Revenue generation, and a sales metaphor
Some informal research I completed recently amongst businesses in my "patch" turned up a surprising result. One the questions I asked was "what is the most important job in your business? The surprise was that so few respondents nominated "sales" at all, let alone in...
Death of an “Iconic” brand
This is the first post of the new year, so it seemed appropriate to hop on a hobby-horse, the indiscriminate use of the word "iconic", in all sorts of situations. My beef today is specific to the food industry. The call to receivers to sort out "Rosella" has created a...
Where has the value of Christmas gone?
Yesterday in the midst of a sizeable gathering, one person was moaning about the rip-off represented by Christmas hampers, specifically one she had received the previous day. "Full of stuff I could have bought and probably cost half as much, what a wank"...
Digital strategy irony
Like most newspaper groups, Fairfax has failed to evolve to accommodate the depredations of the digital revolution. Their business model is broken, and the way forward is unclear. The one spot of light in a gloomy future was the NZ auction site "Trade Me" which...
3 simple Powerpoint tips for Christmas
Everybody, well almost everybody, uses Powerpoint. Some use it well, many use it poorly, and some are just appalling. We have all sat through that presentation by somebody we thought had something to say, and they said it all on packed, almost illegible slides, which...
Seeing the real cause of a problem
How often do we get sidetracked by several possible causes of an adverse or unexpected outcome? In the course of doing a fair bit of process improvement work over the years, one of the really successful strategies I have used is to get people to distinguish between...
You can’t test everything
Web based A/B testing goes a long way towards eliminating dumb mistakes, making the best choice, creating a discipline around innovative activity, and encouraging change, and has been made far easier in a whole range of areas by the data collection capabilities of the...
An Apple supply chain pivot?
Tim Cook, the Apple CEO has just come out and announced that Apple will restart manufacturing in the US, starting with an unnamed Mac computer model, some time in the near future. The driver of "offshoring" to sources of cheap labour to escape the high manufacturing...
Flawed sales funnel metaphor
We are all pretty familiar with the typical sales funnel, wide at the beginning, narrowing progressively as you get closer to the "business end". It is a simple, descriptive metaphor for other than an impulse or regular consumer purchase, but like most models, rarely...
Rule of 3
There are three types of activity in any business, from the small one man service operators to BHP. Doing all the things that generate revenue, today, tomorrow, and into the future, Doing the necessary things that support the generation of revenue, All the other crap...