Nov 6, 2013 | Alliance management, Branding, Marketing, retail, Small business
The agricultural supply chain that has dominated the way we get our food has evolved as a fragmented, opaque series of transactions that occur to fill the gap between the producer and the consumer. Many of these transactions add no value to the consumer, rather, they serve to capture value for some link in the supply chain.
As they add no value, it is fair to ask “are they necessary”, and in many cases the answer will be “No”, in others it will be that whilst it may add no value, it is a necessary cost, like transport.
Were we to set out to re-engineer the supply chain with consumer value as the driving force, what would we change?
Well, a fair bit, much of it as a result of the communication and data transfer capabilities that have exploded in the last decade. There is now absolutely no reason a grower cannot see where his product goes, each transformational stage, every point at which it is moved, and the costs and margins involved.
Whilst there are sensitive commercial implications in all this, the technical capability is there, and using those capabilities to eliminate costs and margins that do not serve the consumer will increasingly become the focus of competitive activity and innovation.
Wool is the archetypal Australian commodity, and it is also representative of the worst of commodity “marketing” where each link in a very complicated operational chain is a set of strand-alone transactions. However, even in this conservative, institutionalised chain, there are rays of light, enterprises like WoolConnect that have evolved over a considerable period, to deliver a transparent, collaborative chain that has eliminated much of the cost that adds no consumer value, becoming far more productive in the process.
I am working with a small group of horticulture growers and specialist retailers in Sydney on a pilot, a transparent, demand driven chain that responds to consumers, not what growers have on the floor, or what wholesalers think they can squeeze a good margin out of, but real demand. It is a fascinating exercise, one that is hopefully successful and commercially scalable.
This will deliver tree ripened fruit to consumers the day after it has been picked, and similarly, veggies harvested this morning, on your plate tomorrow.
“Sydney Harvest” brand, get used to seeing it in your greengrocer.
Innovation in a horticulture supply chain, who would have thought??
Nov 4, 2013 | Customers, Marketing, Sales, Small business
cartoon courtesy Mark Anderson
Automation of the marketing and sales “funnel” has many productivity advantages, so long as the implementation of the software works, which is always harder than the smiling assurances of the automation salespeople would indicate.
However, there is one benefit that is largely ignored that can have a significant impact, irrespective of the software implementation: the classification of leads into categories that reflect the leads individual behavior and the expected sales strategy to be implemented.
The usual process to date, encouraged by the “Sales Funnel” has assumed that all prospects travel progressively down the funnel in a consistent homogeneous manner. Clearly, nothing could be further from the truth, every situation is different.
Following is a list of the categories I have used in the past to classify prospects. They can be managed simply in a spreadsheet, or elsewhere on a continuum that ends with extreme software intervention, but irrespective of the tool, the nail still looks the same.
- Newly identified prospects, with little information.
- Leads that have been “qualified” by marketing, but sales has rejected, or failed to move ahead.
- Leads that sales has qualified as “hot” and therefore become a priority, at least in the eyes of some sales people.
- Leads that are really just contacts not ready to progress towards a sale, but with whom you need to just maintain contact.
- Contacts that need some marketing input to turn into qualified leads
- Contacts that are really just “tyre-kickers”
- Leads you have lost contact with, but who may be “restarted”
- Finally, and perhaps most importantly, those who have for some reason or another dropped out of the funnel at some point, and who can be recycled back into the system.
Each of these is different, although there are grey areas between them, and each requires a tailored approach based on the history of the prospect, their role, purchase decision making power, and many other factors.
Before automation, there was little consideration of the real behavior of prospects, now, irrespective of automation, you need to be considering the sales funnel from the perspective of the “Funnellee”
Oct 30, 2013 | Change, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
Engaged in an innovation portfolio management assignment a while ago, we struggled to define why one project should continue to suck up resources in preference to many other seemingly worthy opportunities.
We tried all sorts of models, financial and strategic, and really faced the dilemma that all were driven by assumptions, the accuracy of which was only clear with hindsight.
Not much help there.
We set about distilling all the data, assumptions, models, and diagrams we had collected into something simple, something that reflected more than the assumed commercial and strategic value of the initiatives, something we could engage with. We came up with one word, and three questions.
Value.
Who would benefit from this initiative?
Why was it better than anything else?
Why should anyone care?
Suddenly the task became clearer.
The discounted cash flows, competitive positioning, portfolio diagrams, and potential for stock exchange announcements became less important, and what become far more important was the simple notion, which of the projects we were considering was doing something important, solving a problem, adding value to someone unavailable elsewhere.
We developed a set of metrics covering these three questions we called the “Value Gap”
The value gap analysis between options to invest in new stuff became the benchmark for prioritizing projects, and we found there were only a very few from what had previously been a significant portfolio that were worth our effort.
Oct 29, 2013 | Change, Management, Social Media
There have always been gatekeepers, those people who make the decisions about what you see, what you have the opportunity to buy, and weather or not you can participate.
The supermarket buyer determines what goes on the shelves, a faceless committee determines what constitutes the levels of “obscene” and therefore what is able to be published, and the bloke running the big dipper determines that no-one under 5 feet can take the ride. The examples go on.
The web is usually cited as the medium that has democratised information, made it available to all with a computer, and that is true, but it has also introduced a new form of gatekeeper: the algorithm.
Algorithms are simply instructions that determine what computers do with a piece of information, or set of instructions, they are the guts of everything we now do with computers.
Facebooks “Edgerank” determines what you see on your newsfeed based on an algorithm, Google uses algorithms to determine the order of responses to a search, sign up to a blog site, and an algorithm sends you a “thanks for joining” note of some sort, and it is the application of algorithms to the mass of so called Big Data that is enabling the extraction of individual behavioral information.
Don’t kid yourself, the gatekeepers are still there, and probably more influential than ever, just better hidden, so you better understand how they work.
Oct 28, 2013 | Alliance management, Communication, Management
A story on myself.
I am in the middle of a small project that requires considerable collaboration amongst people not used to collaborating. Always challenging.
In a conversation over the weekend with an old mate, wise in the ways of start-ups, he offered me a gentle shove by saying:
“Sometimes people spend huge amounts of time and energy getting their ducks in a row. Pity it does not really matter what they look like, it is what you do with the ducks that counts”.
Ouch.
What are you doing with your ducks?
