Be Different or be dead

February 24, 2020

6 simple ways ‘CRAP’ can be cut from your organization

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6 simple ways ‘CRAP’ can be cut from your organization.

The world is a noisy and cluttered place to live; so many choices and so many people exercising them.

Resources available are scarce and limited but demand continues to grow.

How can organizations — and governments for that matter — achieve their growth objectives with limits on the available time and money necessary to achieve them? And in some cases, not just holding the line on resources but reducing their availability?

Obviously productivity gains will offset the need to add some resources.
If the organization can realize a 10% increase in productivity, and growth requires a 5% increase in operations expenses, growth goals can be more than achieved assuming the targeted productivity savings are realized and are allocated to growth projects — spending productivity gains elsewhere is a waste and results in added costs being necessary.

But there are limits on how much should be mined out of expenses from productivity to fund growth.

Doing things more efficiently has its limits and it’s trade offs

Changing operational processes to drive cost out can impact customer service.
Costs of a re-engineered process might decrease but customers could be dissatisfied with the resulting way they have to engage with the organization — it’s less customer friendly.

And they express their dissatisfaction by buying less or by moving to another supplier.

Outsourcing call centers to remote regions of the world, for example, may reduce costs but could also reduce customer loyalty due to the new experience that customers have to endure.

And of course when productivity benefits are calculated, the opportunity costs associated with impaired service and lost revenue are rarely part of the analysis.

In my experience, the bigger play is not to focus on how to do things right — seek more efficiency — but rather to do the right things — be more effective.

Effectiveness is achieved when the right set of new programs is selected and is flawlessly executed to achieve the long term strategic intent of the organization.

Effectiveness is not just deciding on the new things you need to do

A huge part of effectiveness is not what additional to take on, but what you decide to give up — the current activities in motion you decide to stop.

It’s forced obsolescence — productivity applied on a macro scale (large projects or blocks of activity) as opposed to eliminating smaller pieces of the operations (a call center or product fulfillment process).

Forced obsolescence — cut the CRAP — is consciously eliminating yesterday’s relevance for tomorrow’s necessity.

Examples of forced obsolescence initiatives could include marketing programs established in the past to enhance a product line that are no longer in the crosshairs of the strategy. Or a planned HR system built to support acquiring skills and competencies that are no longer considered essential.

This is my step-by-step process to force obsolescence out.

1. Assign a senior champion

Appoint a respected and trusted senior person with a high tolerance for ‘pain’ and whose compensation is based on how much savings is actually realized by the cut the crap activity.

Avoid the mistake that most organizations make by assigning a mid level manager to the task. This communicates that forcing obsolescence out isn’t really all that important and like many other corporate programs, “it too shall pass”.

2. Take inventory

Inventory all current initiatives in the organization. It’s important that the list be complete in order to capture all of the activity consuming resources. I suggest that you set an annual expense threshold — say, $100K — and identify only activity that exceeds this amount.

The point is to isolate activity that consumes a material amount of resources and a threshold criteria is a meaningful way of doing it.

>3. Create a ‘keep’ list

Create a list of those initiatives that should remain because they all directly support the organization’s strategy.
Make keep list short, as there is a tendency to try and justify everything that is currently going on as vital to the future of the company.

This, of course, is hogwash and is merely an attempt for people to protect their position in the organization. If you end up with 100 major initiatives on the list, walk away. You are wasting your time.

4. Create a ‘cut’ list

Create a list of yesterday’s work that is no longer needed because it is not relevant to the strategy the organization has chosen.
Make the cut list long; make it tough to keep doing activities of yesterday.

As a guideline, you should have at least 3 cut activities for every keep activity; on a threshold of $100K that means you are cutting $300K in expenses for every $100K you keep — a 3:1 payback; not a bad place to start.

5. Finalize keep and cut lists

With both lists in hand, the senior leader must present and get input on both lists throughout the organization to get as much buy-in as possible.

Forced obsolescence will never get 100% support so don’t bother fretting over it. This is a challenging step as no one wants to give up what they’re doing. They have too much emotional equity in what they’re busy with.

So debate and listen then make the call on what needs to stay and what needs to go.

6. Prepare the CRAP execution plan

Develop a 6 month action plan to execute the cut list initiatives. Include firming up the annual savings and the organizational units that will realize them.

THE key step — close the loop by reducing their operating expense budgets and place savings in a special account that can be used to fund new initiatives.

This fund should be available to anyone responsible for introducing a new strategic program that is a priority.

And beware of those who possess the CRAP.

These ‘custodians of the past’ are people who are comfortable handling past activities; they enjoy them and they don’t want to change.

They are managers of irrelevance and are critical to the CRAP elimination process. If they are permitted to continue to do their thing they will infect others in your organization and prevent them from taking on the new direction.

Identify these folks and manage them: either reassign them or, if they are unwilling to move to the future, exit them with dignity from your organization.

Cut the CRAP will save the world. If we don’t expunge today’s unproductive and wasteful activity, we won’t have the resources to take on the new initiatives necessary to advance organizations and societies.

Taken to its ultimate conclusion, the obsolete will rob the world of growth and limit our possibilities.

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

• Posted 2.24.20 at 06:33 am by Roy Osing
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February 10, 2020

3 proven ways to make an easy and affordable business plan

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3 proven ways to make an easy and affordable business plan.

If you can answer 3 questions, your business plan will beat all others.

Unfortunately, many organizations don’t develop a strategy to guide them into an unpredictable future; they rationalize the current planning process to be too complicated, time consuming and expensive.

And they’re right.

Numerous people gather in a room for a strategic planning session. Subject matter experts descend of the group and try to impress everyone with their detailed knowledge of the many governing factors that need consideration in the strategy building process, and many days are consumed — in my experience wasted — to get the strategy perfect.

Normally the services of a third party firm are used to both facilitate the session and provide expert content to the plan direction and efficacy. This is a clever way of avoiding having the people responsible for the strategy’s success taking ownership of the direction taken by applying their own opinions and good judgement.

The planning team is presented with material, they ask questions about various aspects of it and in the end most of the time they agree with the results of the analysis and direction proposed.

But at the end of the day, the traditional planning process takes so much time and energy, there is insufficient time left to develop how the plan will be executed in the trenches by real people. And the planning team is left with a strategy that may make sense on paper, but can’t be executed effectively because there was insufficient time devoted to implementation.

Get insanely focused on execution

Given that eventually any strategy or plan must result in action, the best planning process is predicated on the premise: keep it simple, get to the gut issues quickly and ACT.

Minimize the strategy direction setting time; maximize the implementation action planning time.

Loosen up on strategy development; tighten up on execution.

The strategy-building process I developed was necessary because although the field of experts who could help me develop a theoretically pristine direction was wide and deep, the number who actually could help in plan execution was close to zero.

The process I developed was simple, fast and time efficient. And unlike its brethren, it used the knowledge and experience of the planning team members rather than going with a third party planning expert — added benefit was the team building that went on during the process.

My process — the strategic game plan — was based on discovering the answers to 3 questions; the answers defined the strategy.

Growth — HOW BIG do you want to be?

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.

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.

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.

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?
HOW will you compete is intended to explore the competencies of your organization that you can exploit to gain competitive advantage, with emphasis on how you can be positioned in the customer group you’ve chosen as the ONLY one that does what you do.

By answering these 3 questions using the expertise of those in the room you will have your business plan quickly (less than 3 days) and inexpensively (a personalized experience for your team). And it will be owned by every person who has contributed to it which means execution will follow.

if you want your business plan to be easy and affordable, this is the way to do it.

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

• Posted 2.10.20 at 02:06 am by Roy Osing
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January 27, 2020

Why salespeople don’t like talking to you if you’re not buying

Why salespeople don’t like talking to you if you’re not buying.

How often do you get the feeling that once the salesperson you are dealing with finally gets that you’re not interested in buying from them, they abruptly start to close down the conversation and usher you to the door?

It’s like “Now that I see that you’re not going to but anything from me, I’m not prepared to invest anymore time in you.”

This type of salesperson is looking for the easy sale and when they sense it’s not coming they want to dump you and move on to their next target.

Effective and honest sales is NOT about the quick and easy sale that can be scaled.

These quick hitters spend their time designing their sales process to minimize the amount of face-time they have with a potential client and maximize the number of pitches they make during the day to yield as many sales as they can.

And some sales organizations add an additional component to the sales process — “the closer”. This is the dude or dudette that enters the client meeting when it’s obvious the client resists buying.

The closer’s role is to harden the interaction even further and push for the sale. The logic is simple: if the client isn’t buying from the first salesperson, maybe, with more push and a different person they will soften up and buy.

This “get ‘em in — get ‘em out” pressure process gives the sales profession a bad name. It’s the stereotypical hard sell approach devoid of any meaningful human interaction with the potential client.

The salesperson in this scenario cares little about the person and more about the product.

It’s about leadership

This is not a sales issue per se, it’s a leadership one. The reason the sales process is based on speed and superficiality and not quality is because leadership actually believes that it’s the only way to meet sales and revenue objectives.

And they prioritize getting sales over anything else, including building long lasting relationships that will not only spawn a regular flow of sales, it will also create a referral network that will increase sales beyond expectations.

It’s hard to believe in the sales world today, replete with experts pronouncing how critical it is to focus on building intimacy with clients that the impersonal hard sales process is still practiced by many if not most organizations.

Either the pundits have it wrong — and they don’t — or leaders don’t trust that people will hand over their money if they are treated to an amazing experience with one of their sales professionals.

I think leadership is so focussed on showing good performance in the short term that they simply cannot risk investing resources to build long term health.

They say the priority is to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty but their actions belie their intent. I mean how can you even promulgate a relationship building strategy when sales compensation is driven by how many dollars they generate today?

Also, what’s the response if customer feedback is extremely negative; that people absolutely hate the sales approach used?

My experience so far is that your views are politely listened to and abruptly ignored; organizations generally are not interested in forsaking a immediacy in favour of a longer term horizon.

What’s the solution? Will a person continue to be subjected to the pusher and the closer who are only interested in you saying “yes”?

I suspect so, because I don’t believe leadership has the jam to make the change.

If you’re in sales I ask that you push back if you are being asked to push or close products. Take a stand for the people you engage everyday to buy from you, and push for a sales process that is sensitive and responsive to the needs of the client.

And if you’re a potential buyer, go somewhere else where sales actually likes humans.

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

• Posted 1.27.20 at 04:42 am by Roy Osing
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January 20, 2020

How a service mistake can turn into to a colossal service delight

Source: Pexels

How a service mistake can turn into to a colossal service delight.

An astonishing source of customer amazement — and customer loyalty — is how service breakdowns are handled.

Typically service breakdowns include such things as a broken promise made to a customer, a product or service that doesn’t work the way the manual says it should, billing mistakes or service repairs that need to be redone because they weren’t completed right the first time.

The solution to these missteps is called service recovery and it’s formula is simple:

Service recovery = fix the screw-up and do the unexpected.

Let’s face it when you screw a customer over, they expect you to fix it. But they’re not particularly blown away when you correct your error; they don’t say ‘WOW I can’t believe you actually remedied what you screwed up!’

This is where most companies fall short. They actually believe that by merely fixing their mistake the customer will be satisfied and their obligations will have been fulfilled.

The rule of recovery: fix the mistake fast and then blow the customer away by surprising them with something they don’t expect.

If your goal is merely to satisfy a customer, you may be content with having a fix it capability that is incredibly efficient. But if you want to create the ability to consistently build customer loyalty and earn their lifelong trust you need to go further.

You need to move from a positive response to ‘Were you satisfied with what we did to fix our service screw up?’ to ‘Did we blow you away with what we did to recover from our mistake?’

The surprise factor

If you choose the path of wanting to delight your customers and create memorable service experiences for them, you need to understand that the source of of an amazing experience is doing what the customer doesn’t expect.

The challenge, therefore is to discover exactly what that little bit extra is and for them to do it in a way that makes their eyes bulge out with amazement.

And the key is that the surprise act must be relevant to the customer. Providing something extra for the customer that doesn’t resonate with their needs, wants and desires will leave them scratching their head.

And it’s not about coming up with a boilerplate trash-and-trinket program that provides the same bland response to every customer — you’re wasting your money.
The surprise must have personal meaning to the customer otherwise it will be ineffective — in fact could make matters worse!

The surprise must also be extremely compelling to the customer; it must be a high priority with them if you want to impress them.
This is the emotional component of recovery. A compelling act will stir the emotions and make the customer believe you actually care about them.

Customer secrets and speed

The successful surprise requires that you need to understand what makes the person screwed over tick; what turns them on and what action on your part would most likely trigger an emphatic emotional response. You need to know their secrets — reread the ‘How to build an amazing marketing machine’.

You can be relevant and compelling in your recovery act, but if you take a week to get it done, forget it. Your investment will be worthless.
Studies have found that you have about 24 hours to get it done; after that, the ability to capitalize on the screwup and build stronger customer loyalty goes down the tube.

If you make a mistake and recover in a dazzling way, the customer is more loyal to the organization than they were prior to the screw up.

If recovery is such a critical element in building customer loyalty, why are there very few organizations that have a recovery service strategy? I suspect it’s because no one likes to admit that they will have a service OOPS! from time to time; they pride themselves on trying to get it right the first time.

But if you know that mistakes will happen from time to time — and they will — and that there is tremendous strategic value in recovering well — and there is — why wouldn’t you have a plan on the actions to take when the event happens?

In my past role as Business Services VP with a major telecommunications company, one of the elements of our service strategy was: ‘If we fail, Recovery will be our #1 priority’.

We had a specific recovery plan that, for each customer segment, provided the range of recovery actions that could be considered to respond to an OOPS! and the level of recovery investment necessary given the value customers represented to the company — the higher the value, the more robust the recovery actions requiring greater investments.

And substantial training was given to all employees to ensure they understood the power of the strategy and what to do when a screwup occurred.

5 key takeaways

▪️Recovery = fix it and do the unexpected.
▪️Do something personal; make it relevant and compelling.
▪️Know your customers’ secrets.
▪️Execute the recovery process in less than 24 hours.
▪️Build a detailed recovery strategy.

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

• Posted 1.20.20 at 12:29 am by Roy Osing
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