The road to “free”
The path to free will be a major challeneg for the current century, as the price of stuff follows the marginal cost of producing it down to virtually free. Music is effectively free off the web, despite the best efforts of the music industry, yet the other parts of...
A brand or a “narrative”
Politicians on both sides of Australian politics are calling for a "narrative" to describe the values that the electorate should hold dear, particularly advocating a set of values that happen to be consistent with theirs, and their particular brand of politics. What...
Road to the top.
In a world of disruptive change, the perhaps usual path to the CEO's office needs to be rethought. Over the last 50 years, CEO's have largely come from accounting and business management backgrounds, more latterly, marketing & strategy have had their shot, but in...
Have we forgotten how to communicate in writing?.
Yesterday I received a number of communications, by various means that broke all the accepted rules of grammar, spelling, and what an old fogey like me considers common courtesy, and it got me thinking. Email, phone text, and now twitter and its ilk have had an...
The facts and the stories.
Remember your history teachers, one who just had you remembering the dates of events, hard work remembering, and why bother anyway, but what about the one who told you about the people, and engaged you with the stories around the dates and events? It became easy to...
Measuring the quality of a sales lead.
Generating and qualifying leads is a key function that rarely receives the attention it deserve, and is rarely measured for effectiveness other than looking at sales results. Like any process, if it can be measured against performance standards, improvements can be...
Category management and demand chains.
Demand chains are a representation of the drivers of "flow" through a supply chain, a concept familiar to those engaged in "lean" initiatives, when the motivator to the flow is demand rather than an ability to produce for inventory or against a forecast of sales....
The 3 questions of successful selling B2B.
It is pretty obvious, although not always acted on that you should define the problem before you spend time trying to sell a solution. There are many techniques to getting to the point where the sale can be made, libraries have been written, but in my experience, 3...
The hardest bit
Yesterday, I wrote about the process jig-saw that supports an implemented ERP system as it works to drive efficiency, but deliberately left out the hardest bit. The most challenging changes necessary to make an ERP implementation deliver the value promised are the...
Sales & Operational Planning processes summarised
Talking to a client last week about his S&OP processes, (or lack of them despite the software) I realised that we were both using English, but were talking a different language. This is often a challenge in S&OP implementations, and even amongst those who have...