Dec 5, 2013 | Change, Customers, Marketing, Sales
Some marketing activity is aimed at creating demand, alerting people to a value proposition. Other so called marketing activity is aimed at delivering an offer, an important but very different activity to demand creation.
Consider the difference between most ads on TV, and the yellow pages. The former generally sets out to tell you why you should buy something, whereas the yellow pages is a list of places where you can go to get delivery.
Which leads me to all the all the banner ads on the web, those persistent, annoying and endlessly crappy pop-ups that appear. I have just upgraded from windows XP to Windows 7 as I replaced my laptop, not wanting the leap to windows 8, just a step too far, and have not yet figured out how to avoid the apparent thousands of pop ups plaguing my screen. None are likely to get my attention beyond wanting to strangle the silly bastard who is paying somebody to disrupt me in the belief that I will react positively to the disruption.
The old laws of supply and demand still work. The supply of space into which to place a banner ad on the web is infinite, so any price is too much, and it does not work, like an ad in the yellow pages does not work to create demand, just where to get it once you have decided to buy something.
Dec 4, 2013 | Branding, Change, Marketing, retail, Sales, Small business
The produce branding model used by the agricultural so called marketing programs run by industry bodies all fail the basic test of being consumer centric. Generally they are retailer centric, using grower levies to fund discounts, and sometimes display space, never brand building. ”
“Australian tomatoes” is not a brand, it is simply a description.
Besides, the major retailers are exercising their control of the supply chain by not allowing proprietary brand building marketing anywhere near their stores.
The major retailers hold varying shares of produce categories. I suggest that hard vegetables like potatoes and carrots are in line with their overall share of around 75%, but their share of sensitive, seasonal fruit is probably more like 40%, with everything else falling somewhere in between. Where they fall depends on the “commodity” status of the produce, and consumers view of the trade-off between convenience and freshness, taste, and the more subjective things like customer service and product provenance.
Sydney Harvest is determinedly consumer centric. It is an evolving business model that creates a collaboration between the best growers in the Sydney Basin ands specialist produce retailers in Sydney to deliver field fresh, best quality, provenance assured produce to discriminating consumers, turning the usual supply chain into a demand chain.
Currently in pilot, the initiative is setting out to determine if there is a market in the niche, as there is certainly a niche in the market for such a collaboration.
Nov 27, 2013 | Change, retail, Sales, Strategy
The verb that describes the process of retailers ignoring the shift to digital: payment, e-shopping, mobile selection of destination, on-line reviews, and so on.
The business model is rapidly evolving, whatever your current model may be, nothing is set in stone, or even rubber. To survive, business models need to be granular pieces of collaborative capability that capture the instantaneous, mobile, web-enabled future.
Currently, our esteemed political leaders are debating how to extract GST from net sales, bleating about the lost revenue that should go to hospitals, schools, and perhaps overseas study tours. It has happened for the last few Christmases; the retailers’ association generates some on-line sales numbers, then applies GST, hyping up the lost revenue to pollies who are too silly to recognise the flaws in the logic:
- Not all sales over the net are “lost” sales to bricks and mortar retail: the net is a demand generator, it does not simply suck sales away from retail.
- Not all net purchases are from international sellers: many are domestic, on which the GST is collected.
- On-line sales are growing strongly, but are still a modest 6.3%, according to the latest NAB survey. Optimising the other 93% would seem more productive than bleating about the little they lose.
- The compliance costs will be huge. Irrespective of how many economic models are generated, common sense would lead to the conclusion that a significant percentage of parcels would need to be opened, and heavy fines imposed, to put a brake on international purchases. If Customs cannot stop the flow of drugs, guns, and such by post, what makes them think they can be more effective slowing the flow of Barbie dolls and books at Christmas?
- Our retailers have the perfect right, if not the capability, to sell internationally, boosting their numbers. Obviously, boosting capability would seem sensible.
The world has moved on. Being “netf…ked” is optional – a choice in the hands of management. So, why not set out to be the netf..ker” rather than the” netf..kee”
Nov 4, 2013 | Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
cartoon courtesy Mark Anderson
Automation of the marketing and sales “funnel” has many productivity advantages, so long as the implementation of the software works, which is always harder than the smiling assurances of the automation salespeople would indicate.
However, there is one benefit that is largely ignored that can have a significant impact, irrespective of the software implementation: the classification of leads into categories that reflect the leads individual behavior and the expected sales strategy to be implemented.
The usual process to date, encouraged by the “Sales Funnel” has assumed that all prospects travel progressively down the funnel in a consistent homogeneous manner. Clearly, nothing could be further from the truth, every situation is different.
Following is a list of the categories I have used in the past to classify prospects. They can be managed simply in a spreadsheet, or elsewhere on a continuum that ends with extreme software intervention, but irrespective of the tool, the nail still looks the same.
- Newly identified prospects, with little information.
- Leads that have been “qualified” by marketing, but sales has rejected, or failed to move ahead.
- Leads that sales has qualified as “hot” and therefore become a priority, at least in the eyes of some sales people.
- Leads that are really just contacts not ready to progress towards a sale, but with whom you need to just maintain contact.
- Contacts that need some marketing input to turn into qualified leads
- Contacts that are really just “tyre-kickers”
- Leads you have lost contact with, but who may be “restarted”
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, those who have for some reason or another dropped out of the funnel at some point, and who can be recycled back into the system.
Each of these is different, although there are grey areas between them, and each requires a tailored approach based on the history of the prospect, their role, purchase decision making power, and many other factors.
Before automation, there was little consideration of the real behavior of prospects, now, irrespective of automation, you need to be considering the sales funnel from the perspective of the “Funnellee”
Sep 23, 2013 | Customers, Lean, Operations, Sales
It is amazing how people adopt to “lean” instinctively, without any planning, or knowledge of the cliches and tools spruiked by consultants (including myself). People are pretty sensible when left to themselves, they do not build waste into a system deliberately. Usually when failure occurs, there is a system in place that fails under pressure, or someones ego is involved.
On Sunday my local tennis club took our turn to have a BBQ at the local chain hardware store (Thanks Bunnings) in an effort to raise the funds to keep our historic grass courts going. Most grass courts have been beaten by the maintanence costs, and have been replaced by various low maintanence surfaces, but there is still nothing like grass, so we hang in there!
It takes about 10 minutes to cook a sausage (cycle time) so when we got going, the cooks organised themselves so that sausages were progressively rolled across the hotplate so that they were cooked by the time they got to the end, at about the time they were stuffed into a bun for a customer. They had a lean JIT process going.
As the morning progressed, and demand increased, the cooks responded by adding a second row to the hotplate, and varying the number of sausages being cooked (WIP)at any time in the second row according to the demand. It still took 10 minutes to cook a sausage, but only a few minutes to adjust the number being cooked as demand changed. This increase in the demand is reflected in what is called, in Lean parlance, Takt time, or the amount of time you have to allocate to a process so that it meets the demand from the market.
Nobody was directing this evolution of this simple BBQ production line, it was just common sense, so sensible people just made it happen. It occurred to me, not for the first time, that the various forms of waste that end up in operational systems are there largely because the demand is not clearly communicated to those running the systems, and so they just cover their arses with inventory, and allow silly practices to evolve and get in the way of demand transparency.
Left on their own, people will instinctively respond to the apparent demand, so why not just give them the information and let them get on with it.
Jul 3, 2013 | Branding, Communication, Sales
Price is always a sticky subject.
In most cases, sales people have been trained to slide over answering the inevitable, and often first question about price, until the value of the sales proposition has been established with the potential buyer.
That is the way it was.
Now, we all seek information on specification, availability, options and list price using the net, all information that in an earlier time, the salesperson could dole out as the sales process evolved. Therefore the decision is often almost made before a salesman has the opportunity to become engaged in the process.
When your sales prospect types “Widget prices” into Google, because that is their last question, the top 10 results, which is all most of us look at, are the ones that have “widgets from $100” or “Worlds cheapest widgets” in the headline.
You have just lost control of the conversation if you are not there.
Web sites are different to face to face, the emotion, the human interaction and the potential that humanity brings to the process has been removed, and you need to replace it with something that creates the opportunity for a conversation.
If you are on the web to sell, and the product is such that potential customers will ask the price early in the game, don’t be afraid, be proud, and put your pricing up front, along with your value proposition, so at least you might get a chance to talk about it.
