Archives for category: Strategy
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The Number 1 Rule for Your Website Home Page

September 22, 2014 //
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What’s the number one rule for the home page of your website? It’s a pretty obvious one, but you’d be surprised at how many websites fail when tested against it.

When you go to a website for the first time, you want to know one thing: What do you do?

In other words:

– who are you?

– what do you do?

– how will this benefit me or my company?

This should not be difficult for you to address, regardless of your business.

Put it in a prominent place on your home page – or your landing page for whatever demand generation exercise you’re doing – so people can form a quick opinion as to whether what you have can help them. Otherwise they’ll leave frustrated. Why else do you think people typically abandon a home page way more than 50% of the time?

Don’t forget that you know your company well; how could people not know what you do? But you haven’t seen the website for the first time in a long time…

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

Urgent vs Important

September 17, 2014 //
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One of the first business lessons I learnt was about prioritising between urgent and important.

In a busy business there are 10 important things you should do every day, and yet you will only properly address 3 of them. Something has to give.

Of all the things you need to do, what are the important ones? What are the urgent ones? Are any both? Are any neither? If they’re neither, well that’s obvious. If the thing you need to do is urgent, but not important, you shouldn’t do it. You should delegate it or discount it altogether, but communicate to the would-be beneficiary the reason for your decision as early as you can so they’re not left in the lurch.

So that leaves you with the important things, and let’s assume for now you have all the important things on your list, including the things you’re avoiding, afraid of, or don’t want to do. While it makes loads of sense to break big things into smaller pieces in order to make progress, the temptation is to do the small important things first, to get them out of the way, because you know that you have to do the big important thing anyway so it will get done come hell or high water.

This approach puts you under unnecessary pressure, affects the quality of your work and turns your long day into an even longer one, which you can sustain for only so long. So how to rank the important things, some of which might be urgent? Some ‘managing up’ is required here, because your boss might be leaning on you for the output that she or he feels is the must important and pressing. What should drive the ranking is the only criterion that really matters, namely the value to your customers. You need to communicate early and often with your boss and make them aware of what is driving the order of the things you need to do.

And what if you can’t separate that handful of things that are all of equal weight and all help your customers be more successful? Well, then you need to get help or suck it up, safe in the knowledge that you are driving up your value as you drive up the value of the people who are the reason you’re in business.

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Categories Customers, General, Strategy

Turning a Book into Bucks

September 15, 2014 //
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When we read a business or self-help book, it’s generally because we want to improve the way we do things and profit from this investment of our time and money.

The hope is that as you get towards the end of the book, you have a good feeling about it and you consider it to be one of the business books that was worth your time and contained some ideas you could definitely use. You can soon relax, reflect on what you learned or what you were reminded of, and consign it to the shelf with the others. And forget it.

We’ve all read books that knocked us for 6 (the cricketing equivalent of hitting a home run in baseball), and really changed our view of the world. Maybe that feeling lasted a couple days, or a week, but pretty soon all but a handful of nuggets is forgotten and we’re back to the way we were before, pulled back to the status quo by the constant drag of daily duties.

It’s somewhat like knocking over the first in a line of dominoes, but the second domino lies beyond the length of the first. The process stops, and there’s no chain reaction, no momentum, and all the potential of the remaining dominoes is still just that, potential.

Why is that? Well, you didn’t do anything! You read a book. You accomplished an event. You didn’t effect a change, you didn’t initiate a process, you didn’t sustain any new behaviour.

We need to recognise that success is a function of learning the new best way of working, adopting it, applying it, coaching to it, and sustaining it. This comes from figuring out what is important to success and knowing how to do it.

We also need to understand that for us to really change for good the way we do things, we have to put into actual practice what we read, or get help to do it. Otherwise, dear reader, all of the power of the book will stay within its covers and won’t be turned into improvement and profit.

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Categories General, Strategy

A Gap in the Market

September 12, 2014 //
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Congratulations, you’ve discovered that great idea that no-one else has thought of. You’ve seen a gap in the market and you’re going to develop your product or service and make the gap yours. It’s your ticket to fame and fortune.

The most important question to ask yourself as you prepare to devote the time and energy to your project is this: there’s a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap?

You need to estimate your addressable market. How many people – consumers or individual users within your business – are potential buyers of what you’re going to offer? How much would they pay for it? Would they pay on a one-off basis or would they subscribe every year? If it’s a one-off purchase then you’re starting from scratch every January 1st. If it’s a subscription model, then you can already rely on revenues come January 1st. This audience multiplied by the price is your addressable market size.

Now, how much of that market can you win? What’s your realistic market share? This market share is your total revenue from the venture. Is it enough to make it worth your while building your product or service, promoting it, and supporting it when your customers start using it?

If the likely income doesn’t outweigh the likely cost, you don’t have a market in the gap and you need to re-think.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Simplicity Brings Power

August 29, 2014 //
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As human beings, we have a tendency to overcomplicate things. Sometimes it’s not of our own doing, it’s the way things grow organically when time, people and variables conspire to turn things into a mess.

The last thing you want to do in life or work is create your own Gordian Knot. Simplicity is your guide. If you can distill things into the simple, most important thing, then you get clarity, you can make decisions, and you can execute.

Try these things to bring simplicity and create power and forward motion:

– Get people to explain things to you in terms a 10-year-old would understand, with no jargon or fancy words

– When faced with a large problem or project, break it up into smaller pieces and fix those pieces one at a time. Then you can celebrate the small victories towards the large end goal

– Prioritise or rank the factors you’re dealing with. You want to focus on the major priorities. All the other less important factors floating around are a distraction that stops you seeing the wood for the trees

– When unsure of what to do next, break the process down into a series of steps to get you where you need to be. Then take that next step

– Be continuously aware of your own or external complicating forces. They are the enemies of progress and the thieves of time

Simple is strong and powerful. Complicated is sapping and fearful.

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Categories General, Language, Strategy

Self-Mockery is Often the Best Policy

August 20, 2014 //
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My wife – otherwise known as Mrs D, or sometimes Ms H when she’s cross with me, occasionally feeds back on my blog posts. She’s a technical writer and has a laser eye for typos and other inadvertent gotchas. She also lets me know when she has no interest in my posts. These are usually the ones focused on sales and marketing, so pretty well all of them.

This blog post is about how to recover from a mistake and I’m going to cite an example from one of her current addictions, which will hopefully induce her to get to the end of it.

When you’ve made a booboo, the best way to recover is to come clean, and if you can be self-deprecating and humorous too, then all the better. When a worthy third party also benefits from your recovery, then it’s a slam dunk.

Take the recent much-publicised gaffe in a promotional shot on the Instagram account of Downton Abbey.  The BBC gleefully reported on the ‘water-bottle-gate’ affair which affected its commercial broadcasting rival. These things happen and the word gets out very quickly and virally thanks to the times we live in.

What better response than to publish a self-mocking response, together with a link to the charity WaterAid UK who work to provide safe water to those that need it.

Nicely done eh, Mrs D?

 

 

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Categories Communication, Language, Strategy

When Airlines Flip

August 18, 2014 //
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I’m not talking, dear reader, about airplane accidents but about when competing airlines flip positions.

The two Irish airlines, Aer Lingus and Ryanair, seemed to have flipped. They seem to have swapped places with each other.

I’ve been banging on regularly in this blog, most recently here, about Ryanair’s blithe disregard for the customer. Something’s changed in the last wee while however.

Ryanair appointed a Chief Marketing Officer at the beginning of the year, a role that many of us senior marketing people could have done and would love to have done, and the changes are already bearing fruit. They were starting from a pretty low bar of course, which is why folk were probably queueing up for the job.

It’s working already though. Those obvious things we all would have done are now bearing fruit. Now it feels like Aer Lingus is the airline that is playing catch-up in customer service. It’s almost like it wants to fill the role that the old Ryanair made its own. I guess that’s OK, except, that it’s not the Low Fares Airline, not by a long chalk, so it’s a dangerous development.

The last thing we want is one Irish airline. Not good for competition…

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Categories General, Strategy

I Was Old – I Needed the Money

August 15, 2014 //
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Desperate times call for desperate measures. There are many people in the public eye, especially entertainment, who regret their entrance into the house of stardom via the less salubrious side door of their industry. I don’t know if this industry gives rise to the phrase ‘I was young; I needed the money,’ but it seems likely that it was so.

When we’re old, however, we’re not supposed to need the money and you’re not supposed to hear us utter this blog post’s title. All our assets are supposed to be paid off, we have a good pension and investments, our kids are self-sufficient – kind of – and we have time on our hands and money to burn.

That now seems a little outdated for most of us. I’ve already talked about the ticking time bomb that is populations and pensions in the next 30-50 years, but it seems to me that unfortunate timing and macro factors have scuppered the plans of many in my generation. To list a few examples:

– Those who chose a long mortgage term or who remortgaged have pushed out their liabilities further than they would like

– The global meltdown and ensuing property slump mean that for many the value of their house is likely to be less than the amount they borrowed, locking them in for longer and meaning they can’t necessarily down-size from their empty nest

– The global meltdown has seriously dented the pension pot of those who are not on a guaranteed pension, which is most of us. Throw in the property slump and those pension funds that were invested in buildings have been more than seriously dented, and in some cases wiped out

– The nature of work has changed. Jobs are more flexible, locations are more flexible, options are more flexible. People are staying at companies less often and changing more, either by design or because they have to. This brings with it great opportunity but also the risk of being in between opportunities for longer, eroding any savings built up while scrabbling around for the next revenue source

– More people are doing their own thing and moving from employed to self-employed. This increased freedom comes at a price, in the form of unpaid holidays and paying for benefits that might have been included as an employee

Even though it’s acknowledged that we’ll be working for longer, we can’t work forever. The alternative is to work until you drop, having forgone retirement, leaving someone else to pick up the pieces.

I mentioned in the linked post above that technology will probably find a way to close the loop for us, to solve or at least assuage the problem. And those of us working in or around technology will probably be able to capitalise on it first, unless it is some immense democratising force.

But my question is this: will the old have to resort to desperate measures like the young once did?

 

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Categories General, Strategy

Do You Say ‘Sales Process, Sales Schmocess’?

July 11, 2014 //
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Many businesses with sales people don’t have a formally defined sales process. Many don’t even have an informally defined sales process. They either survive on organic growth and referrals or they muddle through, intuitively following a series of steps that either works for them or that they’ve always followed.

‘Process, Schmocess,’ they say. ‘We don’t need a process, we all know what we’re doing.’ That may be true, but do you all know what each other is doing? And how does someone manage you if you’re all doing things your own way? How can they plan and grow the business?

Companies design and follow a sales process for a variety of reasons. Times change, and so do industries and companies, so you want to make sure you’re best serving your industry. Every sales organisation has good and less good salespeople, and you want to instil the behaviours of the good people in the less good. If there is an ideal way of selling that closes the most amount of deals to the long term benefit of your customers, everyone should follow it. You can’t possibly sell to customers until you understand how they want to buy, and a sales process is simply the buying stages that your customer wants to go through to buy from you. Your sales process is simply a mirror of that buying process.

You may feel you’re in an industry that is slow to embrace the latest technologies like social media, but all of your customers and prospects have access to the Internet. This has huge ramifications for you as a selling organisation because it means that companies can complete the first stages of the buying process without ever involving you; they do the online the equivalent of asking around, which means looking at your website, industry discussion groups, forums, review portals. Before they would phone you up and ask for a brochure. If they’re not showing and telling in the first stages of their buying process, you’re missing out on the first stages of your selling process, if you even have one. So you need a sales process that acknowledges this and pushes you to get information early that can help you compete.

I was over-simplifying when I said your sales process is a mirror of your customers’ and prospects’ buying process. Your customers may choose to buy in different ways from you, especially if you have a range of products and services. Then you need to group your customers into buying groups that make sense to you and design a sales process for each group. In other words, you need multiple sales processes – yikes!

Here are eight things you need to take into account.

– your customers’ buying process – and therefore your sales process – will reflect the thing that’s being bought. You don’t want a 7-stage process for something that’s bought over a phone call, and you don’t want a 1-stage process when someone is taking 9 months to decide to invest half a million with you

– a sales process is a linear series of steps you take to guide your customer towards buying something that will uniquely or best help them fix their problem. You do the steps in order, you don’t ask for the order before you know if you’re talking to the decision-maker

– a sales stage mirrors a portion of the buying journey that represents a meaningful milestone to your customer. Example buying stages of a sales process might be: define the problem, design the requirements, evaluate the alternatives, select the winner, negotiate, do the deal, implement the project, review the progress

– a sales stage mirrors the buying stage. Example buying stages might be: identify the prospect, qualify the prospect, define the requirements, demonstrate the evidence, acquire the business, get the order, implement it, review the progress

– each sales stage should contain a series of steps that you need to take in order to progress the sale. Ideally, these steps are verified by the customer. For example, has the customer confirmed when the project has to start by? Has the customer confirmed the quote is acceptable?

– get your sales people to feed into and buy into the sales process. You need them all to follow it. When they’re all doing the right things – which are the same things – at the right time, with the right kind of customer, and are recording the information in the right way, you then have objective, scientific activities and data on which to base your forecasts, your planning and your coaching, rather than no data, or subjective data based on people’s estimate of how they’re doing. As you know, some are optimistic, some are sandbaggers, and the rest fall somewhere in between

– find a sales technology that allows you to design and manage a range of different sales processes, so that you can report on and coach according to the specific parts of your business. The technology should guide your sales people through the steps to take, and cause them the minimum amount of keying and effort to keep up to date. It has to give them back much more than they put in. This is so much easier said than done, so choose the technology carefully. If it makes them win more deals, it makes them more successful and wealthier, which makes them smile more, which makes them want to use the system more. Behold, the ‘virtuous circle’

– you’re looking to instil regular, repeatable, ‘best practice’ behaviours. When you bring in this kind of thing, you are doing change management, and most people – and especially sales people – resist change. Small checks early and often, not large infrequent milestones, are the way to go, otherwise the new behaviours will never become the accepted behaviours

Don’t know where to start? Ask a sales consultant, or look online for sample sales processes, then adapt them for your use.

Despite what you might think, you need sales process in your life. It’s the spine for your business. You ain’t going anywhere without it.

Categories Customers, Planning, Sales, Strategy

Counting the Revenue You’re Counting On

July 7, 2014 //
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So much business-to-business software these days is based around the recurring revenue model. Much loved of SaaS (software as a service rather than bought outright as a product for your perpetual use) companies, the recurring revenue model eschews the big up front license payment in favour of a lower regular payment, sometimes structured by per user per month, or annualised to per user per year.

Customers like it because it means no up front payment, no being tied into a certain technology or provider for ever, and no maintenance fees on top as they are generally priced into the recurring revenue fee. Software companies like the set-up because it is theoretically easier to sell in the first place and makes it easier to upsell additional products and services which then all recommence on a recurring anniversary. Investors like it because at the start of each new financial year you can count on all or a great majority of the historical recurring revenue, plus all additional new business you close during the year. This makes this kind of company, which is essentially an annuity-based business – the gift that keeps on giving – very valuable, with companies typically being sold for 5 to 10 times their annual revenues.

Some of these types of recurring revenue arrangements are paid a full year in advance, locking in for the customer a good price and for the vendor income that they can bank and account for in financial terms over the course of the year. Then there are arrangements which are looser, where you pay an agreed fee on a monthly basis, and you pay month-to-month, only needing a month or less to give notice of cancellation. In these types of situation, companies have to work much harder to persuade the company to stay vested, because the window for adoption and continued use is much narrower.

When you think about it, lots of businesses outside of software operate what is effectively a recurring revenue business too. They sell something, they hope there will be services down the line, and they hope for repeat business as well. These might be companies in industries that charge subscriptions, membership fees, retainers, premiums and so on. When you’ve sold to a customer, it’s anything between 3 and 4 times as easy to sell to them again as it is to sell to someone new, so companies should do a really good job of managing the future revenue streams and protecting the future business. This should be obvious, because in the recurring revenue business your cost of acquiring the business is usually the same as it is with traditional up-front business, but you have no big sum coming in to offset the considerable cost of sale. Recurring revenue businesses need to make sure their companies stay with them at least 3 years to make the similar kinds of profits over the long term, so retention is much more important while the barriers to exit are much lower. Your dissatisfied customer pays for what they used and they’re off.

So if you’re counting on the revenue coming in from sales you’ve just made, you need a really good plan – and a really good system – to make sure you are profitable over time. Too many recurring revenue companies are in a constant state of treading water because they churn too many customers and their new business wins simply replace the business they lost, rather than building on it. If you don’t have a high renewal rate in the 90’s % (by revenue rather than by number of customers) – or a low churn rate under 10% – in your recurring revenue business, you will die.

Here is a number of things you can do to make sure you are properly managing your future recurring revenues:

– decide who’s responsible for securing future recurring revenues. Do you operate a hunter-farmer system where the new business people break open the new sales and the account management people develop the relationship, or should your sales people manage the recurring revenue from the business they brought in?

– provide them with the training and skills they need to do the role that you’re asking of them

– make sure you have the right system to make it easy for them to set up the recurring opportunity. For example, when you record the new business win, you should be able to record in the same process what the future recurring revenue items are, and when they should fall, so that the system prompts the person at the right time to begin the process of securing the next piece of business. Automating this will stop deals falling through the cracks and will increase your effectiveness, productivity, renewal rate, all those good things that make you more profitable

– measure, measure, measure. If you can’t measure, you can’t manage

– don’t manage, coach. If you have your responsibilities delineated properly, your people know what they’re doing, and your sales team management system is in place to help them sell more and administer less, you can focus on improving their performance and helping them get the important deals over the line

You shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch, but you should count the revenues you’re counting on, before they go elsewhere.

 

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Categories Customers, Sales, Strategy
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