to be dangerous’.

A couple of decades ago, a friend of a friend of mine went to live with a Spanish-speaking family to improve his basic language skills. In his first week there, they went out to dinner together. The daughter was 17. During the course of the conversation something was said to make her blush. He wanted to ask her if she was embarrassed.

Unfortunately, he didn’t know the Spanish for embarrassed so took a guess. Worse still, his effort – embarazada – means pregnant. Not good. The father went apoplectic and he had to leave the family shortly thereafter.

Knowing enough cuts both ways. Ask yourself this, do you feel lucky? 🙂

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

Intensity

January 8, 2016 //
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Do you know what really helps accelerate the sales cycle? Intensity.

Oftentimes you’ll hear about sports people – players or pundits – talking about having good intensity, or lacking intensity when their performance was flat. Intensity is about being fully engaged in the sale, and fully engaged with the customer, for want of a better word.

Intensity in a sales and business context is a word similar to the phrase ‘rightful impatience’, which a former boss of mine used to use. And you can add to that adjectives like enthusiastic, passionate and committed.

When you have the right intensity, you’re ‘in the moment’ more often with your customer, in sync with their requirements, their hopes and their concerns. This has the effect of bringing them more swiftly on the journey towards buying from you. You’re sweeping them up with your emotion, in a good way, a way that is focused on the mutual goal of their satisfaction.

In a selling relationship, it’s often not okay to be intense. This is a characteristic that some customers find difficult to work with. However it’s good to have intensity in your approach. There is an important difference here. Good intensity make good things happen more quickly.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Planning, Sales, Strategy

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

Delegating to Busy People

November 11, 2015 //
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In the olden days, by which I mean in the last century when I was learning my managerial trade, the received wisdom amongst managers was that if you wanted to get something done, you gave it to the person who was the busiest.

The theory goes, I suppose, that the person with more on their plate who is better at getting things done will have more chance of completing the additional task. This assumes, of course, that busy is directly proportional to productive. It also sends a signal to the less able or less committed member of staff that by appearing to be doing less they will continue to see other people’s workload increase to a greater extent than theirs.

It is a short-term approach that has the medium-to-long term effect of alienating and burning out the very people who you want to keep in the business if at all possible. It also does not address the problem of the less able or less committed, who are clearly in need of more training, coaching, and dialogue to help them improve.

As someone who prides himself on getting things done, on executing a high volume of important projects, I can see both sides to the argument. But, as I argued earlier, it is a question of time, that most precious of commodities. Short-term gain, at the expense of long term benefit, is simply a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. It’s not sustainable. It’s not good management either.

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Categories General, Marketing, Planning, Sales

All or Nothing

November 2, 2015 //
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If you’re going to do something, you have to give it 100% or your investment won’t get the benefit you hope for.

Sport is a good example of this in many ways. If you’re going to tackle someone, commit to the tackle otherwise you’ll end up not committing and getting yourself hurt.

Compromising, hedging your bets, trying it and seeing what happens. These are really ways of avoiding a decision. They are succumbing to the fear, uncertainty and dread, rather than making the effort, doing the homework and studying the research. And then committing.

I was reminded of this recently while on holiday. There was a ‘bouncy island’ as a guest attraction in the hotel pool. Think of a bouncy castle, but with bouncy palm trees and bouncy treasure chests. The kids and some of the parents were getting stuck in, pushing each other off the island into the pool and generally having great fun. I was happy to read and enjoy it as a spectator sport.

Finally, after about 2 hours of being encouraged to join in, I gave it a try. After about 60 seconds of being Mr Nice Guy, a child – with sharp nails, it transpired – got pushed into me in the kerfuffle and scratched off the top of my nose.

My own fault. I was patched up and got stuck in after that. It was great fun.

One footnote to add: there’s always an exception to every blog post rule. One of the dads decided it would be great fun to dive off the top of the slide at the end of the island, rather than sliding down the slide – which is why, he now realises, it’s called a slide – and cracked his head open on the floor of the shallower-than-thought pool. Off to hospital he went for 5 stitches, but it could have been a lot worse.

The commitment was there, but not the planning.

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

Work and Time

October 30, 2015 //
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Of all the laws and sayings that govern the world of work and play, I think it’s Parkinson’s Law that resonates the most with me.

‘Work expands to fill the time available for its completion,’ or words to that effect. It occurs to me that it also contracts to fit the time available for completion as well.

I was reminded of this recently when a project that had been running for months and had a deadline of 11:59pm on a Friday used up literally all its available time, and a few minutes the other side of the watershed too. We were in good shape mid-week, then a few extra review rounds got wedged in, and before you knew it we were under the gun.

The key thing is this: nothing’s perfect, ever. You can always find another tweak, something that constitutes a micro-improvement. This is especially true of a long, detailed document. The possibilities for a typo, a punctuation error or a stylistic inconsistency are limitless.

Which is why we have deadlines, why we impose limits.

You always have to do your best work, nor settle for mediocre. But, you gotta stop at some point.

 

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Categories General, Planning, Strategy

Writing a Book

October 14, 2015 //
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I’ve decided that writing a book is hard, really hard.

I’ve been working on one for a good while. For a couple of months when I didn’t have too many commitments I made some excellent progress and got at least half of it done. Then I took on more work and also significantly expanded my portfolio of voluntary activities and the book started to gather the electronic equivalent of dust.

It’s not a question of discipline or commitment. I take a disciplined approach to my blogging, but it comes easy because I write about what I see and a lot of it is stream of consciousness. I’m committed to almost everything I do, otherwise there seems little point doing it. With a book, though, you need a plan and you need to write to that plan, and that takes more time. Time to research, time to create.

Time is what I don’t have. Certainly, I could spend less time with the family, I could do without some of the 8 hours sleep I know my body needs on a regular basis, or I could drop some of the other things I’m doing. But I don’t want to do that, because I’m naturally drawn to the portfolio career and a diversity of activities.

Writing a book is essentially a selfish, specialist activity in order to get it done. You need to put yourself first, and sacrifice things that are important to other people, things that they’re relying on you to help with. Generalists find this tough.

That’s why writing is book is hard, really hard.

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Categories Communication, General, Planning

The Key Sales and Marketing Word for 2016

September 21, 2015 //
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Want to know what the most important word will be for sales and marketing professionals in 2016?

Engagement.

Well, it’s out there now.

I used to think the key word was ‘resonate’, but that doesn’t go far enough. When what you say resonates with someone, it’s like they’re a string you’ve plucked. You’re on their frequency, to mix a simile and a metaphor. But the string doesn’t vibrate for ever, it fades away, or loses interest and it becomes immovable, in both senses of the word.

No, to succeed we all need to engage our audience. If we work in sales, we have to get our customers engaged so that they will do something with us. If we work in marketing or sales enablement, we also have to engage our sales people, those internal customers who never read an email we send them, or a document we prepare for them. We have to find ways of making them listen and realise that this is what they need, what they have been asking for, what is going to make them more money because they can satisfy more of their customers and prospects.

Sales engagement – and partner engagement for that matter – is a crucially important slice of the pie, but it’s often the slice that gets left to go cold. And no-one likes cold pizza, at least not like they do sizzling warm pizza that engages the senses.

So if engagement is the key word in 2016, what is the key process for us for the rest of this year?

It’s this: the journey to establish and effectively communicate what we have – or what we will need to have – that will truly engage our customer.

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