Jun 28, 2023 | Branding, Communication, Marketing
No business I have ever seen has enough in their marketing budgets to do all they would like to do. Therefore, they often start cutting bits off ‘willy nilly’ to reach a budget that can be managed.
There is a better way: Basic marketing 101, which most SME’s ignore to their detriment.
What problem do you solve.
The more specific the problem you solve better than anyone else, and the more specific you can be about those who are likely to have that problem, the more able you will be to focus your limited resources productively.
It appears easy at first glance to articulate the problem, often it is way harder than it seems. The key is to articulate it the way a customer would, rather than the way you speak about it internally. That way you have a chance to avoid the drill or the hole confusion.
Your brand.
Those who have the problem and may be inclined to pay someone to solve it for them, need to be aware of your brand, and the offer you make that will solve the problem for them. You must figure out the best way to reach these people in such a way that you may be able to at least add your brand to the list of options they have for consideration. Preferably of course, your brand is the only one they consider.
Trust.
There must be a reason for someone to pick your solution in preference to others that may be available. If that reason is price, then in most cases you have already lost by winning that race to the bottom.
Trust is hard won, and easily lost, but plays a crucial role in any sales process.
For most SME’s doing more than one thing at a time is challenging, so they tend to throw money at all three without adequate consideration of the best options they have to leverage their small budgets. There are many service providers out there who have all sorts of creative and verbally attractive ways to spend your money, but very few will go to the trouble of walking through this minefield with you.
It is easy to be overwhelmed, most are.
However, thinking about the process in these three buckets offers the opportunity to weed out a lot of the ‘noise’, although it is not easy.
The line that trips many up, even those who spend the time to deeply consider these three buckets, is the breakup of the budget between the two very different types of expenditure inherent in the whole process.
First. The resources you spend to build the brand, such that when someone is aware of the problem and is in a mind to consider solving it, your name comes to mind.
Second. ‘Activation’. The tactical means you use to swing the choice your way at the point of the transaction.
The first is long term, and very hard to measure except with hindsight, by which time the horse has bolted. The second is more immediate and subject to at least a modicum of quantitative measures.
The starting point should always be your objective.
Is it to generate leads, is it to build brand awareness, is it to build trust, and where do all these, and other points in the customers decision processes overlap?
Playing cards by yourself is usually a way to win, but it does not translate into a real game. For that you need a real appreciation of the barriers to winning, and often partners.
Call me when you need a partner who inderstands the game.
Jun 26, 2023 | Communication, Marketing, Social Media
On first glance, the only purpose of a blog post, or indeed any sort of content that comes into your inbox, is to provide some impetus to encourage you towards a transaction.
That remains the case, but if that is the only reason, we have arrived at the point where AI can spit out posts by the dozen that purport to serve that purpose.
Not a good place to spend your time if you are on the receiving end, and it serves to degrade the expected standard of all posts.
By contrast, a post that evolves from an idea, problem, or situation faced by a real business, which is intended to offer some level of insight into the way forward can be of immense value, when the right people find it.
Therein lies the attention challenge of those writing posts intended for the latter reason. How do you get the attention the effort reasonably deserves?
If, like me, you do not care much for the attention, or the lead generation potential of posts, you can then produce them with an entirely different objective.
That objective is to clarify your own thinking sufficiently to be able to articulate it to others. That clarification and articulation is what makes the research, thinking and writing of a post valuable. Whether others see it, think about it, and take some sort of action as a result, is an entirely different challenge.
Posts on StrategyAudit are all of the latter type.
Ideas come from anywhere, and have been the fodder for posts on StrategyAudit for 15 years. There are ideas everywhere. The most useful are those that come from the challenges being faced by those I interact with in some way. These always force creative thinking, the application of one of many ‘mental models’ I have accumulated over 50 years. They often stimulate a creative perspective on what are often mundane and common problems faced in varying ways by all businesses, so are ‘grounded’ by those real situations.
It seems to come back to the thought expressed by Kevin Kelly in an essay in 2008 thinking of the same challenge, as yet not powered by AI, that all you need is 1000 true fans.
Social platforms set out to prevent you doing that by favouring ‘on platform’ communication, while penalising posts that take a reader away. LinkedIn is very explicit about this. Put in a link to an outside site, and you get stuck in ‘LinkedIn Gaol’, just an algorithmic means of severely limiting the number of feeds your posts are fed to. I have been in LinkedIn gaol for years, the only way to see all I write about is to subscribe on the website.
The only way to grab attention is to deserve it, and have those few who find you to refer to others who might benefit. It is a long game, built one by one.
No AI here, guaranteed organic!!
Jun 21, 2023 | Governance, Strategy
Commercial success, that which delivers more than a wage, comes from only two places:
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- Critical thinking
- The ability and willingness to be a bit different, experiment and embrace risk.
Why is it then that the web is full of ‘7 point plans to….’ Templates designed to remove the need to think, and assuring us that if we follow the plan, all will be well.
I have been as guilty as most, reducing some of what I publish on this blog to lists of sequential actions. This sort of headline increases readership of a post significantly, people want packaged solutions that promise an answer to a complex problem but removes the need to think.
I have been as seduced as anyone by the vanity of page views.
The important part of any plan, from the most complex to the mundane list of what you must do today is that it is the result of critical thought.
What is important vs urgent?
Is this the best use of that absolutely finite resource: Your time?
How will this impact on those around me?
General Eisenhower made the observation that ‘plans are worthless, but planning is everything‘. Eisenhower further noted that emergencies were unexpected, and therefore planning for them was impossible.
Noted philosopher Michael Tyson’s contribution is perhaps the best known “everyone has a plan until they get hit in the mouth”.
Besides, without a plan, and associated goals, how will you ever know how you are performing?
The act of planning should be an act of critical and creative thinking, not filling in a formulaic set of generic questions.
Header credit: Scott Adams with an early question from Dilbert.
Jun 19, 2023 | Customers, Sales
Optimising a sales process is not just about the conversion rate, as that is an outcome, a function of many things that come before and contribute to that outcome. The challenge is more about optimising each stage in the process that leads to a maximised conversion rate.
Over the years there have been many tools that assist the process, BANT being one of the best known. All of them in one way or another recognise a progression through a process that should be simple, but which consultants and others have overcomplicated.
The following 3 part qualification process should play a role.
Basic criteria for qualification.
Does the prospect fit the picture of your ideal customer?
Basic criteria + Fit.
Does the prospect have a need for what you have, do they have a problem you can solve better than anyone else? How compelling to them is your value proposition?
Basic criteria + Fit + Intent.
Is the prospect aware of the problem, are they searching for a solution, have they engaged with you in some way? Are they willing and able to pay for your solution? What elements will drive the timing of their decision to buy now, delay, or decide not to buy?
While this may seem too simple, often the best is also the simplest.
Jun 15, 2023 | Change, Governance, Strategy
There is no way around the fact that AI is now with us, and evolving at logarithmic rates. The unanswered question is ‘so what?
There are two extreme schools of thought, and everything in between.
On one hand we have those who are extremely wary:
# It will replace jobs, creating an unemployed under-class
# It will take away peoples rights to privacy, choice, and freedom, creating risk from baddies
# The buggars will take over, we become the slaves of some dystopian thinking ‘terminator’ machines.
On the other hand, there are those who see:
# Huge commercial and community benefits from the automation and efficiency AI brings
# Every platform change in the last 200 years from coal to electricity, horses to cars, vacuum tubes to integrated circuits, PC networks to the cloud, all delivering huge benefit. Why not again?
# The risks are manageable, and less than the benefits that will flow, besides, it is now an unstoppable force, so choices are limited.
Let’s first have some context.
We have been idolising AI from our earliest times, seeking assistance, advice and guidance from all manner of sources. The beguilingly named Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron wrote what is seen as the first ‘software’ for the Babbage machine in around 1840, with Babbage taking the credit. In 1943 the first paper that associated the neural networks in our brains to electrical circuits was published. In 1950, 73 years ago, Alan Turing wrote a paper called ‘Computing machinery and Intelligence’ which posed the ‘Turing test’. This remains the central question of AI: ‘When can machines think?
The term AI emerged from a 1956 workshop held at Dartmouth College, seen as the birth of modern AI. It kicked off research work in many corners of the scientific world. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, scientists, and many startups such as Deep Mind, now part of Google, and OpenAI the designer of Chat and Dall-E, significantly funded by Microsoft, have been working on this since the 90’s. The ‘T’ in ChatGPT stands for ‘Transform’ a patented technology breakthrough by Google.
This long scientific road led to an inflection point last November when OpenAI let Chat GPT out into the wild to see what would happen, and take the strategic ‘first mover’ advantage.
What AI is: the application of maths and software code that ‘teach’ computers to synthesise information and generate output. It is controlled by people, although even the scientists are not always sure of what goes on inside the black box of software.
What AI is not: Killer software and robots that spring to life and take over by killing and/or subjugating people.
How does it work? Statistics and probability, combined with huge computing power.
The probability of a ‘u’ following a ‘q’ in English is very high, the probability of that q being followed by any other letter is very low. The probability of that ‘u’ being followed by an ‘e’ is higher than it being followed by a ‘z’. And so it goes, letter by letter, word by word, progressively taking on the context in which those letters, words, sets of words, and sentences are reflected, such that the difference between a ‘party’ in the sense of a happy event, versus a ‘party’ in the political sense is clear.
Having sorted all that out, what are the things we should be thinking about?
- AI as an augmenter. A tool that can assist us to outcomes that are smarter, quicker, and more comprehensive than we might have reached on our own. The role of humans will not be eliminated, but it will be changed.
- AI as a broker. AI stands between us, and an outcome we may not know how to reach, but can be facilitated by AI. You want to write some code, now you do not have to be a coding whizz, AI can do it for you quickly, and with reasonable levels of success.
- AI as a magnifier. Every kid can have an IA tutor, every doctor an AI coach, every scientist an AI collaborator, this will lead to potential productivity growth, scientific breakthroughs, creative boundaries being busted, reduce death in wars. The downside is also magnified, there is always a flip side to be managed.
- Should we be concerned with ‘Synthetic Empathy’? we humans are social animals, what impact will this accelerating trend to isolation from physical contact and interaction have on our collective psyche?
- Blue Vs White collar displacement. Every platform change in our economies over the last 250 years have displaced blue collar workers, in favour of white collar so called ‘knowledge workers’. This one is different, it is the white collar knowledge workers, those who shuffle stuff around who are in the gun. There is no AI/robotics that can replace Albert the plumber, or Steve the sparkie. AI will change the support mechanisms they use, but will not change the simple act of fixing the leak in your bathroom or installing that extra powerpoint in the kitchen..
- Regulation. How can, and indeed should, we regulate, somehow. It is remarkably difficult to regulate something that does not exist. We have failed to regulate social media, despite with the benefit of hindsight, recognising the damage it can do. Compared to AI, regulating Social media would be easy, and we have failed to get that done. The problem is how do we go about crafting regulations that do anything at all beyond catching silly stuff, when it is in the outliers, and things we do not see other than with hindsight, that the real danger hides.
To answer the question posed in the header, it is my view that AI is an enormous avalanche of technical, cultural and digital change. We need to either get with the program, or get out of the way. If it is the latter, you will be consigning yourself to irrelevance.
This is not to imply it is all good.
AI does not have goals, it is not alive, it is just your toaster on steroids, so you can control it. AI is a tool, like any other, which can be used for good and bad, but indifference will lead to whacking your thumb with the hammer. The other thing about tools is that over time, they build equality and productivity.
However, the potential downsides are huge, the opportunity for evil have never been greater, but as the avalanche will not be stopped, you have to be in front of it to see and prepare for the pitfalls before you trip over them and are consumed.
Suck it up and enjoy the benefits!
Header cartoon credit: XKCD comic from the scary mind of Randall Munroe
