Archives for category: Strategy
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Mind the Gap

December 27, 2017 //
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When you’re in marketing and sales, you’ve got to mind the gap, otherwise you may never emerge from it.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a start-up launching a new business, a business launching a new product, or a company planning its sales targets for the next 4 quarters, there’s always a gap for marketing and a gap for sales.

By this I mean that there is a lag effect. The marketing lag is from the time you start thinking about marketing to people, actually marketing to them with your finished content, to someone putting their hand up and saying ‘Talk to me, I’m interested.’ The sales lag is from the time someone puts their hand up, through the period of qualifying whether they’re a good fit for your business, through to them signing the deal. Add the marketing lag and the sales lag, otherwise known as the sales cycle, and you’ve got a pretty big gap before you’re turning your stuff into cash.

So, if you’re a start-up and your product’s not ready yet, you need to start marketing right now: blogging, tweeting, emailing. Building up a head of steam so that you can have real conversations once your product is ready takes at least 6 months. That’s half a year, which sounds much worse than 6 months.

Same if you’re an existing business about to launch a new product. You have to mind the gap, similar rules apply. And if you’re building your 2019 financial year’s sales figures, you need the marketing to kick in in 2018. Companies selling complex products and services with a 3-month sales cycle will not see any marketing activities from one quarter converted to sales in the same quarter. It might not be the quarter after that either, when you factor in the sequential lag time of the marketing and sales gaps.

How many companies who do a business plan for year Y plan the marketing effort for year X? Not many. And certainly not the ones who finish their year Y plan at the very end of year X, or even the start of year Y. Those companies can write off any help at all from marketing, probably for the first half of the year.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

The Three Phases of New Product Go To Market

December 22, 2017 //
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Taking a new product to market, whether it’s the sole product of a start-up, or it’s a new product or offshoot from an established business, is a fascinating area, and one which I’ve been involved in and advised on for a while.

There are typically three phases that a company goes through in its go-to-market journey towards a repeatable, scalable business: problem-solution fit; product-market fit; scale. All of them are customer-verifiable.

1) Problem-solution fit

In this phases of the new product go-to-market journey, you have a solution that a customer acknowledges – by parting with money – solves a problem for them. Hardly rocket science. It might just be one customer, and that one customer might be helping finance your development of a product that you hope you can sell to others. The trade-off is between customising the solution to the customer’s requirements and developing a solution that will still do the job for your target segment.

2) Product-market fit

In this phase, you have developed and sold your product to the point where there is a fit between your product and the market. Again, we’re not splitting the atom here. Your customers acknowledge that they need your product and they would be in trouble if for some reason your product was unavailable to them.No-one buys a nice to have, they buy what they must have, and you’ve demonstrated that a good number of customers need what you have.

3) Scale

The third phase of new product go-to-market is when you’re adding sales at an acceptable rate and at an acceptable cost of acquisition. There are various different ways of doing this, such as using channel partners, optimising internal resources, getting better at implementing and servicing the business, and so on. As the business is growing it is achieving greater economies of scale. It is multiplying revenues at a progressively smaller incremental cost. It is scaling the business.

Plenty of companies are perfectly happy providing solutions to problems for a very small number of customers, perhaps for ever. A smaller number graduates to a product which has product-market fit. A smaller number still manages to genuinely scale the business.

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

Practising What You Preach

December 20, 2017 //
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The ad agency that masterminds its own advertising campaign.

The consulting firm that follows its own methods to bring in work.

The childcare experts who raise their own children.

Sometimes it’s really hard practising what you preach. You stick too rigidly to the framework of best practices you advocate yourself. It takes you longer than it does for your customers because it has to be perfect. You have to get it right. You have to eat your own dog food and be the best at what you do because it’s what you’re also selling.

Of course, there are difficulties doing your own stuff. You’re too close to it for one thing. Also, the shift in perspective is always a revealing one. ‘This is the way I’m teaching this stuff, yet when I do it myself it’s hard.’ Or, ‘this is how I tell people to prospect for new business, why am I not following this practice myself?’

Then there is the criticism of those who say that ‘do as I say, not as a I do’ is a copout for those with lesser abilities than the people they’re coaching. I’m not sure this is valid. Even those who are the best at what they do look for coaches to give them that extra edge, regardless of whether the coach has been in the mentee’s shoes before.

Practising what you preach is useful for refining what you preach. Doesn’t make it any easier though.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Strategy

Uber and Car Ownership

November 22, 2017 //
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I was driving in central Dublin late on a Friday and a Saturday a few weeks ago, marvelling at the traffic. There’s not much traffic about, but it’s almost all taxis. Whole armies of them, pulsing through the arteries of the city. I don’t know how you can make money as a taxi driver that time of night. Supply seems to far outstrip demand.

Perhaps people can’t afford to pay Dublin parking rates, or perhaps they fear for their car’s safety at night time. Perhaps the one-way systems drive them mad or maybe they simply prefer public transport or taxis when they’re out at night. Either way, it got me thinking.

There seems to be a considerable drop in the amount of private cars in the city at night time. There’s been much written about the Uber platform over the last few years and what it’s done to the traditional taxi industry. But has the Uber phenomenon also contributed to a drop in car ownership in each metropolis?

We’re supposed to be moving to an eventual situation where we don’t need to own a car anymore. We’ll simply dial up a request for a car which will be deposited at our departure point. We’ll drive it to our destination there, where someone else will drive it somewhere else.

I was talking to a friend the other day who came back from a sabbatical in England in the summer. He’s not bothered to move back up to a 2-car family – they sold their second car before heading to London – and on the odd occasion he needs a second car he simply hires one for the day or weekend.

It feels like we’re gradually making the move towards treating a car as a service rather than an asset, if the connection of uber and car ownership is truly causal. It’s about time too. There’s no other major asset we purchase which starts depreciating the moment we get it.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Strategy

Anonymous Donors

November 17, 2017 //
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‘It’s better to give than to receive,’ or so the old saying goes.

Many organisations and institutions rely on donations to fulfil their role in society, even for their survival. A regular donor is worth their weight in gold. Their donor lifetime value is often a very sizeable sum.

And then there are the high net worth individuals who give vast sums. They are of course the holy grail. In very many cases their donation results in something being named after them. The Smith Room/Building/Wing/Stadium/Institute/College; the list of possibilities is long. For the donor this is rewarding and gives them the public acknowledgement and legacy that they probably feel is a fair reflection of their generosity. And why not?

Then there is the other type of donor. The folk that don’t need for there to be a connection between them and the thing that their donation is funding. Anonymous donors are the truly special breed. For them the satisfaction of giving and the knowledge of the benefit it will provide is enough for them. They’re happy to play second fiddle to the receiving organisation. For them the shadows and the light under the bushel.

Anonymus donors have a special kind of nobility.

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Categories Customers, General, Strategy

The Deferred Life

November 8, 2017 //
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The traditional approach to work for the vast majority of us, at least since national governments have been putting proper welfare structures in place for their people, is that we work for 40 years and then we retire, with a pot of money to sustain us, theoretically, for the rest of our lives. It’s the occupational pension, as opposed to the state pension which kicks in beyond a certain age.

Another school of thought has emerged relatively recently, namely that we should take regular long breaks from work and work until we’re older, enjoying these mini-retirements when we’re younger and healthier. Proponents of this version of the work/life balance call the traditional approach ‘the deferred life’, because you’re working hard and putting your life on hold until you retire. All your free time is pushed back to your most aged and infirm years. We’re living longer, which is a bonus but we’re also working longer to support the longer retirement too.

I must confess that I’ve had a few of these mini-retirements, in some cases before they were even thought of as such, but that was probably more down to indolence than good planning.

Of course, the $64,000 question that everybody asks is this: ‘how do I amass the $64,000 I need to live well without earning for a year or so?’ Clearly there are two barriers to being able to do this: money and flexibility. You need to have the moolah to bunk off every few years and tick something off your bucket list. You also need to have a work situation that allows you to do that, in the form of either an understanding and forward-thinking employer or your own business.

As many of us are faced with the prospect of working into our 70s to recoup the cataclysmic pension losses of 2008, the idea of mini-retirements and mini-returns-to-work seems more attractive with every passing month.

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Categories Customers, General, Strategy

Free Air

October 20, 2017 //
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We all feel the pinch from time to time and need to watch the pennies. At least some things are genuinely free, like air. That’s true in a narrow sense but many types and formats of air are not free. In some cases, the air we want to put into our vehicle tyres to keep them safe and economical is not free.

These days at fuel stations you tend to see large automated machines that provide you with air and water on payment of a coin, typically a euro or a pound. Other fuel stations have free air dispensers, but they don’t work much of the time, or the gauge is broken or illegible.

Air is part of the overall service that a fuel station provides, along with a host of other vehicle- and house-related items.

In my town there are 3 fuel stations. They have a tendency to converge on exactly the same price, even down to the tenth of a cent per litre, which is worth another post in itself. I have a policy, where prices in my locality are comparable, to buy my full tank of fuel – about €80 – at the station that has a free and regularly functioning air dispenser, so I can check my tyres too.

You reward the suppliers who have your long-term interests at heart and who try to provide a more rounded service, some elements of which may cost them money, but which they recoup in spades.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Pint Benchmark

October 18, 2017 //
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When I drink a pint of booze I often think about the effort that went in to getting it into my hands and to my lips. Someone had to grow the ingredients, then harvest them. Somebody had to take the ingredients, combine them with other ingredients that they didn’t have to grow but still acquire, and using skill, technology, equipment and time produce a barrel of beer.

Somebody then had to warehouse the barrel, schedule it for delivery and get someone to distribute it to a licensed place that served booze. Finally, somebody to had to set up the barrel, connect it to some pipes, pour the product into a glass and serve it to me in their furnished, heated, cleaned building.

A pint is generally 20% either side of €4.50. It lasts about 10 to 30 minutes, depending both on its number in a sequence of beers and my mood.

Does that not strike you as being ludicrously good value? The effort that’s gone into producing the lovely, creamy work of art that should be in front of me right now, as I write this on a Friday evening.

Whenever I want to pay for something, anything, that’s relatively small, I use the pint benchmark:

Is this item expensive compared to a pint? Does it provide comparable value to me?

Then I act on my decision accordingly.

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Categories Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Self-Interest

September 18, 2017 //
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Almost everything we do is guided by self-interest. It’s human nature. Heck, it’s in every sentient being’s nature, otherwise it would cease to exist.

This rule seems to apply to us humans at all levels of the famous Maslow hierarchy of needs, from the basic acts like food and warmth to the more sophisticated ones like self-actualisation, which I think means achieving our potential.

When we do something with family and friend interests at heart, there’s probably a degree of self-interest in there too. Even when we do something for people we don’t know, in an act of charitable kindness, self-interest figures in the mix, aside from the simple satisfaction we get from our generosity of spirit, time or money.

It always comes down to that, the underlying reason for why we do stuff.

The question for me is this. Can we rise above it? Can we do something that’s genuinely not self-serving? Not all the time, but once in a while, perhaps occasionally?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Strategy

Different Scenario

September 15, 2017 //
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When you’re going for a walk or driving or taking a train, a plane or a boat, you’re looking for different scenery, a different view of the world. Variety keeps the interest and adds to our bank of experiences. Too much of the same view and we get bored. It’s no use changing our location if the scenery is still the same.

It’s the same thing with work and play. You’re looking for a different scenario, a new angle, another way of looking at and experiencing things. While we love our routine, within that routine we also strive for variety. There’s no point making the effort to change if we get the same view, the same scenario. In this case the pain of change is greater than the pain of the staying the same.

We want the pain of change to be less than the pain of staying the same. This is why, if were going to improve our lot, or seize an opportunity, or fix a problem, we need to look at a different scenario.

The same scenario doesn’t work for us. We tried it already. It’s done. Time to move on. Time for a different scenario.

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Categories General, Strategy
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