3 questions to drive sales focus.
It is usually easier to find more business with existing customers that it is to find new ones, or to devote the resources to reducing customer churn. Nevertheless, most enterprises overspend their limited resources seeking new customers at the expense of their...
Website hyperbole
It is amazing how many sites I visit claim least one of a few hyperbolic options: We have a "unique" solution, We are the "industry leader", We have an "innovative approach" We offer the "best value" These claims mean little, after all, there is only one industry...
Lean lessons from the pub
Last Friday night I was in a small local club with a client, co-incidentally as they had the weekly member "badge-draw" which had jackpotted to $19,000. As you can imagine the joint was packed, it took 20 minutes lining up just to get a beer. What struck me, apart...
The cadence of a presentation
Presentations of any type are a sales pitch, not always a product, perhaps a point of view, capability of an organisation, seeking engagement with an objective or vision, or an idea. Irrespective, the objective of selling cannot be met unless the audience is first...
The chicken & egg of groups
One of my consistent themes has been the power of a group to get stuff done, and the ways the web facilitates, and empowers the processes needed to get the stuff done by the group. However, which is the chicken, and which is the egg? There are no groups without...
The geometry of networks
It is pretty clear to most that the number of connections in a network grows more quickly than the number of people in the network. It is a mathematically consistent relationship captured by Metcalf's Law, but in summary, you double the size of a network, you...
Parliamentary performance measured.
On the "Insiders" show on Sunday, there was a review of the current Parliament, and how it had responded to the challenges of being 'hung". Notable was the interview of the Labor leader of the house, Anthony Albanese, and the clips of his review speech on the last...
15 uses of Twitter
I am indebted to Alan Rustbridger, editor of the Guardian newspaper whose recent Andrew Olle lecture articulated many of the challenges facing traditional media owners as the new social media destroys their business model. Among the gems in this lecture is a list of...
Measuring adjacencies
Innovation programs always throw up the word "adjacency" and it has lots of interpretations, depending on who is doing the talking. So here is my two bobs worth. Measure each of the following parameters on a 1-5 scale, (or 1-10 for a more nuanced outcome) 1 being the...
6 questions for a new product “reality check”
Most new products fail, and most of these failures are almost predictable, particularly in fast moving consumer markets, where the adage that "you need to be prepared to fail often to succeed sometimes" is regularly taken to irresponsible lengths. Following is a...