Insurance

April 22, 2016 //
2

Where are you on the risk aversion spectrum? Super safe, insuring everything, or cavalier and blasé about your belongings and family? Somewhere in the middle?

It’s a tough one. Some insurances – like car or mortgage protection – you have to get. Others, clearly, you don’t. Some people seem to view insurance as something they’re entitled to get a payout for, after a few years of claim-free premiums. ‘Yes, I could do with a new living room carpet; time to engineer some spillage..’

For those of us who are more honest, however, either you view insurance as a necessary evil or an unnecessary ‘nice to have’. I used to belong fairly and squarely in the former camp. These days, though, I’m not so sure.

Firstly, there’s the financial argument. If you never pay for metered parking, one day you’re going to get caught and your fine might equate to all the fees you should have paid. That’s fair enough, and not really an insurance example, more a general risk and return argument.

I hire a car quite a lot, and I always take out excess insurance, so that I’m properly covered in the event of any incident. I have friend who doesn’t take it out, figuring out that if he does eventually have a prang, then the cost of picking up the tab will be off-set by all the times he never paid for the extra insurance.

The other dimension, though, is the success rate for a real claim. These days the small print seems to exclude almost every eventuality for which you’re taking out insurance in the first place. I have mobile phone insurance, but if I leave it in my car, it’s only covered against theft if it’s in the glove compartment and the compartment is locked. Who does that?

I used to work for a guy who never insured any of his contents. He simply didn’t bother; it wasn’t worth it to him. His reasoning was ‘Who’s going to steal a bed anyway?’ Well, presumably a bunch of organised thieves who know you’re away for a weekend and stage a fake house-moving heist. This chap would simply go ahead and buy replacement stuff if it ever happened. He could afford to.

But the question remains. As insurance companies are often in similar financial straits to lending organisations, and with premiums sky-rocketing, there is a huge incentive to make the claiming process as rigorous and parsimonious as possible. They’ll wriggle out of a payment if they can.

 

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Categories Customers, General

Precipitation

April 20, 2016 //
0

I always thought that SAD syndrome – where you’re down in winter and up in summer – was related to dark, short days in the beginning and the end of the year for us northern hemisphere folk.

I think for me it’s more a nagging, low-level frustration than sadness. As I write this we’re emerging from my ninth consecutive winter in the west of Ireland. It’s been a very damp, windy, mild winter. This morning – April – it snowed. Anyone who knows about global warming will tell you that it doesn’t necessarily manifest in simply a warmer climate. It also increases the extremes of weather.

It rains a lot in the west of Ireland. While we’ve had our share of storms this last winter, you might be surprised to know that in terms of annual rainfall the figure here is half of the Seattle figure. We tend to get what the locals call ‘soft’ rain; drizzly, filmy, misty rain, falling out of predominantly light grey skies. In fact, it probably rains at some point during the day – perhaps some days a couple of drops, other days perhaps a dozen quick showers – 300 days of the year.

It never absolutely clatters down and then clears up, like in Florida during certain seasons. Precipitation here is an almost constant, gentle friend, with a slight smirk on its face. The kind of smirk you want to wipe away.

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Categories Communication, General

The Productive B2B Buyer

April 18, 2016 //
0

A few years ago, I used to work with a company called The TAS Group. They invented something called the Sales Velocity Equation, a metric for sales effectiveness.

It was a really simple and powerful way of thinking about how effective a sales person or organisation you are. In a nutshell, your sales velocity for a given time period (let’s say a quarter) is proportional to the total number of qualified deals you work during the period, multiplied by the average deal size, multiplied by the percentage of deals that you win, the total then divided by the average sales cycle length for those won deals during that period. It’s all about speed, the implication being that if in the next period you can improve the factors above the line and reduce the sales cycle length, your speed – or sales effectiveness – increases. Good, huh?

On a number of occasions I suggested that the natural corollary to this is the buyer velocity equation, but my thoughts were not bought into, which is fair enough. I think it still has merit though.

If you’re a B2B buyer – and I suppose you could think too about yourself as a B2C customer or consumer, offline or online, though it’s nowhere near as elegant – you want to be as productive a buyer as you can.

It follows, then, that your productivity within a certain period is a function of the number of projects you have tabled, the average size of those projects, the amount of projects you get off the ground, and the length of time from project conception to project kick-off, or even to project completion. The greater the projects volume and project size, the greater the percentage of projects you get off the ground, and the quicker you get them off the ground, the more productive a buyer you are.

Make sense to me anyway. In the same way as the sales velocity equation, it helps you strip away the waste and the unnecessary and focus on the small number of important levers of success.

 

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Strategy

Damning the Critics

April 15, 2016 //
0

It’s important to be able to receive constructive feedback. If you value other people’s opinion that is. If it’s destructive criticism, or you don’t respect the opinion of the person who’s volunteering it, why bother listening to it?

Staying with constructive feedback, the really important thing is to make a decision on that feedback. Do they make a valid point? Is incorporating their feedback going to improve what you’re doing? If it is, great, you have a better product or service.

If it isn’t, then damn the critics and go. Have the courage of your convictions. You’ll either win or your learn from your loss.

And, sustaining you on your journey are stories like the Beatles, whom record company Decca turned down, or Fred Astaire, who was told ‘can’t act, can’t sing, can dance a little,’ or JK Rowling, turned down by innumerable publishers and now the first female billionaire author.

Yes, damning the critics and doing it anyway. Feels good, doesn’t it?

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

The B2B Customer Call

April 13, 2016 //
0

A B2B customer is far, far more important than a B2C customer. Let me tell you why.

I work from the home office quite a lot of the time. When I’m on a customer call, or a customer’s customer call, and there’s anyone in the house, I always warn them that I’m not to be disturbed unless the house is burning down.

A B2C customer is one customer, one consumer out of many. There are degrees here, of course, since some B2C customers are large or repeat customers, and spend much more money than one-off or small basket-size customers.

A B2B customer, however, doesn’t represent their own interests, they represent the interests of lots of other employees, who are in effect lots of other customers. They’re corporate and they have very, very deep pockets. And for that reason, they’re very important. If they take away their business from you, you lose an awful lot. If one consumer does, it’s no biggie.

A B2B customer call is like the red ‘On Air’ sign outside a broadcasting studio. You’re broadcasting to a large number of individuals and are not to be disturbed. One bad experience is immediately magnified throughout the entire audience – or company.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Macs Make You Lazy

April 11, 2016 //
0

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.

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Categories General, Technology

Off The Grid

April 8, 2016 //
0

I was on holiday quite recently. We took the family skiing. Not something we do every year; it’s too expensive and I’m a big fan of the heat.

We went to Italy. I don’t do the data roaming thing, because I’m not a big user of data when I travel; voice and text is enough for me. This means I rely on wireless networks, you know the deal.

The apartment we rented was tiny, but the use of space was so amazing IKEA should have been taking notes. It had no wireless, though. This meant if I wanted to get online it was the mountain restaurants and bars.

This was fine in principle, except the connections were so flaky that you couldn’t really do much, so I didn’t.

I was basically off the grid for a week, except for 5 minutes to check in for the return flights online and download the boarding passes with my fancy airline app. And, do you know what, while I was ‘away’, the sky didn’t fall in.

It was actually great. I didn’t miss it at all, and felt no compulsion to go onto social media and tell people how many corn flakes I’d eaten. No withdrawal symptoms, no first world problems, nothing. It was like the good old days when you went on your family holidays and came back wondering what news you’d missed and what song was number 1 in the charts while you were away.

Coming back was not too bad either. The inbox was manageable.

I recommend being off the grid it to all my friends, at least to try it for a few days. A sort of digital detoxing.

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Categories General

What Brits Mean When They Say…

April 6, 2016 //
0

I’ve always prided myself on being honest and saying what’s on my mind. Not necessarily framed in a hurtful or undiplomatic manner, but one that leaves no room for misunderstanding. After all, people, especially customers, need to know what you’re thinking. They also need to be advised what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

It turns out, of course, that the Brits have long been guilty of not exactly saying what they mean, as the table here will testify. I’m indebted to James Trezona of Rooster Punk for drawing my attention to this table, though the version I’ve shown is borrowed from here. In this sense it would seem that the Brits are similar to other peoples, like the Japanese for example, in eschewing direct feedback.

Anglo-EU Translation Guide

Anglo-EU Translation Guide

 

I do think, though, that this British habit of hiding behind the nuances of the mother tongue is gradually dying out. You could put this down to a bunch of mega trends I guess: globalisation, American cultural influences, the erosion of the British class system, our increasing inclination not to waste precious free time, to name but a few.

If it’s not dying out, then it’s certainly lessening from a bracing wind to a gentle breeze.

Or maybe something else is at work here? Maybe we’re not very good at delivering bad news. Maybe we’re too willing to soften the blow for our audience and ourselves. Either way, I think we’re getting better at that too.

There is, however, still sufficient truth in the table, and sufficient difference between what Brits say and what they mean – and differences between two situations is of course the root of humour – for it to be seriously funny.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Sales

Unknown Unknowns

April 4, 2016 //
0

It was Donald Rumsfeld’s phrased response to a White House question in 2002 that was to provide him with an excellent legacy and the title of a book. He distinguished between things we know we know, things we know we don’t know, and the unfathomable things that we don’t know we don’t know.

These are otherwise known – if you pardon the overused word – as the known knowns, the known unknowns and unknown unknowns.

I was tasked the other day with making sure the US version of a website was accurate, not just in terms of spelling and phrasing, but also used the correct terminology. My realisation that I had  not used the correct word for the US audience had already caused quite a bit of re-work and prompted a detailed pass through the US website to catch any further inaccuracies.

The problem was, you had to have worked extensively in that industry to know what the correct name was in the US, or whether they used the same descriptor as their UK friends.

So there were terms that I knew I knew, and the ones that I knew I didn’t know. Unfortunately, there were also bound to be terms that I didn’t know that I didn’t know, and they wouldn’t be spotted until it was too late. It’s the unknown unknowns that get you in business, as in many other things.

It’s bad enough having unknown unknowns in a fairly niche website with a few thousand visitors a month. Imagine having them for matters affecting entire countries and global relationships. Nasty.

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Categories Communication

The Late Post

April 1, 2016 //
2

I was at a commemoration the other day, to mark the centenary of an important event in Ireland’s history. As part of the ceremony they sounded a baleful and well known song called The Last Post.

Ironically, it reminded me that that very same day I’d forgotten to publish my morning’s blog post. From The Last Post to The Late Post, as it were.

My posts go out every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I’ve probably forgotten to post 3 times in 400-some posts. I’m usually a few weeks ahead on posts, but the combination of two weeks travelling pushed me out of my routine and all of a sudden I was one blog deficient.

A chap I used to follow a lot is Seth Godin – less so now because I spend quite a bit of my own free time writing. The eponymous Seth’s blog probably has in excess of 6,000 posts under its belt – or should I say roll? – at this stage. I’m sure he hasn’t ever missed one. He’s probably a lot of weeks ahead compared to my few, and either he has help to do the scheduling so that he never runs out or forgets to hit publish, or he is a superbly infallible machine that never misses. I suspect it’s the latter, since when I used to catch every single post I would on very rare occasions find a small typo that I would make him aware of. He never failed to come back within a couple hours to acknowledge my email and the fix.

Either way, I suppose it’s better that occasionally it’s my late post, rather than my last post…

 

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Categories Communication
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