Archives for category: Strategy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Why Go To A Consultant

July 15, 2015 //
0

Question: Why go to a consultant rather than someone in your company to get something important done?

There are myriad reasons, but the 3 I like and the 3 where I feel people like me can add value are these:

1) Specialised experience. You pay for experience in the field where you need help, because a consultant’s experience allows them to know which corners you can cut to execute quickly and save time.

2) Hard-nosed practicality. Consultants know what works and what doesn’t work. The practical, workable solution gets the job done.

3) Laser-like responsiveness. A good consultant knows that you went with them because they are free from any internal company politics or distractions and because they can deliver.

These 3 reasons are the ones we stand behind at M4 Marketing, which is my consulting practice. Together, they add up to what I think is a compelling offering, namely accelerating a company’s time to market for any important project.

Answer: You should go to a consultant because you want to get something important done.

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

The Wrong End of The Support Bell Curve

July 6, 2015 //
0

When you look at support generally, it seems to me that the bell curve is in operation quite a lot. A few support questions account for the almost all of the bell curve in terms of the frequency with which they occur, and then a multitude of obscure and uncommon queries occupy the outer reaches.

Companies in the support business (all companies, really) try and whip through the major bell curve with content and answers to FAQs designed to pre-empt the vast numbers of people contacting them. What happens then is that their metrics and their productivity get sucked away by the time and effort spent on the unusual, hard-to-categorise, hard-to-legislate-for stuff. Or they ignore them and focus on the 90%.

I have my broadband and my mobile contracts with the same provider. I also have an interesting issue, namely that my outbound email works fine from the country where I live, whereas when I’m overseas, the outgoing SMTP server fails to send my mail. It works fine inbound, and fine for webmail in either direction, obviously.

I have spent the last couple months trying to find a solution, which is either to change the outgoing SMTP server on my laptop, or else connect via my mobile phone and change the outgoing server on that. Except it’s not that easy, and as you can imagine I’ve been pushed from pillar to post by people who are tasked with getting support queries off their stack and onto someone else’s rather than solve the customers’ problems and see their metrics killed.

The last communication by email was from the broadband side of the house advising me to send a mail to care@ the mobile provider, which I did. One week later I got an auto-respond email back – one week later! – saying that the care@ email address has not been supported since 2004 – 2004! I then contacted the mobile provider via live chat – for there is no way of emailing a support query, which you knew if you were keeping up – who told me that I needed to call the tech support call centre which charges by the minute.

This has left me ticked off and my provider no further forward because it has invested significant aggregated time failing to fix my issue – which is important to me because I travel often.

If you’ve got an unusual support query, you’ll find yourself at the ugly end of the support bell curve, the end where nobody wins, unless you’re prepared to pay additional cash.

Tags
Categories Communication, Customers, Strategy

How Long is Your Runway?

July 1, 2015 //
0

When you’re executing a project, it helps to think about runway. For example, when you’re looking to generate leads for sales people to follow up on, there is a lead time between starting the project and leads coming in from the project you’ve executed. You need to plan for this runway, or else you’ll be trying to do vertical take off, and unfortunately business operates like an aeroplane rather than a helicopter or a jump jet.

The smaller your project, the smaller the runway you need. The larger the project, the larger the runway. You can get a light aircraft off the ground in 200 metres. You need at least ten times that for a jumbo jet. Same thing with business projects.

Make sure you’ve allowed enough runway, or you won’t get off the ground.

Equally important, the larger the project, the more runway you need to bring it home, complete it and assess its performance.

Make sure you’ve allowed enough runway, or you won’t land to fly another day.

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

Founders – Prepare to Lose the O

June 26, 2015 //
0

Founders – you need to prepare to lose the ‘o’.

If you’re the founder of a business, it’s more than likely that you’ll be the funder too.

In other words, to prove you’re serious about your business – and that others should be serious about it too – you’ll need to be funder as well as founder, to get it off the ground, winning and keeping customers.

Once you’ve been a funder, and you’ve proven your product/market fit, you can add the ‘o’ back in and get back to being a founder again.

Tags , ,
Categories General, Strategy

The Successful Marketing Manager’s Magic Word

June 5, 2015 //
2

I recently wrote a post on the successful sales manager’s magic word. That word was buffer.

It might also be prudent to offer a suggestion on what the successful marketing manager’s magic word is.

That word is buffer, as well. In fact, building buffer is a pretty good mantra for everything we do, from all types of work to how we manage our leisure time, our coffee appointments, our train departures and our meetings.

Just as the successful sales manager builds buffer around a team target that’s lower than the sum of the individual rep targets, so too should the successful marketing manager build buffers around the different marketing initiatives, especially around demand generation which in B2B circles is so essential to the successful sales manager, relying as they do on a steady stream of leads from marketing.

If you have a team of individual outbound ‘demand gen’ reps working the phones, make sure that the total of their individual targets is more than the team or company total. Similarly, if you have a range of outbound activities planned for the quarter, make sure that the sum of the targets for each of those activities – in terms of leads, opportunities and resulting revenues – exceeds the team or company total. You need to insure yourself against activities not happening or underperforming, or a rep underperforming, getting sick or leaving to give you a back-fill headache.

Remember to go back and measure the actual performance against target too, for the previous period. Then over time you can improve and be able to refine the amount of buffer you need to build into each area.

Even the best laid plans and estimates go awry. Give yourself some buffer, to make sure you can over-deliver on your promises.

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

The Stigma of the Underdog

June 3, 2015 //
0

Most people like to see the underdog triumph, especially when they’re not invested in the outcome.

There’s huge stigma attached to being an underdog, to escape the ineluctable eddy of the also rans and vault the barrier into the winners’ circle. It’s not simply the statistical mountain you have to scale. And it’s not only the story of the plucky small team and its fan.

No, it’s the psychology of winner versus underdog that’s the hardest to overcome, at least in the opinion of this blogger. It spreads out like a virus, infecting referees and fans alike. You see it in sports, where referees seem subconsciously swayed – at least I hope it’s subconscious – to give the big clubs the edge in the key decisions. Big club refereeing, my Dad used to call it.

People like to be in the safe bosom of voting to stay with the big dog, whether they care to admit it or not. It’s no different in business either. The person who make a significant purchase on behalf of the company knows that they’ll probably escape any blame by going with the big supplier. They haven’t stuck their neck out. This is what the underdog supplier is up against, and what the underdog supplier needs to work doubly hard to overcome.

It’s not so much Stockholm syndrome as stock hold syndrome…

Tags , ,
Categories General, Sales, Strategy

The Successful Sales Manager’s Magic Word

May 25, 2015 //
0

What’s the successful sales manager’s magic word?

Buffer.

Building buffer buys benefits for the sales manager.

I mean buffer in a money sense, not a time sense. Building a buffer into deadlines is always wise, regardless of your profession, to insure against the inevitable slips, trips and falls on the journey.

You should always have a buffer between your team target and the total of your people’s individual targets, because not everyone is going to hit target every month. Even in well-performing companies you might see a third-third-third split between those above target, those around target and those below target.

For example, to keep the maths easy, let’s assume you have 5 sales people on your team, each with a sales quota of $1,000,000 per year. Industry variances aside, your team target should be in the region of $4,000,000. Similarly, your sales director, if they have 3 managers with the same team target reporting into them, should have a sales organisation target of around $10,000,000. And so on, through the roll-up to the top person.

You want your people to hit target, and your Director wants you to hit target. That’s how successful companies retain successful sales professionals, rather than creating a constant need to replace churning staff.

Notice that I’m not talking about forecast buffer here. Building padding into your forecast makes it really difficult for the company to do meaningful measurement and planning.

Tags , , ,
Categories Communication, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Commission Plan Commitment

May 22, 2015 //
0

Commission is the financial incentive you give to sales people to help them meet or surpass the sales targets you set for the business. Many sales people receive a base salary and can earn commission on top of that base by achieving their monthly or sales quota. You want your sales people to hit their sales targets, right? If you do, there are a number of things you need to ensure to keep your sales people – and your company – happy.

Is your commission plan easy to work out? If it’s easy for your sales people to understand the commission they will earn by closing a certain deal, this will make them pre-disposed to do well. If your commission plan is an intricate, esoteric set of formulas requiring an advanced degree in pure maths to fathom, then you’re going to engender confusion and distrust.

Does your commission plan give your sales people a fair chance of achieving target? If the targets are reasonable and your sales people should hit them with a reasonable amount of effort and ability, that’s great. If you know they’re not achievable, then something’s wrong with either your people or – more likely – your business model or the need for your product or service. You need to take a long hard look at the root causes of the failure.

Is your commission plan correctly aligned to the long term goals of the business? You need to make sure your salespeople are chasing the right business for your business. Sales people, quite naturally, will look for the easy wins and the path of least resistance to achieving target. Some products and services are easier to sell than others, and if your people are concentrating on those easier-to-sell items that are not in the strategic interest of your business, you’re building a rod for your back. You need to make sure that your commission plan is structured in a way that is fair to your sales people while also enabling your company to grow in a stable and sustained manner.

Commit to a fair and wise commission plan and your people and the company will commit to you.

 

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, Sales, Strategy

Go Map Yourself

May 15, 2015 //
0

Do you want to be more successful at B2B sales and marketing? Then you need to do three things.

First, figure out how your customers want to buy from you. What do they want to do, when, in what order? If you don’t know, ask them. If they don’t know, consult with them and help them.

Second, map your roles, processes and systems to how they want to buy, so you can deliver that perfect buying journey for them. Then, adapt your roles, processes and systems accordingly.

Third, involve your people in steps one and two so they understand why it’s in everyone’s interest to adapt and come up with some great suggestions for how they can best get there.

Go map yourself. You’ll be glad you did. But not as glad as your customers. In some cases they may not buy what you have very often, and so you have to listen to what they’re trying to do and guide them through the steps they need to get there.

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Customers, General, Planning, Strategy

The Knife Edge of Change Management

May 13, 2015 //
0

Change is hard. We all know that, as individuals and companies. People naturally resist any changes that break their routine, especially if they don’t understand or buy into the reasons.

At the same time, you can’t simply draw a line in the sand and expect people to change the way they do things overnight. It’s not in their nature, and it’s not in the interests of their business.

That’s because they have a job to do, objectives to meet, targets to hit, or a business to run. The clock doesn’t stop running while we try something different.

Successfully changing the way people do things is a very delicate balance between small, consumable exposures to the new ways and getting the day job done. That way you can effect a smooth, gradual, and above all measured transition that has a strong chance of being successful. You give people the chance to help shape the new ways and the time to ease into the process. Then the knife edge of change management is cutting for you, not into you.

Tags ,
Categories Communication, General, Planning, Strategy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »