The Ideal Pipeline

Startups and big companies can both learn a great deal from one another about how to improve their sales cycles and pump up their pipeline.  Learning how to both assess deals and focus your time on the highest returns in your pipeline should be a primary concern for all sales leaders.  Can you drive more deals through your pipeline?  Yes, you can….

My very first job out of college was in sales.  We were a small group selling to a niche market and knew intuitively how to position the company and sell the products.  We didn’t have (or need) sales materials, pricing strategies or elaborate service-level agreements.  As the company grew (and my sales increased), however, we found that growing this tribal knowledge was difficult.  We were missing the basic tools and new people who joined the company lacked pricing standardization, marketing material, processes, etc.  In truth, our products were highly customizable and we simply made it all up as we went along.  Onboarding was difficult as was easily rolling out changes to pricing or positioning relative to competitors or new sales tools.  We needed standardized tools to arm our sales team with the information they needed to do their jobs effectively.  And we needed to be better at targeting the right opportunities.  We knew our customers, we were responsive and we delivered a great product, but, we had serious growing pains.  We lacked all the rules and processes that make big sales organizations successful.

I shouldn’t have been surprised then to find that when I returned to sales some ten years later not much had changed.  Here are some of the things I’ve learned since:

Get Better At Forecasting:

Many small companies have a culture that promotes rigorous prioritization.  This same approach should be applied to the sales pipeline. I do this now through regular pipeline reviews.

In order for a deal to be forecast in the current quarter, the sales team has to have done four things:

• Identified a champion on the customer team
• Identified a budget holder with money to spend
• Presented the customer with an ROI (return on investment) calculation of the benefit of using our product or service
• Determined if the customer is in an active review of choosing a supplier for what we offer

By having the salesperson walk me through each deal, I could often tell when he couldn’t defend having the deal be listed as an “A deal” (and thus have a high forecast percentage). When I got busy and only had time to review spreadsheets it was impossible for me to know which deals were “real.” The reason, I learned, is that many salespeople take meetings with customers who are willing to meet them and give all the right messages. But many of these people they’re meeting with are simply don’t have the influence and authority to finalize the sale and thus, aren’t qualified.

The Three Most Important Words in Sales:

Inexperienced sales people spend too much time with potential customers who are nice to them and talk a good game about being interested in their products but don’t have or own the budgets. I learned this the hard way. Either we’d have deals that seemed stuck (for example, they were in the “closing within three months” pipeline for nine months), or we’d have sales reps who constantly kept adding new deals and taking out the old “sure deals” that never closed.

The most experienced sales reps were the ones who knew the three most important things to do with a sales lead were to Qualify, Qualify, Qualify. Lead quality matters, because a sales rep’s most scarce resource is time, and no matter how much you want to sell your products, you can’t push them on a customer who isn’t ready to buy. They might have other initiatives, budget constraints or just need more time to evaluate your space. As the best sales leaders will tell you, “you have to align a company’s sales cycle with a prospect’s buying cycle.”

Increase the flow of your perfect pipeline.

Target the “A” deals:

After the sales rep walks through the deal, management has to step in and help with relationship building and communication. As the company grows, this task can be shared between a VP of Sales, VP Marketing and the CEO.  Part of this is standardizing the assignment of territories, industries and accounts, but part is focusing efforts on the most likely sales.

“A” deals — those that have a realistic shot of closing in the next three months — should get much of the sales person’s time (say 66-75 percent). “B” deals, forecast to close in 3–12 months, should get the remainder of sales reps’ time. Each sales rep needs to build their pipeline with these, and many bigger deals take time. However, the key to scaling is that “C” deals — deals that are unlikely to close within 12 months — get no time from sales. Marketing should own those.

Let Marketing nurture the C deals:

Marketing has two roles in managing pipelines. First, they need to fill the top end of the funnel with new “qualified” leads (e.g. converted from “suspects” to prospects). Second, they need to manage C deals. Today’s C deals are obviously tomorrows As and Bs.

So the best-run companies have Marketing running activities, such as the following, to nurture their C deals.

• Customer events. This is one of my favorite activities. It’s far easier to get potential customers interested in you when they hear actual customers talking about your products or services and how they are using them. Suspects and prospects are often in search of success stories from their peers to hear how they’re improving internal operations. So one of the smartest things we did was to host local and international summits in which we had our existing customers talk about how they were using our products and had our product management teams talking about future innovation and development. Customer events are a great way to market to your C deals to keep them informed and try to raise their interest levels

• Newsletters. One of the goals of newsletters is to keep your company and its offerings in the consciousness of your suspects or future buyers. C deals go in the newsletter bucket and should be identified as C-deal newsletter companies. The information you send them should be different from the newsletters you send to existing customers and should be targeted to what they do.  Focusing on innovation, case studies and new research all help legitimize your brand.

• PR. Some companies are excellent at PR, and others don’t put much effort into it at all. I think PR is an incredibly important activity for technology companies, but most companies aren’t very good at it.  The reason many companies don’t put enough effort into PR is that PR doesn’t have an immediate translation into sales. It’s mostly a “C deal” activity.

• Onsite Training – The constant influx of new technology, new methodologies and better business practices provide a wealth of data your customers want to know more about.  For the price of a few pizzas (Lunch and Learns) you can gain access to a large number of your target audience and hold their attention while you offer insight on your subject matter.  This simple activity builds bridges with many of the doers, while providing the opportunity to walk the halls and meet budget owners.

• Social Media- It goes without saying that social media is a corner stone of today’s marketing machine but it’s still often done poorly.  Brand building, customer interaction and emotional connection should all be taking place with each tweet and post.  Both product and service companies can do this with the right approach.  Make this an opportunity for your customers to see early iterations of your product.  Share some of the “design secrets” you’re promoting and look for every opportunity to engage.  Get your whole team involved.  If a restaurant down the street has more customer interaction than you, you’re doing it wrong.

Introducing a small degree of process and rigor to the structure of your sales activities helps ensure that your teams spend their time wisely and stay on target for their most rewarding activities.  It also boosts their sales and assures that your team doesn’t get lost in the weeds.

Until next time,

www.betterleadershipblog.com

Crowe Mead

Sales Strategies- Pump Up Your Pipeline is copyrighted and the property of Better Leadership Blog. It was originally posted on May 3, 2013. Please notify Better Leadership Blog when you view it on another site

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  Bigger sales come from crafting a story that tells why your solution is different, better, and worth more to your customer.  But that’s just part of the equation.

It happened again.  I just sat through a pitch with a potential service provider who was long on bullet points and completely void of real value for my particular needs.  Why do sales people still present like this?

When you think about it, sales strategy is all about making sure that your reps hit their quota, right?  One of the biggest inhibitors to achieving quota is the inability to communicate value. If your sales team cannot communicate why your solution is different, better and worth more, there’s nothing your sales strategy can do to fix it.  If people buy on emotion, why are you simply presenting facts?  Your message should contain significant value to your audience, communicate your offering, contrast it with your competition and be wrapped in a story that the customer can identify with.  Your goal is to leave them thinking “Hey!  That sounds exactly like my situation.  This might work for me!”

The messaging element – what salespeople say, do, and write in order to create customer value – is often far from adequate. To be effective, a sales strategy needs to focus on customer conversations as a way to create a distinctive purchase experience and separate your company from the competition. To do that, there are three key sales areas that your sales strategy should focus on.

#1: Demonstrate Value

We all dream of the situation where the prospect has already recognized and wants to solve the problem that your solution addresses. In this selling environment, you don’t need a solid sales strategy and message. But too often, you are not in a great selling environment and you need to work the prospect from every angle. You need to create opportunities. And to help prospects see the value of your offering, you need to tell stories with contrast. You need to tell both the “before” and “after” story – and it’s the contrast between the two that creates a powerful perception of value. The bigger the contrast you can create between the “pain” the customer experienced before your solution and the “gain” the customer experienced with your solution, the greater the perceived value.

#2: Position and Differentiate

Most technology companies position themselves for a competitive bake-off of features and benefits. They talk about “why us?” But the real questions that customers are considering are “why change?” and “why now?” A successful sales strategy requires a new approach for positioning and differentiating your offering. To stand out from the crowd, you need to understand that your real competitor is the status quo and that you need to help your prospects make the decision to change before you help them make the decision to choose you.  Data tells part of this story but without involving them in the emotion of the solution, you’re only part way there.

#3: Tell a Compelling and Memorable Story

When salespeople prepare for conversations with suspects or prospects, they usually focus on getting all of the facts straight about their offerings. And certainly, you need to be accurate in what you say about your solution. But you also need to connect with your customers – and the best way to do that is through stories. Telling personal stories, as well as using metaphors and analogies, helps bring your message alive in a way that reciting facts and data simply cannot. Once you start sharing stories as part of the way you talk to customers, you’ll see relationships change. Your customer relationships will be deeper and more rewarding.

I’ll write more in the future about how to craft exciting stories that engage your customers.  The primer though is to simply to listen with the ear of the customer.  Telling a story that is unique to them and solves their problem is a far better first step than a fact filled PowerPoint presentation.

Until next time,

www.betterleadershipblog.com

Crowe Mead

www.betterleadershipblog.com

Bigger Sales: It’s The Story That Matters! is copyrighted and the property of Better Leadership Blog. It was originally posted on April 5, 2013. Please notify Better Leadership Blog when you view it on another site

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   Lesson # 3 for Sales Teams:  The Danger of RFPs:  Why write long RFPs when there’s a better way?

Any salesperson knows that responding to RFPs (Requests for Proposals) is a huge time and resource commitment.  And it’s often a waste of effort.  It’s an activity that usually involves numerous cross-functional teams, long hours, detailed responses and reams of paper.  It doesn’t build brand but does take key personnel away from billable work.

i.            My first recommendation: Don’t respond.   I realized a long time ago that if we had to submit an RFP it was because we didn’t have the right relationship already in place.  If we receive a request for submission now without prior conversations it’s ignored.

ii.            Automate:  When I wrote responses to RFPs I would often cut and paste as much as possible to answer the standard questions.  Now, we assign junior team members to tackle these using extracted data from all our previously completed RFPs.  This allows our sales teams to stay focused on current customers.

iii.            Videos:  Once upon a time, instead of completing the requestors confusing and outdated template we simply sent them a video… and won the contract.  Our submission was all of 2 ½ minutes long, introduced our solution, prices and timing and added a guarantee.  We recommended that they call us if they were interested in learning more and they did.  Picture a team in a War Room reviewing a dozen or more documents that all look similar, and then coming across our DVD.  The customer paid rapt attention during our orals and even invited their senior leaders to attend. We now boiler-plate even this process keeping the same two thirds of the video and creating a customized introduction for each client.  Our win rate for this has been significant.

iv.            Charge For Discovery:  There are times when RFPs are appropriate.  But I still don’t like to do the work for free. For big opportunities I now often pitch a “Discovery” phase at a fixed price.  Doing so demonstrates that we want to provide the right customized solution but that our time is valuable.  When customers aren’t sure what they need, guiding them through an analysis phase has great value, and allows you to build a relationship along the way.

Until next time,

Crowe Mead

www.betterleadershipblog.com

Lesson #3 For Sales Teams: The Danger of RFPs is copyrighted and the property of Better Leadership Blog. It was originally posted on March 19, 2013. Please notify Better Leadership Blog when you view it on another site

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Lesson # 2 for growing a sales team:  Never negotiate service-level agreements (SLAs) and terms and conditions (T&Cs)

One of my early employers utilized a standard service-level agreement (SLA) that was far too biased in our favor. We thought we were managing our economic risks, but in reality we added a huge and unnecessary overhead to the process of negotiating deals.

The boiler-plate offered a 30 business day response time for software updates, but if a buyer pushed we could do it 20 (in reality it was always under a week).  We would then have to agree on what would be included in the upgrade, level of effort required and total man hours.  Once we agreed on the delivery we’d negotiate service credits because the standard contract had no remedies in the event we didn’t meet our SLA.  Veteran buyers saw through much of this and pushed hard for even better deals.

We also let customers negotiate terms and conditions because we didn’t want to lose deals (already damaged by the unnecessary negotiations above). In so doing, we created a patchwork of non-standard contracts that made it much more complicated to manage the business as it scaled.

Eventually, we migrated to one standard SLA for normal customers and a high-level SLA for premium customers.  This made the sales process much smoother and allowed us to begin billing sooner.  Creating non-negotiable terms and conditions has been a standard process ever since.

Until next time,

Crowe Mead

www.betterleadershipblog.com

Lesson #2 For Growing A Sales Team: SLAs is copyrighted and the property of Better Leadership Blog. It was originally posted on March 7, 2013. Please notify Better Leadership Blog when you view it on another site

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Growing a sales team: Moving from a concept-driven entrepreneurial company to a mature process-centric organization requires many changes.  Along the way the sales team has to change too.  Teaching process to your sales team is one of the most important things you can do.

A company’s growth, trajectory, culture and success often come from the sales and marketing teams.  As the company expands the sales team needs to change to continue that growth.  Your early-stage, evangelical salespeople are often consultants who convince prospects that they need your products or services.  Scalable sales teams, on the other hand, are typically process-driven people who build and manage relationships, map your solutions to a customer’s problems and win business through persistence.

In my years in sales I’ve learned some valuable lessons about what processes a growing company needs to focus on to avoid those growing pains.  In the following series I’ll address what I consider to be the most important lessons for maturing sales teams.

#1) Standardize your discounts and pricing:

For most U.S. businesses prices are published and handed out gladly.  There’s no attempt to cover up the cost for an “off the shelf” product or service.  You may get away with quoting these prices to your newest prospect’s budget owner.  But when procurement gets involved, they need to show their value.  So does the CFO… as well as the attorneys.  In the end, that price list is long forgotten.

Many salesmen at young start-ups will discount their prices based on who the client is, how important the business is, who they’re competing against and how aggressively the deal is negotiated.  In my first sales job revenue was hard to predict simply because every salesman negotiated differently.  Over time we standardized the pricing and allowed each salesperson to discount the prices up to 15%.  If the price for a service was usually $30,000.00 he could offer it for $25,500.  This allowed him control of the sale without continually checking with management.  Discounts beyond the standard 15% required CEO approval.

We also created standardized packages of features that reps could offer to increase their up sell.  For example, a premium package might include discounts on additional software, onsite customer service representatives, or decreased service times.  In the early days, each sales rep negotiated each of these on a case by case basis.  By reducing the negotiable elements of the pricing and packaging, we eliminated bottlenecks and hurdles to a successful sale.

Until next time,

Crowe Mead

www.betterleadershipblog.com

Lesson#1 For Growing A Sales Team: Pricing is copyrighted and the property of Better Leadership Blog. It was originally posted on February 25, 2013. Please notify Better Leadership Blog when you view it on another site

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Corporate battles are won and lost, not through poor product but most often through poor client experience.  Any engagement should have a plan that addresses how the client will perceive the services offered and assure their continued satisfaction.  Following is my model for a repeatable process that promises both happy clients and long term advocates.

I spend a great deal of time working with key business accounts and interacting with their top level staff.  Throughout these interactions, whether it be in-person meetings, casual conversations, strategy sessions, emails, Skype or chat, I’m continually focused on the client experience; how they perceive me and the solutions I deliver and how those perceptions drive their loyalty and buy decisions.   While brand, product and pricing clearly have an impact on client engagement, much of the account retention and future work together comes from their immediate previous experience with me and my associates.  Establishing a relationship, providing strong solutions and stellar Return on Investment is a part of every engagement, but building a high quality repeatable customer experience is where real professionals begin to shine.

I’ve built the following set of rules that are always in play and that contribute to continually improving the customer experience:

• Every client engagement is backed by four critical documents:  a solid business case, a formal strategy document that ensures buy-in at every level, a Change Management plan and Communication plan that all provide continued momentum.
• Understand what the client is saying and thinking in every interaction, including both their emotional response (how they feel) as well as their objective response (how effectively their issue has been resolved).
• Establish a set of criteria that address the client’s values.  How is this work linked to their corporate mission statement?  What is important to them on a daily basis? Identifying this information ensures a culture fit and leads to a better client experience.
• Seek consistency in the customer experience across all of the different interaction channels. Every means of communication should reflect the client values.
• Identify every opportunity to improve their experience.  Look beyond satisfaction surveys to measures such as loyalty and their willingness to recommend my services to colleagues.  The true reflection of a job well done is when a client becomes your advocate and promotes your work.

It is costly for clients to change service providers, just as it’s costly for service providers to prepare for new clients.  Given the importance of the client experience to loyalty, and their loyalty to both our profitability and theirs, it is critical to follow through with a plan that ensures not only stellar delivery but immensely satisfied clients who will invite you back to the table at every opportunity.

The Principled Client Experience Model is copyrighted and the property of Better Leadership Blog. It was originally posted on February 6, 2013. Please notify Better Leadership Blog when you view it on another site

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When I first learned of the principles of Agile software development I thought the entire globe had turned upside down… and I loved it. Little did I know there was a better way.

I have always followed a prescribed set of processes that each engagement regardless of type must go through.  Whether building a house or designing a new operating system extensive amounts of time were spent identifying scope, defining activity sequencing, writing project plans, resource estimating, and budgeting.  Entire days were set aside for report writing, and change management was the de facto standard.  And nothing was built until everything was in place and approved.

Agile methodologies (and specifically Scrum) changed all that by throwing out many of the tenants I lived by.  Resource utilization was forgotten.   Project planning, in large part, was tossed aside.  The customer, once completely removed, now became an integral part of the team helping to guide development and decision making.  The top-down management model for project execution was rejected in favor of self-organization and shared accountability.  Agile focused on building actual pieces of working code every 2-4 weeks which meant that the customer started seeing delivery right away instead of waiting some excruciating amount of time.  Best of all, it worked!  I witnessed projects being completed in half the time, at 70% of the previous cost.  Project quality was vastly improved and the customer, who had been involved in every aspect of development, now became an advocate for both the project and the team.   I was blown away.

A few years later, my world shifted once again when I learned about the time management process known as Kanban.  And it’s the combination of project management, Scrum and Kanban that I now feel are the trifecta by which all others practices will be measured.

Developed from Lean manufacturing practices, Kanban helps to determine what to produce, when to produce it and how much of it to build.  Where traditional methodologies “push” work along to the next phase, Kanban “pulls” the work forward based on customer demand.   By its very nature, Agile deconstructs big problems into smaller, more consumable chunks.   This very solution makes it ineffective for long term planning.  Kanban, meanwhile, increases visibility, handles interruptions and speeds the flow of work.  It assists Scrum development by helping to identify bottlenecks and does a better job of managing workflow.

For a primer on Kanban, look here.  To see how these three work together, read on:

The rules

Both Scrum and Kanban provide rules on how you should perform your work. An immediate difference between these two methodologies is the number of rules they impose.

Scrum is quite prescriptive and has a vast set of rules. Here are just a few:

• 1. The Product backlog is created and managed by the Product owner
• 2. Teams must be cross functional
• 3. The team’s work cannot be interrupted during sprints
• 4. The team’s work is time boxed
• 5. There’s a daily scrum meeting, where the team answers to 3 questions
• 6. Progress is measured using a burn down chart
• 7. Teams do a demo to stakeholders at the end of each sprint
• …
• 23. (This goes on and on.)

Kanban is much more open than Scrum, and it has only a couple of rules:

• 1. Visualize your workflow
• 2. Limit your Work in Progress

Now, being such an open methodology, it tends to be adapted depending on the environment. For instance, Toyota defined 6 rules for its process. In fact, you can add all rules of Scrum to Kanban, and still have a sound methodology – with 25 rules!

The workflow

A direct consequence of this difference in rules is the way the work items are handled across time.

In Scrum, you select the work you’ll be doing for the next sprint beforehand. You then lock the sprint, do all the work, and after a couple of weeks – the usual sprint duration – your queue is empty.

Typical flow of a Scrum process

In Kanban, all that’s limited is the size of the queues, called the Work In Progress limit. This means that you can change the items in the queues at any time, and that there’s no “sprint end”. The work just keeps flowing.

Kanban flow, with a WIP limit of 3 for the To Do, and 2 for the Ongoing

Which to pick?

The answer to this question is, as always, it depends.

If you’re doing feature development, which relies heavily on stakeholders’ feedback and if the developers need to focus to do a good job, then go with Scrum. The sprint lock and the end of sprint demos to stakeholders are invaluable in this scenario.

On the other hand, if your work is more reactive, and you cannot lock your backlog for a couple of weeks, use Kanban. It’s a great methodology for Maintenance teams that need to adapt to customer input on a daily basis.

Better yet, learn lessons from both models, and adapt them to fit the unique needs of your organization.

Where does Project Management fit in?

A project, by its very definition has a beginning and an end (schedule). It has specific objectives (scope) to be met and has a budget (cost). The nature of scrum allows us to manage these types of projects more closely and have better visibility and ultimately accountability. These types of projects are those that require us to allocate budget to a defined amount of work. With every iteration of a sprint, every feature in the sprint needs to be estimated and when completed compared to actuals so that we can assess and manage the remaining work based on the remaining budget.

For those types of endeavors where we allocate work to a defined budget (i.e., yearly budget for product maintenance or enhancements) Kanban would be the preferred approach. In this scenario, Kanban allows you to streamline and improve the process so that you can squeeze out more features against the allotted budget. Because it is the process that is the focus and budget is readily available, some practitioners no longer estimate. In fact, some argue that eliminating the need to estimate is one way to improve the process!

Who Does What?

Specific roles play a function here too.  Traditionally, the project manager is a leader, a decision maker, a planner, someone who manages the project and the team and is the person accountable to the business for accomplishing the project objectives. The Scrum Master’s role is more that of coach and facilitator, a role that sits between the project and the customer. The Scrum Master doesn’t manage the team that produces the work; instead, he supports the product owner, coaches the team, and makes sure that Scrum processes are adhered to. The Scrum Master is responsible for the Scrum process, its correct and continuous implementation, and the maximization of its benefits.

These projects still need someone who is responsible to the business side of the equation.  Someone can report to senior leadership on progress and project health, who can assign resources and someone who can remove road blocks for the team doing the actual work.  And while the Scrum process doesn’t worry about budget and risk someone does need to own those too.

The End Game

By combining these three methodologies you’ll produce rapid software development from highly interactive teams.  As mentioned before, quality drastically increases as does efficiency and customer satisfaction.  Mature teams will be able to accelerate the delivery of a better product and can sustain that delivery model.  You achieve visibility, reliability and happier, more productive teams.  What could be better than that?

Until next time,

www.betterleadershipblog.com

-Crowe Mead

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True leaders encompass the aspects of leadership into every part of their life.  Leadership isn’t a mask they wear, but is engrained into their very DNA.  Following are my personal rules for everyday living.

1)      Lead by example.  Whether at work or at home every action is a reflection of your abilities as a leader and the way you conduct yourself reflects this.  If you are average, your team and social circles will be too.  If you push for performance, so will those around you.

2)      Be clear on your vision.  Provide clear, concise and achievable goals and outline the path to achieving them. Communicate these goals throughout the entire organization and to every stakeholder.  Revisit these goals regularly and assure that your entire group is in tune with what is to be accomplished.

3)      Own your mistakes. We all make them.  Accountability is a real defining factor of leadership.  Don’t let ego cloud your responsibility to do the right thing. Instead, recognize and admit the mistake, learn from it and take corrective action to assure it doesn’t happen again.

4)      Be humble. Listen. Learn.  If you’ve truly done your job of surrounding yourself with gifted people they will have insight that you lack. Seek out that information and use it.  Assuming that you are right without confirming your assumptions can lead to disaster. Take advantage of your team’s “boots on the ground” experience.

5)      Be thoughtful but decisive.  It’s your job to set the direction and pace for your organization. Listen to input, evaluate the various courses of action and consider the results.  Recognize that a given solution may not meet the entire need and, when necessary, accept a plan that gets 80% of the way there. Then, be ready to communicate that plan. Don’t shy away from stakeholder questions. Be prepared for them, welcome them and set the path forward.

6)      Create competition. Nothing gets people fired up like healthy competition.  And nothing shows involvement like a leader who is continually setting tough goals and encouraging his team to stretch to meet them. Create challenges and encourage your team to surpass them.

7)      Create team passion.  Demonstrating how every one of your direct reports is critical to the success of his team and to the overall goals of the company should be a primary objective. Instilling in them a sense of self-worth and showing how their successes relate the overall organization’s success will provide them with the confidence and desire to surpass their personal goals. This is the path that creates passionate teams who can overcome any obstacle.

8)      Don’t rely on your title.  Your title should only exist to remove obstacles and align resources. A true leader relies on his ability to persuade and to create clear, logical reasonings.  Focus on what motivates your particular group.  Absorb the information they share and scale it appropriately.

9)      Do what you say. Nothing builds trust like a leader who reliably delivers on promises.  And nothing erodes it faster than unfulfilled commitments.  Be ready to make those commitments but understand what they entail first.  If you can’t provide what you’ve promised, communicate that clearly, offer alternatives and get buy-in on the new direction. Make sure they understand why things have changed and what you are doing to address it.

10)   Provide recognition.  Your team’s successes and failures are yours.  Regularly recognize the successes of individuals and share them throughout the organization.  Do this in individual and team meetings, as well as through every other corporate communication method. Make sure people know how good your teams are and what they’ve accomplished.

Until next time,

www.betterleadershipblog.com

The Ten Leadership Rules I Live By is copyrighted and the property of Better Leadership Blog. It was originally posted on November 18, 2012. Please notify Better Leadership Blog when you view it on another site

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Can you sell like John Cleese?  Creating contrast between what you offer and what your customer has or is considering is crucial to the sale.  Show your customer where the real value lies, just like John.

What’s the opposite of “attention” when it comes to sales messaging?

It’s not “inattention,” though that is the most logical obvious answer. Inattention is a passive, natural occurrence you have to wrestle with in every messaging situation. And certainly, the failure to move somebody from inattention to attention is a primary killer of sales opportunities.

What’s worse than inattention is active resistance to your message. Denial that the problem you’re trying to solve needs solving.

Don’t try this at home: Check out this great 80’s commercial for Compaq computers, with actor John Cleese trying to create contrast for a new “portable” computer:

You need to paint a clear picture of what is bad and good. You need to concisely define the shortcomings of your prospect’s current situation and contrast that with the opportunity to overcome those shortcomings with your solution.  Not only must this difference be clear, it must be significant.  Value for your customers lies between the Pain and the Gain.

What happens if you don’t show enough contrast? There won’t be enough value for a prospect to do something different.  Make sure you clearly articulate and visualize the contrast between your solution and your prospect’s current situation if you want to move from denial to attention.

And remember, customers buy on emotion and justify with fact.  Be sure to wrap a great story around your offering.

Until next time,

Crowe Mead

www.betterleadershipblog.com

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The next big changes include not just what your device looks like but what it can interact with

Your digital life is about to change in ways you haven’t yet dreamed of. The next few years will bring about unprecedented and fundamental shifts to nearly everything we do online.   We’re entering a period of unheard of technological growth and it all centers around your smartphone.

As a primer note this interesting milestone that was reached last week:  Certain Google keyword searches were performed on as many mobile handsets as on desktop platforms in the U.S.  That’s a huge shift from the traditional laptop and desktop model and a specific indicator of how rapidly smartphones are outpacing traditional computing.   It also indicates the looming death of desktop computing, already considered a dinosaur by many.  In another example of this change, 20-somethings were asked a simple question:  “If your carrier was to change your plan and offer only voice or data plans, which would you choose?  Nearly all stated that they would choose to have a data device and forgo the ability to talk on a phone.  The shift from a telecom device to a data PC that fits in your pocket could not could not be more pronounced in these examples.                                                                                                    

The smartphone is becoming anything but a phone, changing in ways no one predicted.  In the next few years these changes will drastically alter how we search, shop, converse and connect. (www.betterleadershipblog.com)  For consumers and developers alike, here are a few of the changes you should be keeping an eye on:

• Data exchange: How your device connects and communicates will change drastically.  Currently, we’re challenged with sharing information between our various devices. Images that we capture with a camera or phone have to be manually transferred to a printer, laptop or database.  Media files and personal information that we download at home isn’t easily available on the go. But not for long.  Within 2-3 years smartphones will recognize the devices and other phones around them and will collect and distribute information accordingly.  Data will reside in the cloud to be available regardless of the device you’re using, essentially making your phone a digital briefcase.  It will allow you to access documents easily and display them on whatever monitor you’re near, and will re-create your last desktop complete with previous browsing tabs and video files.  And it gets better:  While you are out for a walk your data device will be searching for information that’s important to you.  It will collect and share the recipe of the day from that new restaurant you passed, music from the music store, and poetry that your neighbor is publishing. It will alert you to the latest showing at the theater and suggest plans for your next date.  This is where your device becomes truly interactive.

• Camera: Smartphones accounted for more than 25% of all photos taken last year and as photo quality improves so will their variety of usage.  Expect to see applications that leverage your camera for video chat, thermal imaging, medical diagnosis and augmented reality.  Well beyond that will be the integration of Microsoft’s Kinect into your smart phone. The Kinect may well be Microsoft’s most revolutionary piece of technology to come out in years and its potential is vast. (Watch the Kinect introduction here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diy7rkWkDtU)  Each of these is worthy of its own post, and the message is clear; the camera will cause one of the most dramatic changes to the mobile experience yet.

• Social Media: Facebook is becoming the new testing platform for many smart phone applications and as this testing occurs the prospect of great opportunities will abound for the consumer.  Informed developers are utilizing social media to define their target market, test their application title and content, measure click-through and rate their icons and online appearance.  This may be transparent to the casual user but it does reflect the growing need to very specifically define applications for a given audience.  For smart phone users this presents early adopter opportunities, the ability to direct how and what software is created, and to be rewarded for testing or participating in a beta release.  Smart developers will also reward participants for downloading and using the application to help spread the word.  This is drastically different than the behind closed doors development that has traditionally taken place and demonstrates how the consumer will now be able to mandate the display and experience as well as define bottom up design improvements.

• Speech Recognition: iPhone’s Siri application was partly responsible for mega sales of the iPhone 4S. But voice control and speech recognition is still in its infancy.  2011 saw the integration of voice control with automobiles and while both of these examples are still very early in their development, much bigger changes are coming.  With increases in processing speed and power,  future voice control releases will allow the application to be always on and listening for key words.  The technology will become completely hands free and will not just acknowledge commands but will be able to hold conversations with the user.  This will change the experience for Mobile Search taking us beyond information “at our finger tips” to informed decision making about everything we do.  Our decisions for where we go, what we eat, and how we connect with one another will be driven in part by these changes.

• Digital Cash: Starbucks recently announced the ability to pay for your coffee via a mobile device.  “Mobile Wallets” essentially turn your phone or tablet into a cash register, processing debit and credit transactions rapidly without handling a credit card.  The announcement shines a light on the rapidly expanding mobile payments market worth billions of dollars.  Competitors like Google, PayPal and Facebook are going head to head against little known start ups like Square and Revel.  In the coming months this will be a game changer for many companies who don’t like to handle cash and it will ultimately impact everything you buy.  From a taxi ride to the airport, to that food truck you stop at for lunch or the smoothie you grab on your weekend run, the mobile frontier is leading the charge to eliminate cash.

• Micro-Payments:  Micro-payments are financial transactions that involve a very small sum of money.  The idea of charging just a few cents for specific services has been around for years and represents a multi-billion dollar opportunity.  But the ability to reach to a wide enough U.S. audience to make the model lucrative has been a challenge. With the rise of social media and the always-connected smartphone this is about to change.  The purchase of goods and services through smart phone apps could become highly lucrative for many companies while offering unique opportunities for consumers.  Soon you’ll see every day opportunities to buy music, rent movies, purchase pay-for-play games and own small niche applications all through your phone.  Additionally, the ease with which micro-payments can be processed makes the opportunity available to anyone.  That garage band down the street may find serious money in charging .39 cents to hear their latest single. Or you might pay a buck to be the first to be notified about fantastic deals on that next trip to Hawaii.

• In-Application Purchases:   Continuing with the “phone as an ATM” theme is the rise of new monetization opportunities for companies through In-Application purchases (paying for additional content or services within an already installed application).  This will continue to drastically change the way we shop and spend.  As subscription services lag, online news media may offer teaser stories but ask for a nominal charge of .39-.99 cents to view a whole report.  Other applications may be free to download but ask for an additional charge to access premium features.  This model is already popular in gaming but will spread numerous other verticals including finance, travel, and social media.  Companies will have to carefully craft their offering to gain traction but the opportunity for the end user could be terrific.

• Battery life:  It wasn’t that long ago that mobile devices required you to recharge throughout the day in order to maintain battery life.  We all remember meetings that would start late while people clambered for the few outlets in the room.  However, with the increasing processing power of most phones, batteries have had to keep pace and they’ve done quite well.  The average battery life of most smart phones is currently around 7 hours of talk time.  But changes in application power usage, battery efficiency, alternate power sources (motion charging, solar charging cases), and wireless charging mean that we’ll grow even more dependent on our smart phones as they are able to run longer without a traditional charge.  Many of these changes will take place in the next 1-2 years.

• Enterprise Apps: For business, mobility innovations will allow companies to move faster, become more nimble, and react quicker to customer requests.  Executives will be able to approve vendor invoices via their Oracle application, or authorize changes to a presentation in SalesForce all while in a taxi on the way to a client meeting.  Much more powerful, however, is that mobile applications will route and prioritize information and email based on your location and preference.  You’ll have the option of viewing only actionable, important email. This will fundamentally change the Inbox Hell so many of us deal with and allow relevant information to become immediately available.  Social Media will become a much bigger part of the enterprise as well, enabling companies to stay more attuned to employee concerns while allowing them to crowd-source within their own walls.  As a result, email will decline and many decisions will be much better informed.  Enterprise applications could be the next big boom for mobile developers.

• Privacy: All of these changes make many people wonder about how privacy will change. In fact, to be effective applications will have to continue to gather information about where you go and what you see, hear and experience.  This is where a dramatic and fundamental shift takes place.  For baby boomers and many Gen X’rs privacy is a big concern.  However, for 20-somethings it’s just the opposite.  Most have no perception of a loss of privacy.  The changing attitude is to ask why wouldn’t you share all of your images, your location and experiences with everyone?  Social media is part of the fabric of their lives and these changes will be seen not as a violation but as a natural progression.  The truth here is that as the younger generation becomes our future business and technology leaders the changes to privacy are here to stay.  Those who adapt most quickly will have the advantage.

These innovations have far-reaching implications that extend beyond the technologies themselves. They will truly impact how we see and experience the world around us.  The challenge for developers is to engage users, let them help define how and what is created and then to properly market their application.  Consumers are heading towards a much more exciting, vibrant and connected experience that will leave us wondering whether we should even continue to call that thing in our pocket a phone.  The opportunities for all of us are tremendous.

Until next time,

www.betterleadershipblog.com

Top Ten Big Changes Coming To Your Smartphone is copyrighted and the property of Better Leadership Blog. It was originally posted on August 20, 2012. Please notify Better Leadership Blog when you view it on another site

The post Top Ten Big Changes Coming To Your Smartphone originated from and is the property of Better Leadership Blog.