The New Corporate HQ Game

We have found a fun thing to do that passes five minutes. Lots of people who have found themselves out of a job are taking the opportunity to start up their own businesses. One of the first things to do is launch a web site, which requires a trading address for contact purposes.

If the trading address is in a city chances are it will be on Google Street View. The challenge is to link the most ambitious company trading address with the humblest abode. Global House International which is really number 4 Suburban Avenue. Some are in blocks of flats, The Galaxy ‘Suite’ can be a giveaway.

It would be interesting to track these start ups, perhaps they will turn out like Google, starting in a garage and going on to world domination; what they won’t need to do is create a more suitable address.

If you spot an interesting one let us know.

The 10 Causal Reasons Why So Much Customer Service Is Poorly Delivered

Looking after your customers would seem to be the most obvious thing to be focusing on in these difficult business times, so why are service levels still so variable and the customer experience generally so unimpressive?

1. Nobody at board level is responsible for service performance, why? Because everybody is responsible. This means accountability is fragmented and responsibilities indistinct.
2. Service is not contained within the strategic focus of the organisation.
3. There is no service design, no working definition of service in the organisation, few metrics for service performance and little understanding of cause and effect.
4. At best service, is measured with a one-dimensional customer feedback instrument. At worst, by the number of complaints received, or in a significant minority, not at all.
5. There is little understanding of the relationship between the intangible aspects of service delivery (the personal interaction stuff, how a customer feels etc.) and the intangible requirements, the service infrastructure. For example, how a call centre operator makes the customer feel (intangible) and the quality of the organisation’s telephony systems (tangible).
6. Poor integration of technology with the customer experience. See article Integrating People With Technology To Drive.
7. Front-line staff are measured on operational performance issues not service delivery: the number of transactions in an hour, the amount of sales made etc. rather the quality of experience delivered. This is because operational things are easier to measure and have a short-time impact on the bottom line.
8. Front-line staff are inadequately trained in service delivery. ‘Smile training’ doesn’t work. See article Developing The Best Kind of Customer Service People.
9. There is a large cultural credibility gap between the rhetoric of service and the reality of delivery. This makes the front-line cynical, especially when they see posters exhorting them to ‘go the extra mile’ going up around the business when service levels have recently been cut through redundancy programmes.
10. Management don’t really get it.

If you would like to talk about how your organisation can use service as a form of competitive advantage SalesPathways can help, please contact us.

Developing The Best Kind of Customer Service People

First things first; Smile training doesn’t work. A one-day programme covering how to serve customers better, establish rapport and ‘show you care’ doesn’t deliver any real change or lasting benefit. But there are things you can do to really improve front-line service delivery.

Below we produce a checklist to test your own practices and cultural norms against:

1. Get the recruitment policies right. It is much harder to develop the right mind-set than it is to improve skills. Whether you use psychometrics or other assessment tools or just really good interviewing techniques, make sure you recruit people who want to engage with customers.
2. Get induction right. Customer service starts with expectation setting. What are the minimum standards this organisation considers to be acceptable? Create a success metric for this training phase. Performance, rather than attendance based induction drives the improvement of customer satisfaction levels.
3. Obsessively product train. A customer would rather be sold/advised on the right product in an unfriendly way, than their new best friend talking enthusiastically about the wrong product. John Lewis takes product knowledge/product application understanding very seriously.
4. Design service processes that support the front line with minimum bureaucracy and maximum freedom to engage with customers.
5. Use technology effectively. See article Integrating People With Technology.
6. Deliver transparent success failure criteria, with clear performance metrics linked to service outcomes that the person feels they have some control over.
7. Incentivise for the service outcomes you want.
8. Use service champions as role-model coaches, sharing their expertise and motivating others to put in the extra effort that makes all the difference.
9. Get directors to champion service, raise the profile and status of front-line people. Develop effective recognition schemes.
10. Only embark on customer service training when all the previous points have been delivered on. This creates a positive, aligned environment for the training to succeed.

SalesPathways can design (and deliver if required) high performance Customer Service Development programmes for a cross-section of industries both in the B2B, B2C and Third Sector environments. To find out more, please contact us.

Integrating People with Technology To Drive Transformational Service Delivery

Effective service delivery can be transformed by the effective and clever integration of appropriate technology.

Anybody who has ordered over the internet and received an instant confirmation email showing everything is correct will know how effectively it reduces purchasing anxiety, especially when followed up with further emails showing order progress. Or the effective application of a CRM system that gives all relevant customer facing staff a single (and 360°) view of a customer’s status in real time.

But organisations are still getting this wrong. A recent example of bad practice we came across in our work was where instead of being asked to select a product by name on the web site, they were asked to pick an SKU number. The back-office system had not been versioned for the front-end customer.

Effective use of technology is increasingly becoming a condition of play, a price to pay if you want to even remain competitive.

However, what has the capacity to make the service experience transformational is the effective integration of technology with the human experience. This is something SalesPathways term High Tech + High Touch, which is shown below:

© SalesPathways Ltd. 2005-2009

It is the combination of these two things delivered seamlessly that delivers memorable, distinctive customers experiences, which drives up both repeat business levels and referral rates.

The reason many businesses struggle with this concept is because their structures and processes militate against seamless integration. See article The 10 Causal Reasons For Poor Service Delivery.

Rigid, functional structures encourage responsibilities to be atomised into neat silos. The customer experience will cross several functional areas, all of which will have a technology component; how is the voice of the customer championed as they make the journey through those experiences?

Which brings us to the other challenge connected to, but different from structures, that of the management of processes. If you design an optimum customer service process and then map it against what currently exists you will see where the service improvement work needs to be done.

By taking a strategic view of technology, integrated into the roles of front-line customer service people, you can deliver significant competitive advantage to your organisation.

To talk over your own technology/people integration issues please contact us.

Are You Director Material?

This month we provide a checklist for you to test yourself against the benchmark for being an effective Director. If you are already a Director then this will provide a wake-up call to make sure you are still doing all you need to.

1. Do you have the required minimum intellectual horsepower to understand and contribute to the conversation around Finance, Strategy, Compliance, & Operational Excellence? If you do, but don’t have the skills, develop your own Personal Development Plan.
2. Do you demonstrate the required Director legal literacy?
3. Do you keep your personal learning ahead of the rate of change in the relevant sectors? All Directors should demonstrate relevant market insight.
4. Are you a Leader? Effective Directors are leaders of people, not simply operational or functional managers in a senior position.
5. Do you demonstrate a passion for what the organisation does? Are you happy being with customers?
6. Do you have a track record of success which you apply to the benefit of the organisation?
7. Does your contribution make a transparent difference to the growth and development of your organisation, in addition to your functional responsibility?
8. Do other people look up to you as a role model? A Director must have the credibility and respect of all levels of the organisation they come into contact with.
9. Do you have sufficiently developed interpersonal skills? Are you easy to get on with? Will you deal effectively with conflict and difficult situations? Are you self aware? Emotional maturity gives a sense of being personally secure, making you much less liable to indulge in unacceptable behaviour.
10. Do you have sufficient personal presence? Can you effectively represent the organisation at external events and at company conferences?
11. Do you put the organisation first, sometimes even when in conflict with your personal life or personal preferences?
12. Do you behave pro-actively? Doing what it takes, without being asked?
13. Do you demonstrate the integrity to uphold the office?
14. Do you uphold the vision & values of the organisation?
15. Do you demonstrate a capacity for hard work?

Some organisations get this right, others have very little conscious understanding of what being a Director means, or explicit criteria when making Director appointments. One thing is for certain, making ill-informed Director decisions will have long term negative consequences for your organisation, and getting it right will have significantly positives outcomes for many years to come.

Predaptive spend significant time working with Directors and senior managers, in improving team and organisational performance. For more details contact us.

Interviewing An Apprentice

This year’s Apprentice season has come to an end and not only has Sir Alan given someone a new job, he looks to have landed one for himself too.
The Apprentice makes for great TV viewing, with plenty of lessons to be learned, mostly around not putting yourself or your family through a reality TV show. Feedback we’ve received over the last couple of weeks seems to indicate that some people have been watching the interview episode as an instructional video. HR Managers have reported baffled candidates wanting to understand why they weren’t successful, and asking why the recruiter from the line was asking aggressively phrased yet seemingly irrelevant questions.

Meanwhile baffled recruiters are asking why people don’t want to accept the jobs they’ve been offered – with those candidates muttering about ‘other offers’ and ‘more attractive industries’, to reveal when pushed that the interviewer didn’t seem in the slightest bit interested in talking about the job or their suitability, but fired one weird question after another, occasionally not waiting for an answer.

Recruitment techniques do need to test a candidate’s capability to do the job, not simply to ‘ace’ an interview, and with interview coaching sessions being commonplace employers do seek to ask unexpected questions and challenge experience, however, the simple recruitment rule remains important, you want to know if the candidate can do the job. The best way to find out is a competency based recruitment approach rather than a trial by confusion.
Predaptive work with organisations to help ensure that their people recruit against a fair and consistent process, ensuring reliably good hires and a quick transition from new starter to confident performer. To find out more contact us.

Would Anyone Miss Your Brand?

With mergers, rescues and collapses having been a major part of business life over the past year it’s worth reflecting on some of those brands which have disappeared or will disappear soon. This week Lloyds Banking Group has announced that Cheltenham and Gloucester branches will be leaving the high street. Along with them go Abbey, Alliance + Leicester and Bradford & Bingley as their brands become absorbed into Santander. None of the banks brands have been around too long in their current form, they were already merged or contracted names of local building societies, and whilst no-one predicted the banking crisis, takeovers were mooted for all of them long before the credit crunch.

Walking along my high street I notice that Woolworths isn’t there any more, or Zavvi. Whilst I may have had no emotional connection to Zavvi it was a useful place to pick up a CD on a whim, and I’m sure each time I need a piñata or childs dressing up outfit I’ll rue the passing of Woolies, but that’s not a weekly occurrence. It’s not inconceivable that Vauxhall will disappear, along with any number of GM brands which merge into an Oldsmobile blur, and I’m sure not in a hurry to learn how to say Setanta properly if they won’t be around next season.

These disappearing brands have been teetering for years and whilst it’s sad to see some go, it’s not a surprise. With each of them the question seems to be “What were they about? What did they stand for?” Customers and employees find it difficult to express what their unique purpose is/was. Whilst they may have had mission statements, they all seemed to share a lack of clear, differentiated purpose. Without a clear, well articulated Purpose Framework businesses struggle to motivate and mobilise both employees and customers. IS your Purpose Framework strong enough to carry you through tough times? To find out more contact us.

What Does High Performance Sales Management Look Like? (And What It Doesn't!)

Why do we employ sales managers? An apparently obvious question gets more interesting when you look a bit deeper. Many sales managers are seemingly employed for the following reasons:

• to simply act as a span breaker between the sales director and the sales team
• to stop them leaving by promoting them into a sales management role, without thought as to their management abilities
• to curb their earnings as salespeople
• to manage house accounts (to stop other salespeople earning too much bonus on the biggest clients)
• so somebody is making sure salespeople are doing what they should be doing
• to check salespeoples’ expenses
• to pull the teams activity data together into a monthly report for the sales director
• to organise hospitality days
• to organise and run a monthly sales meeting
• so the sales director has somebody to kick around

All of the above reasons we have seen in our work. For one unfortunate sales manager we talked to in pulling this article together, he felt virtually all applied to him!

Sales managers should be employed because they create a performance premium, i.e. the team would perform to level 'X' without a sales manager and perform to level 'Y' with the sales manager in place. In our experience there is a significant minority of sales managers to deliver a reverse premium, their leaving would increase the performance of the team.

Let’s look at the those things added value sales managers are doing:

• getting the right people into the right roles so they can excel
• setting high standards of performance, activity and behaviour
• constantly coaching
• not tolerating mediocrity
• always looking for ways to optimise the sales process
• seeing their role primarily as one of motivating and enabling
• fighting to get their people the best equipment, resources and information - first
• supporting their people with good systems and minimum bureaucracy
• not trying to be the best salesperson on the team but the best manager
• auditing their own contribution, making sure they focus as much on leadership behaviours as they do on management activities
• protecting their people from ‘upstairs’ interference as much as possible
• obsessing about the relationship between the quality and quantity of sales activity and never getting the emphasis muddled up
• prompting sales excellence by recognising best practice champions in the team
• making the sales job as enjoyable as possible

If you would like to learn more about all of the above in greater detail and more besides, why not attend our High Performance Sales Management course which is next due to run on 21-22 July 2009.

For further information or to book a place on any of our courses please contact us.

Turning Difficult Customers Into Lifelong Fans

Do difficult times produce difficult customers or have they just always been there? We recently received this unsolicited testimonial from a participant on one of our sales training courses.

“I took the bull by the horns and contacted my ‘difficult customer’. I used open questions to all his objections, utilised the cycle technique and pinned him down to an appointment. Success! ……… it has made me realise, that the techniques learned on the course, do actually work. I thought you would like to know this.”

On the course in question (Selling...The Essentials For Success) we had spent some time looking at specific issues affecting sales people and the ‘difficult customer’ kept coming up. Maybe we have a preconception that the ‘difficult customer’ is a particular type of creature that needs handling in a particular kind of way? Or do we just overlook why that person is a ‘difficult customer’ in the first place?

On the course we looked at different ways to approach new and potential customers where everything from understanding your Unique Selling Point to your personal presentation, makes the best possible impact and pre-empts any ‘difficult’ responses. We also explored the relationship-building elements to sales and different techniques to help maintain strong, supportive and mutually beneficent relationships that minimise the possible areas for confrontation.

Of course, receiving this sort of testimonial is always very rewarding and it was no coincidence that we had also discussed the strategic importance of obtaining references and referrals from existing customers. One of the most powerful ways of moving your business forward is through the recommendations of your happiest customers. If they are delighted with you, they will be your best advocates. We discussed ways of getting testimonials and their place in your approach to promoting yourself, your offer and your business. But the unsolicited ones are by far the most satisfying!

If you feel that you would benefit from help in turning your difficult customers into lifelong fans why not give us a call to talk through some options. Or perhaps you'd like to attend our Selling...The Essentials For Success course? For further information or to book a place on any of our courses please contact us.

Government Funding For Real Training

Do you have 5-249 Employees? Would you like free structured training?

In these tough times the UK Government recognises that the way to future success is through proven, impactful, commercial training and is offering funding for such training. The type of funding available is for courses such as the Sales, Management and Leadership Training offered by Structured Training.

The qualification criteria are simple. You qualify if you have:

• 5-249 Employees

Structured Training’s range of courses all fall within the scope of the grant as they all provide a high quality cost effective training input that increases business skills.

The grant programme starts at £500, which is fully funded. Where the training cost is above £500 the government will match your spend 50-50 up to £1,000. So if a course costs £1,000, the government will reimburse your organisation £750. It will only cost you £250.

Where you need to spend more, for example on a management training or sales training course for a team, or a leadership programme, individual cases are considered locally on their merits.

The specific rules and contacts vary throughout the United Kingdom. Structured Training has experience of helping organisations gain access to this funding. Therefore to find out more about the rules in your region and find out how you can benefit from government funding for your training contact us.

The Real Deal Around Recruiting Salespeople

With the number of salespeople in the job market it seems timely to give a heads up on the stuff only really good recruitment agencies will talk about.

1. The best salespeople never get to the open job market. They certainly don’t need to register with several agencies or ‘spay and pray’ their CV. The best salespeople:

• are locked into their current employer
• headhunted
• leverage their own network to create a new role
• move because of an opportunity put to them by somebody they trust

2. This means the large majority of out of work for a while salespeople are not top decile, even upper quartile, performers. If you are, and you are reading this, get in touch!

3. Our own work with coaching newly appointed salespeople reveals most of have moved ‘sideways’. The major reasons being:

• didn’t get on with their sales manager/director
• consistently average performance was creating some attention
• they didn’t believe the selling organisation (and by extension themselves), weren’t given enough respect/resources/support
• many salespeople seem to be hired for their CV and fired for their behaviour

4. When interviewing a salesperson try to use either a competency based approach and/or predictive analysis:

• competency based is where you have identifiable capabilities required, turned those into identifiable behavioural indicators and then design the assessment process against those indicators
• predictive analysis is where you look at what you need done and then look for evidence that matches in the person’s CV. Successful candidates need to demonstrate capability, not through good communication and enthusiasm but with evidence.

5. Spend a lot of time on understanding the person’s mind-set. You can develop the person’s skills much more easily than their mental approach.

6. B2B customers, whether they are decision makers, users or professional procurement people, are getting smarter and more demanding. Don’t recruit for the job today; you need to recruit for the job 2-3 years out. Can this person move up the value chain?

If you would like to review your sales recruitment practices, or need support through the process, give SalesPathways a call.

Developing A High Performance Mind-Set*

In our sales development and coaching work we have been collating material from profiling a cohort of high performance sales people across several B2B organisations. The one thing they have in common is they are all ahead of last years numbers and this years targets. Sometimes this places them in a group smaller than 5% of their respective sales teams.

When you boil down what they are actually doing we came up with a surprisingly simple set of activities/attributes:

Resourceful

• Where can I find things out?
• What could I do to make things work better?
• Who knows stuff that could help me?
• Who can I bring into my network with power and influence?

Reflective

• Why am I doing it like this?
• What am I trying to achieve?
• When do I need to improve/succeed by?
• What is it that motivates me?

Resilient

• Keep going – even when it's hard to stay pro-active
• Keep smiling – even when you don’t feel like it
• Keep trying – even when it's difficult to do
• Keep learning – even when you don’t have the time
• Keep focused – don’t be deviated from your objectives

These same things kept coming up over and over. Our high performers combined the action orientation of doing something (sometimes anything) with the self-awareness to understand themselves and the world around them, making for a very dynamic mixture.

Another striking element is its simplicity. These people aren’t always the brightest, or the most experienced, or the most senior, they just get on with things in a productive, meaningful way, relentlessly. It’s a cliché, but they do indeed make their own luck by creating opportunity rich environments for themselves more often then their (above) average peers.

SalesPathways hold one day workshops for sales teams that dig into what’s behind these simple statements to help a larger percentage of sales people become high performers.

To talk about your sales team’s development, call us for an informal discussion.

* Mind-set Definition: The amalgam of a person’s personal belief system, general approach to work, and outlook on life.

Innovation/Creativity - It's Easy To Talk About, Much Harder To Actually Do

Every business talks about being ‘innovative’ or being more ‘creative’ as part of its vision or values. Management will talk about blue sky thinking, or its more robust cousin blue ocean strategy, without doing much else.

Often people will talk about innovation and creativity as the same thing which doesn’t help. You might mean them to be the same but they’re not. Innovation is usually held to be the more exciting original, strategic activity; creativity being more about low level process and operational, incremental improvement.

However, the real meaning of the words actually places their context the other way round. Innovate has its roots in innovâre--to renew. Creative however is, by definition, to bring some brand new into existence.

Whichever way you use the terms they do point to two different activities and thinking processes; one about originality, creating new things, and the other about taking something that exists further and better than anybody else previously has. Both these approaches can be sources of competitive advantage.

The commercial history of attempting to institutionalise innovation/creativity can be shown on a timeline.

What major corporations have recognised over recent times is that a functional focus is no longer effective (above the line). A more networked approach is required that connects the inside of the organisation to outside expertise and customers. The other significant development is the focus on cultural norms rather than rules and responsibilities. With everybody thinking differently, the ideas pipeline is much more effectively stocked.

The Major Innovation/ Creativity Drivers

• Clear alignment with the vision and values
• Linked to strategic objectives
• Encouraged through informal networks
• People trusted and empowered to try new things
• Critical analysis of customers articulated and unarticulated needs
• Leveraging existing intellectual capital
• Early involvement of suppliers/partners
• Toleration of rule breaking

Three Major Innovation/Creativity Considerations

1. It doesn’t happen without strong evidence of leadership being present
2. It doesn’t happen without good organisational change capabilities
3. It doesn’t happen without being measured through a Balanced Score Card type performance framework.

Note: The most common inhibitor to innovation/creativity is management talking about wanting more of it, without taking practical steps to make it happen.

One thing is certain, in this increasingly reductive, commoditised world, without innovative/creative capabilities your organisations' competitive advantage will be severely limited. If you would like to talk more about how SalesPathways can help develop this critical success factor, we’d love to talk to you. Please contact us.

Changing Your Organisation - Recession Or Not

Assuming you’ve already made the critical changes required for your organisation to survive, the next challenge is how should you change your organisation to thrive?

Different approaches are being deployed; some organisations believing any further change is dangerously destabilising, others who believe that developmental rather than remedial change is always required if opportunities are to be taken and competitors kept at bay.

In our work we see an interesting coloration that identifies this more pro-active change capability. The quality of leadership focus in the Senior Management Team* (SMT) determines the degree of competitive advantage development present in the organisations’ change agenda.

Predaptive have developed a summary checklist to help identify this change - leadership symbiosis:

1. How much of a defined and effectively prosecuted Vision is there for the organisation?
2. How values driven is the organisation?
3. Is the majority of SMT meeting time focused on customers and market opportunities rather than internal (and seemingly intractable) problems?
4. Is the SMT a functional, integrated, value adding entity?
5. Is the SMT visible around the whole business?
6. Is leadership demonstrated more by this group than talked about?
7. Is there an articulated strategy that the whole management population understand?
8. Are structures viewed as servants to the strategy rather than the other way round?
9. Are projects managed effectively, creating real differences in the business?
10. Are people working on development activities as well as ‘business as usual’ stuff, rather than being ‘too busy’ for anything other than the day job?

There is obviously a lot going on behind these headline questions, with significant dependencies between all of the 10 points, but the conclusions are clear. If an organisation scores poorly on the above then its ability to change is severely restricted.

The notion that change is a remedial, difficult and extraordinary activity, rather than an exciting, developmental opportunity rich activity is a very dangerous one and a totally alien concept to leadership focused Senior Management Teams.

Predaptive work extensively on senior team development, to talk about your issues please contact us for an informal discussion.

*Senior Management Team is the Directors plus all their direct reports.

Bird Flu, Banks, Swines and You

It seems that we’re never too far from a crisis. Whether we’re crunched by credit, panicked by pandemics, or outraged by outbreaks, there’s always something to be worried about. It may seem that all that worry is wasted energy, and to a large degree it is, however, some of that concern delivers real benefits when the Next Big Thing comes our way.

Looking back it’s easy to think that the Financial Services Authority could have found something more productive to do in the months leading up to the credit crunch than pull together board directors and key strategic managers from the leading UK banks and financial services businesses to take part in a large scale bird flu pandemic simulation over a number of weeks. Other organisations undertook their own emergency planning programmes, involving people at all levels to ensure that all foreseeable risks were covered. Bird flu has not made it to large scale human to human transition, so we’re not very worried about it now, the credit crunch was not foreseen so wasn’t planned for.

However that planning has already been used by businesses throughout the UK, reducing panic, maintaining business as usual and making life better for everyone. The need to keep cash moving is always identified by economists and criminologists as a key priority in emergency situations. When it looked like some UK banks could fall over, and panicky customers sought to draw out their cash, bird flu planning procedures helped to mobilise cash. When snow ‘gripped the country’ at the start of 2009 and people couldn’t get to work, bird flu planning procedures kicked in to ensure that thousands of employees could carry on working from home seamlessly, thanks to IT departments planning for restricted movement.

The emergence of swine flu has already seen organisations raise their internal preparedness level. It will be great if it doesn’t get used in a pandemic this year, but the planning that people do now will make business smoother in the long term. To talk through your planning processes and develop your emergency team contact us.

Did You Choose A Real Leader?

The news has been full of Members of Parliament’s expenses this week. The publication of itemised expenses claims with receipts has been great fun for the newspapers as they construct lifestyles based on charges for swimming pool maintenance, ‘gourmet’ dog food and ladies underwear. For the MPs concerned it’s been embarrassing.

The MPs could feel that they are being unfairly victimised in trying to do a difficult job, living in two locations and trying to balance parliamentary, constituency and family life to the best of their ability within the rules.

Unfortunately it seems that the public doesn’t see it that way. People are expressing anger not at MPs salaries, or at the rules that allow them to claim allowances, but at the way in which MPs have claimed what seemed like unreasonable expenses and as a group worked hard to prevent the public from knowing what the money was spent on.

It seems it’s not the MPs honesty that the public sees as lacking, but their integrity. People don’t like to feel that people they trust would do something which they see as being unfair and underhand. People in leadership positions are held to a high standard of behaviour and those who fail to meet that standard can quickly lose the trust and respect of their followers.

We see the same thing happening in organisations when senior managers cancel all non-urgent expenditure whilst continuing to utilise their travel budget to the max, or when leaders announce pay freezes for all employees and pay themselves a bonus. Leadership means living up to the standards that other people aspire to, whether it’s easy or not. Leaders who do this gain respect, trust and loyalty, all vitally important ingredients of a successful team. To find out more about how Predaptive can help your leadership team succeed contact us.

How Would You Rate The Significance To Your Organisation (In The Next 6 Months) The Following Business Development/Survival Strategies?

We ran a survey last month with the above title asking people to rate the importance of a range of business development techniques from irrelevant to critical. Below we post the aggregated results, from most to least significant.

1. Getting customer service right (most significant)
2. Launching new products
3. Reducing costs
4. New ways of working
5. Web based activities
6. Field sales optimisation
7. Changing the culture
8. Tele-sales optimisation
9. Recruiting new people
10. Off-line marketing
11. Reducing prices (least significant)

Commentary

• Getting customer service right was way out in front, over 80% of respondents rating this as critical. This still seems an obvious win, yet so many organisations still struggle with delivering any kind of memorable (for the right reasons), consistent customer focused service experience yet don't really understand why. Working with our sister company SalesPathways we would suggest it’s to do with two factors. Firstly not aligning with and designing service as part of the strategy. And secondly, not engaging with the frontline effectively. The combinatory failure creates mediocre service.
• Next, look at answers 2-5. What is the one organisational capability required to make an impact is these areas? Innovation. So few organisations are consciously competent when it comes to creativity and innovation, many have it as a key value (mostly more in hope than reality). Competitive advantage comes from either doing things clearly differently from everybody else, or from doing things materially better. To innovate, either incrementally through continuous improvement or radically through implementing step-change ideas will enable you to launch new products, reduce costs, and implement new ways of working and web based activities.
• There seems to be a recognition that online is now more significant than offline marketing activities.
• The field saleforce is still seen as a major influence on business performance, from our experience one of the quickest wins in boosting the numbers it to improve the activities of the sales team.
• Changing the culture is not a quick win but this seems to be a (relative) recognition that many organisations don’t have the cultural norms to come through the recession. This will be a real challenge.
• Recruiting new people is not bottom. Something to gladden any recruitment company.
• It’s interesting that reducing prices is bottom. There is a look of evidence that prices are under pressure so this is interesting. It might be about the fact many organisations are reducing prices but only as a condition of play rather than with any sense that it will make much of a difference. The other factors in the list being more significant.

Can we thank our newsletter readers who took part, and we hope you found the survey results a useful counterpoint to your own economic coping strategies. If you'd like to talk through how we can help your company with the challenges it faces please contact us.

100 Days Of Management

Barack Obama has just completed his first 100 days as President of the United States. He’s put in place a $787bn economic stimulus plan, put 2m acres of wilderness under federal protection, set in place a major reform of healthcare and acquired a new dog. A Gallup poll indicates that a majority of Americans feel he has done a good or excellent job so far. At the same time former President George W. Bush has spent his first 100 days out of office raising funds for his Presidential library, after 100 days he’s at $147m, ahead of expectation and well on the way to his $300m target.

100 days is an interesting marker to see how well someone is doing in a new job. Some people set themselves 100 day action plans, clearly setting out what they intend to do each day to build success, others set themselves 100 day objectives, visibly publishing what they will have achieved at the end of 100 days without specifically identifying the markers to get there.

Unfortunately many managers set themselves a lower goal of using the first 100 days in a new role to settle in, find out how things work, get to know everyone, and think about what changes might be appropriate. This strategy rarely yields significant results. At the end of 100 days the new manager is able to explain the current situation, justify why things are the way they are and rationalise any failures in performance.

To give managers a real chance of succeeding, they need to feel excited about their new management role, and confident in their ability to carry it out successfully. In too many cases a person is appointed or promoted to the role of manager with no clear idea of what their responsibilities are and no clear mandate to manage. Structured Training’s Fundamentals of Management course is a great way to invest 3 of those all important 100 days, taking time to decide what kind of manager you are (and want to be), what your key challenges will be, what your objectives are developing strategies to really deliver on your management promise. Don’t worry if you’re already in role. Your 100 days can start here.

For more information or to book a place on the next course please contact.

Customer Satisfaction - Is It Enough?

Businesses all talk about ensuring customer satisfaction as a priority. They even do detailed and lengthy surveys to determine just how satisfied their customers are - and why? - because we all know the old adage that unhappy customers tell more people of their woes than happy customers do of their joys. Whichever statistics you look at, we all know from our personal experience that the adage feels true. So what do we do about it? Agree standards of service based on the responses we get from the customer satisfaction surveys to get more satisfied customers – that’s what.

But is it enough? In an age where high levels of customer service is increasingly taken for granted the emphasis now is on Customer Loyalty – our research in this field has shown three main benefits from having increased numbers of loyal customers:

1. Increased repeat business
2. Increased recommendations and referrals – improved reputation
3. Increased access to available spend

These three together equal:

1. Increased business growth

Customer Loyalty goes much further than simply satisfying customers; it means ensuring that every interaction with customers, no matter how small, is an opportunity to Delight them. Businesses must re-align their entire operational focus on continually delighting customers otherwise they run the risk of losing them to someone who does!

For more details on how Structured Training can help your organisation to Delight its customers, please contact +44 1789 734300.