Sep 17, 2012 | Management, Marketing, Sales
The web has disrupted the sales process, as well as just about everything else in our world.
Just think about differences between how the process works now, and how it used to work.
It now starts with a web search by a prospective buyer, after a team has identified the opportunity, scoped it, and developed specifications that need to be met, usually well before a salesman even knows that the prospect is in the market. The specs are then sent to a range of potential suppliers with a “request for quote” or some such phrase which really means give us your best price.
This all used to be the function of the sales person, to shake the trees, identify prospects, qualify and develop them through to a sale and ongoing supply relationship.
No longer.
Now it is the function of marketing to digitally “shake the trees” for prospects, then find ways to use the communication and marketing tools of the web to engage and qualify them, before turning them over to sales at the point at which they are about to become customers.
Many enterprises I see have not made the internal structural and cultural changes that acknowledge this disruption, and are failing to extract the maximum productivity out of their communicationand sales investments as a result.
Sep 14, 2012 | Branding, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
The shape of Apple after Steve Jobs has been a source of much scribbling, and the launch on Friday of the newest version of its golden goose, the iPhone 5 has given us a peek.
The razzamatazz has been huge, Apple all over, but they delivered what the pundits view as a pretty limp offering. Nothing new, apart from a different case, and behind current offerings from Samsung and HTC on a number of parameters.
However, what Apple does deliver that nobody can get close to is profits. On $150 billion forecast revenues this year, Apple is delivering an astounding 28% EBIT, double a year ago, and considerably more on phones according to Creative Strategies Tim Bajarin. All this as their sales in a market growing at 42% are increasing at only 27%.
Apple has its own ecosystem, so to some extent is protected from commodity type comparisons that erode price, but how much of a premium can they sustain, and for how long? Googles Android operating system now has around four times the share of Apple, from “even-stevens” just a year ago, and Google spends 14% of revenue on R&D, to Apples 2%. In dollar terms, they are about the same, and Apple has less of a product portfolio to manage, but the tide of initiative is now with Google, and the momentum is really hard to break.
It seems to me that Apple is mortgaging their future, putting the dough in the bank, much as Microsoft did in its halcyon days, and not continuing the drive that got them where they are today. In a sharp reminder of priorities, Apple is spending big on protecting its current position by suing everyone standing in the tech space, which must be a huge distraction from the disruptive innovations created almost yesterday that put them where they are now.
Sep 13, 2012 | Communication, Customers, Marketing, Small business, Social Media
In a chook-house, there are both chickens and eggs, all mixed up, and hard to tell which chicken laid which eggs. It is a bit like the web, full of sites that could belong to any number of businesses.
As a part of a project a while ago looked at the sites of a range of operators competing in the market category in which this particular client operates. Most spruiked the features of their products and brands, what they did, rather than talking about the benefits that usage delivered, what problem the product solved, and why that solution was superior.
Why is it that the designers of sites seem to think that the most important thing to be said is what their product does, rather than designing the site to offer information that relates to the reasons why a customer may be seeking a product?
The old habits of printing a brochure and shoving it into every letterbox in reach die hard, and are being replicated on the web. A real pity, when the real opportunity is to target the offer to the individual who is attracted to look at the detail of your proposition because it engages them with something they want to know
Sep 12, 2012 | Change, Management
We have access to huge amounts of data, “Big Data” in current parlance, but wading through it all, and finding the few insights that will make a difference is a task our fathers really did not have, it is the tail side of the coin, the head being the value of the insights, and definition of opportunity that can be extracted.
What we think about the huge amount of data available is a bit conflicted, we understand we need it all to be competitive, but the task of aligning organisations to extract and leverage the potential in the data is a real challenge, one that often our organisations are not up to.
“Competing on Analytics” is one of the emerging bank of literature that highlights the challenges and opportunities of not just crunching the numbers, but using them to win.
William (W.) Edwards Deeming, father of the continuous improvement revolution, had a wonderful saying ‘In god we trust, all others bring data”. It says most of it, but just does not address the challenge of gaining insight from the tsunami of data being produced by the digital revolution, something he did not have to take into account.
Sep 11, 2012 | Management, Small business
The two “F’s” of life scare us all, Failure, and caused by the fear of failure; Finishing.
Because we do not want to fail, most of us avoid finishing. We procrastinate, take on “busy-work” or “easy-work” to avoid the necessity to finish the important things, and risk the failure that goes with it.
The net has given us a host on new reasons not to finish things, all those emails, the face-book and Linked-in contacts that need attention, and now even twitter takes on importance in the fight against finishing.
We all need to get “un-busy” finish stuff, get it out the door, risk that failure, then get on and potentially fail again, before we can really finish something that makes a difference.
