Archives for category: Strategy

It’s All in the Prep

November 26, 2014 //

When I’m preparing to write anything significant, I spend a disproportionately large amount of time deciding on the outline for it. Often I will then write the introduction, and then the conclusion, before turning to the body of the document. I find that if I don’t spend a good amount of time on the planning, and I cut corners, then it takes me correspondingly longer to finish the document. This is because I haven’t thought it through properly and it doesn’t have the right structure or flow. It doesn’t hang together nor is it convincing.

It’s all in the preparation. Cooking, doing an important presentation or speech, tackling an essay at school, there’s a feeling of release – or is it relief – when you’ve done the prep, or built the outline. It feels like half the battle and you know you’re on solid ground from hereon in. The rest follows more easily, hanging comfortably on the framework of a solid beginning, middle and end.

Does this mean I’m denigrating the benefits or merits of spontaneity? Not really. There’s so much to be said for going with the flow and sometimes the best of times come from spur-of-the-moment behaviour. It all depends on the situation :-).

Tags planning, Preparation

Categories Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Avoiding Complexity

November 17, 2014 //

Avoiding complexity is good. No matter how complex your business is, or your life, it pays to strive to avoid complexity. We humans don’t deal well with complexity, which is why a winning approach is to simplify, to reduce, to unify, to distil.

I was reminded of this the other day when travelling. Ireland is a small country, with a few million people. Its infrastructure is correspondingly small, and it’s pretty simple.

I took the train from one side of the country to the other every week for five years. I think it was more than 10 minutes late once or twice in all that time. The coach service is the same. The small number of airports too. The Dublin-based bus service is less reliable, but there are hundreds of buses and tens of services. The complexity thing again.

Then there’s the UK, much bigger, much more populated, and with its hugely complicated rail service and airports. Unreliability is somehow innate. I was flying into Bristol. Did you know that Bristol is the highest airport in the UK? It was built in the second world war for pilots to practice flying and landing in the fog. Well, guess what, it was foggy yesterday, so we tried to land twice and got diverted to Cardiff, in another country.

We then had to take a specially laid on coach to Bristol airport, except that it took us 15 minutes and 3 goes to exit the airport barriers. We drove through the city of Bristol where 75% of the passengers were heading, but didn’t stop as the service was point to point, out-of-the-way airport to out-of-the-way airport. We finally got to our destination 4 hours later than advertised.

Complexity is the problem. When you make things too hard, stuff goes wrong. And who suffers? Your end customer, which means that eventually so will you.

Tags Complexity, Simplicity

Categories General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

The Small Beauty of Efficiency Gains

October 22, 2014 //

When you’re looking to improve what you do, the temptation is to go for far-reaching change, massive innovation, that kind of thing.

It’s far better in the long run to look for the small efficiencies, and to look for them all the time.

When you visit the R&D facilities of a Formula 1 racing team, you see people striving to shave thousands of seconds off racing times with the most miniscule adjustment to things like aerodynamics. A few thousandths of a second is a few metres at top speed. A bunch of a few thousandths of a second is a commanding advantage.

Compare the touch-typing keyboardist with the one who has learned their own way, maybe using half their available digits and crossing hands across the workspace as they type. Imagine over a working life the enormous time savings formed from the collection of a vast number of infinitesimally smaller micro-movements by typing properly. Could you retire a year earlier if you were more productive over a 3-decade career in front of a computer, in a business where your productivity correlated to your profitability? Probably.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t look to change the game, out-think the competition, or disrupt the business model. Not at all. But you need to do it against a background of continuous improvement. The little things add up to much more than constantly battling the big things.

Tags Productivity, time

Categories General, Strategy

To Boldly Go into White Space

October 11, 2014 //

This is not about Star Trek and the most famous split infinitive in screen history. This is about finding additional value and revenues in the most important area of your business, namely your existing accounts.

When you manage opportunities, you can only win a certain percentage of the sales opportunities that exist, that you have either heard about or that your customers or prospects invited you to tender for. To get control back in your sales performance you need to do something quite obvious, quite simple, but to many people – quite radical. You have to create opportunities. But from where? From the realm known as account management.

One of the most powerful things you can do is draw a simple matrix. Across the top axis is the list of things you sell, all your specific products or services groupings. Down the side you put the list of your all existing customers. Then you take your customer records and plot which customers take which of your offerings, colouring in the box at the intersection of the particular customer and the particular product or service. Maybe you can colour the intersections differently to distinguish between different groups of customers or groups of products or services.

The most common colour in your matrix is likely to be the one you miss, the one you can’t see. Yes, it’s the white space. The white space is the area beloved of graphic designers because it lets the important content breathe on the page or screen. In account management the white space is beloved of sales and marketing people because it is the land of opportunity, the place where you haven’t yet sold something into your customer.

At this stage, of course, you haven’t created any opportunities. You’ve simply identified where they might exist.

Tags account management, Create, White space

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

There’s No Prize for Coming Second

October 10, 2014 //

OK, so there are sometimes prizes for coming second. You might have raised your profile for the next opportunity, or gotten onto the next short-list automatically, or even learnt a lot for the next time, but you won’t be generating money for your organisation from this lost deal, you won’t be making work for your colleagues – in a good way.

Business-to-business sales opportunities are often more complex than we realise and in 99% of them we don’t have all the information – and I mean all the information – that we need to optimise our bid. Here are some things to think about:

– Always get your people (and yourself) to follow the same tried and trusted process for selling. If you’re not all following the same process, you don’t know where you are, you have nothing measurable or objective with which to run your business

– Always analyse and qualify your sales opportunities. Can you win the business? Can you deliver the business? Do you even want the business?

– How best should you compete for the business, and how best will your competitors compete?

– What’s the customer trying to do? What’s stopping them from doing it (something must be, or you wouldn’t have an opportunity)? How will you best help them do it, better than any other competitive option (including doing nothing)?

– What are the politics in your customer organisation? Somebody always wants somebody to win, right? Who is it? Are they important? Who do they want to win? What should you do if it’s you? What should you do if it’s not you?

– How will they decide on the business? What’s the process? What’s important to the customer? What’s important to the individuals inside the customer? How might these different wants and needs play out? How can you take advantage of that?

– What are the steps you need to take, the things you need to do, to progress and win the deal? What should you not do because they don’t progress the deal?

There’s an awful lot to do to win deals, and win them consistently, but it’s an awful lot worth doing.

Tags B2B, Business-to-business, Winning

Categories Sales, Strategy

Standing on the Shoulders of Competitive Giants

October 8, 2014 //

It would be a lot easier to live in a business world without competitors. You could spend your time creating truly valuable solutions for your customer, knowing that you would get the return you deserve. In the real word, however, as you strive to maximise your sales and win as many of them as possible, you need to put in place the best strategy for each opportunity.

A lot of historical business strategy theory borrowed from the military strategist Sun Tzu, the author of The Art of War. He has fallen from favour somewhat in the last few years as business has moved to a more collaborative environment. ‘There are no competitors, only potential partners’ is a refrain you’ll sometimes hear.

Here, however, are three of the key principles documented by this Chinese warrior two-and-a-half thousand years ago, adapted for sales opportunities, that I think still have validity:

– Know your product (or service), your customer, and your competition, and you need not fear the result of a hundred sales opportunities
– Know only your product (or service) and not the customer or the competition, and for every victory gained, you will suffer a defeat
– If you don’t know your product (or service), your customer, or your competition, you shall succumb in every battle

In other words, do your homework and planning and your effort will be rewarded.

Tags Competition, warfare

Categories Sales, Strategy

Account Management – Take and Then Give?

October 3, 2014 //

In the world of web 2.0 ad social media, we’re so used to hearing the phrase ‘give – and then take’ to describe how you earn the trust and followship – a new word I just coined, such is the bounty of stream of consciousness – before you reap the rewards. Could it be then that account management is really the reverse of that concept?

Winning brand new business is hard, as we know. If you’re not doing your own prospecting, you can only win a percentage of the deals that your customers or your friendly marketing department put in front of you, and in this way you’re not in proper control of your business. Worse, you’re missing out on real revenues that will either be allocated to other projects or scooped up by your competitors, who, don’t forget, may count your customers as their accounts too.

You need to maximize the size of the field you’re already playing in. You need a framework for finding and creating opportunities from the key customers you already work with. It’s not a coincidence that it’s 4 times as easy to sell to a current customer compared to a new one. This is the realm of account management. It puts you in control of your business, and instead of waiting for deals to be put in front of you, you’re putting the deals in front of your customer, and you both win.

This is why in many ways the account management approach is the opposite of the ‘give and then take’ philosophy of social networking. You take what information you can from your existing account, strategise on it, and turn that knowledge into insight you can give to your customer, which they value enough to pay you for.

So when you’re wondering where your sales are going to come from, look at what you sell to your existing companies, do your homework and figure out what else you can sell to them that helps them address the problems they haven’t fixed yet. You’re being proactive and creating something that may not have existed before you put the work in. Creating is everything in sales.

Tags Account, Management

Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy

What Are You Waiting For?

October 1, 2014 //

You’ve done all the homework, all the prep on your latest big project. You’ve sounded people out, you’ve gotten buy-in, feedback. You’ve iterated the plan a few times, all your resources are in place, people have been briefed and are ready to go. And now it’s time to push the button.

What are you waiting for? ‘If I just wait a few days, just in case the situation changes, I may get more information in…’

The longer you delay, the more paralysed you get, the worse the fear becomes, the greater the inertia.

You’re not waiting for anything except the fear of failure to increase. Go!!!

Tags Execution

Categories Planning, Strategy

Wants and Needs

September 29, 2014 //

One of the first things I learnt in economics was the difference between needs and wants, and how price indices were calculated using a ‘basket’ of essential items, items you needed to buy on a regular basis.

A want is a nice to have. It’s something you’d like, something you may even lust after, but you don’t need it. A need is something you must have, and if you don’t get it, something else you don’t want to happen will happen .

As marketers, we need to develop and highlight products and services that people need. If people want them, but don’t need them, we don’t have compelling products or services and we don’t have a sale.

As sales people, we need to create or accentuate need in the minds of the buyers, as they won’t buy unless they have to, unless they need to, unless they see a return on their expenditure or a problem taken away.

We all should gravitate towards needs, scarcity and value. We should eschew wants, dearth, and lack of value.

Tags Need, Want

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Nice to Have Means Don’t Have

September 24, 2014 //

If you’re in marketing and sales, your product will generally be perceived in one of two ways. It’s either a ‘nice to have’ or a ‘must have’. A must have is just that, something your buyer must have, and ideally by a certain time. These are the two conditions of the ‘opportunity’ holy grail known as BANT, where N is need and T is time.

I used to work in the email security business. Talk about a must have product. IT managers would call up on a daily basis either worried about the latest global virus to hit or because their network had just turned toxic from some ‘trojan’ and they didn’t want to be caught again. It wasn’t uncommon to hear them say things like ‘the CEO wants this sorted by the weekend or else, can you help us?’.

A nice to have is something you can live without. It means you don’t have a problem that needs fixing. You can sit on it for a while, do nothing – the secret, sneaky competitor of the sales person – or even try and fix it yourself. The way to figure this out for your product or service is to put yourself in the customers’ shoes and say ‘OK what will happen if we don’t do this?’ If nothing major will happen, you have a nice to have.

If you have a product or service that is perceived to be nice to have, you have no opportunity, you have no sale, you have a problem. Then you need to start building a must have case, such as ROI, TCO (total cost of ownership) or the lost revenues or savings from delaying a decision.

If you have something that people feel they can’t do without, it is indeed a thing of beauty.

Tags Need

Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

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