Archives for category: Planning
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The Investment Dating Game

April 1, 2015 //
0

You have this great business idea. You haven’t seen anything like it and you’re convinced you can make a success of your venture. The most pressing question, unless you happened to be prodigiously wealthy – so you already know how to get money and make more of it – is around financing the development and take-off of your idea.

You could bootstrap the business, running it on your own savings until it starts to ‘wash its own face’, but you might need more than you reckon on as these things always take longer than the best laid plans. You could go to friends and family and secure relatively small amounts from a relatively large number of people. At this point you might already need to start giving some of your company away in return for the investment, and by now you’re starting to think about the level of relationships you will have with these investors.

Those who don’t have access to their own funds or the funds of their nearest and dearest need to start playing the dating game with professional lenders, who might be high net worth individuals, institutions, state/semi-state bodies or private investment companies. It’s at this point that you need to develop an understanding of two things, very, very quickly. The first is how investment business and its clandestine terms work: seed this, A round that, mezzanine the other, and so on. The second, arguably even more important, is the type of investment partner you want to work with and who will be good for your business as it grows. Cultural fit is of paramount importance.

If you’re in the third camp, needing to start the dance with someone who lends and makes money for a living, then I can recommend this post for an excellent primer. There are some additional very good links within the post. I don’t know the guy at all, but he writes well and he seems to mean well too. Good luck!

Tags ,
Categories Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

A Cluster of One

March 30, 2015 //
0

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 :-).

Tags ,
Categories General, Planning, Technology

The OTE in Promote

March 23, 2015 //
2

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.

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

Volume or Deal Size

February 9, 2015 //
0

What’s your business model? Is it a high volume, small deal size business? Or is it a low volume, large deal size business? It really has to be one or the other. It’s really hard to fall in the middle or do a bit of both. How many medium volume, medium deal size businesses do you know? How many that have a bit of both?

High volume businesses rely on great metrics, reliable conversion rates, and a constantly full pipeline so that the army of small deals makes a big total. Low volume businesses face a lumpy, more unpredictable sales chart but when the deals come in life is good, until the next big deal.

You could argue that the best business model is a blend of all three, so that you’ve got a pipeline of big deals, middle deals and small deals. Getting the blend right, however, is a tall order, especially when you bear in mind that different deal sizes are usually subject to different groupings of buyers, different sales processes and different sales cycle lengths. Hmmm, you need to be a pretty sophisticated and well practised sales organisation to make that work.

I’ve seen a number of organisations with a volume business model who haven’t done the maths to figure out how much sales and marketing they need to do to create enough leads, to create enough pipeline and so on. When they do, it makes for a pretty sobering meeting. Then there are the companies with a large deal business model who don’t know their sales cycle length and so don’t know how long they need to go between deals.

Whatever your business model, if people don’t have a genuine need for your product, or if you have to evangelise and educate in order to create the need, you have an uphill struggle.

Tags ,
Categories General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

The Second Selling Stage

January 9, 2015 //
0

Ah, the second selling stage. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? And so it should, because it’s a very important stage. Coming after the first selling stage where you have defined and listed your addressable market, the second selling stage is opportunity definition.

This stage corresponds to the Second Buying Stage of problem / opportunity definition. If your customer has a problem to address, or an opportunity to exploit, then you need to define what the opportunity is for you. This stage is all about qualifying the situation. At this stage there has been some level of engagement between you and the company. Either they’ve reached out to you or you to them.

Don’t get your hopes up yet, however. If you can’t qualify the opportunity to your satisfaction, as far as you should be concerned there is no opportunity. Being ruthless at this stage and discounting the ‘bad’ or non-opportunities is the best thing you can do, because it frees you up to concentrate on – or find – the good opportunities.

So how to qualify? Many people use acronyms like BANT – do they have Budget, do they have Authority to buy, do they have a defined Need, what is the Time limit by when they have to act – to help them define the opportunity. In essence, this sales stage is all about establishing that this is worth your while putting in more effort to pursue the opportunity, over other opportunities. These questions will help you:

– exactly what’s stopping them from doing what they want to do? What’s the problem?

– is there a great fit between what you provide and what they need?

– who are you talking to at the company? are they high enough up the pecking order?

– when do they need to act by?

– what will happen to them if they don’t act?

– what other alternatives are they considering (the biggest two being do nothing and do it ourselves)?

– how can you do a better job for them than the alternatives, and why?

– do you like the odds on getting this deal?

Ideally, you don’t want to deduce the answers to all the above questions, you want the company to confirm the answers for you. All that is, except the third question and the last question. I would keep these answers to yourself and use them to decide the following: am I in, at this stage, or am I out?

Tags , , ,
Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

The Third Buying Stage

December 26, 2014 //
0

In previous posts on the buying process for B2B companies, I shared my view that the first buying stage is awareness of a problem or opportunity, followed by the second stage, namely defining that problem or opportunity.

The third stage is the brief, where the company sets out its requirements for removing the barrier to achieving its objectives. The brief can come in many forms, from the ultra-short verbal brief, to the more formal requests for information, quote, or proposal, through to the ultra-formal Invitation to Tender.

At this stage companies may still decide they can meet these requirements internally, that they don’t need to go for outside help. Don’t forget that for you the selling organisation your two biggest competitors are ‘internal solution’ or ‘do nothing’.

Most importantly, the requirements stage is where the customer outlines what they think they need. They might not need what they think they need. Crucially too, they’re pre-occupied with the ‘what’.

They’re not as focused on the ‘why‘, which is the key question, nor the ‘how’, which is down to you.

Tags , ,
Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

The Second Buying Stage

December 24, 2014 //
0

If the first buying stage is awareness of a problem or opportunity during normal business operations, the second buying stage in the B2B buying process is an acknowledgement and definition of the problem to be solved, or the opportunity to be captured.

Your prospective customer – or existing customer – has identified that there is a barrier to achieving an objective, or to capitalising fully on the opportunity that has come to light. Something is broken and they need to change the way they do things. At this stage, they haven’t decided if they can fix the problem internally, such as by reallocating their resources. They still might need to go outside their organisation and invest in your product or service.

In this buying stage the customer needs to define these three important questions:

– what are we trying to achieve?

– what is currently broken that is stopping us from getting there?

– what will happen if we don’t fix what’s broken?

Companies are generally very good at answering the first two questions, but less good at quantifying or qualifying the the answer to the third question, which is effectively the ‘opportunity cost’ of not doing something.

Once the customer has defined their problem, they’re in a position to move forward. If they can’t articulate their problem, they’ve got problems, plural.

Tags , ,
Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

The Poison of Perfection

December 19, 2014 //
0

‘When I play the perfect set of tennis,’ I used to say to myself, ‘a set I couldn’t improve on in any way, I’m going to hang up my racquet and never play again.’ I’m still playing. You can’t get to perfection, nothing’s ever perfect for anything other than a fleeting moment.

It always used to amaze me that you’d find typos in printed books, especially first editions. Who’s checking these things? I would mark the errors on my copy, contemplate contacting the author – especially if I knew them – and never get round to doing it. I used to be a voracious reader of Seth Godin’s daily blog. Very rarely, because his work is pretty meticulous, I would find a typo, maybe once every 200 posts. I would send Mr G a note with the correction and he would unfailingly acknowledge me, like he has nothing else to do. I don’t do it any more.

The same applies to our working lives I think. Whatever you’re doing, it won’t ever be perfect! You occasionally get these very exciting periods during a land-grab, dot com-type situation where people talk about ‘ready, fire, aim.’ ‘Just get it out there,’ they say. ‘It’s good enough.’ When you’re in those periods it seems like you need to move so fast that good enough is all you have time for.

I’m not saying you should give up and get it out there. The ‘perfect’ approach is to aim for somewhere in the middle, between ready, fire, aim and perfect. Exactly where in the middle is down – or up – to you. You should always give something your best shot, or there’s no point doing it. It needs to be more than good enough. It needs to be the best you can do, in the time available.

You can always change something, tweak something, improve it or correct it a touch, with one more iteration. At some point, time is up, and you have to hit the ‘go’ button. As I was fond of saying, ‘life’s too short, and so am I.’

‘Perfect’ poisons you. Your best shot is your best shot.

 

 

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

Start at the End

December 8, 2014 //
2

Writer’s block? Not sure how to start, or where to start? A lot of people will tell you: ‘just start, write something, anything to get you going.’

Whether you’re writing, composing, or just plain planning, I find the best place to start is the end. What is the end result you’re looking for? How do you want things to finish up? What’s your destination? Once you’ve defined that, you can work back and build your outline or framework.

Then you can start at the start.

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Marketing, Planning, Strategy

It’s All in the Prep

November 26, 2014 //
0

When I’m preparing to write anything significant, I spend a disproportionately large amount of time deciding on the outline for it. Often I will then write the introduction, and then the conclusion, before turning to the body of the document. I find that if I don’t spend a good amount of time on the planning, and I cut corners, then it takes me correspondingly longer to finish the document. This is because I haven’t thought it through properly and it doesn’t have the right structure or flow. It doesn’t hang together nor is it convincing.

It’s all in the preparation. Cooking, doing an important presentation or speech, tackling an essay at school, there’s a feeling of release – or is it relief – when you’ve done the prep, or built the outline. It feels like half the battle and you know you’re on solid ground from hereon in. The rest follows more easily, hanging comfortably on the framework of a solid beginning, middle and end.

Does this mean I’m denigrating the benefits or merits of spontaneity? Not really. There’s so much to be said for going with the flow and sometimes the best of times come from spur-of-the-moment behaviour. It all depends on the situation :-).

Tags ,
Categories Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »