Archives for category: Technology

Account Based Marketing with the Right Tech

November 2, 2016 //

Account Based Marketing is like a cross between Account Planning and marketing. Instead of marketing to everyone and then qualifying the leads in your funnel to focus on the target leads, you do the qualifying up front, selecting the companies you want to work with, strategising on where and how they might need your help and targeting them with personalised messages.

Thanks to something called web personalisation, you can take a lot of the leg work out of your in-funnel marketing. You can automate the assets you deliver to certain people depending on the type pf person they are and their stage in the buying process. Web personalisation software uses functionality called reverse IP look-up, allowing you to know a lot about a website visitor, like industry, company size, and so on.

If you also recognise this visitor as one of your target accounts, then you can literally present customised web pages to them on the fly. Which is nice.

This is very powerful, and, understandably, has got a lot of people excited about more focused, higher return marketing investments.

Remember, though, that Account Based Marketing is not a silver bullet. You should do it in parallel with other more ‘traditional’ demand generation activities, because you need a good spread of differently sized opportunities for a healthy, forward-moving pipeline.

Tags Account Based Marketing

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

People and Culture Don’t Change

October 5, 2016 //

It’s really hard to change the culture iof an organisation. It’s even harder to do it quickly.

This is because culture is made up of people, who themselves find it particularly hard to change their engrained behaviour, as you might expect. You’re expecting people to change who they are. Not gonna happen, at least not without a ton of effort, time and patience.

I remember working with a company in the last 2o years where we worked hard on establishing the mission and values of the organisation, those important things we stood for. The difference, however, between what was on paper and what was exhibited by people, from the CEO down, was considerable. The value statements looked great on paper, but that was not how the company behaved.

This is why culture eats strategy for lunch, and why it’s so important that, once you’ve genuinely established the culture of your organisation, you hire people who are true to that culture. It’s easier said than done.

People and culture don’t change. Sometimes people join a company and find the culture is different to their experiences of it before they joined. Other times people join a company thinking – or more likely hoping – that the prevailing culture there is a good fit for them. In either situation, if you find yourself in a business either where the corporate culture is not your culture, it’s a good idea to consider trying to find a company where there is a fit, preferably as soon as possible.

Tags Behaviour, Culture

Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Start-up, Upstart

September 14, 2016 //

I was walking past a sign the other day. It said ‘Stressed is desserts backwards.’

Have there ever been truer words, in more than one sense?

It got me thinking about other types of palindrome-type anagrams. A start-up is the reverse of upstart, if you’ll allow me the license of a rogue hyphen. Yet, strangely enough, this is exactly what a start-up needs to be in order to taste lasting success.

A start-up has to do things differently, approach the market in a different way, and offer a new way of doing things. It has to disrupt the status quo, the accepted, established way of doing things, and become the new accepted, established way of doing things. it’s the new kid on the block. In short, it has to be the upstart.

I guess this is why you sometimes hear start-ups referred to as upstarts.

Tags Start-up

Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Technology

The Thin End of the Currency Wedge

August 5, 2016 //

It’s hardly the most profound thing in my blogging history when I say that a lot of money can be won or lost in the zero sum game of currency exchange.

Not just in the business world, where some astute planning, hedging and plain old organisational skills can mean a major bottom line difference.

It can be equally important in an individual sense as well, but it seems to me that with every transaction the loser is always the individual, who always seems to get the thin end of the currency wedge.

The only time I had to move a significant sum of money between currencies was when I sold an apartment for a modest low-five-figure profit. I had to work really hard with the receiving bank to get a dealer rate, which made quite a big difference to the rate I was originally offered.

If you have money to start with, this can become less of a problem and you have much more control in the negotiation. I knew a chap who took advantage of very good exchange rates to buy all the US dollars he needed for living expenses over a two-year degree course over there. He had the money to do that. Few do.

In other every-day transactions, like making electronic purchases with a euro card in the UK, you’re taking a hit every single time. There’s an inter-bank rate, then there are the rates applied when the bank or payment authority either buys from you or sells to you. These can vary prodigiously from the inter-bank rate. This is, of course, where the bank makes its money, but it’s hard not to feel like a hostage in the whole process.

Ecommerce companies like Amazon make a fortune this way, as do the airlines on their in-flight rates.

This seems to be one of the few areas remaining where the consumer finds it hard to exert power in the relationship. You’re starting to see more and more currency transfer websites offering much lower fees than bricks-and-mortar banks to change money, which is great. But you’re still a hostage to the rate they offer you.

Tags Currency, Exchange

Categories Customers, Technology

Virgin Interinactive

July 27, 2016 //

I was staying at my Mum’s the other day and she was complaining about her rather flaky digital TV service. She maintains a pathological avoidance of all things Murdochian, so has never embraced the world of Sky. For her broadband and TV, therefore, she’s opted for Virgin Interactive.

The broadband seems to be very reliable. I’m round at hers and it always seems extremely reliable. Less so the TV, however. The Virgin Interactive isn’t very interactive. It’s rather interinactive.

The system navigation is crude and clumsy. The operating system is slow to the point of Windowsian. The catch up and on demand functions fail regularly, and don’t get fixed by a restart of both the television and the Virgin unit. When you call customer service at unsociable hours you get an automated service advising you to un-plug and restart…

The remote is hard to fathom and clunky, meaning you mis-navigate frequently. I couldn’t get it to work and I’m relatively tech savvy. My Mum of a generation further removed from tech savviness, so for her the usability is key and the frustration palpable.

This is rather unsatisfactory and disappointing for a company that prides – and prices – itself on customer service and is headed up by one of the world’s most respected and inspirational entrepreneurs.

When you boil everything down to the lowest common denominator, stuff has to work and be simple to operate. And when there are no or few viable alternatives, the incumbents can afford to be lazy and take liberties with the consumer.

Tags customer service, Ease of use, Usability

Categories Customers, Technology

Prime Now, Prime Not

July 1, 2016 //

I did a stupid thing the other day.

I packed for a trip to the UK from Ireland, and forgot the power pack for my MacBook Air. Realising the error of my ways, and with an hour’s juice left, I went online to see if I could get one delivered to me the same day. I had heard that with Amazon Prime Now you can get stuff delivered in big cities like London within the hour, which was perfect.

I couldn’t see any Prime Now offers for the charger I needed. Then someone told me that Prime Now was a mobile thing, so I needed to download the app. I couldn’t find the app, which was when that same someone told me I probably couldn’t see the app because I lived in Ireland where Prime Now was not available. No problem, I’ll change my country to the UK in my Amazon settings. Except that it’s not straightforward and you have to jump through a lot of hoops to do it.

No problem said that same someone, I’ll order it for you with my Prime Now app and get it delivered here to the office. Great, except that the app wouldn’t allow him to change the delivery address from his home to the office. Not a good first impression…

We gave up. I walked 3 minutes to a local electrical store, they had the power pack I needed, which I bought, and I was back in the office in 15 minutes.

You see, when your ecommerce technology fails your customers, they leave you and go back to good old bricks and mortar.

Tags Convenience, Productivity, time

Categories Customers, Sales, Technology

What is a Product Roadmap?

June 27, 2016 //

What do you understand by the term ‘product roadmap’? There are lots of definitions, some narrow and some broad, some internally focused and some market- or customer-focused. And how detailed should a product roadmap be? Should it pin your detailed colours to the mast, or should it be high level, allowing you room for manoeuvre?

I think that over time B2B customers have become somewhat desensitised towards product roadmaps. This is especially true in the software industry where the sheer complexity and number of moving parts, combined with the influences of individual customers, conspire to make roadmap projections aspirational at best and at worst downright misleading and fictional.

The pressures on the business in a dynamic landscape are changing all the time, and I’ve seen businesses where products or product enhancements have arrived 2 or 3 years after they were advertised to come on stream.

But back to product roadmap definitions. The one I use when asked this question defines a product roadmap as a plan of product or platform developments, delivered through a release mechanism – which could be a few or several times a year – through properly managed projects and programmes. After all, you’ve got to be sure that all the parts of the business can fulfil their element of the whole product solution. In other words, the roadmap should really be about when new releases are delivery ready, not sales ready. By all means seed the market, and build the demand to allow for the natural lag of a sales cycle, but publish your roadmap based around genuine availability.

Customers love to see detailed roadmaps, but only if you actually can commit to the associated timings, otherwise the trust quickly evaporates. Just like in sales, you’re only as good as your last quarter. Software development never seems to build in any buffer for the inevitable bumps in the road – probably because the front of the business is pushing for the earliest possible delivery date – and when those bumps occur, it’s very hard to get back on track. That’s why I fall back on the principle of under-promise and over-deliver to customers, and pushing back to the business. The customer comes first, so I’m in favour of high level roadmap pronouncements that strike the right balance between demonstrating progress and allowing wiggle room, so you can be on time, on brief, and maybe even on budget.

Tags B2B, Commitment, Roadmap, Software, Trust

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

Macs Make You Lazy

April 11, 2016 //

I’ve come to the following conclusion rather late in life. Using a Mac makes you lazy.

Well, perhaps not lazy, it’s more that a Mac allows you to be less disciplined in the use of your computer. It tolerates your bad behaviours.

I use a MacBook Air. It’s about 3 years old. I can’t remember the last time I shut it down or even restarted it. It’s at least a month.

I can have dozens of tabs open in my browser, dozens of documents open in my office productivity suite, social media engines whirring away in the background, music running, a dozen emails open from my inbox, and it still chunters along just fine, despite the fact that these days it’s getting pretty hammered storage- and processor-wise.

In contrast to the 2 or 3 monitors you see people using at modern workstations, I have the single 13-inch diameter screen of my laptop. I simply toggle between all the different apps and docs as I go. This makes mobile working and ‘soft desking’ in various offices an absolute breeze.

Open the lid, close the lid; it’s like opening the door of the fridge. You’re straight into the good stuff, no delays at all. No pinwheel of death, no ‘have you tried switching off and on again?’, no reinstalling the operating system every 6 months.

But, boy does it make you complacent and then impatient when it comes to using something that’s not iOS. A former boss of mine asked me once, ‘You’re not one of those mac bigots are you?’

Guess I must be.

Tags apple, Mac

Categories General, Technology

Challenging the Status Quo

March 9, 2016 //

We’re constantly hearing about entrepreneurs or leading companies that challenge the status quo and look for new ways to do things. This can often give them an important edge in the market, which inevitably takes the competition time to identify and address.

Challenging the status quo is easier said than done, however. It takes a certain mindset which needs to operate in two dimensions. The first dimension is that you have to be able to think outside the box, to use a battered cliche, to be able to eschew the standard assumptions and accepted situations. The second is that you need to be able to do it a lot, and ideally all the time.

I was reminded of this some months ago when helping to prepare some messaging around a certain market, which included defining that market and how that market was structured. A couple of the senior individuals were in the team and I was struck by how differently and more expansively they were able to view the market they operated in, and hence how they could position their company in a more different and more beneficial way.

They simply brushed away the assumptions about how the industry was structured, assumptions I had wrongly taken as the pillars for how things worked in the industry.

It’s obvious that the role of senior executives is to be looking over the parapet far more often than other staff who are more siloed, specialist, operational, or tactical. But, that said, it was refreshing to see people who took a professional approach to questioning everything and thinking deeply about what they could and couldn’t move.

As you can imagine, visionaries are far more able to see everything as movable. For them there is no status quo.

Tags change, Structure

Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy, Technology

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