Archives for category: Sales
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The Time-Waster

March 6, 2017 //
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Beware the time-waster. The person that wastes your time, not theirs. They are the scourge of modern society.

We all know them. We see them at work or at play, they are everywhere. The most heinous individual – barring the bully or the abuser of any kind – is the time-waster. They suck the life-force out of you. They rob you of the most most precious resource you have. They don’t value your time.

The time-waster is the person who can’t see or or doesn’t care that they’re clearly taking up too much of your time. They love to talk, they love to unload. They can’t make their point quickly, succinctly, pointedly. They hog the oxygen at meetings, holding forth yet coming up with nothing of consequence or action. They are often shirkers, stallers, avoiders, prevaricators.

You see, you do know them.

Don’t suffer fools gladly. Be direct. Cut them off. Move on.

And what if they do that to you? Well, examine thyself. Either you’re a time-waster and you need to improve your interactions, or you’re not, in which case you need to find another way.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Sales

Churn or Growth for Startups

March 3, 2017 //
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I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and blogs. A few of them I even get around to reading too. One in particular focuses on start-ups.

If you’re in a start-up, you should read this chap’s stuff. He’s memorably called Tomasz Tunguz and he’s a VC investor in software-as-a-service companies with a firm called Redpoint.

One particular post that sticks in the mind is called: Which To Prioritize – Churn or Growth? The answer, in case you didn’t have time to read his article, depends on your maturity as a business, but for early stage start-ups it’s churn. The one thing you need to establish as a start-up is product-market fit. You want to demonstrate how difficult your early customers think life would be without your product, which is why they’re all staying around. The stickier it is, the better your long-term prospects.

Tom – I don’t know him personally but I suspect he prefers to be addressed as such – offers many more reasons why churn is what you focus on instead of growth. For me it boils down to the business model. If you’re in an annuity-based business, founded on recurring revenues, then the more customers you can retain and renew, the greater your revenue starting-point is at the first of the year, before you’ve even begun to win new bookings.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

6 Types of Pitch

March 1, 2017 //
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I recently finished reading a 2012 tome by Daniel Pink called To Sell Is Human. I thought it was excellent. It revolves around the premise that we all practice selling, even those of us in non-sales roles. We sell our kids on going to bed on time, our company on our project over someone else’s, our spouse on this holiday destination over that, and so on.

One of the sections is about 6 different ways to pitch a product, service or idea. They’re developments from the tried, trusted and a little outdated elevator pitch. Here they are:

  1. The Once Upon a Time pitch. You tell a story as follows: Once upon a time [there was a situation]. Every day [something happened, like a problem]. One day [introduce your solution or idea]. Because of that [something different happened]. because of that [there was a specific benefit or good outcome]. Until finally [there was a new situation brought on by your solution or idea].
  2. The twitter pitch. As it sounds, can you get your basic idea over in 140 characters or less, ideally less to allow others to retweet it?
  3. The rhyming pitch. Something is more memorable, catchy, lasting and prone to propagation if it rhymes. Example: if you don’t make it rhyme, you’ll need to make more time
  4. The one word pitch. If you had to distill everything it’s about into one word, what would it be?
  5. The question pitch. A pitch can be more powerful than a statement as it invites you to think about fairly solid facts. Think: what could you do with a faster internet connection?
  6. The subject line pitch. Designing your offering like the subject line of an email that you really want people to open is a really good way to tighten your pitch

All of these have their merits and situations they’re best suited to. The book has loads of other thought-provoking recommendations and is well worth a proper read.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Sales, Strategy

Thanking Your Suppliers

February 24, 2017 //
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Here’s a thing. In business we’re maniacally focused on our customers. We even call them clients, or patients even in the caring professions. Everything we do revolves around them. We work hard to win them, and in the private sector we thank them, take them to lunch and send them corporate gifts. This is something I write about in my first ever blog post here.

I have customers in my business too, and I try to look after them so that there’s a fair exchange of value between us.

What I also really focus on as well is my suppliers. Often we treat our suppliers with a fraction of the care we provide to our customers. Whereas our customers are on the highest pedestal, our suppliers are often the afterthought in the basement.

Good suppliers are absolutely critical to your success, especially if you’re in an industry where you take what your supplier gives you and build on it or resell it for your own wellbeing. I don’t send Christmas cards to friends or family. They have plenty of them already. I send Christmas cards, each with a personal note, to all my suppliers thanking them for their service, help or support during the year.

Are you in the habit of thanking your suppliers? Do you award the best ones with a ‘supplier of the year’ accolade? If you do, you’re in a pretty small minority. You’re bucking the trend. When the world zigs, you zag.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Rarely What You Expect

February 22, 2017 //
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Things in business or life rarely turn out exactly as you thought they would. They’re rarely what you expect.

The other day I was working on a customer project that relied on two third party companies for help. My experiences of dealing with the two companies, and the opinions I formed about them, led me to the following conclusion. One company – let’s call it company A – was going to help me out and it was going to be a fruitful exercise. The other – which you’ve probably guessed is company B – probably wasn’t going to oblige too much.

As it turned out I was completely, 180 degrees, wrong. A didn’t go anywhere and B was superb.

It reminded me that even though you can go into things with a positive frame of mind, hoping that all engagements will work out for you, you can often get your assumptions wrong. While it’s great to act on a hunch in the absence of anything solid to go on, we have to check our facts where possible, speak to people and see things through. I’m sure there have been many times when I’ve said to myself, ‘why didn’t I get to this before, why didn’t I speak to them sooner?’ Is that true for you too? If so, it’s probably because things are rarely what you expect.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales

Why Can’t I Demo Your Stuff?

February 15, 2017 //
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In this Internet-enabled age buyers often know as much as we do about what we’re selling. They’ve usually done their homework, researched the alternatives, and – most importantly – asked their peer group what their experiences of the alternatives are.

Gone are the days when we knew more than them and we could act like masons, jealously guarding our information and secrets. Customers now are used to self-serve and the most savvy companies are making it possible for buyers to buy their stuff with no or a light touch. After all, why step in front of a moving train? Why increase the cost of acquisition when they’re in buy mode?

Imagine how frustrating it must be, then, for B2B buyers of complex software systems who can’t demo your software on their own, without your intervention? What signal does it send to the buyer if it’s hard or impossible to try your software for themselves:

  • I’ll think your system is too expensive
  • I’ll not see the value unless you explain it to me
  • It’s too hard to use, too hard to navigate
  • It doesn’t look good
  • It’s clunky
  • It falls over

The list goes on…

The challenge for the purveyor of complex, comprehensive B2B software is to simplify it without compromising on power. The challenge for the purveyor of poor B2B software is to fix it before you’re no longer the best of a bad lot.

The provider’s response might be that they can’t sell to a buyer unless they understand the seller’s requirements and how the system can help them address those requirements better than anything else. This shouldn’t stop the provider using content, guiding the buyer to that conclusion and packaging a bunch demos of their software to back up each argument.

Low touch is the pathway to no touch.

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Technology

1000 LinkedIn Connections

February 13, 2017 //
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I reached a thousand connections on LinkedIn the other day. Given that I almost never connect with someone I don’t know or have not worked with, I consider this a function of my advanced years that I’ve been able to accumulate what is in theory a valuable network.

Of course, there are various tiers to this network. Some of the people in it I actually can’t remember, so I either worked with them very briefly a long time ago or I connected with them when I was under pressure to break my 2 cardinal rules. Others I know better, and others again are part of a small coterie I know very well and would reach out to for help or to give help.

Interestingly, I only realised I was on 998 connections after I had sent out 3 connection requests. I wondered who would be connection number 1,000. Number 999 would be in the top 3 of all my connections influence-wise, and would be a well known name in the Ireland business community. Number 1,000 was someone relatively senior in the UK with whom I have only recently starting working. Number 1,001 is a friend of a friend who has not accepted my request yet.

Getting to a 4-figure network, which I consider to be a genuinely powerful network rather than one of those that is ten times the size and built for the sake of quantity not quality, reminded me how little I currently leverage the network that I have worked so hard to build up over the last 10 or 12 years. I must do better with this important, sleeping giant of an asset…

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Technology

Revenue Avenue

February 8, 2017 //
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There’s a guiding principle for all businesses, regardless of their size, industry or stage of life. It applies across the business or for a specific project or initiative within the business.

What’s the revenue avenue?

By which I mean, what is the quickest path towards revenue? What do we need to do to get the sales? After all, nothing really happens in a business until somebody sells something.

Sometimes we can get too caught up in the planning, or do too much analysis, or maybe overcomplicate our strategy, making it too hard for ourselves. When this happens, we need to keep it as simple as we can and ask ourselves what we need to do to get it going, to get the revenues going.

It’s far easier to make decisions for the future of the business from a position of income. Always look to take the revenue avenue.

 

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Genuinely New Idea

February 6, 2017 //
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What do you do when you come up with what you think is a genuinely new idea for a business, product or service? Inventions, as we all know, are 1% perspiration and 99% inspiration, so you probably still have one foot in the starting blocks even though you have a great idea.

Maybe it’s such a great idea, so obvious that when you make it a success people will say ‘that’s so obvious, why didn’t I do that?’. Maybe you don’t know if it’s been done before and you’re anxious to get it off the ground before someone else who’s better resourced and financed than you comes in .

I’m not an expert in this area, as I tend to help people scale their start-up, which is a step or few beyond what I’m describing here. Nevertheless, there are two things you can assess pretty easily. First, does this thing, or something close to it, already exist? Second, is there a market for it?

If it doesn’t already exist, it’s often a good indicator of viability if your idea dovetails into some of the emerging mega-trends. You need to look out for articles like this one from people who know the field. Who knows, you might be nicely aligned with some of the future ‘big things’. There’s no guarantee that someone somewhere isn’t already developing precisely your new idea, and you could argue that if it’s been identified as an emerging trend you’ve missed the boat, but who knows, there might be room for more than one player in the truly hot areas.

Sometimes it’s a genuinely new idea that there isn’t a market for, and we’ve all had those, probably several of them. And perhaps it’s a genuinely new idea that we don’t have time to work on, because of other commitments. I had a genuinely new idea about two years ago. I researched it and nothing like it existed, which amazed me, because it seemed so obvious. Two years on, I’m still working on my idea, and it still doesn’t exist.

At some point, you have to forget the genuinely new idea and move on, or go for it. Nothing ventured…

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Read vs Retain

January 30, 2017 //
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I don’t know about you, but as I get older I find it harder to retain information.

I read loads, at work and for leisure. I remember the information for the short term, but it doesn’t stick over time and I have to go back to the information I need again. And again.

When I was younger, at school, I used to have regular tests, like loads of other kids. A lot of the tests were vocabulary tests, for different languages. I would cram, learn the words by rote, regurgitate them in the test, score well, and then forget many of them over time. Later, when I started taking the kind of exams where you couldn’t learn something by rote – you had to learn how to do it, like a solve a maths problem a certain way or learn how to do an income statement – I struggled.

When we need to retain information or knowledge, it has to happen regularly over time, as we absorb the new information or methods and learn the patterns that help us embed them with repetition and practice.

Something else needs to happen, though. We need to listen or read actively. We need to be engaged. It’s like saying hello to someone new for the first time and engaging the brain actively to remember their name. If we don’t pay the right kind of attention, the name is gone in an instant. If we listen actively, it stays for years, decades even.

There are lots of books and courses out there that help you remember names and other more involved concepts by figuring out connections and stories that make them memorable. But to me they’re more developed ways of engaging the brain for retention.

So it’s not really my getting older that’s the problem. It’s more that I live in an era of information overload and I’m scanning everything, rather than reading it properly.

The difference between read and retain is the difference between passive and active.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
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