When I first went to the UK in 2000 to meet the kmp.co.uk crew, Bill kindly took me for a bit of a tour around the North of England. We visited a “Manor Hoose” (the aristrocratic way of saying house).

We went into Manchester and drove around Old Trafford. He said to me, “THIS is Old Trafford”. I said - not trying to be a smartarse - “looks like an Aussie Rules ground but smaller…”. I didn’t have any idea how important that ground is to many people nor any idea of the history….

We went back to his place but on the way took a detour. “Here is where Posh Spice and David Beckham live…”

My response was, “Who is David Beckham?”

I am surprised he didn’t just push me out of the car there and then! But the Vodafone commercials hadn’t hit Australia so I truly didn’t know…..

Having discovered your strengths, it is time to think about what your point of difference. In advertising parlance, this is the unique selling proposition - and the difficulty is trying to refine the many things you offer into a simple phrase of about 4 words.

A good place to start is thinking about your friends and colleagues, and the positive things they bring to your business and personal relationship. Once you start doing that, you can get a good sense of how you would like people to talk about you.

Let’s take an example: we have a really great bunch of project managers in our team at the Consulting Division of Ross Human Directions, but each brings a difference nuance and skill to this particularly difficult role. One absolutely prides himself on delivering projects on time and on budget. He has never delivered a project that wasn’t delivered on time and on budget. He also particularly delights in his ability to be able to project manage, team lead, undertake business analysis and cut code - basically every role in a team. We have another that is particularly good at really, really difficult projects - those with complex requirements, tricky stakeholders that can be a bit vague with their requirements. He is particularly good at nailing these requirements down and ensuring nothing is vague prior to build.

We have another that is great at delivering projects - but also particularly strong at mentoring staff. Another is particularly good at bringing parties together, being flexible and meeting all parties needs.

As you can see, all sorts of different skills sets, and what we work on matching our clients and project managers for best result.

Have a think about the people around you in the same way and pretty soon - at least in a business context - you will have a great idea how you would like people to think of you.

I was chatting with Bill Wallace about marketing ideas, particularly given he has recently joined a new consulting business, and I wanted to understand what it was all about. More on that later, but one of the many key points that came out of the conversation was that it is really is necessary to pay attention to yourself as a brand. In other words, how would someone else articulate your value or understand your personal traits in a business and social context.

I read in Harvard Business Review an interesting article, and it suggested asking some colleagues for some frank feedback on things you do well. It suggested not asking about the things you don’t do well - primarily because human nature can easily tend towards the negative and focussing on improving those things you don’t do well. Chances are you will waste your time and you are much better spending the time working on being the best at the things you do well. If you are interested in this, see Now Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham - a very good read.

It is a good place to start, but expect that:
1. People whom you think would respond to that sort of request often don’t
2. You will be surprised - generally pleasantly so - about strengths you didn’t realise you had.

If you can concentrate on really working hard on those things you do well, you are bound for success.

One of the things that I found interesting in the way we conducted presentations to clients was Bill’s uncanny nack of teasing out and confronting the hidden issues that someone that he had never met before would open up to him. It really was a case of drawing on a lot of experience.

The essence for our approach was drawn from Spin Selling. The Spin Selling Fieldbook and Major Account Sales are required reading if you want to understand the process of creating opportunities and realising them in sales.

If you have not come across it before, SPIN covers 4 key parts to a sale:
Situation: what are the facts you need to know about a customer and their environment to determine if your product will be a fit for their business. In application development terms, this might be a question like, “are you a J2EE or .Net shop?”. Best to do your homework prior to seeing a customer if you can, so that you don’t spend the meeting like an interrogation.
Problem: Having established the environment, the trick is to explore problems that the customer might be experiencing. You must have thought about your product and service, and the types of problems it solves for customers. Again, such a question might be (again, in application development terms..), “Have you been having trouble implementing the latest flavour of .Net?”
Implication: Generally this is where the probing is really starting to add some value for the customer - as much as it may be causing a bit of discomfort. For example, the above question might have yielded a response such as, “yeah, a little but we will be ok and just grab a book or google it..”. You then need to be able to ask the question, “If you do that and it doesn’t work out, what is implication on service levels for your customers?” or other similar question that probes the next level of depth - the aftermath of the course of action going pear shaped.
Need - payoff: At this point, a great outcome is the client saying, “I hadn’t thought of that, I need to get that sorted out. At this point, the next question is, “well, if we able to eliminate that as a problem for you, what would that do for you?”

Notice that during this process you have not been selling or even talking about your product at all? This is the hard bit for most salespeople who get trained up in the product, grow to love it, and want to share their passion about their product to the customer. The customer, of course, is only interested in their own problem. If you focus on closing in a complex sale, chances are you will be nowhere near as successful as you could be. So, grab those Spin Selling books, I highly recommend them.

Some shortcut key points:
1. Business Development Processes if you can systematise you process, you have a more rapid way of fulfilling on customer enquiry. I have found that by responding with a solid proposal quickly, you stand a much better chance of success. Many companies do not really track the time from enquiry to delivery of proposal, conversion rates, or the time to develop a proposal and aim to shorten it.
2. Market Segmentation - you just simply can’t sell to everyone, but the question becomes who to really focus on, and in depth.
3. Analytics - Looking at what data you capture and making sense of it
4. Database clean up and management - and integration. In your business you probably have a bunch of people referred to in different parts of your business as customers, clients, debtors, creditors (if they both buy from you and sell to you) - and probably all in different databases, accounting systems, and email clients.
5. CRM - the big question here is “what does CRM mean to you?”. Technologies have been fantastic at undertaking demos on product that seem to solve all of the problems - it is the implementation of the technology AFTER people and process issues have been resolved that delivers success. Our experience is that this needs to be very much customised to the individual company rather than trying to the meld the company to the software. As I run a business specialising in application development, I do have a bias here - but in many cases is cheaper and more effective to build software for purpose as a core business system rather than buy something with features you will never use.

It is no surprise that in business the greatest pressure is - of course - on the boss. Whilst staff enjoy up to 14 days per year paid sick leave with 4 weeks annual leave, and cumulative long service leave, the poor business owner who has their house on the line often is unable to take a sick day, rarely gets a holiday and certainly gets little choice when to be able to manage this. However, being a “super human” boss isn’t the path to prosperity - just the path to a heart attack.

So here are some tips to get the organisational management and people structure right.

Today’s generation is about a flat management structure, the flatter the better. A meritoracy, where position is based on performance. Bullsh!t seems to come as a bi-product of hierarchical structures. ( You know the sort of thing - I need a car parking space/an assistant/better car / should be promoted to the same position as him/her etc. )

Here are some rules:
Rule 1 No assistants
Rule 2 Pay is measured against performance
Rule 3 Bonus all the staff on group performance
Rule 4 Have regular team meetings
Rule 5 Promote self help and survival tactics and don’t hide the bad news (or the good news) from the staff
Rule 6 Do not tolerate system abuse or bullsh!t from the staff (and occasionally use the f-word to get your point over – see next post, Management by the F Word)
Rule 7 Use contract staff wherever possible (No risk, no politics, pay on performance, no payroll tax, no hassle)

Engender self education in your workforce….

Today’s workforce is different. There are so many different wants for people today that their expectations of their employer are higher than they have ever been in history. In absence of common purpose, the focus is on self, “where is my career going, I want more time for family etc etc”. There has been a quantam shift in the employment attitudes of Gen Y versus their predecessors, much to the frustration of their managers whom often worked very long and hard to realise their career success.

The top consultancies – the McKinsey’s, Boston Consulting Group and others – employ smart people able to rapidly learn and assimilate concepts and deliver business value.

“I asked the tech guys a key question on some new technology and what was the right answer. They said,” we’ll tell you at 4pm”. What they were doing was posting the question on 100 newsgroups and using software to collate and rank the answers by the number of people agreeing with a single response. This is a self help, rapid learning approach. This was happening in 1999, well before the phenomenon of Google.

I attended a conference in November 1999 on ecommerce with a premonition that something was going to change my career as a result. The something was Bill Daring, and after a 5 minute chat, and a 10 minute demonstration my life changed direction. I was told that in 12 months I would never be able to work for someone ever again. Nervously I leapt from the precipice and proceeded on the journey.

We proceeded to “star trek” the development of a business. With impecible timing, we opened the door in Australia just 4 weeks prior to the tech wreck.

For me this ended up as a fabulous and interesting journey that was and continues to be all about perspectives and the important things in both business and life. This blog is intended to include stories and anecdotes from direct experience in business – and have been supplied with either a tone of seriousness or with laughter which will be appreciated by anyone associated with Bill Daring.

I hope you enjoy it…

Justin Davies