Luck or Karma? Planning’s Big Lie

March 14, 2014 //
0

A few years go, as a recent recruit to a sales effectiveness company, I briefed the powers that be on how I wanted to run my session. I wanted to start with a story on how it was lucky I made it to the US that day at all. I had a new smartphone and set my alarm for 6am on the Saturday, unaware that my alarm was set for weekdays and not weekends. I awoke at 6am anyway, and realised my error. In any event, the thrust of my story, I said, was that you can do all the planning you want, but sometimes you need a bit of luck.

The powers that be looked at me askance. This was not what they wanted to hear. You see, they said, the whole point of sales methodology and planning is that you remove luck from the equation. You leave nothing to chance and you control the eventualities of the sale with your ideally perfect knowledge and assessment of the situation.

That said, loads of us believe in luck, hope for luck, are counting on luck. Luck and hope may not be great strategies, but even with the best planning in the world you get the feeling that luck still has a role. That bluebird deal comes in when you thought the customer gone dark. A change of key personnel plays right into your hands, or takes the deal away from you. Sometimes you feel that stuff happens that you just can’t legislate for.

The concept of luck is an interesting one. Some folks believe in it, some don’t. There was a great Greek tragedy writer called Euripides writing about 2,500 years ago. I reckon he was better than his much vaunted peers Aeschylus – who wrote The Persians – and Sophocles – he of Oedipus the King – and only a handful of his plays like The Medea survive from the 90 or so he wrote. He believed that there was no such thing as good luck. There was either no luck, or bad luck.

I take a different view of luck from my erstwhile planning perfectionist employers. Great planning means you can allow for luck or karma, or you know what to do when the luck rolls in. As Gary Player once said: ‘The more I play, the luckier I get.’

Tags , ,
Categories Customers, Planning, Sales, Strategy

The Phone That Rings Out

March 12, 2014 //
1

Have you ever been in a company, institution or building and you hear a phone just ringing out? No answer machine, no voicemail system to let them know you called and to ask them to call you back?

That’s because they don’t want you to be able to put the ball back in their court. You’re the customer but they don’t care about you.

My favourite places for this to happen are public sector organisations, local government offices, state and semi-state institutions. They don’t understand customers, they don’t acknowledge you as a customer. You’re not a priority to them; they are a priority to them. They are part of the bloated state administration system and they wouldn’t last five minutes in the private sector.

This is the equation: Your call is not important to us + we don’t care about you = your call rings out.

Your solution: bypass them. Find another way to get what you need to get done.

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, Customers

Full Stops

March 10, 2014 //
7

The full stop, preferable to a comma according to the good folks from Coldplay, is also called a period by our US friends.  Period has never really caught on as a term in the British-English speaking world, perhaps due to its association with what the older generation called ‘women’s things.’

On the surface, a full stop is a pretty easy concept.  You use it to finish a clause or a series of clauses and give the reader chance to pause for longer than they might at a comma. When you’re writing for business, though, sometimes it’s tough to know when you really should use a full stop, especially when you have bullet points or indented paragraphs. Super formal documents, like those produced by Her Majesty’s Civil Service, are very formal:

– they have a comma at the end of each bullet,

– until they get to the last bullet,

– and then they finish it with a full stop.

My own preference is not to use anything at the end of bulleted text, even at the end of the last bullet:

– it looks neater

– it’s also easier for me.  Even if it’s a longer bullet with a couple of sentences in, I still don’t put a stop at the end of the bullet

– it allows me to use this convention both for short bullet comments and longer indented paragraphs

Whatever you decide, make sure you consistently apply the convention through your document.

In the normal parts of a document, of course, you should have a full stop at the end of each paragraph. It’s not a luxury you can do without, as a former colleague of mine is fond of arguing. And that former colleague knows who they are :-).

Tags , ,
Categories Communication, Language

The One Criteria That Gives You Away

March 7, 2014 //
6

Singulars and plurals: they’re usually really easy to differentiate, but sometimes they make you look like you’re not in command of your native language.

The most common one I hear in a business context is ‘criteria’. It catches folk out all the time. You see, criteria is a plural, and it’s not the kind of plural you can use in a singular context, like ‘data’ for example. You often hear criteria coupled with ‘success’, a popular entry in bullsh*t bingo.

So you have one criterion, from the Latin criterium and before that the old Greek kriterion, and you have multiple criteria from the Latin – you guessed it – criteria. Data has the same latin origins, but it’s so much part of our everyday language that it’s morphed into a collective singular noun and it’s quite acceptable to say ‘the data is awful’ for example.

Not so with criteria. You’ll hear even senior people in an organisation saying ‘which particular success criteria is the most important?’, which gives them away. Of course, mine’s the stiffer upper lip British diagnosis of the word. In other English-speaking territories, they’ve taken a slightly more lenient view. Then again you’ll sometimes hear people talk about the many criterias you can select from, yikes…

Tags ,
Categories Communication, General, Language

The Blurred Lines Between Sales and Marketing

March 5, 2014 //
4

[Disclosure – this blog post contains adult sexual references, though not expressed in a vulgar way, because that would be a poor show.]

I thought I’d open, dear reader, with a warning, as I’d hate to see your double espresso do a U-turn as you read this. The adult reference is not to the title of the well-known song that you will find in the subject line of this blog post (and I can imagine there might be a slightly different audience finding this post as a result) but to an analogy for the difference between sales and marketing.

The rivalry, jibes and sometimes gulfs between sales and marketing is a path so worn away with words that I hesitated before I wrote the post, yet I think my point has merit.

In the old days, you could say that marketing was like sex for 1. A mainly solitary exercise, you would be crafting strategy, messaging and plans in your own company. Sales, on the other hand, was like sex for 2. You were building a rapport with that person, listening and catering to their requirements.

The connected economy has blurred those lines almost beyond recognition. If I’m a salesperson, my B2B customers can do their research online, see how people score what I offer, without ever having to dance with me until they’re ready, and on their terms. I don’t sell to them until they’re ready to start the relationship – unless I understand how to use the same processes to guide them to me.

If I’m a marketer, while I should always have been listening to the market, I can get instantaneous feedback on what I’m putting out there and can collaborate with my customers in real time to give them what they need.

The best salespeople, marketers and customers are those that understand the leveraging power of the Internet and use it to put themselves in the shoes of the other person. That way they can relate to them more, and partner with them better.

Tags
Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Love Your Customers

March 3, 2014 //
2

This blog is 6 months old – today. As I write this I have a very small blog audience – which I consider to be my customers – tiny in fact. But that doesn’t matter. As long as I enjoy writing it, and one person enjoys reading it, the connection is made and there is a fair exchange.

A rather good book I read last year advised that you should love the first customers you get. This is nothing new; they are the gateway to future success. Since this blog is 6 months old I would like to thank my best customer by sending them a present. I define best as the person who has interacted the most with my blog. And so Mr Gibson, my heartfelt thanks and gift goes out to you. And this has nothing to do with your recent milestone birthday which I could not attend…

There’s no harm being grateful when it’s also expedient :-).

Tags
Categories Customers

Ownership or the Lack of

February 28, 2014 //
0
Yep, all this is mine...

Yep, all this is mine…

“Yeah, we own that customer…”

No you don’t.  You don’t own a customer, ever, and they don’t own you either. As a matter of fact, we share ownership of all that we consider ours: our house with various critters, our company with a bunch of stakeholders, and our real estate and world with an altogether different bunch of stakeholders. It’s like we share a view or a moment.

The sooner we get the notion of sharing into our heads, even in the commercial western world, we all work together better and we all profit. You don’t have customers, suppliers, or competitors, you have partners, and partners by their very nature share stuff.

Tags , ,
Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

The Business Joy of the Hand-Written Note

February 26, 2014 //
0

I got a hand-written card today! From an organisation! I was so excited. The oblong hole in the front door is not just for bills after all.

Somebody had written me a personal thank you note and a different hand had written my name and address on the envelope too. This wasn’t from a friend or family; this was from a large organisation.

Yes, the good people – I always suspected they were good but now I know it – at Movember wrote to me personally to thank me for the huge sacrifice of growing a moustache for 31 days. Now there are thousands of people a year that raise money for this prostate cancer charity, and I bet we all got a hand-written thank you letter. Mine was from Sara and she signed it ‘Sara x’. Who cares if it wasn’t actually Sara, it’s the thought, and the perception, that counts.

I shall definitely grow a moustache for November 2014; they have me for another year, and another few hundred quid, with one thoughtful gesture.

Attention people who have customers – or people who want to stay on the right side of someone else: show you care by taking three minutes out of your day to write a card and envelope and why you appreciate them. You’ll need a stamp too of course, but if there is a better return for such a small investment, I don’t know what it is.

Incidentally, even if you’re not in marketing – or even business – you should dip into the daily genius that is Seth Godin’s blog. Here’s one of his best ever pithy-but-explosively-useful posts containing the handwritten thank you note.

Anyway, back to emails, the web and calls…

Tags , , ,
Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

When It Doesn’t Do What It Says On the Tin

February 24, 2014 //
0
The Cleaner Fuel, Really?

The Cleaner Fuel, Really?

‘It does exactly what is says on the tin.’ A very well known advertising strapline that has served the company – and of course its customers – very well over the last few decades.

I’ve talked before about the importance of perception. Appearances mean a lot. We make judgements from them, we trust them. But what happens when those appearances let us down? Then we start to doubt the claims of the person or company and our trust starts to break down.

Wondering around my home town the other day, I noticed these fuel tanks hiding behind an environmental-looking faux bamboo fence within a housing estate. This is clearly the central place that serves the neighbouring houses with their fuel.

Even though this is the stuff we hide away behind walls, fences and floorboards, there is clearly an ironic and serious compromise of the brand promise going on when the container of of a fuel container is filthy, or filthsome as my offspring have recently coined.

As a marketeer, you have to protect and optimise every single touchpoint of your brand with your customers. While it’s true to say that a rising tide raises all boats, a hole in the net lets all the fish out too.

Tags ,
Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing

Announcing a New Dictionary Word – The Drummernumber

February 21, 2014 //
0

In the last of this week’s posts loosely grouped around respect – or sometimes lack of respect – for the customer, I offer you a new word. A good friend of mine recently opined over a good glass of chianti (not, I might add, a contradiction in terms), “I reckon we should add a new word to the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s the Drummernumber.”

Continuing in the best tradition of coining words after people, like malapropism and bowdlerise, these four gloriously euphonous syllables reference a certain David Drumm, erstwhile CEO of Anglo Irish Bank. As I write this, three of Mr Drumm’s colleagues are on trial for allegedly suspicious loans they made on the bank’s behalf in late 2008.

So why the connection to Mr Drumm? Well, according to a colleague of his in taped conversations between senior members of the bank which found their way into Irish national newspaper the Independent, Mr Drumm had a fondness for making up numbers, except that it was phrased in the manner of someone dextrously plucking the number out of one of the more notorious part of their anatomy.

The number in question was the amount the bank needed from the government to bail it out. The plucked number and the actual number were considerably apart. I remember from my MBA days the Japanese practice of multiplying by SIX the initial estimate of the financial cost of an incident to arrive at the more likely eventual number. This is the sort of scale we’re talking about here.

Now some of you will have heard the business joke, ‘Did you know that [insert percentage of your choice] of all statistics are made up on the spot?’ which plays with the idea that statistics help to illustrate or strengthen an argument so it’s better to make one up than not have one. The event that I refer to, however, which had major ramifications for the Irish tax payer, takes the process to a whole new level.

So, expect to see the following entry in the dictionary before too long:

“Drummernumber [drum-er-nuhm-ber] noun. 1, A number which has been made up in order to advance an argument or secure approval. Also colloquially referred to as ‘a number I picked out of my a**e’. Attributed to Mr David Drumm, former CEO, Anglo Irish Bank, q.v.'”

Who knows how the trial will turn out, but this quote-unquote that we coin here is allegedly a small episode within an allegedly colossal disrespecting of – and ultimate failing of – hundreds of thousands of tax-paying customers.

And as for Drummernumber: you heard it here first. Allegedly.

Tags
Categories Language, Strategy
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »