Great Expectations - Are Managed

Because of the snow, there has been a great deal of media coverage devoted to service performance in the last few days:

• Airports
• Eurostar
• Postal Services
• On-line Shopping
• Rail Services
• Road Transport

All of these areas have been affected by the recent poor weather. BA and BAA have come in for a fair amount of criticism - particularly in terms of their communication (or otherwise) with people stranded at a major airport.

One firm made me think about these issues in marketing terms. I ordered several items from Amazon last week - and was assured that delivery would take place in time for Christmas. When I re-visited the site on Monday (nearly 5 working days before Christmas) - the message was clear. It will not arrive in time for Christmas.

Amazon took responsibility for managing my expectations. And (as far as I know) - over-delivered - the parcels shipped to my home have all arrived in plenty of time - all apart from one that is not a gift.

Our local Pizza firm, in the next village is another great example of good expectation management. They always tell me that delivery will take place "Within the hour" - and most of the time manage a 34-45 minute delivery time. The main point is - they set expectations and then over-deliver on them - a bit. And that makes me loyal.

So, how do you communicate with your customers? Do you manage expectations properly? Are you guilty of letting people find things out the hard way?

Credibility in Hyped Markets

A Twitter reference from Robert Craven to a wonderful article (

Time to ditch the blood-sucking social media gurus)

in the Telegraph got me thinking. My mind jumped straight to a series of publications from Gartner about Hype Cycles - I even sent Robert the link. On reflection, my leaping mind may need a little more explanation.

Observation

Every new technology, social or business hype cycle (and there are many) attracts a range of people. Just as the California Gold Rush - one of the best publicised hype cycles - attracted fools, charlatans, crooks and wise people in large numbers, so each modern hype cycle attracts a similar group of people and businesses. And many, just as in the Gold Rush, end up disappointed.

The Dangers

When you fall victim to a hype cycle, you are in danger of suspending your normal business judgement. Then you run the risk of either:

• Investing time and money you cannot afford in some doomed venture, or:
• Paying for a service linked to your passion that you do not need, will not benefit from and delivered by somebody who, if your normal antennae were working, you would not normally deal with.

Current Danger Zones

I was at a business event earlier this month when an excellent, reputable (they really know their stuff) local business was speaking on the subject of sustainable energy sources and how to profit from them through rebates etc. I asked the speaker about the thieves and charlatans and the degree to which his industry was plagued with them. This triggered a quick summary of horror stories ranging from blatant over-charging through to dangerous (likely to catch fire) installations. As a reputable business, my new contact has joined a trade association and is working to normal business standards - in an industry where most of us will encounter the sharks first.

Here is my list of potential hype danger-zones (Gartner list more):

• Sustainable energy
• Cloud computing
• Tax schemes
• Social Media
• Unified Communications
• Tablet PC's
• Smart-Phone apps
• Franchises
• .....

Please bear in mind that in all these examples, there are many many reputable businesses working very hard to deliver excellent value. The problem comes when we start reading about things in general terms and they become "the next big thing" - and we start to falter in the general direction of suspending judgement. The markets were caught out in the .com bubble in just this way - they assigned huge values to business models that were, at best, mediocre - if not worthless.

Warning Signs

As soon as a topic becomes a common theme in business seminars, you should start to be more alert - especially if you are asked to find large sums of money to attend whole conferences dedicated to the topic. As soon as a topic starts to get hyped, you run the risk of letting your guard down.

What to Do

If you are operating a business in a hype zone, you will need to take a number of steps to ensure that you clearly differentiate yourself from the sharks. Some of the areas where you might need to be careful are:

• Write your business plan with great care
• Join the trade association
• Get approved (if your business involves skill in applying a technology, many vendors have a certification scheme - from vinyl graphics to software)
• Write down, and publicise, your code of business ethics
• Test your proposition with at least three sceptics
• Avoid statements like "of course they will buy it, it hasn't got a wire" (source available on enquiry!!)
• Base your market assumptions on a realistic model - just because there are around 10million dogs in UK households (K9 Magazine) does not mean that the market size for your wonder-dog-slipper is 10million.
• Make sure that you are constantly aware of your less scrupulous competitors and their impact on your industry or profession.

Collecting Business Cards for Profit

Most networkers collect business cards. Some people index the cards they collect. Some follow up the contacts they have made. Very few have a structured approach to collecting, storing and long term follow-up of the contacts they make.

We all know the value of referral marketing. So why do so few of us make a real effort to index and categorise the most valuable information we collect when we are business networking?

What to Do

Scan

Start by scanning the cards you are given into a digital format that avoids the need to manually transcribe all that contact information. There are a variety of ways to do this. Some Smart-Phones have applications available that instantly transform a photograph of a business card into a contacts entry. Business card scanners are available at modest cost.

Import

Import this valuable data into your CRM system. If you use spread-sheets or if you use one of the available CRM tools, the rules are the same. Import data into your CRM system and classify the cards based on the information you wrote on each when you were in front of the owner.

Classifications

The categories you use to classify business cards will be function of your business. Some people will be useful to know for one reason or another, others less so. Think in terms of your business and the type of people you want to meet. Here are some suggestions for classifications to consider:

• Suspect - somebody that you suspect might one day, with careful nurturing, turn into a prospect.
• Prospect - a person you meet who will be buying services like yours sometime soon.
• Referrer - those people you meet who are most likely to be looking for a business like yours to complement their own operation. These are the gold standard businesses who regularly have opportunities for you which they share out.
• Supplier - when you are networking, be on the look-out for good quality businesses which have little or no overlap with your own business and to whom you can easily pass referrals.
• Resource - knowledgeable individuals who can help your contacts with information and advice.
• Card collector - we have all met these. These people attend a myriad of networking events wasting everybody's time. Be careful though. Your card-collector might be my prospect.
• Salesman - Too busy pitching and selling to take any notice of the people they meet.

Plan Follow-Up

With a classification for all these cards, you can now plan and implement your follow-up in a timely manner. And you can start to keep the promises you made when you collected the cards.

Still Struggling

There are a lot of articles and information on the web to help you become a better networker. This blog post is not designed to help with your networking skills. Rather it is concerned with the systematic approach to information collection, collation and action points.

Sack Bad Customers

We all have (or have had in the past) a bad customer. Do any of the following attributes ring any bells?

• Only pay after the third reminder
• Consume all our time
• Expect something for nothing – constantly
• Continually change their minds
• Fail to plan and then expect us to work miracles to sort things out
• Cause problems and then expect us to fix things for free

Options

• Sack Them - If you have a customer who is costing you a disproportionate amount of time and/ or money – get rid of them. You can then spend more of your time on customers who appreciate your services and who then go on to provide you with testimonials and referrals.
• Increase Their Price - You might not be in a position to sack your recalcitrant customer – depending on their ability to damage your reputation or the degree to which their income is critical to you today. However, it may be feasible to increase their price.
• Change Terms - Change them from all inclusive to price per hour or start invoicing extras.

Things to Think About

• Reputation - If your bad customer is going to tell 25 of your prospects about shoddy service, you may have a problem. If you sit down with them and speak honestly it is more likely that they will move on gracefully. If you are sacking 20 customers, you might want to take professional advice on the PR elements of the project and announce your “change of strategy” before your sacked customers damage your reputation. Some customers damage your reputation – just by being your customer.
• Profitability – Customers who are killing your business can do what they like to your reputation. As long as you keep your existing profitable customers – and publish new testimonials as a follow up to your changes – any reputation damage will be minimal – and the positive impact on your profit could be profound.

Before You Quote

In your Opportunity Review process, it pays to ensure that you really understand what you are taking on. If you predict that a customer will turn out to be painful to deal with, consider one of the following options:

• Price accordingly
• No-bid
• Refer them to a competitor

7 Symptoms of Sick Businesses

Here is my list. You may have your own factors to add to my 7.

1. Blame
2. Meetings
3. Politics
4. Sloth
5. Arrogance
6. Macho Planning
7. Deck Chair Syndrome

I am often asked if I would go back into employment. I could probably earn a great deal more money than I do at present, so why not leave independence behind and return to the corporate fold? My answer is the same as most of the strong minded independent business owners I meet. There would have to be something special about a business to attract me back into a world that I left behind 4 years ago.

Seven of the things I do not miss about large businesses are symptoms of a sick business - things that the very best businesses aim to eliminate.

Blame
A lot of people talk about eliminating a blame culture - few actually achieve it. The response to a problem is more often "whose fault is it" than "how can we help". One of the jokes often cracked by experienced project managers is that old chestnut:

"No project team is complete until we have appointed the PTB - (person to blame)"

When things go wrong, how often do you start asking questions that are aimed at isolating a blame recipient? And how often do you defuse things by making it your own fault then working on the recovery plan in support of the team/ supplier/ customer as appropriate?

Meetings
Internal meetings will continue to be run in this way until morale improves. Effective Meetings - Not. Are your meetings painful, unstructured, rambling affairs where you tell everybody how it is - building momentum as you go so that all the debate is a pointless charade and the decisions all get made in a blinkered way?

One of the dangers of the meeting culture is that, instead of canvassing opinions and capturing the best ideas, a "pack mentality" emerges where everybody jumps to the same conclusion without pausing to review data or to check facts. If your business is regularly sorting out the impact of the unintended consequences of poor decision making then you would be wise to seek help with making your meetings more effective.

Too Many Meetings
If you have created a culture where middle and senior managers are spending more than half their time in internal meetings - you may have a problem. If these same people are spending a further 20% of their time preparing reports for these internal meetings you have a big problem - especially if these reports all contain similar information re-formatted for different audiences. 50% + 20% = 70% - leaving 30% free to drive the business forwards. I am not saying that your meetings are not driving the business forwards some of the time, but your external facing senior people should be spending more time with customers. At the levels I am conjecturing, you are paying for 10 people to get 3 working with customers. Hardly efficient!

Politics
Some form of internal politics is inevitable in any organisation - humans work on relationships and success in any large organisation is a function of your power-base, aptitude and effectiveness. As leaders in an organisation, you have a duty to ensure that you are promoting and supporting your best people - those who are most able and who are most effective. If you fall into the trap of only promoting those with the widest power base or best grasp of internal politics you run the risk of creating a culture of mediocrity. You run the risk of losing your best people as they become disenchanted and move on.

Furthermore, your senior management team is not always going to be the people who are best able to support or develop the business strategy. As a leader, you are most effective when your support team is effective - not populated with people who agree with most of your ideas.

Sloth
Indolence and sloth are the results of the slow decision making and lack of drive that, in turn, arise from a lack of alignment in the business. By alignment, I mean that the objective setting and performance management systems in the business are not aligned to the strategy and possibly not aligned to delivery of the short term change programme.

Arrogance
Routine benchmarking and the proactive seeking of external inputs are marks of great businesses. Sick businesses, or even the slightly poorly, are guilty of :

• Assuming their business is totally unique and incapable of benefiting from any external input;
• Not-Invented-Here-Syndrome - unless they created it, it must be sub-optimum.

Unless you establish business processes to benchmark competitors, to actively seek best practice and to measure and capture customer feedback, your business is guilty of a supreme arrogance. Over time, that arrogance will allow you to fail to plan or to develop an adequate strategy. These failures will damage the business performance - possibly not in the short term but performance will be damaged.

Macho Planning
Is the biggest danger to your business the white-board or flip-chart used in your planning meeting? Stretch targets can be motivating - as long as they result in substantial action plans. Unrealistic plans run the risk of leaving you with a demotivated team. Worse still, your shareholders and other stakeholders will lose faith if you consistently miss your targets. Realistic plans - which should be stretching - should be based on:

• Facts and data;
• Buy-in throughout the business;
• Alignment of goals and objectives;
• Balanced measures;
• You creating an environment which facilitates execution of the plan.

So, if you are tempted to "just add another 20%" on to a target without any realistic assessment or change programme. Think in terms of the market, the power of your proposition and of your business' ability to deliver - do be careful!

Deck Chair Syndrome
The corporate mantra surrounding many re-structuring projects is "Re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic". You may not be guilty of anything quite so dramatic, but if your business is resorting to re-organising reporting structures on a regular basis, you could be ignoring the root causes of the issues you are trying to resolve. As a rule of thumb, and assuming that there are no disasters or major people changes inflicted on you, any re-organisation which is not part of your strategic plan should be questioned. Just as major changes in strategy on a regular basis are themselves symptoms of problems, your organisation structure should be matched to the strategy. A military leader will deploy forces in line with the tactics derived from the strategy. Refinements will be made in response to the changing situation but major changes in resource deployment or strategy are usually indicators that there have been mistakes in the original strategy.

Summary
How many of these symptoms can you identify in your business? Your suppliers? If you can identify 2 or more of these symptoms, it is worth starting an improvement plan - but beware creating yet another initiative that prompts more meetings and more poor behaviour! Good luck.

Idea Testing

In our businesses, we are often in the position of planning a change - either an expansion, a change of direction or some other variation on our current business.

The accepted wisdom in such circumstances is to plan the change, make the changes, measure the results and then make refinements.

• There are situations where a variation on accepted wisdom can make sense. Major changes to small businesses can prove expensive, especially if the changes damage established lines of business that are relied upon for income or for profit to re-invest.
• Some ideas are so radical that many small businesses put them off - usually forever. These radical ideas often have merit and can be tested at low risk - with a well thought out test plan.

You can start your testing by discussing the idea with trusted advisors - although it does pay to avoid the 3 F's (Friends, Fools & Family). If your discussion based testing does not throw up any substantial obstacles, you can then move on to a test implementation.

Your test will be dependent on the nature of your idea but could take the form of a market test where you offer the new product/ service/ process/ ... to selected customers or prospects away from your main markets to test reaction. For a limited period, you operate the idea at lowest possible cost or disruption. Only when the idea is proven do you invest fully in all the items costed into your business plan. Until then, you operate on a shoestring. This does not mean that you are unprofessional, just that you keep extra costs & disruption to a minimum.

Areas to think about:

• Print business cards only
• Microsite linked to your existing web-site instead of a complete change
• Short term property rents - which is a lot easier at present than in a boom- instead of long leases or purchase
• Creative thinking everywhere instead of major investment

When you know what works (and what does not work) - then you can start to scale things up - taking bigger risks with the existing business as you become more confident in the new idea.

When the Hype Bubble Turns to Indifference

As part of the generation that grew up through a series of hype cycles - from clacker balls through Deeley Bobbers and Rubik's Cube to iPod and on to iPhone and iPad I have an observation.

Hype and hysteria always peak and then turn to indifference - leaving the former hype subject to a few enthusiasts.

Here in the UK, Line Dancing was once the most popular exercise for millions with classes and events advertised everywhere. Now there a few thousands of loyal people continuing to enjoy their hobby and the hype grazers have moved on to other passions.

So, why do people move on? Will the current Apple hype cycle peak and burst?

Consumer based hype cycles are nothing to worry about - the vast majority of the people who are sucked in to the wave of hype and part with 2 to 3 times the price of a nearest competitor can afford it.

What about the hype cycles that spawn thousands of small businesses though? Where honest hard working people are sucked in to packing in jobs and re-mortgaging houses. Magnets, herbs, creams, solar panels - there are countless examples.

If you are considering a business based on a hype trend, it pays to think carefully before you bet your financial security on it. You need to look at the people who are desperate for you to buy a franchise or a license. Where do they make their money? Is it from selling you an expensive license or initial stock? Or is it from your long term success? Take advice. Listen to Accountants, Business Advisers and to your bank. Business professionals have seen these things many times before - they cannot make your decision for you but they can at least make you really think through the realistic potential of your business dream.

The only people who make money out of hype cycles are those at the beginning and those at the top.

When a hype cycle turns to indifference, make sure you are not left with a garage or industrial unit full of Deeley Bobbers (or the 21st century equivalent).

And there are some lessons for large firms too. In many industries, it has become fashionable to surf a wave of hype. Voice communications was all about IP 8-10 years ago. Now it is on the Unified Commmunications hype bubble. Electronic security systems are in the middle of their own IP wave. In each case, some of the products aligned to the hype bubble are warmed-up versions of previous generation products with a few extra features and an expensive re-brand. Intelligent buyers can see through these distractions. Be careful not to alienate your customer base - especially if your products are not quite "hype ready" - or whatever the term is in your industry.

Trust

One of my tweets, which was quite complex for 115 characters (leave 25 for the re-tweet!) was copied last week – by one of my followers. As I follow back, and was early for a meeting, I spotted the transgression – which was identical down to the last dot. This reminded me that it is a long time since I looked at Trust in the business environment.

We all spend a lot of our time working on our business image. We do this in order to:

• Generate awareness of ourselves and our businesses;
• Build trust with our target audience;
• Demonstrate that we are credible suppliers who can be trusted.

Before people will deal with us, they need to trust us. Just how much they need to trust us will depend on the nature of our business.

Things to think about:

• That trust upon which we depend has to be earned. It is not ours by right.
• It takes time to establish trust with a new contact.
• Our social media interactions are an important element in our marketing and have to demonstrate the same integrity as all our other marketing activities.

How much Trust is Sufficient?
Any new contact will have their own perception of just how much they need to trust you before they will confirm a transaction. Both the trust required and the time to achieve it will be a function of several variables:

• What is at stake;
  - Cost;
  - Non-financial impact of failure;
• Complexity;
• The contact’s own knowledge and experience.

Credibility

To be trusted to do something is to be a credible supplier of that product or service. Credibility is derived from:

1. Truth – you portray the best possible image of your business but do so honestly.
2. Behaviour – you keep your promises and you behave in the same way at all times – not showing one character in public and another in private.
3. Caring – you care more about the outcomes for your customers and the quality of your work that contributes to those outcomes than you do about other factors.
4. Skills and experience – you can prove that you have the skills and abilities that you are selling. This means promoting your strengths as they suit the opportunity – not promoting the skills you would like to have in order to win a piece of work.
5. Responsibility – you take responsibility for the outcomes of your work and you make sure that problems and issues are rectified.

Further reading:
Stephen M.R. Covey with Rebecca R. Merrill, The Speed of Trust, Simon & Schuster, ISBN-10: 0-7432-9560-9

Note: No politicians were harmed in the writing of this article

Ask For Feedback

How often do you seek objective feedback about the service that your business is providing? And I do not mean the equivalent of a waiter in a restaurant: “Is everything OK with your meal?” – just as you have a mouth full of food – on these occasions there is only one expected answer – which is the one they get 99% of the time. They are not seeking objective, honest feedback when they interrupt your conversation and your meal with a closed question.

You might think that your customers are telling you what they think of your product or service. But very often they are not, you need to ask. And you need to ask open questions at a time when people are prepared to be open and honest with you, not when they are just getting to the important part of their own conversation.

By asking for feedback in the right way at the right time, you will get an honest review. Then you have the opportunity to improve service delivery and to resolve minor issues before they became major problems that may result in a lost client.

Ask for feedback. You might not always like what you hear, but it is much better to know than not know. If you do not know about a client’s issues, you won’t have the opportunity to do something about them.

And most important of all, once you have their feedback:

• Take Action – and let your customer know you took their feedback seriously by improving the things they told you about.

Continuous Cost Control

Speaking to a friend at the beginning of the recession, he mentioned some of the cost savings being made at his firm (a large professional services business) to protect the business against falling revenues. These included:

• Cancelling newspaper subscriptions
• Changing travel policies
• Reviewing staffing levels in overhead areas

And a host of other small steps.

The reason for raising this is that I was really surprised to learn that the business concerned had waited until revenues were under threat to review these items. One of my clients operates a much smaller business. Here, costs are checked routinely. Commodity purchases are price-checked at least once a month. Unless something is essential to the customer experience or the fabric of the business, it tends not to be purchased.

So why did the larger business have a more profligate approach before things started to go wrong?

If you are tempted to sign up to extended contracts in order to secure a price saving on essentials (like utilities) - it will pay to get professional advice. Your accountant can probably put you in touch with a strategic purchasing expert who specialises in businesses like yours.

On everything else, start to think like it is your money - and make sure you are getting the best deal possible on essentials. And if it is not essential - should you be buying it?

Up Your (Business) Game

We all want our businesses to be the best in our chosen Niche. However, when we work in a small business, or alone, it can be difficult to find tools and techniques that enable us to consistently improve our performance.

10 top tips to inspire

• Attitude - Always foster an attitude of greatness in your own performance and in those you work with: Suppliers; Customers; Peers; Colleagues
• Avoid Mediocrity - Good enough – is the enemy of great – resist the temptation to lower your quality standards – even for the lowest paying customers. If necessary, sack customers who pull your performance down.
• Belief - Believe in yourself and in your own ability.When you start to doubt yourself, speak to a trusted advisor, family member or mentor – or pick a task from your to-do-list that will make you feel better about talents.
• Enemies - War drives innovation – as does any major struggle. Choose a worthy enemy to compete against or to bench-mark your performance. It may be a business you actively compete against, or you could choose a business like your own in another town to measure your business against.
• Colleagues and Associates - It is often said that our own income is the average of the people we associate with. Find people who make you stretch your business performance. Choose networks for the talented people represented as well as for the business opportunities. Forge alliances with people who are better than you in some business aspects – you will probably excel in an area that they find difficult.
• Defy Convention - Conventional wisdom is often wrong – base decisions on facts and data. Avoid “gang mentality” approaches to business – they are often based on prejudice and fear – rather than on evidence.
• Inspire Others - Spend at least part of every week inspiring others in some way. Your own confidence and attitude will benefit from your generous actions.
• Technique - Practice – school yourself on key techniques. Measure your performance. Act on your measurement to improve your ability to work in each of your specialisms.
• Training - Get training on any techniques that you struggle with. Olympic athletes have lessons to improve their technique – there is no justifiable reason for assuming that you know so much about a topic that you will not benefit from some well thought out training and skills development.
• Youth - People who are straight out of school, college or university can have a better grasp of professional areas that we are too arrogant to revise. Take advantage of their enthusiasm and learn the things you have forgotten as well as the more modern techniques developed since you trained.
  

Good luck with upping your business game.

Doing Things Right vs Doing The Right Things

In business, it is easy to get lulled into a world of efficiency – where all the energy in the business is devoted to doing things right. When this happens, effectiveness suffers – because no / limited energy is devoted to doing the right things.

What is required is a balance.

• Sufficient time devoted to doing things right – being efficient

Plus

• Sufficient time devoted to doing the right things – being effective

Management is doing things right;
Leadership is doing the right things.
Peter Drucker

Examples

Doing Things Right

• Improve quotation turn-round time/ reduce quotation back-log
• Chasing cash in the most effective manner
• Improve networking follow up process
• Dealing with today’s emergencies as a matter of urgency (Urgent and Important – fixed - Check)
• Maximising the efficiency of a manual, outdated process

Doing The Right Things

• Target the right people with the right offer to maximise conversion rates of the most profitable business
• Understanding all the obstacles to cash collection and changing business practices to ensure maximum customer delight and minimum obstacles to on time payment
• Creating offers based on regular payments by standing order
• Attend the right networking meetings for the right reasons and network deeply
• Working on the Important but not urgent issues in the business to minimise the number of emergencies in the business
• Automating processes where it makes sense
• Streamlining the business to remove / change processes that add no value to the business or the customer.

When to think about this:

• Planning to-do lists
• Strategic planning
• Budget time
• Setting out the plan for the week
• When fixing problems in the business
• Team meetings
• Business planning sessions
• Board meetings
• Setting up the business review process

Presentation Sins - Top 10

Over the last three weeks, I have had the misfortune to sit through a lot of PowerPoint. The best presentations were interesting, just the right length, taught me something I did not know before and kept my attention throughout.

The worst - well they included one or more of the following sins (in no particular order):

1. "Sorry, this is not my presentation" - no excuse for this one - just too hurried or too lazy to learn the material behind the slides. You are in front of an audience because you are expected to know more about the subject than the audience. If you abuse that trust by not knowing your material, everybody gets to waste their time.
2. "These figures are taken from the annual report which is out of date" - or some other excuse for not updating the data you are using. Your audience will expect you to have the best available information - or to extrapolate to today depending on the circumstances. Lazy presenters are guilty of this error - frequently.
3. "Here are a couple of case studies. I am not familiar with them so I will read the script." - another way of telling your audience that you could not give them the courtesy of preparing properly.
4. "These slides are from a colleague, so please do not ask me any questions." - so why did you include the slides that you could not be bothered to research?
5. Blue fonts on a blue background - It may look OK on your whizz-bang laptop, but projection systems are often lower in contrast. Help your audience by making things legible.
6. 4 point font - You just had to include all the text. Then you read it to the audience who cannot read it for themselves. In a short presentation, there is a limit to the amount of information that an audience can absorb. Unless you have a great reason, try the rule of 6. Maximum 6 bullets per slide. Maximum 6 words per bullet.
7. Not rehearsed - often made obvious by a failure to stick to time, repetition of similar points, lack of flow or a hesitant delivery. Your audience trusted you to be the authority. You could give up an hour of your time to rehearse.
8. Technology fumbles - pressing the wrong button or that clever video fails to run. In all presentations, arrive early, check the technology - especially if you are using somebody else's systems. And keep the embedded techie features to a minimum. If it does not add value to the audience, leave it out. You are there to engage the audience with your content, not with your grasp of weird PowerPoint features.
9. Ignoring the audience - or failing to do your homework before the event. Try asking the organiser about the audience if you do not know them. When you get in the room, you could try asking questions of the audience to see what they already know of your subject, then you get the chance to vary the level at which you deliver the content - assuming that you spent enough time preparing properly.
10. Over-running - your host invited you to speak for a specific amount of time. And you agreed to speak for 20, 30, 50, 70 minutes. That means planning the content properly to cover the material in the planned amount of time. If you are the only thing between the audience and the loos, coffee or 'phone messages, how much of your content do you think they will remember?

So, how many of the sad 10 are you guilty of? There is a huge amount of content on the web about preparing for presentations. If you struggle to get the basics right, then it will pay you to spend a day of your life getting some training. One day, you might win some business from an audience that you pleased rather than boring senseless!

I Am The Problem

7 symptoms your business may be aware of - but has not got around to letting you in on the secret.

1. Micromanagement
You have stopped trusting the team. You are spending so much time micro-managing details that:

• Your team now resent your continuous interference, And:
• You have stopped working on the business improvement projects that only you can deliver.

2. Knee Jerk Changes to the Offer
Sales slump and you are making changes to your firm's offer without pausing to speak to:

• Customers (new, existing, lapsed) or to

• People who enquire but do not buy.

3. Cost Focus
Instead of assessing value and returns on spend, your focus is on cutting costs - regardless of the implications. Typical areas to explore are:

• Advertising spend vs Lead generation
• Staff down-time vs Staff training

4. Sales Failures
Your obsession with detailed problems and issues has caused the entire firm to lose confidence - which leads in turn to further sales losses as prospects fail to be enthused by meetings, telephone calls or emails that feel negative.

5. Marketing Fairground
You sample every shiny new marketing gimmick - but without thought and without considering how long it might take to make a real difference. You are jumping on each initiative that is appealing but failing to be consistent in anything.

6. No Customer Insight
Your prospect understanding is either non-existent or was compiled in a different economic environment.

7. Fad Focus
Business improvement has declined to the point where you have engaged every freelance you know to work on their specialism in your business - for just long enough to not quite deliver any improvement:

• Teamwork
• Coaching
• Board mentoring

How many of the sad 7 are you guilty of?
1-2 - It is not too late - you need to start working on your business instead of in it.
3-5 - You need help - and you need to find support that you will engage for at least 3 months whilst you stabilise the business
6-7 - It may be too late, but you need to act now to ensure that you start the recovery process before the financial symptoms start to dominate your thinking.

The Perils of Hype

In the early part of the 20th Century, a new technology was struggling to become established. A plethora of new manufacturers, some operating on a shoestring, were clamouring for public attention. Overall adoption of the new technology was modest. This modest adoption rate arose because, whilst the target market was often convinced of the merits, the whole product was not fully developed to the point where it became a practical proposition for people of modest means. Vehicles were often expensive, servicing was troublesome, fuel availability was patchy. And the early cars frightened the horses.

The new technology was the Motor Car. There were lots of examples of extravagant claims and marketing hype for motor cars in the first 20-25 years of the 20th Century. However, many manufacturers adopted a more robust approach to publicity. Their process was:

• Find a challenge (usually a sporting event)
• Complete the challenge
• Promote the results

It still took an enormous change in the mechanical aptitude of the average consumer (soldiers returning from WW1 able to drive and to conduct basic maintenance procedures) before the masses became mobile.

The 21st Century approach to the marketing of new technologies seems to be:

• Find a band-waggon
• Create tenuous connections from my product to that band-waggon
• Confuse the market by claiming membership of a hype trend

Net Result
Target customers become confused, and analysts get frustrated. Products which were previously being promoted as the best possible exponent of the previous band-waggon are mysteriously upgraded (sometimes with minimal changes) to become fully hyped members of the new hype trend.

Marketing Caution

• Make sure that your marketing messages are based on substance
• Use style to embellish if you must - but never at the expense of hiding elderly substance under a cloud of hype
• Avoid being suckered into joining the next hype trend with last year's products
• Listen to customers and analysts to be sure that you are not over-communicating the hype solely because that is what your competitors are doing

Never Stop Selling

(How to avoid boom & bust)

One of the biggests risks for some businesses is having so much business that you stop selling. In some companies, when they are busy they are not selling and when they are selling, they are not earning. This is a particular risk for professional services businesses - even quite large ones - where the best sales resource is often the most valuable delivery resource. Many businesses fall into the same trap. They reduce their sales and marketing efforts when order-books are full. They lack the time to continue their relationship building when times are good. The bad news is that good times are often followed by bad times. A couple of cancellations can leave you starting from scratch to rebuild the relationships that you allowed to become fallow whilst you were busy. What to do?

1. Never stop selling - Even when you are really busy, keep all of your relationships alive. Many professionals sell the majority of their time to people they have kept in touch with over an extended period when they were not buying.
2. Manage your relationships - When order-books are full, keep a close eye on customer satisfaction. Make sure that you are easily dissatisfied. Treat long-standing clients as though they may defect at any moment. Take no-one for granted.

Review If you are at full capacity and growing the number of customers is not appropriate:

• Avoid turning potential business away (business that will most likely stay away from you if things change and you have more capacity);
• Think creatively about how you can satisfy those clients that are currently unsatisfied;

Things to consider

• Look for alliances and other mechanisms to satisfy these customers without adding to your cost base;
• Think about price as a tool to manage your customer base to become more profitable so that you can fully satisfy all the highest spending clients;
• Use Segmentation tools to better understand your customer base;
• Adding flexible capacity that has no fixed cost (outsourcing, sub-contract, …..)
• Additional products with lower costs or new processes;
• New, higher value, products / services may be appropriate for some.

Don't Buy Paperclips - Cost Control Lessons for Enterprises from SME's

One of the many quotes attributed to Duncan Bannatyne is that he forbade the purchase of paperclips in his businesses. This made me think. I never buy paper-clips. There is a jar in my office where incoming paper-clips are stored. I use a few every day, but the level remains constant. Large organisations focus on the major cost centres when they initiate cost saving programmes. This often results in head-count reductions - sometimes with unfortunate consequences for customer service. SME's rarely have significant numbers of staff and are forced to be a little more creative in their cost control programmes.

This attitude leads to a constant search for best value - something which is often overlooked in larger enterprises where:

• It is somebody else's money;
• Most cost saving initiatives involved a purchasing change or a policy change.

I am not knocking the top down approach to cost saving - I expect it has made a huge difference to most organisations over the last 24-36 months. I am advocating something extra.

If a large enterprise is to learn the lessons of an SME in cost control it will need to establish a culture change. This culture change has to start at the top. If you want everybody in the business to be careful with every penny, then you need to start leading by example.

Simple Steps/ Things to Think About

• Trains - split tickets - manage your arrival time in London (for example) carefully and a split ticket can save a significant proportion of the cost. My own (standard class) journey to London is at least £40 cheaper if I buy a Nottingham / Market Harborough return and a Market Harborough / London return at a discount rate for leaving Market Harborough after 09:00am. It may mean staying later in London to get everything done, but the saving is significant - especially if you have several people making the journey on a regular basis. I expect that most readers of this blog are well used to working in standard class rail carriages. The attitude of Sir Nicholas Winterton. is not exactly helpful!
• eBay/ Second Hand - whilst a large enterprise could be making a false economy by changing the IT procurement policy away from Dell or HP for PC's and servers, there are a number of expensive items that do not need to be brand new every time. Server racks for example - good condition is important, but is new essential? Most SME's locate their second hand office furniture store and buy good quality second hand desks and filing cabinets - and get something better than if they had bought new on their budget.
• Meetings Meetings Meetings - Internal meetings are one of the biggest cost wasters in large enterprises. Your most expensive resources locked in rooms, often making assumptions about the customers they no longer have time to go and see. If your organisation can only exist by keeping senior people in an incessant stream of internal meetings, you need to change. Start at the top. Think about the number of meetings and their duration. Think about making sure that you have the right people in each meeting. Halve the duration of your board meetings. Insist on information being circulated in advance - one page briefings preferably so that the meeting is used for clarification, review and decision making - not for interminable briefings.
• Internal Reporting - I once worked for an organisation which had so many matrices and internal communication routes that some senior managers spent 40% of their time compiling internal reports - usually repeating information already reported elsewhere in a different format.
• Car & Van Sharing - How often do your people turn up at a remote site, each in their own vehicle? Have you considered the cost of this? Senior people are usually the worst offenders. However, a small client of mine had 10 vans but usually paired fitters on site. By halving the number of vans and some creative thinking in the work scheduling their transport costs were reduced by a significant margin. Couple that with a good deal on weekly rental of un-liveried vans (some magnetic signs are inexpensive) and you have a flexible solution to a major cost issue. It could be that the biggest obstacle to savings like this is your "Fleet Manager" who exists to manage a fleet of vehicles.
• Bonus Schemes / Buy-In -In an SME, it is easy to make sure that people understand the cost management issues. In a larger enterprise, you might need to be more creative if your people are to be bought in to your cost management philosophy. Your main objective is to ensure that most of the initiatives are started by the people who are most affected. Nothing saps morale in a large organisation faster than a continual stream of penny pinching changes to expenses and car policies. If you have a large service organisation, get the ideas from the people who are most affected. They may surprise you. If you have a bonus scheme, you may already have the means to reward the right behaviours - you only need to facilitate the change projects.
  

The Message
Be creative and give your teams an incentive to participate in the cost saving programme - it will make a refreshing change from trying to impose yet another change to the expenses policy.

Related Articles
Seth Godin wrote a recent blog which offers a counter argument. John Crickett wrote a great article which is in broad agreement with my sentiments above. Your firm, your choices!

Lies Lose Sales

Sat at a desk in a client's office the other day, we were interrupted by the telephone. My client's sales manager took the call. The caller (having selected our sales line) asked for the Tech Support manager by name. The caller was, politely, advised that we needed to find the Tech Support Manager but could we know who was calling. Fred Smith from Blogs & Co. "Is he expecting your call?" "Oh ye" came the answer.

After a walk to the next room to find the Tech Support Manager engrossed in the weekly team meeting (the one where all unresolved trouble tickets are reviewed), our caller was advised "He is in a meeting. And he says he was not expecting your call."

The caller then said "no he wasn't, but you are a salesman, you know the game of saying anything to get past the gatekeeper."

So, we have an expensive resource ensuring that my client will never do business with his employer - because he lied. They may have a fabulous proposition which, at some more convenient time, the Tech Support Manager may have found compelling.

It was a stupid lie too - one that was easily found out.

The lesson: If your sales people are so weak that they resort to lies to try and con their way past gate-keepers you have a real problem. Gate-Keepers are good people doing a variety of jobs - always with the best interests of their employer at heart.

Make sure that your sales team have a short introduction which includes your compelling USP - that anybody can understand. Then you will often find that the internal meeting only lasts an hour every Tuesday and a call back later in the afternoon on another day will see your call put through. It will not always work, but it will give substantially better results than telling lies to gate-keepers.

Do your target clients know what you do?

In their eagerness to set out a comprehensive list of services some businesses fall into a common trap. They claim to be experts in too many things.

Many businesses, especially those in their early stages of development, offer too many things to too many people. They fail to specialise, with the result that their target customers become confused as to what they offer (and to whom).

Why is this important?
The human brain is a wonderful and complex filing system. Our brains work on a system of associations. We need to know how something compares with something we already know before we can index it. On-line and paper directories are organised around these things. Good old yellow pages are a classic example. Finding a business is much easier when you know which category it is in.

Most successful businesses have a real understanding of what is special about them – what their Niche is. Niche marketing is all about narrowing your focus... specialising... establishing yourself as the expert in a tightly focused range of products or services.

Your niche is the place in which you have a natural competitive advantage because you occupy the right place in the right business category.

Know what you do
You must be clear in your own mind about your lead offer - before your customers and prospects can easily work out what you do. This is easier for some than for others. It is always worth the effort.

Express what you do in one line
If you need to qualify and explain, then you may still leave your prospects in doubt as to where your real expertise lies.

The good news
You do not have to turn away work that is not totally within your declared specialism (as long as you stick to work for which you are qualified). If you are busy, there may be a justification for starting to be fussy – perhaps using price as the mechanism to discriminate.
The point is to refine your proposition to the market so that clients and potential clients can label you. When people can label your business, they are much more likely to enquire about your products and services. What really counts is your passion and consistency in promoting your core products and services to your chosen target customers.

Be brave
If business starts to fall off, it is easy to fall into the trap of becoming a generalist again. Your specialism may need to be refined, but having the courage to stay specialised will pay.

We All Need A Fool

The most common root cause of failure in business is:

The failure to act on alarms and indications of problems because they come wrapped in opposition to "The accepted wisdom".

The Accepted Wisdom
This is the company position on something. Usually defined and planned to a degree of accuracy only possible when the White Board is nearly full or there are only 2 sheets of paper left on the flip-chart.

You Need a Fool
In 1995, British Airways appointed Paul Birch as the official BA 'corporate jester'. An entertaining and thought provoking speaker, Birch tells the story of approaching his director of corporate strategy with the idea. His justification was that an official jester might play a useful role in the company, just as medieval name-sakes had done in royal courts. The logic was that the modern board of directors is a bit like a medieval court, where no one questions the king or senior courtiers, because "they have become far too important for anybody to challenge ... as long as they can't possibly be wrong, they can continue doing the wrong things all the time and never know it".

Who Do You Use
If you are really lucky (or a great Leader) as an MD, your team will automatically perform this role for you. You have created a board environment where people feel able to challenge the consensus. People in your team will take it in turns to call for a sanity check - to make sure that your leadership team is not in danger of becoming a stampeding herd heading for the next corporate disaster.

Most organisations will have to work at this. Some will need an external input. In the form of a Board Mentor or Non-Executive Director (NED).

External Catalyst
Use the right external help, with a balanced perspective. And the ability to work alongside your team and to ask the awkward questions. Then your team will make business decisions based on facts and data more often. Relying a lot less on intuition and herd instinct.

Viral Brand Damage Limitation

Businesses and organisations who care about their brands take a number of steps to develop their brands and their reputation. They usually spend a lot of time, money and energy on design, registrations and promotion. Many go on to survey their audience to ensure that their brands are recognised and are associated with the intended image.

In this world of social media, just as it is feasible for ingenious brand owners to promote their brand using the power of the internet and the social media, so it is now entirely feasible for your reputation to be damaged by the same social media. This why Tweets about certain brands will solicit a fast reaction and a correction. A recent set of Tweets on Asda’s on-line store shows that they not only monitor Twitter for their brand, but take pro-active steps to contact people and to ensure satisfaction. NHS-Direct also monitor Twitter for negative comments and make an attempt to fix things – although a simple Twitter reply with a link to a generic comment web-page is not in the same league as Asda’s recent reaction. Similarly, other brand owners seem to be totally oblivious to the power of the web, including forums and Twitter.

If you type “Land-Rover Discovery 3” into Google and then go to the second site in the natural listings (www.disco3.co.uk/forum/) you will find a forum which, on 4th January 2010, included 1077 posts on faults and fixes for the Discovery 3 model and 398 posts in the same category on the recently launched Discovery 4 model. It may be that not all of these represent manufacturing faults, but would you buy an expensive car after reading this lot?

My point is simple. It is now a lot more important for brand-owners to be sensitive to customer opinions. They may conduct surveys; they may take the feedback from those surveys seriously. But, how many brand owners actively seek out dissatisfied customers? These are the dissatisfied customers who find it so easy to publish faults and foibles to the global internet audience.
People usually vote with their feet – and change to an alternative brand if they are unhappy. Unfortunately, some of our purchases fall in to the “too expensive to dump it and move on” category – especially in a recession. So we are forced to stick with brands we are unhappy with and to tell the world – damaging brands in the process.

Suggestions

• Make it your business to actively seek out unhappy customer comments in the social media world. Speak to your customers.
• Show them you care.
• Put things right – over and above the warranty if required.
  - Do this before they build a huge following who are just waiting for the next public notice of some issue or problem.
• Consider developing KPI’s on your brands appearances in social media with positive, neutral and negative comments.
• For something more structured - take a look at a post on Creating Customer Delight
• Or, read: Richard C. Whiteley, The Customer Driven Company, Perseus Books, ISBN 0-201-60813-8