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
Tags: customers, meetings, sales

This morning, as I came home from the pool a mother and toddler walked up my street. As I folded my bike and fumbled with my keys the pair stopped outside my gate and I overheard the mother ask, “What would you like for your birthday, if you could have anything?”

Her little boy didn’t have to think, and I didn’t have to “overhear” the answer; the whole street is in on the secret.

I’ll come back to his answer in a minute, but for now, this question reminds me of the “King for a Day” question, variations of which often pop up in strategy offsites, particularly for early stage projects.

I was introduced to this idea by a grey haired old managing partner type facilitating a meeting with our team when we couldn’t agree anything about our new product initiative. Coming back from a break, he changed the tack of the meeting by asking each of these questions in turn, making us write down our answers privately before a group discussion at the end.

What would you change?

1. Imagine you’re about to meet a clairvoyant who can actually see the future. You have one question – what do you ask?
2. It is now five years in the future. The project has been fantastically successful. You’re about to be interviewed by a journalist about what you did to make the success. What three things will you tell the journalist made the most difference?
3. Same scenario except the project went badly. Now what do you say?
4. What are the first three actions you will take out of this session?
5. And finally the King for a Day question. You have the power to make any change to the “system” (usually political, market, sociological or technological) that you like. What would you change to make the project more successful?

The whole session — private writing and open discussion — ran a couple of hours, but by the end we’d moved forward, driven issues on to the table, and had a half decent action plan for what to do next.

The King for a Day question itself can seem a bit facile. “If I were King for a day I’d make a law that every customer in our target market has to buy our product,” for example, isn’t very helpful. Or is it? Answers like this may point to a member of the team who isn’t convinced about the product or marketing (which is a big deal in a small team), or they could be highlighting a weakness in the regulatory framework that effectively excludes start-ups so there’s a risk the new product won’t have a fair chance with tenders in its chosen market (which is a very big deal in any team), or something else entirely. Who knows until you bring it into the open?

I’ve used versions of the questions many times since, and king-for-a-day often provides the liveliest and most productive debate. Time spent exposing issues and deciding actions is always good time in my book.

I’m sure the mother on my street wasn’t interested in the strategic concerns of a nebulous product team, but her question served the same exposing and deciding purpose as king-for-a-day; cutting to the chase, what’s next?

The prince in my street hollered his answer, “I WANT A GREAT BIG SPANNER.”

Four years old maybe, but this little fella has things to do, and he knows what he needs to get it done.

What about you?

Neatly filed under Innovating, Managing
Tags: consultants, meetings, vision

Every manager has to deal with uncomfortable situations from time to time.

From giving constructive feedback to letting people go, difficult conversations are part of life.

If you’re not sitting down with a troublesome member of your team, and dealing with the stuff that’s so troubling, then you’re not managing — you’re ignoring/avoiding/ evading/bailing/hiding/running-away-from and not living up to your responsibilities.

Some of the most difficult conversations involve key players who aren’t living up to their responsibilities or your expectations; worse still if the problem is a fellow founder.

• Deal with problems early — don’t wait for a mythical right time. Give feedback (good and bad) as near to the source as possible. Immediate and direct is better than delayed and fudged.
• Use direct language — “you’re not pulling your weight” isn’t very helpful; “I’m really frustrated that each new feature takes much longer than your original estimate,” is.
• Write it down — the more difficult the conversation or the more likely you are to chew over your words, the better it is to use notes. I make sure I can stay on track by looking at my crib sheet and saying “Let me make sure we’ve dealt with everything. Oh yes, …”

No amount of experience or preparation ever makes these situations easy, but leadership means entering the discomfort and dealing with the issue.

One final point — don’t tell them how difficult it is to say this stuff. You may think it helps to get them on your side. It doesn’t. If it’s hard for you to say, it’s even harder to hear – so stop thinking about yourself and try to empathise; this conversation is not about you.

Neatly filed under Leading, Managing
Tags: meetings, responsibility, values

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
Tags: budgets, finance, meetings, motivation, planning

I came across Taylor Davidson’s How to Fail post through John Wilken’s Our Start Up Story blog. Imitating John I’m going to add my tuppence to three of Taylor’s topics: Meet to discuss, Build prototypes, mock-ups and samples, and Focus on the long-term.

Meet to discuss

I have previous on this topic, having written here on effective meetings and ten ways to ruin a perfectly good one. We’re all experts on how to ruin meetings on a practical level but one of the biggest man-hour traps of all is a meeting-as-talking-shop. As Taylor says,

If you need meetings to “get everyone on the same page” then you have bigger problems the meeting will probably not address.

So many companies have meeting cultures with managers running between days scheduled back-to-back. Almost everyone could benefit from fewer meetings. I’ve found the best way to break a meeting-as-update culture is to force managers our of their offices to perch on the edge of someone’s desk, finding out how things are going, what roadblocks they’re having to deal with, and offering support and connections. Fifteen minutes of this can save man-days of meeting time.

All of my best manager/managed relationships (in either direction) have involved this style of management-by-arse-on-desk.

Meetings, when you have them, should really only be held for one reason – to make decisions. I confess to a secret secondary objective of team-bulding. Teams get built faster when they’re active (discussion with the purpose of making a decision) rather than passive (pretending to listen to John’s update when really worrying my own update that I’m about to give or have just given).

Meetings are certainly not to stroke anyone’s ego. Don’t go to meetings just because you have an opinion, are flattered to be asked, or just to be busy. Don’t call meetings to find out about things (go sit on desks). Don’t invite people simply so they won’t be offended.

If it’s your meeting, ask who you really need in order to make the decision? Invite them. Discuss with a purpose. Make the decision. Move on.

Build prototypes, mock-ups and samples

The thinking goes like this; don’t build the whole thing, but build something that looks like the whole thing, so we can see if the whole thing (kinda) works. It seems to make sense. But as Taylor points out,

“Nothing saps the spirit more than creating mockups and designs without making progress toward a completed product. Most often the product cannot be created exactly as it is designed, and thus it is important to learn through working on the product itself, not the design.”

Having wasted far too much time and money over the years on mock-ups, I have an idealistic two stage process in mind whenever I start something.

First, boil the idea down so you can explain it with one graphic and two sentences.

Second, when everyone gets it, build the simplest version that people will appreciate enough to get a definable benefit from, and iterate.

This is the launch early, launch often philosophy – which doesn’t mean launch buggy code, or a boat that leaks, or a pacemaker that can’t stand walking past a speaker magnet. Launch a simple version that works brilliantly, and then improve it every day.

Focus on the long term

This is probably the hardest one for a planner like me to do something about, and the one I struggle to overcome every day. I love change, I see “a rich landscape of opportunities” and my job has always involved working out how to get there. Vision is great, but what to do today? I’ve developed a system that seems to work for me called GOYA management.

Get Off Your Arse. (The name at least was inspired by my old hero Frederick Herzberg’s famous Harvard Business Review article which debunks KITA management, and everything else on the way). GOYA is what I tell myself to do after I’ve worked out what I want to achieve, how I propose to achieve it and what I won’t be able to do because I’m doing the other stuff (which all fits into my personal planning joy). So then I tell myself “GOYA and do it.” The planner in me prints out special note pages with sections headings. My inner manager lifts my chair and puts me to work.

So that’s my homage to Taylor Davidson’s How to Fail. Make sure you take a look at the original, what are your lessons learned?

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Neatly filed under Focus, Managing
Tags: fail, GOYA, lessons learned, meetings, prototypes