Be Different or be dead

October 5, 2015

Why great salespeople are amazing because they really don’t sell

Source: Unsplash

Why great salespeople are amazing because they really don’t sell.

Seriously.

Selling is generally what pisses people off!!

The sales person descends on the unsuspecting customer, plummeting them with noise and pressure to buy what they are flogging.

Most sales people exist in the moment; driven to achieve short term product unit sales and revenue targets.

This scene gets repeated over and over with the customer either getting beaten into buying or running for cover.

The role of sales must change to meet the challenges of new markets and changing customer values.

The new customer wants someone to trust in business (in a time where the reputation of organizations is generally declining).

They want good experiences.

They want their problems solved; their life enhanced.

Satisfying wants and desires can’t be done by ‘in your face’ selling.

It can only be achieved by serving.

Sales needs to change, and quickly.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 10.5.15 at 06:45 am by Roy Osing
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September 28, 2015

How unwanted waste in your business can be removed

Source: Unsplash

How unwanted waste in your business can be removed.

If your new strategy development process does not deal with the CRAP you need to eliminate, it will surely fail.

Strategy is just as much about what you’re NOT going to do as it is about what you are going to do, but less attention is paid to the CRAP elimination activity.

CRAP is the enemy of progress. It’s the stuff that may have been a priority at one point, but is now no longer relevant to achieving our strategic goals.

If it isn’t expunged from your organization the ‘old’ will continue to have a significant role and the ‘new’ will be hampered. The major source of bandwidth for taking on new activities is the time currently being spent on thinks that really don’t matter.

CRAP will keep you stuck and prevent you from moving forward.

How to eliminate the CRAP?

▪️ Assign a Cut the CRAP Champion to be responsible for inventorying ALL projects and activities going on in your organization;

▪️ From this inventory, create a KEEP category. Make it short. Bear down on the projects to make sure each one of them is 100% aligned with your new direction;

▪️ Create a CUT category. Make it long. Gather all questionable projects. These will be the eventual source of bandwidth for new activity;

▪️ For each CUT project, note the person who is currently working on it. — the project prime. At the end of the day, people will have to be re-assigned to the ‘new’;

▪️ Have a CRAP critical assessment meeting. Involve the senior team responsible for the execution of your new strategy. Trot each CUT Project Prime into the room and have them explain in detail how their project relates 100% to the new strategy. Side benefit: you will see how well they really understand your new strategy;

▪️ Decide which CUT projects will be terminated and the resource savings that will result;

▪️ Develop a resource re-assignment plan. Be prepared to exit people who either don’t have the skills to take on a KEEP project or who don’t want to support your new direction;

▪️ Communicate the results of your work. KEEP Projects and CUT Projects and why certain projects were terminated. A great opportunity to talk about your new strategy. Involve the team accountable for executing your new course.

CUT projects have momentum. They need to give way for the keepers.

Tough work. Critical to your success. Get on it today!

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 9.28.15 at 05:27 am by Roy Osing
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September 21, 2015

How your business can grow the fast and easy way

How your business can grow the fast and easy way.

As a business you are generally limited in terms of resources; cash reserves can get depleted, customers can dwindle in numbers and growth in your business is difficult to achieve — in fact in the COVID world, survival is your prime objective.

Here’s a quick way you can get your business back on the growth path.

Set the context for growth by a quick review of your business strategy — Survival and growth should be a function of what overall direction you want to follow based on your basic business.

Take a moment to review the plan that has worked for you in the past; decide if you want to stay your course or if deviating from it is necessary given the new circumstances you face. It’s ok to make a change; your survival is at stake. And you just may find a new opportunity for your business in the post-pandemic era.

Dumb it down — Keep your approach simple; quick and easy sales is your objective with as little risk and investment as possible. Figure it out on the back of an envelope; it doesn’t have to be fancy just fast.
What demand seems to be there at this moment and how can you morph your basic business to take advantage of it? What assets for you have that can be used for a different purpose?

Some organizations with unused warehouse space launched manufacturing of personal protective equipment when things went sideways. Can you do a similar approach?
Decide how much revenue you need — Calculate how much revenue you need over what timeframe to turn the corner. Have a specific growth target and make it about top line revenue.

Even though the intent is to keep it simple and move fast, it’s important that you know approximately how many sales (and at what price points) you need so you can track your short term performance. You need to know if you’re making progress or not.

Declare your objective and be ok with not knowing how specifically to achieve it. Use ‘I don’t know’ to drive creativity and get your juices flowing.

Be short sighted — Look at short term performance; you don’t really have the luxury of looking far out into the future. Normally I would be recommending a planning horizon of not more than 24 months, however as I’m writing this piece three months into the COVID-19 era I’m now of the opinion that small businesses — no, all businesses — should be looking at what they need to do over the next 24 hours to achieve survival grade performance.

The shorter the planning period the more you have to execute to survive

Be clear on who you need to target — In the midst of chaos it’s really easy to start running all over and chasing opportunities. I’m not saying this is necessarily bad as long as it’s focused on customers you know have the potential to generate the sales you need to keep on breathing.

The easiest growth is achieved from the customers who buy from you repeatedly and often.
You should know who they are when they phone in an order or order something online; if you don’t, start capturing customer information ASAP so you can do everything possible to encourage them to return.

Organic growth is best achieved through the loyal customers you currently serve. Focus on THEM. Trust that with the right value proposition they will do more business with you and tell their friends and family.
Forget about trying to get new customers. If you happen to get some from word-of-mouth that’s ok but don’t try to be proactive. It’s time consuming, risky and takes your eyes off serving your existing base extremely well.

Think ‘fast-and-easy’ — An effective way to choose customers to target is what I call the fast-and-easy method.

It means choosing customers that:

Can be sold quickly — Customers you can get to fast with your current selling methods. If you have to build new sales channels, it will consume energy and precious time that you can ill afford without generating additional revenue.

In addition, as I’ve said elsewhere, it is critical to focus your efforts on the things that matter; those activities that you believe have a good chance at helping to grow your business.

Stick with what you know. Bear down on what you’re good at. Concentrate on customers you know. Ask yourself ‘Is this consistent with fast-and-easy?’ when considering chasing new stuff.

Are ‘close to home’ — In a geographic sense, explore the territory immediately around you before trying to exploit distant ones. If you have a good online presence, stay with the market focus you have.
Exploring new virtual or physical markets — probably with the need to establish new sales channels— can gobble up your time with questionable short term results.

Penetrate and dominate your current markets before you wander afar. This is an area where I’ve seen small business leaders fall flat on their face. They spot something new to do that is interesting and at least theoretically is a good idea and they decide to chase it, reducing the energy that is applied to fast-and-easy activities. They lose on both accounts: the new stuff doesn’t materialize and the current stuff suffers.

The fast-and-easy approach: get sales fast and don’t spend much time to get them.

Don’t need much selling — Where closing a sale can occur relatively quickly and revenue realized soon thereafter. An opportunity requiring a 12-month sales cycle won’t be terribly productive when you are in the survival mode.
Work with clients who will give you revenue tomorrow if you want to hit your sales targets.

And avoid customers who ask for proposals. Responding to the request and waiting for a decision will gobble up precious time you don’t have. The formal sales process is a time consumer; focus on people who are willing to deal you their business based on trust and past success with you.                         

Can give you quality referrals — Again, a short planning period requires closing as many high value deals as possible which generally means getting to deal closure without a lengthy sales preamble. High quality referrals should mean that your brand comes recommended and you can get to the solution presentation quickly.

Just do a few things — It’s critical to focus on doing the right one or two things that will kick in with sales; trying to do too much won’t work. You don’t have the resources or working cycles to pull it off. The secret is to pick a few critical objectives that you believe will give you an 80% chance of hitting your sales needs.

Avoid brainstorming as the way of setting priorities; if an action cannot be directly aligned with generating revenue from your loyal customer base, don’t chase it!

Stop! — It goes without saying that you can’t keep doing stuff that was part of your ‘yesterday’ unless you are absolutely confident it will make the survival sales you need.
Every time you’re tempted to do a comfortable ‘yesterday’ activity, stop and ask yourself whether it is necessary to meet your 24-hour sales goals.
You can’t afford to do unproductive things when you’re fighting for your life.

Yesterday’s relevance is today’s irrelevance.

Know where you are — Measure progress regularly to know if you are on track to hit your survival sales objectives or not. COVID has changed the meaning of time in this regard; you have to know literally every day where you stand. It’s the only way you will know if you have to change your plans on the run.
Pandemic notwithstanding, it takes discipline to grow your business; it doesn’t happen by serendipity.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 9.21.15 at 04:54 am by Roy Osing
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September 7, 2015

How a small business can easily create a winning business plan

Source: Pexels

How a small business can easily create a winning business plan.

If you own or operate a small business, how much time do you spend developing your business strategy? If you’re like most small business owners, not much.
Every small business leader is busy working IN their business; they don’t necessarily spend enough time working ON their business.

I often hear “I don’t have time to plan, I’m too busy running my business”, or “Everything is so unpredictable these days I don’t see the point.” They are consumed by day-to-day priorities and crises and have little time and energy left to develop a strategy for their business.

In addition, developing a strategic plan is often viewed as an expensive, complicated and time consuming activity that is an interruption to the “normal” flow of business.

The truth is that every business needs a strategy; otherwise progress can’t be measured and success never achieved.

Building your strategy doesn’t have to be a complicated time consuming exercise; I have developed an approach that results in having your strategy in not more than three days, and you can begin executing it on the fourth.

To not have a plan is to aimlessly bump and grind along, accepting whatever performance you can deliver.

My strategic game plan — SGP — makes it easy for you to plot your future. It can be created in less than 2 days with your small business leadership team in an informal and fun setting.

It’s called a ‘game plan’ because the focus is to build a just about right direction that can be executed rather than waste time trying to create the perfect plan which looks good on paper but no more.

My process is based on discovering the answers to 3 questions; the answers define the strategy.

#1. Growth — HOW BIG do you want to be?

Do you want $1 million in revenue within 24 months or do you want to be more aggressive and go for $5 million?

Most planning processes end with financial results. They calculate the growth results of executing the strategic direction chosen.

My process starts with your growth intentions, and builds the strategy from HOW BIG you want to be. The reason is simple: more aggressive growth goals require a more aggressive — and risky — strategy, and more moderate growth goals need a more incremental — and less risky — strategy.

The traditional planning approach forgets that there is an extremely tight relationship between revenue growth and strategic intent; my strategic game plan doesn’t and that’s what makes my approach DiFFERENT than others.

#2. Customers — WHO do you want to SERVE?

You have a goal to grow revenue 25% annually over the next 36 months. The next question is where are you going to get it? Where are you going to invest your scarce resources of time and money?

You have a choice here; customers are not all created equal and you need to focus on those who have the potential of satisfying your growth goals and that leverage the core competencies of your business.

It boils down to selecting a group of customers who collectively have the potential to generate the revenue you have decided to go after.

To get the right answer to this question requires an intimate understanding of the various customers you serve. You can’t choose the customer group to generate the revenue you covet if you don’t understand the propensity of your various customer segments to buy from you — discover their secrets and success will follow.

#3. Competitors — HOW will you compete and WIN?

It would be nice if you were the only provider of products and services to the customer group you’ve chosen, but that’s not likely to be the case. There is likely to be healthy aggressive competitors targeting the same customers you want to target, so the challenge you face is to determine how you will differentiate your organization from all others you will be competing with.

Why should people choose your organization when they have other choices available? What makes your team special in view of the alternatives available?

If you can’t give your chosen customers relevant, compelling and unique reasons why they should buy from you and not your competitors then unfortunately you have no other option but to compete by offering lower prices than everyone else, which is rarely a viable long term strategy for a small business with limited economies of scale and scope.

HOW to WIN is intended to explore the competencies of your organization that you can exploit to gain a sustainable competitive advantage over others who compete with you for the customers you’ve chosen to serve — the WHO.

My method is to create the ONLY statement that defines precisely what you and only you provide the customers you are targeting.

SGP soundbite — The final step in my process is to integrate the answers to all three questions as the high level summary of the strategic intent you’ve chosen.

“We will (HOW BIG) by focusing our scarce resources on (WHO to SERVE). We will compete by (HOW to WIN).”

Here’s an example:

“We will grow sales revenue by 25% over the next 36 months by serving the needs of four seasons vacationers in Washington State. We will compete and win by being the only organization creating personalized experience packages that incorporate the many activities that Whistler has to offer.”

The traditional business planning process has its limitations for small business. It generally requires more time than the small business leader has to devote to the task, and it costs more than most small businesses are prepared to pay.

3 questions; 3 answers that will define an effective strategy for your small business because it recognizes the special challenges that small businesses face.

Give it a try.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 9.7.15 at 05:05 am by Roy Osing
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