A little bit lost in Maryland this summer, my family and I came across Glen Echo Park, a once popular destination that’s seen hard times and is on the way back through the involvement of a dedicated not-for-profit tribe of volunteers.

Most of our visit was spent at the carousel where I was smitten with Smarty Jones. Mmmh, mmh that’s a handsome looking horse – if I’d have been riding I’d have taken Smarty for a trot for sure.

But for the whole time we were at the park, not one child rode Smarty.

What’s wrong?

Why don’t some customers buy your product? If it’s anything like Smarty, it’s great: accessible, goes up and down, has all the features, stands out in a crowd, it’s super-shiny for goodness sakes.

So why does the turkey get a ride whilst good ol’ Smarty puts on a brave face?

It’s the kind of question I get asked all the time. “We have a great product, but there something wrong. What is it?”

Whilst every product has it’s own story, the tale is put together the same way every time — and anyone can do it.

Ask your customers

Act like a consultant and ask your customers. You’ll learn more from what goes wrong than what goes right so make sure to ask non-customers who’ve made an active choice not to buy, and actual-customers who’ve bought but have stopped using. Get out of the building and ask the people who know. Visit, lunch, interview, test, survey — whatever it takes to get the information you need.

Speak to enough customers to see patterns; some will point to lack of priority or urgency, others may point to weaknesses in your product or your proposition. Assume nothing, test everything. When you’re pretty sure you know what’s going on, it’s time to act on what you’ve found.

What are you going to do about it?

There are three layers where you might need to fix things inside the building:

• Message problems are easiest and cheapest to solve. Get together with your sales and marketing team and change your presentations, messaging, communications. Use A/B testing to see what changes work best — especially if you’re web based and have a lot of passing trade.
• Go-to-market problems are more strategic and will probably force a new look at your market, features, distribution, pricing and positioning choices. Everything in this layer is connected so be suspicious of anything that looks like a silver bullet.
• A weak or ill defined core proposition means a fundamental rethink and the discomfort of living with your current product whilst working back through first principles.

After two interviews (my own children, 40% of the carousel kids that day) it was pretty easy to work out Smarty’s problem. Too much competition and a very small market. Strategic problems with no answer in sight means old Jones could be racing to retirement.

What about you? Can you change priorities and raise urgency or do you have to go a little deeper?

Neatly filed under Foundations, Making Promises, Skippiness on October 19, 2009

What happens when prospects don’t say Yes and won’t say No?

A Maybe is a hole in time. Complex products live with decision cycles that can last longer than a dying star. Entire companies have disappeared into Maybe shaped black holes. Listen carefully and you can hear them screaming “Just one more meeting, and I think we’re theeerrrreeeee…” as they fall across the event horizon.

It’s not always a problem. In a must-win, absolutely-no-choice, do-whatever-it-takes-to-keep-the-lines-open, a Maybe is the bread of life. If you’re operating bespoke — a new kind running shoe specially made for Paula, say — then you’re mission bound to keep the door cracked open.

Sometimes a Maybe isn’t even on the cards; it’s a Yes or a No, period. Simple products, the kind that leap to a decision in a single meeting, shouldn’t be a problem. Assuming you have good products and give good meeting, you’ll walk away with a Yes often enough.

I always prefer a Yes, but what if the choice is between a No and a Maybe?

What’s wrong with chasing rabbits?

Problem is, a Maybe sounds so possible — (just one more meeting). The more well funded you are the more likely you’re able to chase all these rabbits. The less well funded you are the more likely you’ll feel you have to. But as the saying goes, chase two rabbits and they both escape. Don’t confuse busy-ness with progress and don’t be seduced into endless streams of meeting-email-meeting-email-meeting, with your entire sales pipeline sitting at 75% probability.

Here’s the way I see it:

• Major sales take time and multiple meetings
• There aren’t enough resources to go the distance with every Maybe
• Use first meetings to find champions and ask for what you need

Let me explain.

Major sales are complex. New products are an untried cocktail of opportunities, costs and risks that force buyers to sit on fences for as long as it takes. Assuming your product shows promise and you make a decent fist of telling your story, it’s likely you’ll have no shortage of possible customers who are balanced on their fence whilst they “continue” talking to you.

Too many continuations and not enough progress saps the time, energy and finances of any team. The trick to maximising the effectiveness of all three resources is to focus on the “probable” customers and let the “possible” customers wait until they, or you, are warmer.

Find your champion

In other words, only dig wells where you’re sure there’s oil. Sadly, you can’t KNOW where to set up camp, but you can look for the single feature that marks out high potential territory; the presence of an identified champion inside the customer organisation. Not a point man or sponsor who simply arranges meetings for you, a champion is someone who sees the potential of your product, who pushes for progress and fights the good fight inside their own company.

Ask for what you need

How do you find these people? If you’re getting that Maybe feeling at the end of a sales meeting, do what you can to push for a Yes or No. The quickest way is to tell the truth and ask for what you need, “As you can see, we’re a new company and this is our first product. We’re fully committed but we know we’re not right for everybody at this stage. We’re looking for visionaries who can see the potential of what we’re doing and who want to work with us.”

Or, “So, we’re a small company that’s looking to expand by working with some new customers. We’ve had a good discussion today and I get the feeling you’re interested. What are the next steps that will progress our working together and who should we work with?”

Or … something else.

The idea here is to drive for a “Yes, we want to make progress, it will work like this…” or a straight “No thank you” as quickly as possible.

The more open you are about what you need, the more likely you’ll spend your time with probable, rather than just possible, customers.

Is this crazy? Maybe you should do everything possible to keep all prospects warm? Never giving an opportunity to say No? What do you think?

Neatly filed under Making Promises, Skippiness on October 13, 2009

Image copyright: geishaboy500 via Flickr

No. Na. Nope. Nya. Ummm … no. No siree. Not me. Oh, maybe, hang on a second, er, sorry, no.

I have no idea what should be in your budget and it’s a simple truth that no one else does either. They may have a first clue about what they want to be in there and what it should all add up to, but beyond that … they know nothing.

You do.

A play in three acts

In theory, budget setting is a simple play of three acts.

Act 1 — Setting — What happened last time, in words and numbers?

Act 2 — Thinking — What will change next time? Including anything that’s different inside the company, like targets and constraints, or outside the company, such as market conditions, competitor movements and new technologies making headway.

If you aren’t given objectives, set them yourself. If you don’t know what’s happening in the market, go find out.

The better you understand the variables the easier the planning will be (and the more robustly you can justify your choices during review meetings).

Act 3 — Planning — What do you plan to do, in words and numbers?

After discussion, comes decision. What will you spend in order to achieve the objectives? How is that different from last time? Why have you made those choices?

Give yourself a budget and a target. The budget is a promise, so don’t make promises you can’t keep. The target is a stretch motivator, something to shoot for, to achieve if … if … if, but not a fantasy. Pinning everything to a fantasy is the surest way to demotivate everyone and guarantee failure.

That’s the theory. What’s the reality?

Budget meetings can be bloody. Turn up with a low ball, last year +/- 10%, no thinking, generous pay rise, doubled marketing spend, steady state budget and you probably deserve to get juiced.

Budgets are all about numbers but like so much else, they’re really all about preparation. Get set, have a strong and reasoned argument for every change, be ready to walk through every penny — you’ll skip out of the meeting with a firm budget, a warm glow and a polished reputation.

Sadly, some review meetings are an ego trip for the finance team; they think it’s their job to beat you up. You owe it to your team to deal with them like any other bully — look ‘em in the eye and stand firm.

Ruined by game playing and phoney smiles, managing in the pursuit of skippiness means taking budget sessions as a brilliant opportunity to align your whole team behind a coherent plan.

Neatly filed under Keeping Promises, Making Promises on September 16, 2009

Image copyright: DoctorTac via Flickr

By the end of a sales call you should have a pretty good idea who you’re dealing with. I’d say most people will fit into one of five categories:

1. We don’t have a problem — some customers simply don’t have the problem your product or service is designed to solve. Some customers have the problem but are unable or unwilling to see it. The final possibility that sits here is that they know they have the problem, but they don’t believe your product can solve it.
2. We’ll wait for a major player — people buy from people that they know, like and trust. The wait-for-a-major category accept they have a problem and that you may even be able to solve it, but they’re unwilling to take a risk on a company they don’t know. It may be slightly unfair that they’ve invited you in when they’re too risk averse to buy from an unknown.
3. We’ll do it ourselves — I always hire someone to paint my house, the guy next door never would, ever. Some people, departments or even entire organisations are more like me, some are more like my neighbour and will try to do pretty much everything on their own. I’m sure they don’t invite people in just for the influx of ideas, but for some reason, when they see something new, they imagine it’s easier or cheaper to do it themselves.
4. Come back with version 2 or 3 or 4 — some people are always waiting for the next version, or until the price comes down, or for some other imagined improvement that they know is on the way. They might think you’re not yet ready for their particular situation yet, or that they’ll wait until other people have helped you iron out your kinks.
5. Looks good, what are the next steps?

Many people can be nudged from any of the first four categories into the final group. Many can’t.

Neatly filed under Making Promises on August 12, 2009

Image copyright: Corscri-Daje tutti! via Flickr

Inside any kind of organisation bigger than the land of Me & My Mate, you’re probably surrounded by people who do a job that’s completely different to yours.

What do all those people do?

I’ve been thinking about the doing part of that question lately, rather than the people part. The way I see it, no matter what the job title or department, the doing falls in to one of only five categories:

Making Promises – easiest to think of as all the things that happen in sales or marketing, some customer services and board functions. Anything that makes any kind of commitment on behalf of the company is a making promises action.

Keeping Promises – everything that even vaguely fits into operations: all the tasks that make the product, perform the service, look after customers, pick up, package or deliver the thing.

Measure and control – all the things involving numbers or making sure nothing gets out of hand.

Support – what gets done in order to make everything else function; what normally happens under the headings of IT or HR for instance.

Leadership and innovation – without getting bogged down in book style definitions, leadership is about direction setting and steering to the compass whilst innovation is all the processes that aim to improve things.

These are not departments, they’re functions, and whilst every person spends most of their time in one kind of role, they probably undertake processes in others, if not all. For example, a production worker is mainly employed to keep promises, but they probably also try to innovate to improve things, keep an eye on production rates and quality, put their arm around colleagues when they need it, and continually make commitments within and for their department.

Ok. So what? Is this anything other than yet another way of thinking about organisational structure?

If every process is about making, keeping, ensuring and supporting promises, or improving the way the whole thing gets done, then every job is about the customer.

So what do all those people do? Let’s hope they’re not wasting any time discussing, deciding or doing anything that doesn’t draw a straight line to improving the life of the customer.

Neatly filed under Innovating, Keeping Promises, Leading, Making Promises, Managing on June 3, 2009