Jul 8, 2022 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
A former client has been providing engineering services to the fossil fuel industry for decades. Having breakfast with him a while ago, he expressed the view that the prospects for the industry in which his business competes, and thus his business are dismal.
He is right, so long as he continues to see his current capability set through the perspective of how the business has operated in the past.
The challenge is to position yourself to take advantage of opportunities as they arise. Emerging technologies of various types are opening substantial opportunities for which his business has deep capabilities, but which are hiding in an alternative perspective of how those capabilities can be leveraged. Changing the strategic frame through which they are seen provides a path forward.
The challenge of the future is to reposition yourself quickly towards the point at which there is real, monetised value to be added.
You must be prepared to make early bets on those opportunities with the best odds of success in the medium term with a minimum of information by which to make those decisions. Equally, you must be prepared to walk away from the sunk cost when new information emerges which reduces the odds of the expected success.
Stripped back to basics, you must set yourself up so that as clarity emerges you are in a position to accelerate into it.
In my younger days I spent half my life on a surfboard. In a big swell, the position on the wave you took after the take-off was critical. Done right, you were able to accelerate out of the bottom turn into the fastest part of the wave, and, hopefully, make it through the break above you. Get the timing of the bottom turn just a bit wrong, and ‘Wipeout!
It is the same in business, positioning yourself going into uncertainty in the manner that puts you in the best position to accelerate out as it becomes clearer will be the difference between those who make it, and those who do not.
Photo credit: John Morris via flikr
Jul 6, 2022 | Marketing, Social Media
My inbox is filled every day by emails from random people assuring me that their secret social media strategy will see me as rich as Bezos.
Some have my name and email address; most are more like; ‘Hi there’ and many now start with the ‘Re: our conversation about social media strategy.’
Spamming by those who are trying to sell themselves as experts at selling on social media.
What Nonsense.
If they are happy to use that sort of rubbish to market their own services, what sort of crap would they dish up to you?
Social media is a tiny part of the tactical armoury of marketers, or should be. It is the very end of the process, not the beginning, or middle, it is the very end only.
Social media is simply a tactic, amongst an armoury of tactics to achieve a goal.
The metrics of social media are irrelevant when your objective is to sell widgets. The only measure of success is how many widgets you sell, not how many people view, like or share your content, although the last one can be useful.
In the absence of a reason to take that next step towards an objective, the post is a waste of resources.
‘Content is king’ is a horrible cliché, but it is true.
It is the ‘content’ of your posts that describes in some way the value you deliver, the problem you solve that matters, nothing else.
Almost all the junk I see has no strategy. It does not reflect any understanding of the drivers of behaviour required to achieve a goal.
When you want to find a social media ‘expert’ to work for you, start with someone who has way more than the knowledge necessary to plug a post into Facebook, Instagram, or Reddit. You need someone who understands what it takes to find a prospect, then take them through the process that creates a customer!
Header cartoon credit to social experts Scott Adams and Dilbert.
Jun 24, 2022 | Customers, Leadership, Management, Marketing, Sales
In the past, for the orderly management and convenience of organisations, Sales and Marketing have been kept by management in separate functional silos.
In a time of flattened organisation structures and the ease of communication and data sharing, this no longer makes any sense at all.
The evolution of the silos to one functional area of responsibility will remove substantial opportunity for the transaction costs incurred by turf wars, miscommunication, and unaligned objectives, to be eliminated.
From a customer’s perspective, how you are organised internally is irrelevant, they are looking for the products and services that solve their problems or address their opportunities in the most cost-effective way.
The vast majority of interactions a customer will have with a supplier will be cross functional. Over the course of a transaction, they will interact with sales, technical service, after sales service, and logistics, probably sequentially.
The power in the sales relationship has moved from the seller, who had control of the information necessary for a customer to make a purchase decision, to the buyer. In past days, the sellers only delivered the information that benefitted them, but those days are almost gone. This process has been gathering speed since the mid-nineties, and now dominates every transaction beyond small scale consumer purchases like groceries, and even there, the need to be clear about the ingredients, their sources and provenance is pervasive.
Both sales and marketing silos have the same ultimate objective: to generate a sale, and preferably a relationship that leads to a continuing flow of orders. The combination of the silos into one, Revenue Generation, makes logical organisational sense in this new environment, as well as better reflecting the way customers interact.
Sources of revenue.
Isolating the sources of revenue is a crucial component in effectively managing the revenue generation function. Luckily, the sources can be summarised into three areas.
- Customers. Which customers buy what products, in what volumes, how often?,
- Markets. There are many ways you can dissect a market. Geographically, customer type, customer purchase model, product type, depth of competitive activity, lifecycle stage, and others.
- Product. Product type, mix, price points, lifecycle stage, margin, potential, and others.
Together these three axes form a three dimensional matrix from which your revenue is derived. The task of the RevGen personnel is to maximise the revenue today, and into the future, while minimising or at least optimising the cost of generating that revenue.
Type of Revenue.
Considering not only the source of the revenue, but also the type is a crucial part of the equation that will lead to long term profitability. Again, there are three broad categories into which all revenue can fall.
- Transactional. One off sales that require little else at the point of the transaction beyond a mechanism to execute the exchange of goods for money.
- Packaged. This category is by far the biggest, as it contains all sales that come with a ‘ticket’ of some sort. That ticket may be a guarantee of service, warranty period, assurance of quality via a brand, bundled pricing, promotional support, and many others.
- Subscription. With the emergence of the internet, subscription sales are growing rapidly at the expense of the packaged sales. This exchanges the upfront revenue of a sale for an ongoing revenue stream based on use, time, or both product and service. The emergence of the ‘cloud’ has spawned a host of new business models that use subscription as their base, but it is not new. Xerox used subscription for decades by leasing their equipment, then charging for usage on top. Similarly, Goodyear moved their sales of tyres to the airline industry from a sale to a usage model in the 80’s to sidestep the simple fact that their tyres were more expensive, but lasted longer. This encapsulated the price sensitive nature of airline purchases, with the savings over time because their tyres lasted for more landings than did the opposition.
Thought about these variations all have resulted in an exploding range of business models over the last 20 years, making the task of managing the generation of revenue way more complex, and therefore also opening opportunities for those who can think creatively about the task.
When you need some creative outside experience in this complex menagerie, give me a call.
Jun 15, 2022 | Communication, Marketing
The first Elvis festival in Parkes, NSW, was in January 1993. The brainchild of a couple of Elvis fans running a restaurant in the town, who thought it might be a bit of fun. A couple of hundred people showed up.
Every year since then, except the last two, it has grown. In 2009, 9,500 showed up, at the last one in January 2020, 25,000 showed up, supported by a worldwide online audience.
How does this happen, across all the boundaries we usually use to define who we are? Colour, religion, ethnic origin, age, social status, wallet size, and so on. The Elvis festival cuts across all these boundaries.
All humans are attracted to ‘people like us’. This is how we define ourselves. For the Elvis festival to succeed, all they had to do was define ‘people like us love Elvis’s music‘. The rest was easy, well, not easy, but on some sort of cumulative automatic pilot. For Elvis fans, defining themselves that way breaks down any other barrier between them and other Elvis fans.
There is a bloke at the local Gym I go to who from time to time creates a real stir. An Elvis fanatic, he does an occasional show at the gym for fun, during one of the classes. He dresses up and sings along ‘karaoke style’ to recorded Elvis music. He is terrible, but does not care a bit, and the classes end up being a huge, dancing, singing, sweaty party.
It is infectious. Few in that class would describe themselves as an Elvis fan, but the communal vibe breaks down all the barriers.
When you want to create alignment in your organisation, attract customers, or just be noticed, find something that everyone you want to communicate with can relate to. Find the hook that enables them in some small way to say to themselves: ‘that is for me‘
Jun 13, 2022 | Customers, Marketing
Manufacturing Week was last week in Sydney. I spent Wednesday there, snooping for solutions to problems most of my SME manufacturing clients may not yet recognise they have, and just looking for ideas.
Found one that might be useful, but it was hard going, very hard going.
There were 170 exhibitors in one of the ICC halls, ranging from the small 9 square foot booths to enormous installations that must have cost tens of thousands just for the floor space. On top of that there was the cost of the installation of the gear, manning the stands, and all the associated costs.
Every stand had the name of the company emblazoned somewhere.
Not one stand, not one, had any reference to the problems they solved.
Why?
It is useful to have the names up there. Many visitors would find their existing suppliers to have a yarn, complain about service, look at the new versions, or do a deal. However, those like me, with a problem to solve, the name of the company is of little use.
How much better would it be for them to have up in lights the problems their products are uniquely designed to solve?
I had a look at several participants websites, and they make the same mistake.
They almost all have an ‘About us’ page. It might make them feel good, but I am not interested in the family history, or the great awards they have won, I only care about the problem they solve for me.
They all fail my 3 second Vegemite test, and as a result have wasted at least part of the investment made in being there.
Where are their marketing people hiding?
Having thrown a brickbat, it is also fair to acknowledge that there was some pretty impressive stuff on show.
Header photo courtesy university of Woolongong.
May 11, 2022 | Leadership, Management, Marketing
There is an enormous difference between knowing the name of something, and truly understanding it.
Most move through school, university, and life by skimming, remembering bits about which questions are asked, and judiciously using jargon to get away with it.
Few take the time, and make the effort to truly understand.
The test is to explain that complex idea to a 12-year-old in such a way that they understand it. When you cannot do that, it is not the 12-year old’s fault, it is yours. You do not understand it fully enough to be able in simple words, metaphors, and similes to communicate the essential nature of the thing.
This is what I see from most calling themselves marketers.
Many marketers, particularly the younger ones, come up against a problem, and before doing any reasonable analysis, jump straight to some sort of digital conclusion that is often grossly sub-optimal.
Marketing is part science, part art.
It is a difficult balance, made more difficult by the simple fact that the art part of the equation only comes with experience, built upon the foundation of the science.
‘Anyone can make a subject complicated, but only someone who truly understands it can make it simple’. Richard Feynman
