Australia Day 2019

Australia Day 2019

Jan 25, 2019 | Leadership, Personal Rant

Comes around quickly doesn’t it!

Tomorrow!

2018 was a pretty ordinary year, with the revelations of the Financial Services Royal commission after the government was dragged screaming to the table, sandpaper making its (public) debut in test cricket, utter chaos and turmoil at all levels of Australian politics, house prices in Sydney taking a dump, and my previously resilient 92 year old mother being verbally bashed and left babbling by some scammer bastard on the phone demanding money.

2019 should be better, after all we are Australians.

Sometimes I do not know what that means any more.

As I look forward, I am filled with cynical anxiety at what is becoming of the Australia of my childhood, now long gone.

We can look forward to being molested by politicians and aspiring politicians over the next 3 months, desperately applying layers of lipstick to whatever pig turns up  that day in an effort to  buy our votes. The prevailing sentiment seems to be ‘to hell with them all’ as it relates to the major parties, but then you have the loonies, amongst a few gems turning up as independent options. I suspect a few will find themselves elected, then have to check where Canberra is located.  So much for the intelligent, long term and visionary policy planning we so desperately need in a whole range of areas affecting our daily lives, and those of our children and in my case, grandchildren.

On top of the politicians, we have the usual suspects bleating about the date. ‘Jan 26, Invasion Day’ seems to be the core issue. It is perfectly reasonable that a number of the descendants of the indigenous people  of the late 1700’s feel aggrieved, but let’s be serious, it was 220 years ago, and even if we pull it forward 150 years to capture the appalling, by our current standards, treatment of  indigenous people up until recently, it is still in the past.  The argument about Australia Day does not have to be a binary one. It is the day everything changed, for better or worse, let’s just get on with continuing to build resilient communities and a caring, successful, inclusive nation.

We all wait with baited breath for the announcement of the Australian of the year. Last years AOTY Professor Michelle Simmons was inspired. How she got through the selection processes that strongly favours male sports stars who have not yet featured in the popular press for bad behaviour is beyond me. Perhaps a sign of maturity in the selection panel? Hopefully that level of maturity prevails again this year, and we honour someone who has made a real contribution, rather than just being well known.

Have a great day tomorrow, enjoy the barbie a few beers and your friends and family, but also give some consideration to what you want this country to look like, and how you can make a contribution.

Happy Australia Day!

Header cartoon is from the ‘First dog on the moon’ series in the Guardian. Rarely politically correct, always biting!

The 1,700th blog post: What I have learnt about writing!

The 1,700th blog post: What I have learnt about writing!

Jan 23, 2019 | Uncategorized

 

This is the 1700th post on the StrategyAudit site , and nobody is more surprised at the longevity of the effort than me. The first post was in March 2009, almost a decade ago.

I am not a writer, at least I used not to be, but now I am not so sure.

Over the course of the decade taken to reach this benchmark, I have learned a lot about the process of writing constantly, beyond what  I have learned from the process of formulating the ideas and organising them in a manner that is publishable.

This blog started as a marketing tool for StrategyAudit, but has become much more, and writing it delivered a number of lessons, mostly unexpected. 

 

Curiosity.

Formulating and ordering my thoughts and views on the topics I cover, then having to ensure they make sense, at least to me, has made me very curious. As a result, everything becomes research.

 Notes are assets.

I now make notes of all sorts of things I stumble across. Ideas, references, half-baked ideas that might become posts, information that may be of use somewhere. There are all kept in One note recorded into one of the 25 odd categories I have. This is an ever expanding resource from which I take all sorts of bits and pieces, and sometimes make  something new happen. There are thousands now in the file, and it constitutes a substantial bank of Intellectual Capital.

 Pencils are still valuable.

I still read with a pencil in my hand, and a highlighter not too far away. This serves to enable me to scribble in margins (of books, remember those) and highlight  bits worth referencing. Often these are then transferred into one note for further use later. There are thousands of tools out there, new fangled, digital things,  but for me, the simple act of writing something serves both the clarify the message and set it into some context in my brain, so I just might remember it when the time is right. (I also assume I forget some, but who knows)

 Revisit.

I cruise around my one note files on a regular basis, often looking for something I dimly recall, sometimes for an idea worth adding to something else I am writing, and sometimes just to refresh the memory. This cruising often sparks ideas as connections not seen before emerge.

 Assemble bits.

There are always a number of posts in production, with lots of notes, thoughts, and references, attached as well as drafts of what the final thing might look like. Some linger and evolve  for years before they get published, others get absorbed into other posts, while others are chucked when it becomes obvious there is no original idea in there, and I am just digging old ground.

 Raid a lot of banks.

Books are idea banks, the more you read, the greater the chance you will stumble across things that will be useful. I have always been a voracious reader, across a range of genres, and that has not changed, if anything,  become a bit more obsessive. It also pays to dump a book as soon as it demonstrates there is no value in it. Sometimes it hurts, I like to finish what I start, but where there is no prospect of a return on the investment in time, stop. The only caveat is that I do not throw them out, and therefore the prospect of moving at some point from the house where I have been  for over 30 years terrifies me.  

Marketing tool.

Finally, this blog has evolved as my primary marketing tool, which was the initial objective, but took a long time to evolve into anything meaningful. Overnight success after 10 years of effort.

The blog serves three vital additional functions:

Firstly, it is a repository of the ideas, views, checklists and tools I use in the consulting practice. This has become a critical function, and is not one I had anticipated at the beginning.

Secondly, it provides  a foundation of credibility to potential clients who may stumble across it, are referred to it, and to whom I send specific posts after a conversation of some sort. What I think about, how I approach marketing, strategic and enterprise improvement  assignments, and how I communicate can be easily seen by browsing a few posts.

Lastly, it offers thoughts, opinions, information, tools and insight based on my experience, and hopefully it is of value to some out there. When it is, I have added something to someone else, unknown, unpaid, but that knowledge of being able to help, is to me a an enormous reward.

 

Thanks for reading, commenting and sharing my musings, and I am enormously gratified that they are of value to an increasing number of people.

Have a great 2019, I know I will.

 

How to quantify your Customer Value Proposition

How to quantify your Customer Value Proposition

Jan 21, 2019 | Customers, Marketing, Sales

 

 

The value proposition to a customer is the means by which you converted them to being a customer.

Unless you can demonstrate value to them, in excess of any alternative, including doing nothing, you will not convert.

When you think about it, there are some pretty consistent variables that can  be massaged into some sort of quantification of a proposition. While it will never be perfect, it will be better than nothing when assessing the power of your marketing collateral, or perhaps assessing alternative wording.

Having a powerful value proposition is not enough, you must communicate it clearly and effectively to those who may be interested. You also must understand that ‘Value’ is a qualitative term, and will change with context and circumstances.

There are 7 variables I commonly see:

  • The strength of the purchase intent of the lead. This will vary enormously on a whole series of parameters, and will vary from time to time. For example, a need expressed to convert IT processes to the cloud from your own server might be a good idea, whose time has come, but when your server blows up, the need increases geometrically. The better you understand the drivers of the purchase intent the better able you will be to make a judgement,
  • How closely your proposition matches the need being expressed. When you are trying to sell a 4X4 and the lead is a single bloke who hates camping, you will have a challenge on your hands. Better to offer him the sports car.
  • Differentiation. When you are the only one in the market niche, selling to those who need your product becomes easier. When you are one of a number of undifferentiated alternatives, price becomes the major distinguishing factor, and that is never good. Conversion becomes a race to the bottom, and the greatest risk is that you win too often and go broke.
  • The clarity of the value proposition to the lead. This is where most fall down in the execution. Look at 100 websites, and see if you can locate the value proposition. While we are learning, the clarity of the proposition to a visitor to a website, which is now the first port of call in almost every purchase beyond the regular and mundane, will be terrible. The key to remember is that the lead, after reading the headline copy on the site, must be able to tell you why they should buy from you, and not someone else, assuming they are in the market you service.
  • The level of friction in the sales process. Increasingly as we go on line, friction in the process is becoming more and more important. Off line purchasers are increasingly expecting on line frictionless processes. In B2B sales, the friction is often institutional, the bureaucracy of procurement simply gets in the way. Effective Key Account Management is essential in these circumstances.
  • The incentives used to counter the friction. Most often financial incentives are the primary ones used, but tying them to another is common, for example ‘this special lasts only until Sunday’ or ‘Only 5 left’
  • Uncertainty caused by the purchase process. Human psychology seeks safety, and that resides in the known, and with the crowd. Asking a lead to do something different increases the risk to them, and the riskier they perceive the solution, the less likely they will be to convert.

So, to the equation.

Conversion potential = Purchase intent + need satisfaction + Differentiation + proposition clarity + (process friction – incentives) + uncertainty.

The way to put numbers on each of these parameters would be to weight each of the parameters in your particular circumstance, then score your lead on a 1-5 scale. The ‘w’ in the formula is the weight you give to each of the variables.

CP = wPI +wNS +wD + WPC + (wPF – wI) + U.

As an exercise, look at your own landing page and score it as a potential customer would when seeking a solution to an itch.

Image credit, again, to Gapingvoid.com

The ’90 day trick’ for success

The ’90 day trick’ for success

Jan 18, 2019 | Leadership, Operations, Small business

 

We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, but underestimate what we can do in a year. 

This is a well understood cognitive bias first articulated by Roy Amara, as it applied to tech development, but I have found it holds everywhere else.

90 days appears to be the intersection of the two.

It is short enough to create a bias to action, a sense of urgency, but long enough to make meaningful progress while accommodating the adaptations that appear along the road.

In my consulting, I encourage, indeed demand planning followed by execution of the plan. However, it is always challenging to have a 3 or 5 year plan aligned with the day to day activities, so I encourage what I call ‘nested’ plans.

A nested plan is one that has a longer term outcome agreed, then progressively broken down into annual, three month planning and performance assessment cycles, broken further into monthly and even weekly and daily plans, depending on the situation.

For example, a factory should be working on rolling daily plans, sales working on weekly plans. Performance measurement should follow the planning cycles, and be made absolutely transparent. For example, I encourage weekly rolling 13 week cash flow forecasts, which deliver the combination of urgency and perspective over the more usual financial reporting of monthly profit and loss.

It all comes down to determining what you are going to do today that will contribute to the outcome required, today, this week this month, this quarter and so on. 

Without a nested plan to which you commit, you will always tend to do the seemingly urgent but unimportant things rather than the important longer term things. These longer term activities are always more emotionally and intellectually challenging, which is why we put them off, find excuses, and generally procrastinate.

It is a fine circus act, this short term/longer term balance, one that is hard to maintain, requiring concentration, situational awareness, and finesse, but essential for success.

A note of caution to finish.

As essential as the planning being a part of normal activity, so should be the ongoing incorporation of feedback into the plans. A robust review and incorporation process is as important as the planning itself. No good ensuring you stick to the plan when it runs you off a cliff. 

 

 

To focus, ask the ‘Framing Question”

To focus, ask the ‘Framing Question”

Jan 16, 2019 | Management, Operations, Small business

 

One of my acquaintances is in a real muddle, and stressing out beyond the point of sensible.

His business is circling the drain hole, and he is drowning in things that he thinks he needs to do, and things that his various service providers, suppliers and customers have told him he must do, now, or sink.

Problem is, they are all different, and all come from the perspective of the person offering the advice.

Over a beer, during the Christmas break he observed I had been the only person he knew who played in this space, and had not offered a ‘perfect solution’ to his problems, so he asked my opinion.

I do not have all the details of his situation, so have no solid base from which to offer a view, but suggested he ask himself what I call ‘The Framing Question’

‘What is the one thing I can do, such that by doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary’

Answering this question will lead logically to several others, such as ‘How’,  which leads onto a set of steps, which begins to sound like a plan!

You can have a plan that is really long term, which often resembles a dream until you put specific milestones and performance measures in place, and work towards it progressively. Exactly the same thing can be said about the tasks that confront you on a daily basis.

Making sure that the daily tasks build towards the longer term one is simply a cascade of the daily answers building over time. The daily answers will vary, the longer term answer should not.

In my acquaintances case, the answer was ‘Cash’

He is now working on executing a plan we developed on the back of a coaster that manages his cash better, and will generate more of it.

The plan was for 90 days, which was all he had left if nothing changed, with targets and tasks, and he now has a cascade of monthly, weekly  and daily priorities that he and his staff will work on before anything else. 

What is the one thing I can do…..?

A simple question, but clear and with no room for wriggling.