Archives for category: Strategy
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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

Workflow – Work Slow

January 6, 2016 //
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Sometimes, when you’re too busy to see the work for the trees, it’s difficult to take a step back from what you’re doing and analyse if you could be doing it better.

Process is so important to what we’re doing. You have to get the right steps in place and then make sure you’re doing the steps in the right order.

When I was much younger I was staying in my Uncle’s pub for a while and I was washing his car. After a few minutes he came out and said, ‘what are you doing?’ ‘I’m washing the wheels,’ I replied. You see, the wheels are the fiddly filthy bits that I wanted to get out of the way first.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but now the water’s filthy for washing everything else. Start with the windows and glass first, then go from the top of the car down to the bottom. And start again with clean water.’

Process. You have to get the order right, and you have to do the right things too.

Workflow, as the name suggests, is about the flow of work, the process you go through. If you don’t get the workflow as good as it can be, you work slow, or you work poorly.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Me in Engagement

January 4, 2016 //
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You hear the word ‘engagement’ all the time in business. ‘How will we engage on this deal?’ ‘We’ve got to get the customer engagement right,’ and so on.

It’s an unhelpful word to my mind. It’s not a customer-centric or friendly word. It’s all about ‘me’.

There’s a ‘me’ in engagement and it’s my view that the word makes us think on our terms and not on our customers’ terms. I don’t feel like I have the problem correctly framed nor the priorities right when I’m using the word engagement.

We engage our enemies in battle, because it’s about us and we want to win. We don’t engage (with) our customers, we want them to win.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Strip Out Negativity

January 1, 2016 //
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My Mum has recently acquired two baby tortoises. They’re about 3 months old and both of them would fit on a dollar bill with plenty of room around and between them.

She’s called them Yin and Yang, because they’re quite different in personality. In fact they’re opposite, which makes their names pretty inspired I think.

It got me thinking about how you have to look at the other side of something to help you fix the first side. There are often two sides to every story or situation so it makes sense to look at both.

I blogged recently about staying positive. Of course, one of the best ways of staying positive is to remove the negative, to strip it away so that it becomes emasculated and weedy.

Staying healthy in body and mind, in business and in leisure, is a lot about stripping out negativity. Negativity is like a weight around your neck, pulling you down into the vortex. Free yourself from that weight and rise up. Fire up the hot air balloon and chocks away, to mix one’s aviation metaphors…

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Categories Communication, Customers, Strategy

The Demotion of Emotion

December 30, 2015 //
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When you’re in a discussion about something, and in descends into an argument, it inevitably becomes emotional. This is especially true and unhelpful in business.

In these situations you tend to get a lot of ‘heat’ and not much ‘light’. In other words, there’s too much emotion and not enough inspiration.

I have a short temper and I find it’s easy for me to let a discussion descend into something unhealthy. There should be no room for emotion when you’re trying to fix or improve something, yet we find it very hard not to give it a seat at the table.

I find it much easier to do in business, but you have to demote emotion and recognise it for what it is, an instinctive response to change, stress, and a loss of control. The better you can remove emotion from the equation, the easier it is to get the right answer, to get the sums to add up.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Sales, Strategy

What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

December 25, 2015 //
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Life would be much better without stress, without those mini- or major panic attacks that I have to assume consume us all from time to time.

Whether it’s our work commitments or other aspects, they can prompt some fairly unhealthy moods. After all, it’s hard to stay positive all the time.

Sometimes I feel myself getting pulled into the eddy of such a situation, and it’s easy to forget that there are tricks to get yourself out of them. Well, they work for this writer at any rate. I find that the best way to confront a panic attack is to rationalise it, put it in context with something else.

‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ is the question I ask myself. Really, when you think about it this way, the worst that could happen – unless it’s one of those few-in-a-life-time occurrences where you you need help and a much more profound approach – is generally not much at all. You might miss a deadline, or a bus, or a plane. So what? You still have your health, your family, your friends. When you look back at this situation, it’s going to barely register as a blip, if you’re even concerned about it now.

Stepping outside of your own thoughts for a moment and comparing your current lot to potentially the worst version of it – which will almost never happen – is the reality shift you need to get out of neutral, shake off the paralysing inertia and get moving again.

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Categories Communication, General, Strategy

OSX EL Capitan and the Preview App

December 18, 2015 //
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Every organisation at some point gets too big and hulking, loses touch with what made it great and is forced into a radical rethink or imminent decline. Sometimes it’s a series of points that when added together tip the see-saw.

That moment has come, I think, for Apple with the release of its 2015 operating system, OSX El Capitan. As a company that competes on product leadership, it was never that great at staying close to customers. It got away with this because its stuff was so well designed, so intuitive and so damned beautiful. You didn’t need a manual.

El Capitan has been a bit different, though. Stuff hasn’t worked properly and fixes haven’t been forthcoming. Since I put EL Capitan on the machine that’s created this post, the default application for reading pdf documents – Preview – opens them as completely blank, most of the time.

Lots of us have complained via the discussion boards and so far, most unusually, no fix has been announced or even acknowledged. It’s not the only problem either.

Is Apple losing its touch? Or is it symbolic of the decline of laptops and computers in favour of mobile? After all, Apple is now a mobile phone company. Either way, there’s something rotten in the state of California.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Strategy

The Long Throw

December 16, 2015 //
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I’ve often wondered why soccer clubs and coaches don’t spend more time working on their players’ throw-ins. It’s the most neglected part of the game, and yet it can be so powerful.

When I used to watch the destructive force of the long throws from retired Southampton and Ireland’s Rory Delap, I wondered why more didn’t do it, or develop it. You can’t be off-side from a throw – I know this because my Mum told me, true story – and when you see the havoc that it creates for defences when someone launches the ball in a fast, straight line from the touch line to the 6-metre goal area, you realise what a game-changer it is.

Here’s the thing though: in your business or organisation, what’s your equivalent of the long throw? It’s worth trying to find it.

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Categories General, Strategy

Learning How to Run Again

December 14, 2015 //
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I’ve recently been through an exercise to change the way I run. I’ve never benefitted from coaching and only really jogged or ran to keep the weight off and stay fit for more fun pursuits like soccer or racquet sports.

I’d also been picking up a few calf niggles over the last few years and thought it was something to do with my technique, rather than the more obvious reason which is the inexorable sway of time.

What I noticed was that people who run don’t actually plant the heel. The ball of their foot hits the ground first, rather than the heel. I was always heel first, as if I was walking, but a bit quicker. So I set about changing the way I ran.

Because it’s such a fundamental and constant activity, it takes a lot of conscious effort to change. It’s the same in business. If you’re comfortable doing things a certain way, you stay doing it that way. When you find it’s wrong, or it can be done better, you have to embark on a regular conscious process of upheaval or else you’ll give up and go back to the old way. You might not want to change, even if you privately admit it’s for the better. It’s too hard in the short term.

So it was with the running. Every single stride was a conscious effort, otherwise the mind would wander for a couple of minutes and I’d emerge from my reverie to find that the heel was back hitting first. Slowly, but surely, the new way becomes the new natural way, but it’s still so easy to slip the yolk early and step back – literally.

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Categories General, Strategy
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