Net promoter score interpreted.
Most of the best ideas are simple, as is the Net promoter Score (NPS) the brainchild of Bain & Co executive Fred Reichheld. As it gained currency, its simplicity became blurred by unnecessarily imposed complexity, often added it seems, just to make a consulting...
Your customers are in the jungle
Social media is a jungle, full of vegetation that limits the view, poisionous flowers that look beautiful at first glance, small areas of bright sunlight that somehow finds its way through the foliage, nasty surprises of many types, and gems that can change your life....
Selling is a conversation
I wandered into a car dealer a while ago, largely killing some time, but I do need a new car, sometime soon, so I was tyre kicking with a rough agenda. One of the salesmen saw me get out of my old Pajero, and instead of sliding up with the typical opener, "got a few...
The “semantics” of marketing
People are always looking for answers in their lives, whilst mostly not being in a position to frame the question sufficiently to enable a search as specific as one on Google. It is a factor in our lives that contributes to the context in which we live where we go,...
Sales is the core function
Without sales, all the rest of the stuff that goes on in an enterprise is irrelevant. All the lofty strategies, policies, and well intentioned platitudes are dependent on the delivery of sales for their oxygen. As a senior manager in a large enterprise, I used to...
Australian Collaborative Gold
Management lessons abound in the great win by Australia's K4 crew in London. Co-ordination maximises the effect of input. For 1000 meters, the crew was absolutely co-ordinated, any minor deviation by any individual would have had a profound impact on the performance...
3 fixes for Marketing overhead dead-weight
The decades of growth up till a couple of years ago, and the recognition of the key nature of a robust marketing input to corporate success has left many organisations, particularly brand heavy consumer organisations with a marketing overhead problem as times change....
Innovation anti-bodies
Just as we manufacture antibodies in our blood to combat infection, so do enterprises construct antibodies in their cultures to combat risk, change, and therefore innovation. This antibody construction normally happens by default, after all, why change things that...
No Deviance without deviates
Being different is the guts of innovation, no matter how good, how big (or small) how effective, how cheap, if it is not different, none of the rest will matter a whit. Why is it then, that we have processes and disciplines that weed out the deviances from the norm?...
Negotiation anchoring.
An old mate of mine has only one rule of negotiation "he who mentions price first, loses" Whilst there are other things that contribute to a successful outcome, he is right about the price. Once an expectation of price has been mentioned, it becomes the point from...