Sep 4, 2014 | Governance, Innovation, Leadership, Small business, Strategy
The post on the 2 tools SME’s need in early August led to a comment that, whilst the headlines of focus and discipline made sense, the challenge is in implementation.
Fair comment.
So, how do you build the needed focus and discipline in the face of increasing complexity and competition?
Over 40 years of doing this stuff with SME;s, there have been 6 common factors that lead to successful implementation that have emerged.
- Ownership leads to commitment. In an increasingly complicated world, the hierarchical organisations that worked for us to date now fail, they are too rigid and process driven to be responsive to the chaotic input from a connected world. Leveraging what Clay Shirky calls “Cognitive surplus” becomes the competitive challenge to be won.
- Prioritisation and planning. There is a fine line between prioritising and planning a set of activities, and procrastination and doing the easy stuff that does not really matter. Two rules of thumb: 1. if it is easy, it probably does not matter, and 2. An extra minute spend planning will save an hour later on in the project.
- Accountability. It is one thing to “make” someone accountable in a top down organisation, it is easy for some boss to just say “you are accountable” but that does not make it so. It is really only when the person takes on the accountability as their own that the motivation kicks in, that they really care beyond the protection of an income or position.
- Outcome measurement. Do not measure the activities, just the outcomes. It is good to have the activities visible, so you can see what is being done, but only the outcomes really matter, activities do not contribute to success in any way other than they are just the means to the end, so measure for the end.
- Failure tolerance. The “scientific method” applies to management as well as science, it spawns a fact based decision making culture, rather than one based on ego, status and hubris.The story of the most successful inventor in history, Thomas Edison, on failing for the 999th time to create light from a bulb saying: “Now I know 999 things that do not work” is a lesson for us all. The 1,000th experiment was successful, and the world was changed.
- Persistence. Never giving up is crucial, with the proviso that you learn from your mistakes, and apply the learning.
These 6 are a great start, to which I would add “Sweat”. My dad used to reckon nothing worthwhile was achieved without some of it being shed, and I think he was right.
Aug 28, 2014 | Customers, Governance, Leadership, Management, Small business
Small businesses make up the vast majority of business numbers, make a huge contribution to economic activity and health, but most do not last 5 years.
Over 20 years of observing small businesses as a contractor and consultant, I have seen a modest number of factors that the successful businesses, those that last the distance and deliver good financial returns over an extended period, set out to manage in a very deliberate way.
- Your time is the most valuable resource you have, and is non renewable, so outsource as much as you can to free up your time. It does not matter if you outsource to an employee, or to someone in the eastern bloc, it gives you back your time. Always ensure you retain control of the things that are at the core of your value proposition to customers, that is where your valuable time should be spent.
- Make yourself redundant. When the business runs without you, it is successful, You can then do what you want, but have the income stream coming in to allow you do what your want. The old cliché of working on your business rather than in your business is a cliché for a reason.
- Deliver value to customers first. Most business owners earn the most from their business the day they sell it, so do not become too emotionally involved with the idea of owning the business, be in love with what it can do for you by delivering value to customers.
- Find a niche and own it.
- Leverage the talents of others, there is always someone who can do something better than you, find them, and leverage those talents. On the flip side, do not allow low performers to persist, as it not only enables under performance in their role, but it sets a low bar for the others who can see that non performance is acceptable.
- Automate the day to day stuff as much as possible, and it is possible to automate almost everything these days. This requires time and effort up front to ensure there are robust and repeatable processes, but pays off in spades in very quick time.
- Always be curious, about what your customers are doing, and why, what your competitors are doing, why and how, and what is happening in domains outside yours that may be applicable to your domain in some way.
- Be generous. It pays off. Generosity engenders a feeling of obligation, and in this day of commodities and transparency, having someone feel they owe you a favour is very valuable.
- Have a plan, so at the very least, you know the point from which you have departed.
- Interrogate your business model routinely, as the pace of change is such that the optimum way of extracting value may not be the way your are doing it currently. The Business Model canvas is a great tool, and it is not so silly to keep drawn up on an A3 pinned to your wall to take post it notes with thought s as they occur to you, and others.
- Measure progress to wards objectives. Too many measures are as bad a too few, the challenge is to get the right measures, measuring the things that really measure progress, not just that something is done.
- Watch and manage the cash.
None of this is easy, or comfortable, but as I look around at successful SME’s, they are all employing at least 5 or 6 of these strategies. I would recommend that you do a relatively simple assessment of each parameter, measure yourself, and use that measure to identify areas to target for improvement. Simple spider graphs are very useful as a visual tool for recording progress.
Happy to have a yarn with you about how an outside resource may be able to assist the process.
Aug 25, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
David Ogilvy said many things that have gone into the marketing lexicon, one that is particularly relevant to the ways we are communicating today:
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar”.
It is disturbing for me to sped several hours creating a blog post, and then to have just a few people read it, and I find that following the rules below, my readership increases markedly.
- Lists always work,” 6 ways to build a better backhand”
- “How to” headlines always work. “How to build a better backhand” If you can actually find a way to combine a “How to” with a “list”, well, off it goes. Like “How to leverage these 6 ways to build a better backhand”
- Highlight the benefit, a WIFM (what’s in it for me) headline. “Having a great backhand increases your chances in doubles”. Sometimes a bit of innuendo or double meaning goes a long way to making a headline better “linkbait” to the body of the article or email.
- “Free” is good, “Free e-book on how to build a forehand Federer would love”
- Evoke curiosity, then deliver in the body. “How many more sets would you win with a better backhand?’
- Draft several headlines, and give considerable thought to which is the best to use in the context of the audience, and what it is you are trying to convey.
- Length, SEO experts tell me that about 60-70 characters is the limit, as the search engines cut off the subject lines at about 70.
- Learn from what others are doing. About the best source of effective headline writing lessons is in the local newsagent, spend a bit of time browsing the magazine section, there are SEO killer headlines effectively selling stuff that nobody in their right mind should buy
- The final consideration is that while it is the headline that gets people in, it is the value you deliver through the information in the body of the message that keeps them there. There is just so much content out there, so many opportunities to spend your time, that the real value is in delivering sufficiently good information and ideas to induce people to read the whole post, then return, again and again. The headline is just the icing, it is the cake that people consume.
There are many formulas, that claim to make writing good headlines easy, just like those above. However, like most things that can be broken down into a formula, you end up with some degree of repetition, a “sameness” with others, it may work, and usually has to date, it may deliver the outcome, but it is still the outcome of the same formula your competitors are using. So be different, add some humanity to the message, nothing is as good as a bit of humanity to connect to your audience.
That is really hard.
Aug 20, 2014 | Branding, Communication, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
The blokes I saw as a youngster who had outrageous success with the girls were not always the best looking, or the most interesting, or had the best cars (although all these assets did seem to help) they were the ones who were genuinely interested in whoever it was they happened to be talking to at that particular moment in time. They directed all their attention and empathy at their companion of the moment, casual or otherwise.
Why do we think we can be successful digitally with strategies that are second rate in the real world?
Websites are communication tools, they are a digital metaphor for the conversations you have at a party, in a pub, at the office, in private. Nothing more.
So, go to the home page of your site, (or your competitors) and look at it through the eyes of the person you are attempting to communicate with, and:
- Count how often you talk about yourself, using pronouns like “we”, “our”, “us”
- Count how often you talk about the problems your customer has, the ways that you are referencing their needs and challenges
- Compare the numbers, and in most cases be amazed at how often you talk about yourself.
- Repeat for every page on your site,
- STOP talking about yourself!!
- Rewrite, and reap the benefits.
Pretty simple formula really, no different to those blokes I was envious of years ago.
Aug 19, 2014 | Communication, Innovation, Marketing, Small business
As everyone will tell you, (including me here) marketing is about stories, stories that resonate, are remembered, that generate empathy, and lead to an action, and hopefully if your effort is to be rewarded, a transaction.
So what are the elements that make a good marketing story?
It is instructive to look to the stories we all read, from books we read to our kids, to the fiction we read as adults. All seem to share elements of 6 common traits:
- They are written for an audience. Kids love stories, and reading to my kids was one of the joys of being a parent. They would have loved last years best seller, Jeremy, the story of the kookaburra chick that fell out of the nest and as reared by a family until he could look after himself. Great book for my kids, as kids, but not my choice for my personal reading.
- They have a hero and a villain, and the hero always wins after a seemingly unwinnable struggle, usually at the last moment, and unexpectedly.
- They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning sets the scene, the middle tells the story, and the end does a recap, and reinforces the message of the story.
- They all have a message, something worthwhile taking away, and that takeaway is the point of the story. Aesop, a Greek slave had this part nailed.
- They all have dramatic tension coming in waves through the story. The hero is confronted, and prevails, then is confronted again and prevails again by being smarter, more helpful, inventive, and resilient than the villain. The rhythm of the story builds to the climax, with the hero again, prevailing in some way that demonstrates the traits of ingenuity, resilience, and “goodness”.
- The story has a plot. Pretty obvious, but the plot is what ties it all in together, and provides the context for the hero to beat the villain, to achieve the unachievable, and deliver the message.
A good story gets remembered, and can be retold. That is not just luck, it is the way we have evolved, storytelling is the way we related information vital for survival in the first couple of million years as we moved from caves to the present, passing on the strategies for staying out of the way of all sorts of risks to life and limb along the way. Recently there has been a lot of sophisticated research searching for the mechanics, this post from Chris Penn includes links to several.
Point is, the sophisticated research is simply telling us the mechanics, Aesop just knew the formula, and it remains the formula today, from writing a blog post to making a presentation, you may as well use the formula to your benefit.
How did I do?
Aug 12, 2014 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Small business
Marketing has changed very rapidly from the mass outbound marketing upon which all the marketing theory and practice until about 2000, to what is often called “inbound” marketing, or in other words, finding ways to attract customers to you.
There is now a fundamentally changed capability set required to be a successful marketing executive, and to manage a successful marketing function.
- Customers are the new focus, not because of any epiphany, but because we can now see them clearly. We need to be able create situations and experiences for them to be able to engage with the proposition we are delivering them.
- Marketing is leading the digital revolution, now. Marketing was late to the table abut the pace of development of marketing automation over the last 5 or 6 years has been astonishing, and marketers need to be data analysts and automation savvy.
- Outbound marketing requires content, but no longer can you just hire an ad agency to churn out a few ads. Now the whole marketing function, and ideally other functions in a business need to become producers of content, so that consumers have something to relate to, that tells a story. These materials become the backbone of our branding activity,
- Marketers need to become remarkably ambidextrous when thinking about channels of communication. Not only do we now have a few paid outbound channels, we have a huge array of owned and paid and earned media options and platforms, all have to be managed, in concert with each other, so you get a cumulative and synergistic effect.
- Marketing needs to engage consumers in their social spaces, and on their social platforms. No longer can we just bash messages through via paid media, the challenge of engaging has become far more difficult and the location has moved from the lounge room to wherever they are.
- Branding success has always had customer loyalty and retention as an end result of any activity. Now that has changed, and we are actively developing marketing techniques and tactics to target the loyalty and retention of consumers, and the huge difference is we can now see the impact of our activities.
- Marketing agility based on A/B testing has become a core competence. This combines the data capability wit the imagination of the marketing to dream up ideas, then test and constantly refine.
Marketing is becoming the core function of every enterprise. From a bit of an extra, sometimes even seen as an indulgence 20 years ago, it is rapidly becoming evident that marketing is the most important function of every business.
Competitive success now depends as much on the quality of the marketing effort to deliver customers as it does the product and service offering. However, it is still true that no matter how great the marketing, without the product, you will not get a second chance.
