Archives for category: Strategy
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Get Into It

April 3, 2017 //
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Most of us procrastinate to some degree. Whether it’s a big work project, a domestic chore or a niggling thing we need to get done, we find reasons to put it off.

We’ll start it at the top of the hour, we tell ourselves, or maybe the next day, because we won’t get it done today, even though we often don’t know how long it will take. That new fitness, diet or health regime, we’ll get that rolling Monday, or perhaps the first of the month. You know, make a clean start and all that.

And then that imposed deadline comes and goes and the tiny little switch that blocks out the feeling of serenity kicks in.

I think I know the antidote to procrastination. Get into it. Just get into it!

Once you get into it, you’re fine. You’re always fine. It’s usually not as bad or as time-consuming as you imagined it would be. Thinking about the thing grew in your head until it was bigger than the thing itself.

Make a start. Get into it. Dip in and see what’s involved, see what bits you can break off and get done. And then you’re away.

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

Why The Corner Shop Will Never Die

March 15, 2017 //
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We’ve all heard the horror stories and domesday predictions about the death of the High Street, as shoppers move out of town to the malls, or into their homes to their computer, or right where they are via their mobile phones, tablets, phablets and any other form factor you can imagine. Except that is, the move away from the quaint corner shop.

In Europe we still have corner shops, loads of them.

The corner shop I’m thinking of is in the small town I live in (a village by England standards). It’s not quite on the corner, but it’s next to 2 public houses, as you would expect in Ireland. It’s a health food shop. Ironic, given its location, but there you are.

Now if we’re in the very big city we can go onto a colossal online marketplace and get the thing we need delivered within an hour, for a premium, or the next day for probably next-to-nothing extra. But most of us aren’t in the very big city.

My wife asked me to pick up something for her during my lunch break the other day, since I was doing a couple of other errands. She was in a city and the vast supermarket she visited didn’t have said item. I went into the health food store and asked for the item. It has quite a long title to it, but even before I’d finished articulating its name the lady had pulled it from the shelf next to her till and it was ready for purchase. I was out in 120 seconds, the amount of time it takes to properly pour a pint of the black stuff.

This why the corner shop will never die. They are often specialist providers. You can always find staff to ask something. They can give you a knowledgeable and immediate answer the vast majority of the time. They usually smile and are grateful for your business. And, you are done in a matter of minutes.

In certain circumstances, then, the corner shop is alive and well and still a great retail experience.

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Categories Customers, Sales, Strategy

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

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

Normal

January 11, 2017 //
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Why do so many of us strive to be normal, to fit in? Is it our natural herding instinct, the safety in numbers? We don’t want to stand out too much, do we?

But what is normal?

Is it a basket of behaviours that can be grouped into a standard, a category or a stereotype? To me, normal is rather like ‘average’. Calculating an average number, or an average person can be a useful yard stick for grouping people or things, if it’s interpreted correctly.

But who is average? Who wants to be average? No-one is average. Average is a mathematical nicety describing a group, not an individual. It’s like when someone says ‘well most people would do that.’ Well, I’m not most people. Besides, how could I be?

So who wants to be ‘normal’? What is normal? Can one person really be normal?

I don’t want to be normal. I don’t want to be thought of as normal either.

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Categories General, Planning, Strategy

Primary, Secondary

January 9, 2017 //
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Almost everything we do is secondary. Not secondary in importance, you understand. Secondary as in it’s been done before, said before, heard before, tried before.

We spend 99% of our entire school and college lives learning stuff that has already been figured out. We’re getting it second hand and not doing the primary work, the genuinely ground-breaking stuff. Remember that odd time when you stuck your neck out in school or college and wrote what you felt was something new, a product of your independent thought? I bet it was marked wrong, right? You’re treading where thousands of people have gone before, so your new thing is not thought to be right – thought being the operative word.

So much of what we do is secondary. Our working lives are about replicating processes, re-working, recycling, renewing what’s been done before. So little of it is actually new, never done before.

There is a very small number of people doing the primary stuff. Making the law, setting the precedent, inventing a financial mechanism, product, sport, piece of technology, process, creating something new and valuable. The rest of us are studying it, reading it, criticising it, adopting it, using it, benefitting from it, and sometimes improving it.

In the world of doing primary stuff there is failure, mistakes, false dawns, incorrect conclusions, disappointment and a huge amount of wasted time. But also, by an order of magnitude greater, there is fame, fortune, progress, history, satisfaction, gratitude and humility.

What primary stuff are you doing, or trying to do?

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

Really Viral

January 6, 2017 //
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There’s nothing like the physical world to give us a powerful corollary of how it works in the cyber world.

I’m always reminded of this in late December when families and friends get together at the end of a few months of solid graft and a winter vomiting bug or two runs riot, moving through areas like wildfire.

That’s really viral, genuinely viral. You can see why the term virus was coined in the cyber world. A physical virus is an amazing thing, replicating itself, producing different strains and moving quickly through people in different cycles and timeframes.

Millions can be affected within the space of a couple of weeks, brought on by the combination of people being at a low ebb and slightly more vulnerable to infection after a sustained period of work, proximity to others, and mobility within family groups and circles of friends.

I’m always fascinated by how terms like desktop, folder, cloud, virus and so on are borrowed from the physical world for their digital equivalent. They always seem so apt.

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

Tell A Story

January 2, 2017 //
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Do you want to sell something to someone?

Do you want to market a product or service?

Do you need to convey a complex idea or concept?

Are you trying to get your audience to remember something?

Do you want your audience to be able to absorb, internalise and re-use the information you’re giving them?

Do you want someone to learn something?

Then tell a story!

Stories connect. They resonate with people. They’re memorable. They attach all the links in the right order into a coherent chain.

The story is the basic building block of the sales person and the marketer. Even if you don’t need a full story to get over your message, then a metaphor makes it memorable. So does an image, or a picture.

In this hectically fast world we occupy, with woefully short attention and retention spans, people are still engaged for hours and hours reading a good book, far longer than watching a movie or TV program.

So tell a story. It works.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy
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