Aug 8, 2014 | Management, Small business
clickconnect.com.au
Most SME’s I see are run by a single person, without the benefit of any sort of advisory board beyond those with whom he/she has dinner sometimes, when they get the time.
The hats they wear make Josephs coat look bland.
CEO, CMO, CTO, COO, CFO, CSO,…. The list goes on, up to and including CCO (chief cleaning officer), CBW, (chief bottle washer) and CSK (chief shit kicker)
These multiple roles have always challenged small business leaders, their primary resource beyond domain capability has always been time, and that is non renewable. Recently the explosion of the time and expertise necessary to have a chance at competing effectively in the face of commoditising and transparent markets, aggressive competitive activity, increasing customer scale in B2B, and marketing automation, has multiplied the size of the marketing hat enormously.
Where does the time come from?
Two places:
Focus and discipline.
- Focus on customers, and a niche where you can be significant. The old adage of big fish in little pools rather than the opposite hold truer than ever.
- Discipline to build a plan, assemble the resources to execute, then to execute with the agility necessary to respond instantly to new information, changes in the market, customer preferences, or whatever it may be, but not to be distracted from the broad objectives of the plan. The second part of discipline is to measure progress, not just against the plan, but more importantly, towards the objectives of the plan, the better to understand the next step.
Most SME’s I see have bits of both, not enough of either, so they are like empty drink cans bobbing around in a rough sea, unless they can keep upright, and plug the hole, eventually they sink.
Need some thoughts on how to identify and plug the holes?
Call me.
Aug 7, 2014 | Branding, Customers
I just had another of those really, really annoying phone calls from a call centre, and being a marketer, I cringed with shame and frustration.
After I answered, it took probably 5 seconds for the person on the other end to answer me (memo call centre managers: this is just crapppola!!)
He was probably a nice young man, just trying to make a living in difficult circumstances in, well, it was not Australia, so his first language was not English, it may not have been his second either, so it was challenging understanding him.
He had a script, yes, scripts are a necessary tool, but do not easily allow the flexibility to cope with anything other than an utterly “vanilla” conversation, and those would be as rare as a cat in a doghouse. He clearly was under instructions not to vary from the script, but to respond to anything other than my script predicted comments with “yes, thank you Mr Roberts” and then, back to the script without a pause.
At least he got the name right.
I could go on, but the point is, why would somebody trying to sell me something waste their money so comprehensively?
The possibility that this young man was going to actually engage me in any way with his product let alone extract any money from me, are about as good as my chances of playing Roger Federer in next years Wimbledon final.
Why would any marketer actually pay for this desecration of their brand?
Are they really that stupid?
Unfortunately, the answer must be yes, at least in some cases.
By the way, the product was Funeral insurance, a hard sell in the best circumstances, impossible if you treat the potential customer with contempt.
Aug 6, 2014 | Governance, Management, Marketing
www.strategyaudit.com.au
Developing metrics to measure the impact and ROI of marketing is becoming a game of choice around competent boardroom tables. Given the level of marketing engagement around many of those tables, it seems sensible for marketers to take the initiative.
Following are seven headline parameters that make some sense and can be further broken up to match the enterprise specific strategies that should be in place. Measure yourself on a five point scale.
- Do you have a clear, 360 degree understanding of the behaviors, mindset, product category usage and limitations of your primary customers?
- Do you create, launch and measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns with the deep involvement of data intelligence tools
- Do you” listen” for customers behavior and respond in real time?
- Are you engaged in all stages of the customers product usage life-cycle, from first consideration of the potential benefits to the assessment of operational performance?
- Can you optimise marketing investment across all channels and activity types?
- Are all the KPI’s across the business aligned to the desired market outcomes?
- Is the boardroom “on board” with all the above. (bad pun, sorry)
If you score less than 30, you need to do some work. One of the easiest ways to keep track of progress is a simple spider graph. Making the assessments a normal part of your marketing audit processes, recording progress in a simple way, then evaluating the performance and capability gaps that emerge will make you a more competitively effective enterprise.
Aug 5, 2014 | Branding, Collaboration, Marketing, Strategy
www.strategyaudit.com.au
Design is often used as a noun, “I will do a design for you” is common. However, when you think about it, design is not just a thing, an end product, it is a process of moving from an idea, through iterations, to a final form.
It is a verb.
“To design” should be a verb to be valued. Steve Jobs knew that, and executed on it, and as a result Apple became for a while, the most valuable corporation in the world, starting from the position of basket case.
“Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works” Steve Jobs.
The “how it works” phrase implies not just that the product itself works in ways that deliver great value, but that the way it works is in sync with the mind of the customer.
Need to better define how your customers mind works?
Chances are the experience of the StrategyAudit team can help.
Aug 3, 2014 | Customers, Innovation
http://steveblank.com/2014/07/30/driving-corporate-innovation-design-thinking-customer-development/
Steve Blank is one of the real thinkers in the innovation space who gets out there into the weeds and gets stuff done.
The illustration at the top of this post is one from a recent post on his blog that makes the very real point that everything should start with the customer, not the product, inventors vision, financial potential, or any of the other usual drivers of activity.
So often we forget this simple truth.
The Lean startup and business model canvas methodology are fantastic ways to articulate your business, but without a customer you do not have one.
Design thinking is all about starting with the customer in mind, using the tools that are there to discover ways to add value to them in some way, and as a result, make a return on the way through.
It matters little if you are a micro business on the corner or a massive multinational, the principals are the same:
Be agile
Focus on the customer
Solve problems
Iterate
Encourage the dissenters
Leverage the wisdom of the crowd
Encourage chaos, and build the processes to distil and manage it
Differentiate
Design thinking is really hard, challenging work, but nowhere near as hard as design doing.
