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In sales, keep the main thing, the main thing

I recently asked a sales team what question they thought they were answering when putting together a proposal.

They said that they were trying to show how they were better than their competitors, and what differentiated them from others.

I said they may well be answering the wrong question.

They sold mission critical technology systems where clients controlled their operations in real time. Their decisionmakers were middle management who had senior management keenly observing whether they had made a decision.

They also had their staff worried that the new systems might be difficult to use or even worse, fail to perform better than the outgoing system that they had spent many years using.

If the wrong system was chosen then they would get grief from their staff and their grumbling would surely reach senior management and their career prospects could be severely curtailed.

No pressure!

So the question uppermost in the decisionmakers’ minds will be: How will your system do the job that they need it to?

The other question about differentiation and whether it is better than the competition will take care of itself.

“How so?” they asked.

We’ve all been in English classes at high school where an essay question might have been set.

If there were twenty students in the class, how different would each essay submitted be from the next? Probably widely so, even though everyone was set the same essay question.

In fact, if a group of essays were very similar, or even if one pair of essays were very similar, then the teacher would suspect collusion or plagiarism.

Therefore even though our competitors are addressing the same market and indeed the same request for proposals, the proposals submitted will be very different. Differentiation will take care of itself.

The main thing is to answer the key question, how will the potential customer’s stated need, be met?

Sometimes it can be easy to be distracted by the incentive to upsell and cross sell the customer created by the sales commission.

If the sales commission is calculated as a percentage of the order value, then it can be tempting to focus on pushing the customer toward lifting the value of what they buy.

I’ve seen sales people become so fixed on maximizing their commissions through promoting add-ons and expansions that they spent too little time on the main thing: showing the potential customer how their stated need will be met.

How many times have you walked into a restaurant and felt sales pressure because the waiter or waitress has spent too much time promoting side orders and desserts that you didn’t want?

Meeting customer needs is an axiom in marketing. Its the main thing.

Don’t get distracted by the competition or anything else.

Whatever you do in sales and marketing, don’t forget to make the main thing, the main thing.

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The Virtual Marketing Manager – how a marketing consultant brings you more sales

Tons of small businesses neglect their marketing. They know they should do it but more pressing issues keep them from getting to it. No surprise that

  • The last company blog was months ago, the customer newsletter is late or never goes out at all,
  • The company’s signage and customer experience looks tired,
  • Customers looking online for what the business offers don’t see it appearing at or near the top of search hits,
  • Leads don’t come to you, you have to go out and get them,
  • Sales aren’t growing as they should be…

It’s tough keeping up your marketing when there are more pressing things to deal with in the business. Marketing is one of those things that is easy to put off but over time it catches up with you.

Marketing is about focusing on understanding the marketplace, the competition, and the customers’ desires and pain points.

Typically, marketing is about:

  • The future and deciding where to go next
  • Concentrating on differentiation and offerings that are unique enough to give your business a long term competitive advantage
  • Working on
    • growing brand awareness,
    • attracting prospects and
    • moving people into the sales funnel

Marketing is characterized by:

  • Research
  • Mapping strategy
  • Analyzing data
  • Developing performance measures
  • Setting up systems
  • Watching trends
  • Changing tactics as required
  • Developing and leveraging marketing assets
  • Thinking about long term objectives

Sales is not the same as marketing. They require quite different kinds of people. What makes for a good sales professional contradicts with what makes for a great marketing professional.

Sales professionals are driven by:

  • The short term
  • Converting the lead in front of them into a sale, and then moving on as quickly as possible
  • Looking for and closing the deal

Having access to a Virtual Marketing Manager can be a big benefit for a small business.

Most can’t afford an experienced, knowledgeable Marketing Manager on a full-time basis and may never consider hiring one.

That’s a problem because many small businesses fail within the first three years.

Reasons include

  • Failure to set themselves apart from the competition
  • Inability to find a profitable business model
  • Ineffectively building awareness amongst potential customers
  • Not maintaining customer service standards

A Virtual Marketing Manager is an affordable alternative to hiring a full-time Marketing Manager and can make a big difference to a small business by:

  • Helping to clearly define the key benefit that sets a business apart
  • Exploiting this key benefit through the company’s communications
  • Ensuring that the company is regularly communicating with its important audiences
  • Building inbound sales leads through its websites and other marketing assets
  • Ensuring marketing investments are achieving tangible returns

The nature of SMB marketing means that you probably don’t need a full-time marketing manager.

A virtual marketing manager lets you get the benefits of a senior marketing manager without having to establish a full-time position.

A good virtual marketing manager can let the business owner carry on with running the business without distraction while building demand for its products and services.

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Board Committees: The Dog Should Wag the Tail

Board Committees can be useful

Board Committees can be a useful and efficient tool for large boards to address specialist areas where only a minority of the board has the expertise to deal with them.

They save wasting the entire board’s time from being mired in the detail of, say, the organization’s financials or health and safety.

Committees can also give more intensive scrutiny to specific aspects of a board’s duties. 

Thus, complex issues can be explored in greater detail.

The Board remains liable for Committee decisions

However, a committee generally only has the constitutional power to make recommendations for the full board to ratify as the liability for any committee’s actions remains with the board.

Consequently, any significant recommendations forwarded to the full board should include sufficient background information so that board can make an informed decision on whether to ratify the recommendation. 

Board members are often encouraged to avoid re-litigating matters considered by subcommittees so that the time and energy expended by the committee is not wasted. As a result, subcommittee recommendations are often ratified with hardly a murmur.

Committees can slip through potentially controversial decisions without adequate board scrutiny

Not every matter warrants close board scrutiny.

It becomes a matter of judgement as to what is a significant matter.  One way to assess this is to consider whether the decision carries reputational or financial risks, or both.

As with all matters of trust, it can be abused.

Potentially controversial matters can be obfuscated with

  • A too-brief description of the recommendation,
  • The recommendation is buried amidst many other pages of board papers,
  • The description in the committee minutes omits even why the matter was considered and what factors were taken into consideration in arriving at the recommendation.

In this way, the board is unable to scrutinize the work of its subcommittees and the subcommittee has in effect hijacked the board, at least in that particular matter, anyway.

The line between governance and management can become blurred in board committees

Committees often become exposed to a lot more operational detail than the full board.  The line between governance and management matters can become blurred and so this must be carefully managed. 

The line can be further blurred if attending managers are made full committee members and each is given a vote. 

Often the concern about the demarcation between governance and management centres around board members unhealthily encroaching on what should be operational matters. 

But with executive committee members having voting rights then the composition of the committee must also be carefully considered, because the majority of committee could conceivably be composed of executives. 

When combined with the idea that a committee can slip its controversial decisions through under the noses of the board without it being aware of it, the executives on the committee has in effect hijacked the board.

This doesn’t mean that the executive are necessarily malevolent or Machiavellian they may be genuine and have the organisation’s interests at heart. 

But an important role of the board is to provide independent and unbiased oversight, and this role can be compromised when executive representation on board committees is too high and they are exercising voting power as if they are board members through their committee membership. 

Board committees can be beneficial but they can also be abused

Especially for large boards, board committees can be beneficial.  They can save time and allow complex matters to be considered in more detail.

But board committees must be very aware of what matters are significant and carry a disproportionate risk to the organisation. 

If a decision is likely to be controversial then this is a clear signal that the matter is significant. It can be tempting to obfuscate the matter to avoid conflict.

The attention of the board should be drawn to significant matters so that the board can adequately scrutinize the recommendation so that an informed decision can be made.

The executive team shouldn’t become de facto board members through their voting power in committees.

Board committees should always remain subordinate to the full board. The dog must wag the tail, not the other way around.

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Operating in the midst of uncertainty

The most common reaction I’ve had over the last few weeks when management have been asked to come up with a plan is: What’s the use? Who knows how things will play out?

In fact, taking control of the situation in the midst of uncertainty is possible.

The answer is to put a plan together for the worst case, best case and most-likely scenarios.

For example, here in NZ, the main uncertainty factors were:

  • Movement of people
  • Movement of freight
  • Gatherings of people within New Zealand
  • What is classified as an essential service
  • Whether an effective vaccine or treatment can be developed.

A best case scenario back in mid-March 2020 might look like:

L4 Lockdown might go for 8 weeks.  L1 after 16 weeks. 18 months to develop an effective vaccine and /or effective treatment. International travel will require mandatory two week quarantine or self-isolation at each border for 18 months.    Supply chains will be delayed for 8 weeks as factories closed all over the world.

A worst case scenario in mid-March 2020 might look like:

L4 Lockdown for 16 weeks.  L1 after 32 weeks.  An effective vaccine and/or treatment is never developed.  International travel will require mandatory two week quarantine or self-isolation at each border for 36 months.  International movement of goods not disrupted. Supply chains will be delayed by 16 weeks as factories all over the world closed.

Most likely case scenario back in mid-March 2020 might look like:  

L4 Lockdown for 10 weeks.  L1 after 20 weeks.  An effective vaccine and/or treatment is developed 36 months.  International travel will require mandatory two week quarantine or self-isolation on arrival in any country for 24 months.  International movement of goods not disrupted. Supply chains will be delayed by 12 weeks as factories all over the world closed.

The impact of each of these scenarios will differ depending on the nature of your business, organisation and industry.  

Post-lockdown what are the key factors that will affect your business?

International travel restrictions will continue to impact any business that relies on international travellers.  Given the above scenarios, some businesses are going to have to either find alternative revenues, reduce overheads and perhaps even put their businesses into hibernation, and hope to resurrect them again as international travel resumes. 

Businesses starved of revenue will struggle to pay their rent, staff and suppliers.  Some businesses will be caught short at both ends, with suppliers demanding payment and customers being slow to pay or even defaulting on their payments.  

It can all seem overwhelming.

We can help with the heavy lifting:

  • Putting a plan together
  • Negotiating with landlords, suppliers and customers
  • Tracking cash flow
  • Arranging finance

Government assistance can be provided to fund these services.

The faster you have a sense of what to do, the quicker the uncertainty goes away.

 

 

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Uncertainty around how infectious asymptomatic coronavirus carriers makes setting workplace guidelines difficult | ProPublica

ProPublica’s health reporter Caroline Chen explains what the conversation around asymptomatic coronavirus carriers is missing, and what we need to understand if we’re going to beat this nefarious virus together.

In the early days of the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S., around the last week of February, I joked to a colleague that maybe now, finally, people would learn how to wash their hands properly. My remark revealed a naive assumption I had at the time, which was that all we needed to do to keep the novel coronavirus contained was follow a few simple guidelines: stay home when symptomatic and maintain good personal hygiene. The problem, I thought, was that nobody was following the rules.

In the past few weeks, however, more and more reports have emerged to challenge my neat assumptions. Seven out of 14 NBA players, coaches and staff who tested positive didn’t have symptoms when they were diagnosed, The Wall Street Journal reported. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a case study on a nursing facility in King County, Washington, where 23 residents tested positive for COVID-19, and it found that 13 reported no symptoms initially. Sixty singers went to rehearsal and followed all the rules, according to the Los Angeles Times — nobody hugged, shook hands or appeared ill — yet three weeks later, 45 were diagnosed with COVID-19 or had symptoms of the disease, and two have died.

Read more

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