The OTE in Promote

March 23, 2015 //
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There is a term in sales remuneration called OTE. It’s a three-letter acronym – aka TLA 🙂 – naturally. OTE stands for On Target Earnings or On Track Earnings, though I prefer Opportunity to Earn myself. In sales jobs you can have a base salary element and a commission element that together give you your OTE if you hit your sales quota.

In a previous post I talked about the importance of having a product/market fit. Once you have that, then you need to scale your business so that you can capitalise on your potential. Your ‘opportunity to earn’, therefore, is to be found quite literally in the word ‘promote.’ To attract the right customers in the right numbers, you need to effectively promote your business.

If you’re a business owner/manager with a successful product, you want to take your business to the next level and you think the key is something to do with this marketing lark, here are some things to think about.

– Do you know your market? Can you profile it, describe it, and define it, tightly?

– What slices or segments make up your market? Remember that you can slice the market ‘pie’ according to things like region, industry, size etc, but also according to what is important or needed by customers. How you segment your market is crucial.

– Which segments of the market do you want to sell to? Even though you want to grow, you can’t be all things to all people. Well, you can, but not for long.

– What are these buyers like? What are the buyer ‘personas’? How do they prefer to buy?

– How will you position yourself to these segments? Positioning is the third leg of the segment-target-position stool on which will sit much of your go to market plan. By ‘position’ I mean your messaging, or how you describe your value to customers.

– Does your brand truly reflect where you’re going, not where you are or where you’ve been?

If any of this is alien to you, invest in someone to help you figure it out. It’s the key to unlocking the OTE at the end of promote.

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

The One Thing You Need For a Successful Business

March 20, 2015 //
0

The one thing you need for a successful business is this (no drum roll necessary) …

Product/Market Fit.

You’d be surprised – actually you might not be surprised at all – how many product-based companies don’t have it, or can’t get it.

Product/Market Fit is this, put simply: people want your stuff. A lot of people. In fact, they don’t simply want your stuff, they need your stuff, and a good number of them would be up the creek without a paddle if you took it away from them.

You need Product/Market Fit for your business to grow, and people won’t invest in your business unless you can demonstrate you have it. Conversely, if you’re looking to join a successful company, and this is perhaps the most obvious thing you’ll read this month, join the one that you’re sure is shifting product.

If there’s no market for what you sell, or plan to sell, there’s no business for you. Too many companies find this out too late, usually after they’ve built their product. “Now, who can I sell this to?” In other words, do the marketing first, not afterwards.

 

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

Know Your IoT

March 18, 2015 //
0

By all accounts, and if all the hype is true, the most encompassing TLA we’ve ever known will be the IoT, also known as The Internet of Things.

This concept of almost everything you can imagine being part of a connected world to the extent that it essentially becomes the world is a pretty hard one to get your head around, even if you’re surrounded by technology and pretty comfortable with it.

The thing – not one of the Things in the Internet of Things thank goodness – that I struggle with, however, is the thing that we struggle with right now, namely how on earth do we make sense of all this flipping data? It’s a constant battle to see through the fog and benefit from a constantly expanding body of information about everything.

The key thing for us both as individual people and in our organisations is this: there might well be 30 billion devices connected in 5 years from now, but how will this make our lives easier or enable us to make money from it? Maybe the money will come from the manufacture and sale of the devices themselves. I don’t know about you, however, but I still have 2 remotes for one television and these devices don’t talk to each other. With the millions of different standards in all our different global walks of life, getting the things that make up the Internet of Things to talk to each other and make the sum of the parts greater than the whole is not something I think I’ll be solving by this time next week…

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Categories General

Lifelog This

March 16, 2015 //
0

As we move towards a world that is, literally, the Internet of things, it’s interesting to see how this lifelogging thing is going to develop. For a good introduction to this phenomenon of using wearable devices to track your entire life for some kind of perverse posterity, see here.

The weblog quickly graduated – and shortened – to the blog, where people could write about what they see going on in the world, much like this blog you’re reading, and build up a following and a web 2.0/2-way interaction with people. It’s now become an important part of an organisation’s or individual’s social media strategy.

At the moment, it’s hard to see how lifelogging will develop into something more commercially relevant – and into a more concise and marketable word. Apart from flogging I suppose, but that’s a couple of bridges too far in the wrong direction methinks.

Perhaps it’s destined to go the way of other wearable tech that runs into privacy issue because of the collateral recording of other people without their permission. On the other hand it could presage some hideous dystopian world 50 years from now where we’re all tracked 24/7. Could go a number of ways :-).

 

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Categories General

Why is the Sales Funnel a Funnel?

March 13, 2015 //
0
Your Classic Funnel

Your Classic Funnel

How on earth has the image of a funnel become the prevailing symbol of sales process and sales forecasting the world over?

Funnels come in all different shapes and sizes. The one I’m looking at in this post is your typical kitchen funnel, with a bulbous part that holds the liquid and then a long narrow shoot below it. Your classic sales funnel graphic, however, is a tall, narrow V shape with lines across it, within which lines are the sums of sales opportunities for each specific sales sales stage at that specific moment in time. The early stage opportunities are at the top, and the later stages are towards the bottom. The later stage opportunities are less plentiful – would that it were the other way around! – hence the unmistakable V-shape.

The differences don’t end there, however. Firstly, the sales funnel image is usually 2-dimensional, whereas you could really do with something in 3-D. Furthermore, when you think of a real funnel, all the liquid falls through the bottom, whereas in the sales funnel only the won deals fall through to be processed. Where do the non-deals, the lost deals and the qualified-out deals go? Do they evaporate from the funnel? And wouldn’t it be great if we could get a sense, over time, of how and when deals are dropping out or dropping down from one stage to the next, more advanced stage? And, while we’re at it, some sense of where the deals originated would be handy too.

No, the funnel is a lousy symbol, and so is the ‘hopper’. The ‘pipeline’ is no better.We need an image that acknowledges both the linear nature of a sales process but also the cyclical nature of continually qualifying a sales opportunity. Something that loses progressively smaller volumes as it goes along until only the good stuff comes out. Leave that one with me…unless you’ve any suggestions?

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Categories Sales

In Praise of Mums Returning to Work

March 11, 2015 //
0

Whenever I’ve gone back into the world of the employee after a lengthy period consulting, there’s always a small amount of apprehension, naturally. Will I settle back into the new routine, how will I get on with the new people, will the culture suit me, that kind of thing.

The one comfy chair I can always fall back on, however, is that I have never had more than a month or two off from working. I’ve been able to keep my eye in all the while and stay up to speed with the world of business at a macro level.

I have nothing but admiration, therefore, for women who take a sustained period of time off – by which I mean more than two years straight – to raise their children and then return to the world of work.

The world changes awfully fast, and your knowledge and confidence can take a huge knock. It takes real guts to jump onto a moving vehicle that is going faster than it was when you jumped off, and has completely changed its whole build, shape and appearance since you were last on board. It might not even be the same vehicle; it might be a totally different one in a different industry. You have little or no point of reference. Your skills, shortcuts, and muscle memory from when you last worked don’t cut it any more.

I know someone who took a dozen years out to bring up her kids. She was working in a traditional area of IT that you never hear of these days. Yes, they were called mainframes back then. She went back to college for a year, updated her skills, got her qualification, did an internship, interviewed with some companies and started a brand new career, all within 14 months. Daunting, eh?

So hats off to you returning-to-work mothers. And, as the Irish would say, in probably the understatement of the year, fair play to ye!

 

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Categories General

Everyone’s an Author

March 9, 2015 //
0

Have you got something to say? Do you think it will help other people? Do you think they’ll be interested in it?

Then write it! It’s never been easier to set up a blog and commit to writing on a regular or even semi-regular basis. We all have something to share that would either be useful for other people or entertaining to them.

You used to hear the common refrain that everyone has a book in them. The traditional barriers to publishing and the financial realities of getting projects to pay for themselves meant that for over 99% of people the cost of entry was too high, in both time and money. As a consequence, the impetus that people had to publish their writing was quickly snuffed out.

Nowadays, it’s easy for people to set up a blog page, free of charge, requiring nothing more than a little of their time. What’s more, the self-publishing phenomenon has made it possible for us all to publish a book of which we might sell as little as one printed or electronic copy. Talk about the long tail-leveraging power of the Internet…

“See that? It’s mine. I wrote it.” It’s a good feeling, isn’t it?

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Consistency, Consistency, Consistency

March 6, 2015 //
0

The first law of retail in the pre-Internet era – so it’s still valid for over two-thirds of global retail trade – is location, location, location.

The first law of communication, leadership and business relationships, is, to this writer’s mind, consistency. If you are consistent in your dealings with people, then it’s easier for them to be aligned with you in terms of expectations. They know what they’re getting from you and this helps them save time and money in the long run. Your consistency makes them more productive.

If you’re inconsistent, they don’t know where they stand, they can’t plan properly and they can’t make progress smoothly. No-one finds the maverick or the loose cannon that easy to work with when there’s so much at stake.

You should be predictable and constant for all the right reasons with the people that are important to you. They will appreciate you for it and come back for more.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language, Marketing, Sales

Pressure Good, Stress Bad

March 4, 2015 //
0

My late Dad, who oozed insight, guidance and modesty in equally Herculean proportions, was fond of aphorisms. One of his favourites was: pressure is good, stress is bad.

How right he was! We thrive on pressure, it helps us meet deadlines and increases our productivity. If we don’t apply pressure to ourselves, or we don’t get it from an external force, we’re get nowhere near as much done. It galvanises us, energises us, catalyses us. Just ask any journalist, writer or sports person.

Stress, on the other hand, is what happens when pressure overspills, or we don’t handle the pressure appropriately. Stress reduces our productivity, affects our equilibrium and harms our health, sometimes dramatically so.

The difference between the two is our relative ability to channel the inputs correctly into the desired outputs. And if we can’t do it, we should call for help – and call early.

 

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

Who Reads Long Stuff Anymore?

March 2, 2015 //
0

Does anyone read any long articles on the web these days?

Me, I love reading books. I like reading thrillers and crime stuff last thing at night before I turn out the light. These are physical books too, with the added thrills to the senses of smell and turning real pages.

I’m only just getting used to reading books electronically. This is in part because a couple of friends have taken the self-publishing plunge and opted for Kindle only, so otherwise I wouldn’t get the chance. In part it’s also because my screen-based reading habits have changed.

Don’t get me wrong, I still read long documents for work, but I don’t read long articles on the web any more. I prefer to read small, pithy stuff and when I see web content that looks long, I give it a skip, or else try and glean the high points.

It’s also why I prefer to blog in small chunks, rather than those who only blog about once a week or fortnight and it’s a War and Peace job. Who has time for that these days? Who has the attention span for it?

The web is primarily for us to glean information, knowledge or insight, and for that we want it immediately, authoritatively and expeditiously.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
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