TWO TYPES OF "THINGS"

As an adult I have come to accept and adapt to the fact that I am rabidly dyslexic, but as a child it was a much harder limitation to accept and adjust to. When I started middle school the first day was the start of my living nightmare in the form of joined up handwriting! This will sound easy enough to the majority of people reading this post but to me it was, and still is an impossibility. To make matters worse an incentive was introduced…….

“When you have mastered joined up handwriting you may start to use a pen rather than a pencil”.

Most of my class were using pens by the end of the first term…. I began a torturous road which lasted almost two years before my teacher gave in and realised I was never going to manage to scribe whole words let alone sentences in a beautiful flowing script.

This was of course terrible for me at that time unlike now where children in a similar situation would just be offered a tablet or laptop with spell check and the problem almost goes away. Something that seemed important is now an irrelevance, ‘something’ that needed to be done well now doesn’t and in today’s fast moving business world I see this scenario repeating itself in much faster cycles. I consider there to be only two such categories as that described above!

The vast majority of activities are “things that just need to be done” where quality is not a prerogative the completion or the ability to move forwards is the important factor. The second are far more critical and fewer in general and they are “Things that need to be done well”.

In my business this differentiation is critical in two ways: firstly, as a small and fast-growing company, we don’t have endless cycles to get things done. We rarely get a second chance at anything and we need to come up with answers before the questions are even apparent, this is just the way it is. With so many activities, actions and pressures on our time we need to work out what to do and what not to do. Even the points we agree on doing need to be prioritised into either just get them finished and out of the way or focus on getting them finished to the best possible degree.

>The second reason this is important to us is that our software solution is based on the premise that we can not only identify where there are capability weaknesses within business processes and operations but also that we can identify which actions should be focused on, how much they will cost and the impact they will have on the revenues and profits. When one first engages with a new company most of us will search for that business out on the web, if they don’t have a website then alarm bells ring. But how many of us actually read through every page or count how many pages they have or looks at how often the news is updated, having a website is certainly an important requirement but, is it one of those tasks that just needs to be done or is it one that has to be done well? This is an extreme example, as quite obviously the better your website is the better the view the world has of the entity behind it and this scenario plays out in all other areas as well.

The answer is often defined by the situation rather than the other way around and boils down to the individual’s preference, ability, availability, external pressures etc.

However, making the right choice and knowing when to change that choice can often make the difference between success and failure in both life and in business. I spent many years of my life trying to improve my handwriting and spelling, I no longer worry about my handwriting prowess or the fact that some days I can’t spell my own name, not because my handwriting or spelling has improved (because they haven’t) but because we now communicate in emails not written letters so no one else even knows I have this weakness and this requirement has moved from needing to be done well into almost irrelevance.

Kissing Frogs

In business, you are often told that the hardest daily trial is not working out "What to do" but "What not to do".
The difficulty in this is that opportunities tend to arise either on their own or because of the work you put in. It happens every week, you get a call from someone asking to meet over a coffee or I get introduced to someone who isn’t the right person for me to do business with. It may seem easy to ignore these types of meetings, discard them into the "What not to do" pile, but in my experience, sometimes it is exactly these meetings you should be going to. In my experience, you shouldn’t be afraid to "kiss some frogs".

Hope is a not a strategy, therefore the key for this to be successful is not having any expectation that something will happen, but that it more than likely will not.

Some of my most valuable confidents, friends, partners and long term clients have originated from these first engagements. I used to get in trouble with my boss years ago for wasting “prime selling time” on pointless meetings but now I honestly believe that this has made my career and the companies I have worked for have all benefited from my approach. I don’t spend all day every day sipping lattes with strangers, talking about unimportant topics and lining the pockets of Starbucks investors but I equally don’t shy away from it! If I aim to help others with useful introductions and advice then more often than not so do they. We all know of a really well connected or networked person, who can pick up the phone and speak to people you could never dream off. These people often never have a bad word said about them and manage to positively influence everyone around them.

The simple truth is that they have worked very hard to get to that point and probably they too kissed some frogs on the way.

The world of “Sales” has many rules but only one law

Parts of our lives are considered a constant. You always have friends and family to support you, a job you always enjoy in a good location and a home you always like living in. Congratulations if the previous sentence applies wholly to you, but, for the most part, and for most of us, those things are far from static and are often changing.

Similarly, The Universe has many rules by which we all live but under certain conditions these rules can be bent or indeed, broken completely.

It is for this reason that the world around us has a much smaller number of Laws than rules. These Laws need to have a number of characteristics:

• They need to be Universal.
• The Law needs to be Absolute.
• It needs to be truly Stable.
• A Law must be Omnipotent!
• It must beSimple to describe.

Sales is a wide ranging term encompassing multiple roles, different activities, goals and objectives. This means that in Sales we have lots of advisory rules and frameworks. Grizzled, grey-haired sales people who have been through the mill often reel off these sayings or rhymes to describe perceived best practice:-
People buy from People. The only thing a sales person should not sell is their own integrity. "Listen" to the words your prospect isn’t saying. You’re born with two ears and one mouth and they should be used in that ratio.
This list of sales rules is extensive and grows every day as we all learn more about our ever changing markets. However, like the Universe, Sales has Laws. One Law in fact. A single simple statement that is applicable in all sales situations no matter the size, scale, vertical focus, complexity or difficulties involved.

"Time kills all deals".

I am certain people smarter than I could build the Simple equation that describes this Law but at its core it is, Universal, Absolute, Stable and I would argue Omnipotent! Sales frameworks and process are put in place to increase the likelihood that any given sales person can close more deals. These processes improve your forecast accuracy but given that the only law in sales refers to Time, the critical area to optimise across your sales process is the Speed with which you can impact and effect your prospects. The earlier you engage with a client in the sales process, the faster you can respond to a request the higher the likelihood of success. All the time and every time.

Technology should magnify competency but all too often it embeds incompetency.

Time after time I see organizations investing huge sums in technology that enables processes and decisions that kill competitiveness and drive down financial performance. One example that I came across recently was a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform from one of the biggest software companies in the world where the promotional video on the website ran the following customer scenario:

Scenario

• A North American organization in its last quarter uses their CRM technology to manage the pipeline
• They Identify the west region pipeline is short and threatening the overall number
• They further find the issues lie with the Enterprise deals that are blocking at the negotiation phase
• Further discounts are required to close the deals

Action

• Use the collaborative nature of the technology to get the key sales stakeholders together to discuss the deals
• Agree to give the discounts requested and quickly generate new proposals and close the deals

"Discounting fuels the race to zero!"

The big assumption in the above scenario is that giving the discounts was the right course of action, especially without any attention to the root-cause issues. When discounting is used to close deals it causes the competition to join in and the customers to leverage this behaviour and a self-fulfilling prophesy of commoditisation ensues.

What would good technology look like?

At the point where the above organisation identified that the revenue performance issue was with negotiating on Enterprise deals, they needed to see what capability gaps and weaknesses were causing this and the actions, money and time needed to fix it. Even if they take the discount hit to get the top number, there must be a strategy to prevent it becoming a continuous competitive weakness.

THE 5 ESSENTIAL BUSINESS QUESTIONS

There are 5 questions that business leaders need to be able to answer in order to run a business successfully:

1. What do we need to do?
2. Why do we need to do it?
3. How long will the benefits take?
4. What will the cost be?
5. How can we truly execute?

These are simple sounding but actually very tough questions when considered fully. But they can be addressed is a structured way, and lead to deliver predictable and measurable business performance improvements.
Let’s dig in and explore each one in turn to expel the myths and surface opportunities.

What do we need to do?

Companies set strategic objectives and map actions in the form of business functions and processes to them accordingly. They often then look at resource requirements and set key performance indicators to measure the return on investment. But this approach misses a fundamental and business critical question:
What are the capabilities that we need to build or borrow within our business?
To miss this point is to ignore the root causes of performance success and to leave success down to a strategy of hoping the competition screws up worse; to be the lesser of evils in the context of their solution. Companies need to map capability templates to their business goals and assess or transform their operations in the context of them.

Why do we need to do it?

Every action and capability within an organisation needs to be clearly reconcilable to the creation of customer value, as it is only the ability to do this that will consistently beat the competition and generate the required revenues. If we take the capability template discussed earlier, and identify gaps and weaknesses, we can then identify and map actions to each one to fill the gaps and strengthen the weaknesses. Only after doing this can we truly say with hand-on heart that we know what needs to be done.

How long will the benefits take?

Another schoolboy error is to not factor in the lead-time-to-benefit for the actions we take in business. I wager that, like me, you have all done it though and probably more than once. I always make sure that for every action I plan in business it carries the key attributes of not just cost but lead-time-to-benefit, otherwise it does not get approved by the executive team. Not to complicate matters too much at this stage, but it is important to also consider how sustainable the benefits are, but I will leave that for another post on another day.

What will the cost be?

I mentioned in the previous section that all actions carry cost and lead-time-to-benefit attributes. Therefore, it is possible to model the return on investment at certain time intervals by tracking them to actual revenue generated by the actions. The screen shot below shows this happening in the Excellence Platform’s transformation dashboard.

How can we truly execute?

True execution is about assigning clear ownership and responsibility to the required actions and conducting a rolling review to ensure the required benefits are materialising and that the actions are delivering them. Organisations are attempting this, but with various degrees of success, as the key issue seems to be that they are trying to use 1990s technology in the form of Excel amongst others that is just not able to map the variables in real-time. It is exactly this lack of effective enabling technology to simplify the whole process above that we created the Excellence Platform at C-View Technologies