Meetings, Bl**dy Meetings

July 9, 2014 //
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“Meetings, Bloody meetings!” So goes the refrain – and the heading – in the hilarious management training videos from John Cleese’s company in the 1970’s. A well-run meeting is a rare and beautiful thing. A poorly run meeting – well that’s the norm in most companies. They become a forum for delaying or avoiding decisions rather than arriving at them.

In the sales world good, well-qualified meetings with customers and prospects who have budget, the power to make decisions, a need for your product and a timeframe for making a change are worth their weight in gold. Poor meetings are a waste of your time and their time – and time is the most precious resource. They’re not even good practice.

Many managers work off the principle that the more qualified meetings you have, the more deals you’ll close. It’s largely right of course. Take two sales people with identical abilities, identical opportunities, but one with twice the opportunities of the other, and one will close 12 deals and the other will close 6. The more calls you put in, the more conversations you have, the more meetings you make, the more quotes or proposals you submit, the more deals you win, as long as you’re following a defined sales process.

It’s not only about working harder to be more successful though. It’s about working smarter, and coaching people to work smarter.  If you want your team to be more effective – ie more successful – and you’ve identified that your team needs more meetings, there are a number of things you can do to increase the performance of your sales team without having to add to your sales team. Here are ten of them:

– Is a face-to-face meeting necessary? Would a (video)conference call do? Could we do a web-based meeting?

– what’s the travel time like to meetings, from meetings, between meetings? Could it be better organised?

– could our sales team be better split geographically to optimise the number of meetings?

– is our team properly prepared for the meetings, so that they can close deals with the minimum number of meetings?

– what are the behaviours that drive more meetings? Better leads, better telephone work, better sales skills, better emails and collateral?

– who’s doing well at meetings that we can celebrate so that others can learn from their best practice?

– who needs coaching or other support to get more meetings?

– what sales technology can we use to help us manage the sales process?

– what sales technology can we use to optimise meeting routes and geographical clustering?

– what sales technology reports on meeting productivity can gives us insight to make improvements and correct poor behaviours early?

Maximising your customer contact and minimising your non-contact activities help you maximise your sales success. If your business is relatively high deal volume and small deal size, you need to make this your mantra. Meetings, blessed meetings!

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Planning, Sales, Technology

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

In a Perfectly Connected World

July 4, 2014 //
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In a perfectly connected world, where we are all devices and / or IP addresses on the Internet in the so-called ‘Internet of things’, there would be less arguing, fewer disputes methinks.

“Oh, so you think you’ve been doing the dishes more often than me and you put the kids to bed the last 3 nights, do you? Well let’s take a look at the dashboard, shall we? Look, here we can see that I have clearly washed up the last 5 times, and in fact you put the kids to bed the last 2 nights, not 3, and I did the 4 nights before that – hah! Total domestic activities are 561 minutes for you since the start of the week, and 974 for me. You’ve done 1274 parenting minutes, I’ve done 1478, so there!”

I think we’re a long way away from Minority Report and the Department of Pre-Crime, but total 24/7/365 transparency of what we have done must be within the lifetime of at least someone’s reading this. We should be able to report on everything that happens in the past. This will have huge ramifications for society and things like big data. For example a region would know that 1,825 cases of rape were reported, but a further 6,467 cases occurred but were not reported.

This must lead to a safer, truer society, but at what cost?

 

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Categories Communication, General, Technology

Being Off The Grid

July 2, 2014 //
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When it comes to experiencing things, there are two kinds of people. The first type is those who, if they can’t actively follow something live, they follow it online while they’re doing something else. For example, getting updates on the Wimbledon semi-finals while you’re at work. The second type is those who, if they can’t experience all of it live, they want to shut the world away and experience it later, recorded, and have their own ‘private live’ – albeit somewhat delayed. The example of this is someone who doesn’t want to be disturbed with any updates on an event, and who rushes home unmolested by real-time devices or intrusions to watch or listen to the recording.

I belong to the former group. I can’t see the point of experiencing an event in a sterile environment that’s live only to you. It’s asocial rather than anti-social. Being off the grid – and staying off the grid, which some people prefer to do – is pretty hard to do, especially in this connected world we inhabit. If we haven’t bothered to configure our settings, our laptops and mobile devices get pinged all the time by social media updates. Our instinct is to check the ping, even if we’re on silent – I’d better check, it might be important – and before we know it, our concentration drops for a moment, we read the update unwittingly, and the surprise is gone.

From a sales and marketing point of view, we have customers and prospects who embrace always-on technology, and some that don’t. We also have customers and prospects who are the first kind of people and some that are the second kind. As sales and marketing professionals, we need to try to allow customers to interact with us by whichever means they prefer, which might be exclusively one, or both.

Ask yourself this question: if I work in a predominantly digital environment how should I serve my customers and prospects who prefer to be off the grid, who respond to traditional rather than digital forms of communication, who don’t want to be contactable sometimes? Do I actually want to serve them at all?

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales

Why Big Nations Should Always Win Big Sporting Events

June 30, 2014 //
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I always find it amazing when a small nation overturns a large nation at a major sporting event.  Sometimes you get the odd upset – of course – but for me the big nations should always win at big sporting events.

I was reminded of this fact recently when England lost a key football/soccer match against Uruguay, a country of some 3 million people. There have been some fantastic books which have debunked this theory, such as the superb ‘Brilliant Orange‘, but for me it boils down to a combination of three important factors:

– the sheer population numbers with access to the game

– the number and quality of facilities to be able to play

– the number of qualified coaches

With decent facilities and great coaches you can go a long way, but you also need people playing the sport in their masses so that the numbers of exceptional players percolate through from an immense group. Take a look at English footie and you see an enormous amount of players, plentiful decent facilities, but in the main very poor coaching. It’s ‘hoof it up to the big guy’ or ‘give it to the dribbler’ on pitches that are far too big, from a very early age. Kids grow up thinking that all you need to do is dribble past half a dozen players or shoot from 30 yards. They don’t know the basics and they are not adequately taught the technical fundamentals of the game.

I’m not sure of the actual numbers, but I have heard a statistic that there are 17,000 qualified coaches in Germany, and 900 in England. Here’s an article which suggests England has nearly 3,000, but Spain has nearly 24,000, Italy nearly 30,000 and Germany nearly 35,000. People blame the English premiership and the influx of foreign players, but that’s nonsense. Why would spend the earth for an overseas star if you were spoilt for choice domestically?

In 50 years’ time, China will probably be the nation that tops all the sports it chooses to compete seriously in. Fifty years ago it wasn’t playing table tennis, now they are comfortably the best nation, and the Chinese diaspora declare for many other countries, making up a huge proportion of the world’s top 100 players, men and women. They have some serious numbers, and a totalitarian government with the will and resources to capitalise on the immense political kudos of being the world’s best at something.

You might think there are exceptions to this, like New Zealand rugby’s All Blacks. It’s a population of nearly 4.5 million. But, rugby is the national sport, they invest heavily in coaches – their coaches hold great jobs across the rugby world – and they have decent facilities. They also have their pick of some of the best giants in the islands like Samoa, Fiji and Tonga to bolster their numbers. My celtic chums will hate me for it, but that’s why England are always there or thereabouts in rugby world cups. The largest playing population in the world and lots of dosh are a pretty powerful cocktail.

It always seems a shame that some true geniuses of sport happen to be from small nations. In football terms, think of Northern Ireland’s George Best, Wales’ Ryan Giggs and of course Liberia’s George Weah, a former world footballer of the year. They never experienced the playing on the global stage that their talent warranted. They never got to win the big global sporting event and be included in the pantheon of world’s greats in the way that Messrs Pele and Maradonna are.

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Categories General

Mixing up prescription and proscription

June 27, 2014 //
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“There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip,” as the saying goes. One small letter can make a world of differences and there are Sunday magazine comic strip writers who have made their livings out of this fact.

Always make sure you don’t mix up prescription and proscription. They’re different prepositions, and different propositions entirely! One will help you feel better whereas the other probably won’t.

Always better to be prescribed that proscribed. 🙂

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Categories Language

Monopolies in Developing Countries

June 25, 2014 //
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Beyond the level of your basic human needs – clean water, food, that kind of thing – monopolies tend to be bad for the citizen.

Control and flexibility in one’s life is about choices, so when do you don’t have choices, you tend to suffer.

Perhaps the title of this post should be Monopolies in Emerging Economies, or perhaps in Not Very Densely Populated Areas, because my example for this is the west of Ireland.

Where I live we have one choice of central heating fuel, and one choice of provider of that fuel. The houses in the area were plumbed for this type of energy, and the switching costs to another type of fuel are either prohibitively high or it’s not possible to switch because the infrastructure’s not here.

When this happens, you’re a hostage to the macro ebbs and flows of global energy costs which invariably get passed onto you when the flows are not in your favour, and are slow to come back to you when they are. Hate that :-(.

 

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Categories General, Strategy

The Warm Comfortable Armchair of Proverbs

June 23, 2014 //
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There’s something very comforting about proverbs. They’re rather like a comfy armchair to me, in the way a spreadsheet is to an accountant.

They are the shorthand of our language, as well as a useful guidance to living life by the numbers.

“A stitch in time saves nine.” “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.” These phrases have been honed and shaped over time, a little nub of the collective experiences of humankind over the centuries.

They can serve you well in business too, as long as you understand them for what they are. One of my favourite business proverbs is “A rising tide lifts all boats.” It encapsulates the notion that everybody benefits from an improvement across the board.

Anyway, don’t take my word for it. After all, actions speak louder than words. 🙂

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Categories Language

Culture of the Physical

June 20, 2014 //
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When you live online for so long, experiencing the world largely in 2D, even with moving pictures, you forget that there’s really no substitute for the real thing.

I get reminded of this every time I’m at a physical event. I’m not talking about office work or a meeting, I’m talking about an organised event, the culture of the physical, or perhaps the physics of the culture. It’s more than just physical, it’s emotional, sensory, visceral in some cases.

The other day I was at an oyster festival and there was a cultural exchange between an Irish region and a French region – known primarily for its wine, an added bonus – going on in the marquis. The Irish as hosts had laid down a dance floor and there was an Irish dancing demonstration by the local youth troupe who happened to have just won some big word championship thing.

Man, it was fantastic! I’ve not experienced the Riverdance phenomenon, but I have seen Irish dancing before. Being there in a marquis of maybe 100 people, up close, I was barely two metres away from the dancers. It was literally spine-tingling, almost Newtownian in the sense that you feel part of the energy they’re expending and creating in the room.

I made a mental note to fill the family’s calendar with as much culture as possible.

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Categories General

Always Check Your Comms

June 18, 2014 //
4
Always Check Your Comms

Always Check Your Comms

It always pays to check your customer communications before they go out. It’s a good idea to have someone else – ideally someone away from the business – to check the communications, because you’re often too close to it to see a problem.

This is a recent sample of emails in my inbox. One of them is a problem for me. Can you tell which one? [Pauses, for dramatic effect…] It’s the bottom email. I can say with some certainty that there is no chance that this email will make my Dad smile, since he died some years ago and his ashes are probably fertilising a bowling green somewhere in the middle of England.

Had I received this email in the immediate aftermath of his demise, when I was a teary, shambling wreck of a man, I would probably have torched the offices of the people who sent it, and certainly unsubscribed for ever.

Where you can, always try and put yourself in the shoes of the person you’re sending something to, the person you’d like to buy from you. You’re hoping to build a rapport with them, not dash it to pieces in one fell swoop.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales
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