5 Sales sins.

Oct 31, 2010 | Customers, Sales

    Sales is something we all do, all the time, professionally as well as in our private lives. We may not always  be selling a product for an employer, but we will be selling our ideas, priorities, time, and experience,  in some way.  Here are some simple rules:

  1. Talk as little as possible, and listen as much as possible
  2. Recognise early, preferably before anyone else, when the horse is dead and get off
  3. Act short term to make the sale, but never at the expense of the medium and long term, as any individual sale is rarely the end of the relationship, unless you choose it to be.
  4. Lack of real understanding of the problems faced by customers, their external competitive and profitability challenges, and the internal organisational and operational barriers getting in the way of “yes”.
  5. Lack of product knowledge appropriate to the interaction of the person you are talking to.

    6. Fix these, and the sale should be pretty easy.

     

Product Development Portfolios that work.

Oct 24, 2010 | Collaboration, Customers, Innovation, Leadership, Social Media, Strategy

    Creating and managing a development portfolio is a critical factor in the success of most commercial enterprises, but one that is done poorly in many I have seen. Some recent with a client struggling with the challenge for his organization served to  clarify my thoughts, and assisted his organisation to develop a portfolio discipline that appears to  be working well.

    Success is much more than just using a few tools, of which there are many, it is about how the enterprise at its core deals with ambiguity, trade-offs, and the challenge of being frustrated and wrong a lot of the time, whilst being sufficiently resilient to keep on batting, and batting hard. As Louis Pasteur  said, “Chance favors the prepared mind” and nothing creates chance like persistence tempered with learning from each experience.

    Below are some of the things that appear to me to be of importance

  1. Have a clear strategy. Without a clearly articulated business strategy that has commitment from  those responsible for implementation, how can you possibly have a Product development and commercialization portfolio with any hope of success?
  2. Self awareness. Know what you do not know as well as what you do know, and where the knowledge about what you do not know may reside, particularly if it is with a competitor.
  3. Externalities. Understand the forces driving developments that may create opportunities in the industries you target, and  the commercial and competitive imperatives that drive the decision making of individual customers and potential customers  in those industries.
  4. People. Have access to great people, both internal and external in a variety of ways to extract a range of informed views and data upon which to build a case. Use the emerging communication tools to link these people and leverage their knowledge and experience
  5. Sponsorship. Ensure there is a senior level executive sponsor for each project that emerges from the pack. This person should have the passion, knowledge and position to carry the case for resource allocation, risk management, and strategic fit to the senior decision maker in the enterprise.
  6. Endless polishing. Keep polishing the portfolio, it will never be a completed exercise, it is a live entity always, and needs TLC. Part of the polishing is creation of a “carpark” which captures ideas, issues, technologies, and all the sometimes random stuff that can create that “Eureka” moment when things suddenly come together in a new way. Revisit the carpark regularly.
  7. PDCA. Be prepared to experiment, trial, look for insights, learn by doing, but be aggressive about performance, and relegation and promotion to and from the carpark, and further through the development process, and learn from all that experience.
  8. Customers. Engage customers as early and as often as possible, after all, they are the ones whose problems your product is supposed to solve, and they are usually full of problems and improvement ideas, some of which may be of value to you.
  9. Dare to be different. No successful new product did the job just the same as something that already exists, that is just a price-fight, differentiation is fundamental to success.
  10. NPD is everybody’s job. Product development and idea evolution happens holistically, not by functional line, and it must be a priority for every stakeholder in and around the enterprise, not just something that requires attendance by the marketing personnel at a meeting every second Tuesday at 10am .

    11. There you go, sounds pretty easy!

About competition.

Oct 19, 2010 | Customers, Leadership, Management, Marketing

The scary thing about competition is that someone always loses, even if it is only an opportunity. Many would like to believe that we should all be friends together to save the pain, but outside the public sector, it does not happen like that.

Successfully competing is down to delivering superior value to customers at a cost less than the customers best  alternative. To do that in this connected world where transaction costs are disappearing the whole enterprise needs to be focused on what it is that the customer values.

Sounds pretty simple, but how rarely I see it

 

Down in the weeds.

Oct 14, 2010 | Customers, Innovation, Marketing

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it is the driver of everything that contributes to improvement. Doesn’t matter if it is improvement in a factory, using the “5 why” tool, or some question, the answer to which advances our knowledge of space. The driver is curiosity, and the result, the potential to be better, to know more, to deliver benefit.

For a marketer, being curious should be second nature, but how long since you sat one-on-one with a customer and sought direct feedback on how your product performs Vs the competition?, why they bought it?, how could it be improved?, what job was it really doing? And so on.

It is one thing to absorb research reports, dig through the numbers, engage in esoteric conversations about innovation, and understand at a macro level the things that contribute to success, but it is something entirely different to get down in the weeds with your customers.

Geography is dead

Oct 7, 2010 | Customers, Management, OE, Sales, Strategy

Since man sought to organise themselves beyond family groups, geography has been the fundamental organising principal of almost all the institutions created, it was really the only thing that made sense. Everything from businesses to empires and the church(s) were geographically organised structures.

Since the 70’s, many commercial institutions have attempted to reorganise along a customer or product  driven logic, largely with limited success. Geography and the transaction costs associated with removing the natural barrier of distance have conspired to make it difficult and costly, and the old management silos are hard to break down until the enterprise is in real trouble, as IBM was in the 80’s.

For the last 10 years at a huge rate the net has removed geography as a significant driver of organisational structures. It simply makes no sense to now have multiple overheads in neighboring geographies, when the net tools enable the sharing of everything immediate.

The outcome, structure your organisation to focus on what keeps it alive, customers!