Be Different or be dead

May 2, 2016

7 proven ways to make floundering business planning successful

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I have been the “victim” of traditional business planning methods for years.

“Strategic Planning 101” sessions are not fun; more often than not they are painful to sit through as participants are dragged through a pedantic process which can be extremely boring.

It is time consuming. Literally hour and hours of effort are consumed by preparation, in-session presentations from subject matter experts and debate over the most critical SWOT’s.

ISSUE #1 - current planning emphasis is on creating “perfect” strategic direction; how to execute it plays a minor, sometimes non-existent, role.

The process masks itself as a precise science in a world of uncertainty, randomness, unpredictability and imprecision. There is an infatuation with applying the tool set of strategic planning with the belief that the more analysis you do, the more perfect your plan becomes.

Paralysis by analysis is often the result and more valuable time is consumed.

Helium-filled goals attracts much of the attention in terms of what is desired in the long term. The conversation includes this language: “market leader”, “world class”, “number 1” and “pre-eminent supplier”.

Direction setting occupies at least 80% of the time in an attempt to get it “perfect”. It is tight on strategy but loose on execution.

HOW the strategy will be executed in the marketplace gets little attention. It assumes that execution naturally follows the declaration of the new strategic direction strategy. REALLY? When has that ever happened?

Rather than seeing evidence of active use, “meticulously ironed” planning documents sit proudly on managers’ shelves gathering dust.

ISSUE #2 - there is no practical tool set to determine how an organization can truly separate itself from their competition.

Traditional strategy building is ineffective in producing a true competitive advantage claim to separate an organization from “the herd”; to stand-out and be different in a remarkable way that their customers care about.

The process doesn’t highlight the need to do so nor does it provide practical tools. Traditional marketing concepts like product and market leadership, first mover advantage and technology innovation are relied on accomplish this purpose but are ineffective in clearly defining how one company is different than another.

My approach to business planning — I call it my strategic game planning process — process addresses these inadequacies of traditional planning.

It has execution as its primary focus and it provides a practical and proven tool to create effective competitive differentiation.

It’s called a strategic game plan because the objective is to SCORE! The football analogy is quite apt; move the ball towards your opponent’s goal anyway in a series of moves you can successfully execute and get it across the goal line.

The process of moving down field doesn’t have to be elegant. Exploit whatever opportunities the defence gives you and just get the ball in the end zone. It really doesn’t matter if you score with a “Hail Mary” pass or a series of 10 running plays.

7 building blocks of the strategic game plan:

1. Answer 3 questions and you have your game plan — declare your growth goals; choose the customers you intend to serve; determine how you intend to win.

2. Get your plan just about right — rebalance your planning efforts; loosen up on strategy and tighten up on execution.

3. Plan on the run — your game plan is never complete. Start executing; learn what works and doesn’t; adjust as you go.

4. Focus. Focus. Focus — choose a handful of critical objectives to achieve that have the potential to deliver 75-80% Of your game plan. Don’t try to “boil the ocean” and go after too much. Your efforts will be diluted and your progress blocked.

5. Cut the Crap — eliminate the projects and activities that cannot be directly related to your game plan. Crap consumes precious bandwidth you need to do new things. Hanging on to irrelevant tasks will put pressure to add resources that you don’t need and can’t afford.

6. Create your ONLY Statement — cut through the clutter of vague competitive claims out there and declare what you and ONLY you provide that is compelling and relevant to the customers you have chosen to serve.

7. Review your progress at least every 3 months. Keep execution alive and in everyone’s face as the new business as usual.

Out with the traditional business planning process; in with the strategic game plan as the business plan model for the new market realities.

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

• Posted 5.2.16 at 05:24 am by Roy Osing
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April 4, 2016

6 simple ways to make sure your startup doesn’t fail

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6 simple ways to make sure your startup doesn’t fail.

Got an idea you think can make you lots of money? Good. Chalk one up to you for coming up an innovative thought.

But the real challenge you have is to figure out how to monetize it. If you can’t get people to buy it, your idea is wasted.

Here are 6 steps to take to increase the chances of your start-up succeeding.

▪️Define, in precise terms, how your new business idea is different than your competition.

Ultimate success will be determined by staking a unique claim in the market. If your idea is the same as, or similar to something already out there, it will be invisible and will be ignored. It won’t attract attention and no one will buy.

▪️Identify the potential customers for your idea.

Winning is all about targeting your idea to very specific groups of people and giving them a reason to buy from you. It’s not about flogging your idea to the masses and hoping it will stick to some of them. If you can’t define your potential customers, STOP.

▪️Recruit people who have a strong marketing and customer service background.

Ultimately, the success of your idea will depend on go-to-market effectiveness. Better have people on board who have experience in serving customers and providing value-based solutions to people. Technology and finance expertise are needed as well, but in a supportive role. People responsible for customers must be your anchor.

▪️Test your idea with potential customers.

It’s not about how excited you and your friends are about your idea,  it’s about what your potential customers think. Get them in a room and present your idea. Ask them to evaluate it. Does your idea excite them?Let them play with it. Do they think it satisfies what they crave they have?
Do they think it’s different than other products out there? Would they buy it? At what price? Would they likely tell their fiends about it?

▪️Define the unique value created by your new product or service.

Flogging product features is not a sustainable approach. Discover how you are satisfying a want or desire that your potential customers have. This will form the basis of your marketing efforts and your pitch to potential investors.

▪️Avoid thinking that technology will sell itself.

People don’t buy technology, they buy the benefits technology creates for them. Happiness. Joy. Pleasure. A solution to a problem.

The odds are stacked against a start-up surviving; these 6 steps will help to thwart the grim reaper.

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

• Posted 4.4.16 at 03:41 am by Roy Osing
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January 31, 2016

Why marketing to the crowd really sucks

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Why marketing to the crowd really sucks.

Marketing to the crowd sucks; it has no future.

‘ME’ marketing will destroy traditional marketing; it’s all about the individual not the crowd.

Brilliant marketers get that ‘ME’ segments generate higher returns than market segments produced by traditional marketing.

The four bases of commonly prescribed market segmentation are demographics, psychographics, behavior and location (‘geographics’) and the marketing process is to develop programs targeted at potential customers with similar traits within a particular segment.

Segmentation studies are based on observations of population behavior;  the characteristics of the masses (represented by the ‘average’ person in the population) determine the conclusions of the study.

Why are these four segments used as the prescription for marketing segmentation? Because this type of data on people is readily available to the marketer.

Census data provides demographic and location information, billing and web visitor tracking systems produce product usage information and standard market research studies ask for lifestyle preferences which people are generally ok with providing.

For a marketing program, individuals are ‘mapped’ into each of these segments and are assumed to be like everyone else in their segment in terms of their likelihood to be attracted to a particular marketing program targeted to the segment.

The marketer’s assumption is that each person in the segment ‘looks the same’ in terms of the segmentation variable chosen and because of this similarity will all exhibit the same buying propensity.

Source: Unsplash

I’ve always found this assumption to be a non-starter. Just because I’m a skier does not in any way suggest that other skiers would be interested in buying the same products as I do.
And just because I’m in the boomer demographic with a specific income in no way is a good predictor of what others with similar characteristics will be interested in buying. 

In this approach, an ‘average’ target for a service might be ‘a male boomer with an annual income of between $60 - $100K who lives in Vancouver and who has an annual ski pass at Whistler’.

And the flaw is that there may actually be some people who do have the targets attributes and who would be interested in what is being offered, but there will also be many with these attributes who won’t be interested and who will not be interested in the offer.

Traditional segmentation produces hits and misses and the marketer hopes there are more of the former. But you can’t count on it. 

There are two serious issues with traditional segmentation methodology; its underlying assumptions are flawed.

First, having segmentation variables prescribed with the simplifying assumption that people tend to make purchase decisions on the basis of their demographics and so on, is fallacious; people express their differences with their own buying triggers which can’t be prescribed up front.

And second, assuming that people who exhibit the same segment characteristics will make similar buying decisions is simply not true; there are many sub-clusters within any given segment that have their own buying motivations quite apart from those in the overall segment.

‘ME segmentation’ is different from the commonly-used methodology, and should be adopted by a marketing organization that wants to stand out and perform above their peers.
ME segmentation poses the research question to an individual person not the population.

ME segmentation is strategic

It is considered as a strategic exercise which asks the question “How should the market be segmented to expose as many opportunities as I can?” not how do I assign my customer base into the prescribed segments.

The prescribed segmentation variables such as demographics, location, usage and lifestyle are not automatically used; they are given mild attention only: the focus is on determining the appropriate variable that will unlock the growth key for the organization.

The objective is not to place people in the prescribed segments, but to discover the appropriate segmentation elements that will produce the best sales result.

For example, if a specific web application best appeals to a Gen-Z individual with an IOS device, lives in Tsawwassen BC, is a member of a family of 4, and has a household provider who is female, then this is the appropriate segmentation to use.

Source: Unsplash

ME focuses on differences

Traditional segmentation seeks to define small numbers of customer groups that share similar characteristics, and these characteristics are broad and general in nature.
People who are over 65 years old who have right-of-centre political beliefs, women who live on the west coast who are pro abortion are examples of the segments that are produced by the traditional approach.

ME segmentation, on the other hand, is a process driven by the intent to find differences in customer clusters in order to expose as many customer clusters as possible.

Opportunities come from the differences between people NOT similarities among them.

And greater the number of segments that are defined, the more intelligence you have on each person in the cluster AND the better the ability to match a product, service or experience to their specific individual need.

The ME end game is on ‘the many’

As stated above, ME segmentation tries to define as many different customer clusters as possible in order to get closer to the individual with the belief that if you have a tight fit with an individual person, you have a better chance of selling them something than if the person’s desires are watered down by a larger group.

The probability of making a sale increases due to the fact that you are better able to match your offering with the more precise needs. wants and desires of the individuals in each cluster.

Person-research will yield many conclusions; one for each person you talk to.

And each conclusion will be valid unlike conclusions from population research which will be valid for some individuals (who just happen to be exactly identical to the population profile) and invalid for others (whose special unique characteristics don’t match the population profile.)

Better to have 100 different conclusions from 100 individual people rather than 1 conclusion based on the “average” person in a population of 100.

Sear hung for ME never ends

ME segmentation is a continuous process of going deeper and deeper into a cluster of customers. Obtaining more and more information on the individuals in the cluster.

The marketer needs to keep looking for differences until they are nose-to-nose with an individual because that’s when total understanding of people’s desires is achieved.

If there were one million customers, the result of the ME process would be one million segments of 1.

What are the implications of a million clusters of 1?

▪️you would be different as few undertake the journey;

▪️you would have more rich and deep knowledge on your customers than your competitors have;

▪️your sales potential would increase exponentially;

▪️you would build both share of market and customer share;

▪️customer loyalty would increase because you are better able to match your solutions to their needs and wants;

▪️you would be better able to survive unpredictable ’body blows’ you might suffer in an ever changing world because you are so tight with your customers.

All because you choose to put in place a marketing philosophy to treat segmentation as a continuous strategic learning down to the individual.

Keep segmenting your market until you are nose-to-nose with a person.

Source: Unsplash

The role of the ME marketer

Within the ME context of segmenting markets down to ‘the nose’ of an individual and examining their needs and wants rather than treating markets as homogeneous groups, the ME marketer’s role is different than what marketers have done in the past.

The ME marketer:

— Is driven by individual people have to say, not by what is implied by large markets or populations, and puts the individual before the average needs of the crowd;

— Is ok with the possibility of creating a unique marketing plan and product or service solution for an individual;

— Drives IT to ‘mass-personalized’ serving systems capable of uniqueness delivered to thousands of customers;

— Reserves Customer Appreciation Day events for specific customers who have demonstrated their loyalty to the company for many years;

— Looks to the power of new technology to define the needs of individuals and to use the secrets discovered to create personalized solutions and not to flog their current product portfolio;

— Uses every tactic available to build long term relationships with people rather than flog products at them with a focus on making short term sales. They see AI as a way to create new experiences for people and not a productivity tool;

— Is a strong advocate for the customer inside their organization, ‘doing battle’ for them to protect their interests in their own bureaucracy;

— Does whatever it takes to try and eliminate any dumb rules in their organization that infuriate customers and threaten their loyalty.

Mass marketers are the dying breed of the profession, and it starts with the practice of segmentation.

Segmenting down to ‘the nose of a person’ enables a deep understanding of what people want and desire, and exposes opportunities to not only enhance marketing productivity but also to create sustaining long term value for the organization.

ME markets are superior to crowds.

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

• Posted 1.31.16 at 04:29 pm by Roy Osing
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December 7, 2015

4 simple ways to stand out and easily beat your competitors

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4 simple ways to stand out and easily beat your competitors.

NEVER has it been more important to get out of the herd and carve out a distinctive and unique place for your organization in the market than it is today.

The economy is unpredictable.

Competition is intense as new competitors are entering the market at a blistering rate.

New technology disrupts organizations relentlessly.

Markets are cluttered with sameness; products and services are undifferentiated and competitive claims are lost in the crowd.

Customers are more empowered than ever before, establishing relationships with suppliers that deliver distinctive solutions and ignoring those that don’t.

Which organizations are successful and survive this challenging business environment, and what separates them from the others that struggle, hang on and eventually fail?

Those that are able to win this battle are different from their competitors. They survive the scrutiny of the discriminating customer by providing relevant, compelling and unmatched value.

Those that have no distinctive identity simply don’t make it.

They die.

How can organizations stand-out from the herd and easily beat their competition?

Business plan — It starts with reinventing how strategy is developed. The emphasis is shifted from strategic direction to execution. Many plans look good on paper but can’t be executed. They are theoretically pristine but worthless as they fall short of delivering results.

The strategic business game plan is designed for execution and is created by answering 3 questions:

1. HOW BIG do you want to be? - growth goals;
2. WHO do you want to SERVE - target customers to achieve growth;
3. HOW do you intend to compete and WIN - the value proposition that gives the WHO reasons to buy ONLY from you. Being the best of the best is ignored; being the ONLY ones that do what you do is coveted.

Marketing — Marketing is focused on creating experiences rather than flogging products. Investing in current loyal fans is given priority over providing special promotions and deals to acquire new customers.

Mass markets are ignored in favour of concentrating on the individual and discovering their secrets that will unlock economic value.

Marketing to ’ME’ gains momentum.

Customers are looked at holistically; experiential packages are designed for each of them to satisfy their broad life desires. Creating happiness is the marketer’s end game.

Customer Service — Customer service the way it has been traditionally practiced is out; SERVING customers is in with the end game to dazzle the customer and take their breath away. Internal rules and policies are re-vectored to make customer engagement a friendly process.

The customer is brought in to the organization to get their fingerprints on how they want to be treated.

Leadership —  Leadership is practised by serving around is the new culture. “How can I help you?” are the words leaving leaders’ lips not “Do this.”

To Stand-out from the Herd you need to provide VALUE that people CARE about and that is UNIQUE. Failure to deliver and you’ll be IgNORED, InVISIBLE, CoMMON and DeAD (sooner or later).

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

• Posted 12.7.15 at 04:02 am by Roy Osing
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