Does Your Business Have CIPA? (Read Time 82 Seconds)

I’m just finishing the book Socialized by Mark Fidelman. It is one of the better books I have read of late about harnessing social media. Many of these books date very quickly, but the information in this 2012 book is still very relevant and I recommend you read a copy.

Towards the end Mark relates the story of a girl who suffers from Congenital Insensitivity to Pain, aka CIPA. It was an analogy to businesses who are heading down the gurgler at a rate of knots and don’t even realize it. Those of you who read my blogs will know about how frustrated I was to see Borders self implode, when they didn’t need to. As I mentioned earlier this week, many businesses are being hurt but not realizing it, or not knowing what to do about it. It’s that frog in the pot of simmering water. We all know the story, but many of us are sitting in that pot, enjoying the warmth and then getting severely cooked.

In my experience, it is people who aren’t institutionalized in your business who you need to talk to. If it’s not consultants like myself, at least talk to your customers, the ones you have left. Ask them why they come to your business. What is it that drew them in and how can you give them what they want and stay profitable?. I had loads of answers for the book industry, but they ‘knew what they were doing”. They focused on best sellers, general merchandise goodies and even fluffy toys. The questions you need to ask have to be qualitative, don’t give them choices you think they should answer, have conversations with them. Or get out quick and sell your business to someone while it still has some value. I still maintain if I had been on the management team or board of Borders in NZ, they wouldn’t have floundered, they would have risen like a phoenix out of the ashes of the past and their stores would be full of people, in many cases still buying paper.

Do does your business have CIPA? Are your margins declining, is your stock-turn going down? Are people buying similar products online instead of from you? Are your customers slowly churning to other sources or evolutions of the goods and services you offer? What have you done to future proof your business? As I said in my other blog earlier this week, people are reading more, listening to more music and taking more photos daily than ever before.

Got any questions? Feel free to leave them as comments and maybe we can have a discussion about this.

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I’m Very Thankyou

Yesterday I asked a colleague how she was doing, she replied that she was doing well. I said that I was pleased to hear it and asked after he partner who had been unwell.

She then asked me how I was doing and I replied “I’m very thanks”. She said that was great and then continued into a conversation.

If I ask you, I’m actually asking. What about you? Is it a platitude or friendly greeting, or is someone engaging with you and really cares. My response is one way of finding out if the other person is really listening. I would expect someone who is listening to either laugh (because they know me) or respond with a “very what?”

It doesn’t take much to engage a little with people, even a smile from a perfect stranger, with no more meaning than acknowledgement of your existence from a fellow human being, matters. I’d really welcome some comments here because this interests me.

Next time someone asks you how you are, whether or not you respond with a platitude, if you have a moment, ask them how they are, in reply. Listen to their answer and show that you listened with empathy. Ask a question or offer a positive response relevant to their response. Show them you care and try to make it a habit. Then please come back to this blog and tell me how it went.

I’d really like to know.

 

How Do You Keep Up With the Massive Changes Affecting Your Business?

How do you keep up with the changing environment you live and work in? Technology is a moving target as are many other elements that shape our environment. There are so many facets to our industries that constantly change while you are trying to keep your business going the best way you know how. 

There are a  number of options. You can join business groups, buy industry magazines, search the Internet, follow social media and talk to others in your industry. So now you are working a 16 hour day and not necessarily making much more progress. Why? Because you are so focussed on doing Business As Usual and your view is based on your insider knowledge, bias and training.

What else can you do? One option is bring someone like me in as a consultant. As a Futurist I scan data using tools I have learned, my own experience in business and a wide focus on STEEP, whilst also having no skin in your business and therefore an objectivity that is hard to find when you have been making decisions that you are financially and emotionally attached to.

What is STEEP? It is about looking at the world and elements within it from the perspective of a wide range of elements and wild cards which make up the world. These key 5 elements are Society, Technology, Environment, Economics and Politics.

Take those 5 elements and apply them to your Business Plan. What is going on in your world right now in relation to STEEP? How might each element impact on your new product launch or sales plan? I would welcome your comments. 

One of the elements of foresight is being able to find connections between seemingly irrelevant  factoids or situations and understand what they mean. Then on top of that sometimes there are wild cards to be considered. What would happen if……..

When you look at information in isolation there are many risks. People form opinions based on snippets of information without seeing the full picture. They assume other people’s opinions, perhaps also based on bias or limited information. People often form opinions or carry them forward based on old data, often not even knowing that it is old data. For example, you may see a RT on Twitter and think it is current information, when in fact it has been retweeted by people for a week. Think about the disinformation that went around in Boston recently. Once it flies around it is very hard to know which information is current and correct.

Unleashing the Road Warrior

Currency of information is hard to find these days. When a book comes out, by the time it has been printed it is already out of date. When I published Unleashing The Road Warrior, which took me about 6 months to write, it had a currency of about 2 years. After that, all the technology I wrote about was out of date.

We are frequently bombarded with little pieces of information, parts of stories, brief nuggets of 10 ways to be better at something, or 5 ways to become a social media superstar and double your sales. If only it was that easy.

Is there a simple answer? No, there isn’t. However in today’s world, we are connected to many people who are experts in certain areas. There are also people who maintain they are, when they are not. Start by connecting to people who really do know what they are doing. Ask people you know and trust. Check out their credentials. LinkedIn is a good place to start from a business perspective. Are they well connected? Have they been endorsed or recommended? Do you know people that they are connected with that you can talk to?

There are 3 types of people in the world. Those that make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who wonder what happened. Don’t be in the last group if you want to go forward, but also be careful where you get your counsel from.

As a footnote, if you are in New Zealand, or somewhere else where similar things are happening. Fairfax is said to be closing down in both print and online Computerworld NZ, PC World and Reseller News. So where will you be looking for information on your next technology investment or foray? I welcome your comments.

If Only You Would Listen

Its soapbox time again, but it won’t take long. This is for myself and for the many business people who talk too much.

I’ve been in a lot of business meetings lately, some of them excellent, many of them way too long. This morning I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts Rock the World With LinkedIn on Webmaster Radio which was an interview with the founder of MBAWriters and Director at BT Consulting, Todd Rhoad. Among other things they were talking about the value and importance of eBooks. This is of course something of a hobby horse for me.

I wrote a treatise called Are eBooks Ready to Come of Age and published it 10 years ago. You can get a free PDF copy here.

Anyway, I’ve seen a few eyes glaze over recently in meetings and presentations. It wasn’t that they were unable to comprehend the topics. It was because they had understood long before. There were a few classic sayings towards the end of the podcast, the things smart parents tell their kids. and the things that sales people are taught, well were taught back in the day when sales was considered a profession. Like:

• The most successful business people keep their mouths shut. I learned that in my second year of my 3 year Sales & Marketing Diploma. I was selling 2-way radios to a sharp businessman. Halfway through my presentation he asked me for the price. I thought I was dealing with the price objection, so I started in on the problems he had told me about and how the features and benefits of our product would help him with those. He asked again for the price. I stopped, a little confused. He asked me again. I told him and he signed a big fat purchase order on the spot. I learned big time from that and always try to remind other people that you have 2 ears and one mouth for a reason and you should use them in that proportion.
• As Lori said on the podcast (which I strongly recommend you subscribe to, is that you learn more by listening. All you need to to do to get business is listen to what the customer wants, confirm that what they are saying is in fact what they want, then leg them know if you can solve their problem at a rate that is less painful than the problem they want to solve. Then stop talking and get on with doing the business.
• Smart people are listening and processing what they are being told. As Todd said “With people who are very quiet, you have to be very eager when they pop up and say something, because they’ve been sitting there thinking about it and its probably going to be pretty intelligent.” The flip side of that is think about what you are going to say, don’t speak as you are thinking. Maybe you can’t wait to hear what you are going to say, but your listener may not be as excited unless you are responding to what they are telling you.
• Another thing I learned many years ago which is obvious, but sometimes you need to think about the obvious, is that we can think much faster than we listen or read. Let your customer listen and if you have a PowerPoint presentation, don’t read them the presentation, they have already read it and are processing it. Glazed eyes again, perhaps thinking about lunch or their next meeting.

I’m going to finish with an old Chicago song I used to love and share with you one great tool that I hear women using all the time, which I call active listening. Do you ever have a conversation with someone, usually a woman and she repeats back to you some of the words you have just said?

“The floods and damage from Cyclone Evan were pretty scary….:

“pretty scary”

“I had some friends who were over there on vacation”

“on vacation, I bet they were wishing they had gone somewhere else”

This is an active conversation and the people doing this are totally engaged. Most people are not totally engaged and are in fact focusing on the next thing they are going to say rather than listening to what their customer or prospect is trying to tell them. Active listening is a really good tool to use because it can stop your mind from wandering off and perhaps missing that clue that your customer is offering you as to why they might want your product. It will also help you understand what your customer is really thinking about and wants. It will let you be ready for buying signals and it will also endear you to the customer because you are showing that you are really interested. If you aren’t interested, then you probably don’t want their business.

Next time you meet someone and they ask how you are, say “Thanks, I’m very, how are you?” If they stop and ask “Very what?” They were listening. Chances are they will say something like “That’s nice”.

Listening for most of us is a skill we need to work on. Very few men, including myself at times, are not great listeners. I have found that the times when people really enjoyed a conversation with me, I actually said very little and I have probably learned a lot.

The Problem With Consultants

What is the problem with consultants?

Consultancy is one of the fastest growing sector in professional business people, the USA alone has over 700,000 of them. IBM Global Business Services and Ernst & Young have almost half a million consultants between them alone!

They charge a lot of money for their expertise and knowledge, if you get one through one of the top firms like McKinsey and Boston Group are unlikely to give you any change out of thousands of dollars an hour. Of course what you are buying in many cases at that level is something you already know, its more a corroboration perhaps when you are making a decision that has significant implications for your business, especially if you are looking at taking it into green fields, although most large businesses don’t take those sorts of risks in the first place even if the potential gains are huge.

Given that IBM possibly has the largest group of assembled business consultants of any company in the world, I guess the adage that no one ever got fired for buying IBM (not strictly true) still carries a cloak of implied job security for decision makers.

Perhaps it is the fees that put people off consultants especially when compared with the salary packages of the people who are hiring them, often to tell them things they already know, or for mining information from employees of their own company. Of course consultants don’t have job security between consults and often can’t even talk about what they did for their clients to earn those dollars because the IP is commercially sensitive. Do you get better value from a consultant who works for a top 1o company, or one who is self employed? Maybe, sometimes. Often not.

As a consultant myself, I think a common problem that people have is that the information they provide is known within the company, but for various reasons it wasn’t available to key decision makers, or they didn’t want to hear it from staff who sit below them on the corporate ladder. It is also frustrating for companies when it appears that the solutions or recommendations that consultants make seem to come so easy for them. It also frustrates many companies that they aren’t able to get those answers from interns and graduates they employ who they expect to have the latest thinking on their industry.

The problem for the graduate and the difference between them and the business consultant, is that the good consultant has business experience. They may have specialist knowledge in an industry, be that biochemical nano technology, banking or retail They have years of experience understanding and finding solutions for problems.

A key thing that I bring as a consultant, is that I don’t have emotional baggage in your business, I am not phased by who is the boss, I am not married to the corporate Business As Usual credo of ‘this is how we roll’. I can see things that might be staring in your face and you don’t see them, because we are wired differently. I’ll tell it to you how it is.

I am also passionate about solving business problems. I get out of bed excited about the opportunity to understand your business and help you to find solutions to your problems, how to grow your business, how to find out what your customers really want and need, how to harness the knowledge your people (your most valuable asset) have and want to share with you. I can save and make you money. Sometimes I can do that very quickly with knowledge I already have after many years of working in a variety of roles including my own companies, sometimes it may take weeks or months. I can take knowledge from a wide range of industries and transpose them into relevant solutions for yours.

The problem with consultants is that people bring them in too late. Why wait for an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff? Why not talk to specialists on your way up who can help accelerate your progress and help prevent costly detours or mistakes?

The problem with consultants is sometimes they will tell you what you don’t want to hear.