Everyone’s been to a few “business networking” events. With talk of mixing business with pleasure made me consider the real similarities between networking events and singles dating clubs.

Location: Networking events are often held in a bar. Guess what? Singles mingle in bars all the time, and the booze is a flowing in both types of events.

Attendance : Much like Saturday night at a sports bar, the men will vastly outnumber the women.

Breaking the ice : Much like attending a matchmaker’s party, the business networker is often given something to help break the ice while meeting new people. Sometimes it’s just a name tag. Other times it’s a badge, colour-coded to what your professional niche is, or what your convention status is. Or everyone has a code badge with specific characters – find another person with an identical stamp on their card and you win a prize. Sounds like arranged marriages!!

The people: At networking events, there seem to be two types of people: those huddling with entourage, only occasionally leaving their group to fetch a new drink; and those who approach potential partners and drop opening lines like “Hi, my name’s Bob. What’s your job?” Sound familiar?

Making the introduction: At networking events, the vast majority of opening lines revolve around dropping your title and/or enquiring as to the other person’s job. So it’s not “what’s your star sign”, but “what do you do for a living”. An opening line is still just that, even if more people lead in with a handshake in networking events than their singles equivalent.

Leaving with a Partner: At a business event, you might be looking for a long-term strategic partner or just a partner for a particular short-term need. The exact same thing occurs at a singles party, although modesty precludes too close an examination of this context.

Looks are important: While you’re out looking for that business partner, there are frightening parallels. Looks are still important, though the emphasis is maybe the cut of one’s suit. Business cards are collected and fancy titles savored. All the better if you partner with the CEO, instead of a programmer.

Looking for funding : When the networking is for Venture Capital and potential investors then this is the business equivalent of a Sugar Daddy. A lot of people would like nothing more than to have an investor fund their short-term, exit-strategy-focused venture. That is to say, they want to be taken out for dinner and bought some jewelry before they stop returning phone calls. Then there’s another class of investor-stalking attendee that’s looking for first-round financing for a long-range business plan. These people are looking for a ring.

The morning after: Especially in the case of the investor function, just like Saturday night, even though everyone’s out looking for a partner, almost every one still goes home alone. And for those who don’t go home alone, sometimes their new partners don’t look so good in the morning. Much as a single person would rather gnaw off their arm, as to slip out in the morning without waking a particularly distasteful partner, a breach of contract lawsuit is the ultimate extension of Coyote Love.

One misquote by the CEO can send a brand into freefall as Gerald Ratner discovered in 1991.

Although widely regarded as “tacky”, the shops and their wares were nevertheless extremely popular with the public, until Ratner made a speech at the  Institute of Directors on 23 April 1991.During the speech, he commented:

We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, “How can you sell this for such a low price?”, I say, “because it’s total crap.”

He compounded this by going on to remark that some of the earrings were “cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long.” Ratner’s comments have become textbook examples of the folly of making fun of, and showing contempt to, customers. In the furore that ensued, customers exacted their revenge by staying away from Ratner shops. After the speech, the value of the Ratner group plummeted by around £500 million, which very nearly resulted in the firm’s collapse.Ratner resigned in November 1992 and the group changed its name to Signet Group in September 1993.

Michael S. Jefferies,  the slightly overweight and un-cool CEO of Abercrombie,  made it clear about the focus of his brand in an interview in 2006, but has resurfaced and now with the power of social media has gone viral.

“In every school there are the cool and popular kids, and then there are the not-so-cool kids,” Jeffries said in the article. “Candidly, we go after the cool kids. We go after the attractive all-American kid with a great attitude and a lot of friends. A lot of people don’t belong [in our clothes], and they can’t belong. Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.”

This has unleashed a torrent of abuse, calls to boycott the stores, and affirmative action as the video below shows.

It is the most under-rated skill that can super-charge your career.  And in the past 15 years on the professional speaking circuit I have seen little or no improvement.

Great presentation technique gets you noticed inside and outside your company, gets you promoted or better still – headhunted. With some many poor presenters who use MSPowerpoint as a crutch, being a confident speaker is the easiest differentiator.

Learnt or natural skill?

Sadly for most of you, being a great speaker is a learnt skill. So you cannot hide away claiming that you are “just not a natural”. Now I understand that for many, public speaking is terrifying. In a recent survey of fears, dogs came top, but public speaking was above dying. So people would rather die that speak in public, which is absurd if you knew how easy it is to overcome your fear of speaking.

So the first hurdle to get over is to realise that it is critically important that you master public speaking and that it can be learnt. So to help you, here are three simple things that people get wrong, but are easy to fix and will have the greatest impact on your presentation:

FATAL FLAW-1: presenting = MSPowerpoint

For most people when asked to present something, they immediately boot up MSPowerpoint. There are 3 phases to a presentation

1. Preparation; what are you going to say, to whom and how
2. Presenting; getting up on your feet
3. Leave behinds; what are you going to leave with the audience

The flawed thinking goes like this:

I need to present.  Let me start thinking about what I going to say. Boot up MSPowerpoint. You start typing bullets to organise your ideas. You rearrange the slides. The slides and bullets are tidied up and become the presentation. You add more detail to the bullets because you are anxious you won’t remember what you are going to say. But then you think about what the audience will need to read once the presentation is over. So you add more information to each slide.  Suddenly you have 25 slides each with 100 words in 15 point font. Nonsense.

Lets think about that 1,2,3 again

1. Prepare: I use a mindmap on paper with a pencil.  I can see everything on one page; the ideas, the flow, the high level and the detail. I can rearrange easily. Once finished I can then think about “2. How I will present.”
2. Presenting: They are there to hear you. To connect. They are not there to watch you read your slides. So what do you need to get your message over? Nothing, props, images, diagrams or some words.
3. Leave behind: What you leave them with could be a book, a white paper, a report or a link to a website.  What you used to present should be too little.

FATAL FLAW-2: Weak start and weaker finish

The most important part of your presentation is the end. That’s what people remember so prepare enough time to plan a big finish that summarises the entire presentation. A trick I use is my final sentence costs $5 per word. So keep it short and tight.  BTW “Oh, that’s my last slide” or “That’s all from me” is not acceptable.  Here is an acceptable finish, “This is the most cost-effective way of reaching your customers… ever” or “The best way to excite, inspire and connect with your customers”

The second most important part of the presentation is the beginning. A strong start engages the audience, settles your nerves and should make an impact. Get someone else to introduce you that gives you credibility and allows you to start with a powerful opening statement e.g. “Sailing is the most under-rated marketing medium”, or “Sailing is 250 times more cost effective than Formula 1”.

FATAL FLAW-3: Words words words

The greatest fear people have is they will “forget their words”. This is not a Shakespeare play or Hollywood film. The presentation should not be tightly scripted and memorized, or even worse read out loud. There are exceptions such as legal statements to the press and the military. If you know your subject and you have prepared then the words will come to you.  The exact words are less important than how they are delivered.

In fact 38% of communication is tone of voice. Only 7% is what you actually say. The remaining 55% 
is physiology; body language, how you look, where you stand. (The original study  was Birtwhistle and Mahrabian). So why are you spending time agonizing over the words, the 7%. You should be thinking about the 93%.  The pace and tone

Which leads me to how you bring your presentation to life. Again, most people resort to MSPowerpoint as a crutch to help them through the presentation. Helping them “remember their words”.  Instead work out a different way of remembering your structure. Having notes is acceptable onsome 5×3 cards. So when you prepare think about these which are in order of impact:

• Stories are the most powerful as they really connect with the audience. But you should tell the stories without slides. Use your passion.
• Props are great. They bring the subject to life. Alternatively think of props which are an analogy to your message.
• Images and video can drive strong emotions, which is what you want.
• Words should be the last resort and avoid bulleted lists.

One thought on the text on slides.  Work out who is the oldest person in the room. Divide their age by 2 and that is the smallest font you are allowed. So a 60 year old means no text smaller that 30 pt font.

Every day is a chance to practice

Don’t just think about formal stand-up conferences. These principles are completely valid when talking to a small group or a meeting with just one other person. I create little mindmaps for important meetings. I create and larger mindmaps for major conference keynotes.

Find places that are lower risk to try things out. Put yourself forward to speak at schools, colleges or other groups. Work out what works for you. The best way to prepare. How you relax before you go on stage. How you help yourself remember your structure. How you keep track of the time. You will get it wrong. You will know it was wrong, but often the audience has no idea. Just like your sailing, be good at self analysis. Learn from it and grow. Your career depends on it.

Want more?

I was interviewed on my Top 10 tips and you can download the MP3 file from this link.

Final thought

“There is no such things as failure, only feedback”

It is beautifully presented, but Sir Ken also has a great dry sense of humour. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

If you missed his early 2 presentations that have got 20 million views there are here:

• Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity

• Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!

Artemis Racing has called for an end to the rumours and speculation about the horrific accident that killed Andrew “Bart” Simpson racing on an AC72 in San Francisco Bay. Quite reasonably, his family and friends need space to come to terms with losing someone who was so popular but taken from us way too early.

Privacy has disappeared. Everyone can be heard.

But this is 2013 and social media is alive and kicking. We cannot turn back the clock.

Social media has shown through articles, blogs, videos and tweets how respected Bart was. As a blog on the Americas Cup website says, Tributes pour in for Andrew ‘Bart’ Simpson. Thousands of Facebook profile pictures have been changed to Bart Simpson cartoons. The true feelings of the sailing community have been expressed. How much he inspired others. What an ambassador he was for the sport.

But social media is also a mechanism for very rapidly distributing views on the future of the Americas Cup and the Ac72s. Everyone has a voice, whether informed or not. Their opinions are broadcast, discussed, forwarded and judged on their own merits. In the absence of an official statement on the future of the Americas Cup the press, bloggers and sailors who are hungry for answers look to others to fill the vacuum.

Newsjacking is rife

The term coined by David Meerman Scott  is newsjacking.  His recent book explored the phenomenon. In short, an event hits the news. In this case the Artemis Racing accident. The press run with every angle of the story they can for a day or so, but eventually they run out of things to say. They are hungry for the secondary story. Enter newsjacking. Clever (or the opportunistic) create the next story. In this case it is the debate about the future of the America’s Cup and the future of the AC72s.

The newsjacking of the accident may be deliberate and planned, but much of the debate is simply a passionate sailing community keen to discuss the future of the pinnacle of their sport. The Americas Cup was anticipated to be a showcase for the sport with similar boats racing in the perfect setting – San Francisco bay. The AC45s on the Americas Cup World Series offered that. But with the AC72s it is rapidly turning back to being a few rich boys playing with a few expensive and very dangerous toys.

Decisions and statements already being made

Social media takes any message and amplifies it. Twitter, as many politician and celebrity know to their cost, can land them in trouble in just 140 characters.  There have been no such gaffes by the teams who have sensibly been tight lipped. However there have been a few notable interviews that are fuelling the speculation on both the cause of the accident and the future of the AC72s.

• An interview with Nathan Outteridge, the skipper of the Artemis Racing yacht suggests how the accident occurred and it questions the structural integrity of the boat.
• Patrizio Bertelli, the Italian owner of the Prada fashion label and a long-time sponsor of Italy’s America’s Cup campaigns, spoke to Vsail and in the interview said his team  needed 48 hours to reflect on the tragedy and decide whether to continue with their €30million campaign.
• Sir Keith Mills has publicly commented that he refused to fund a AC campaign due to the rules that would allow such high speed boats. “Seeing what those boats were capable of, speeds of up to 40 knots, frightened the life out of me.”

Considered decisions required, but fast

Tasked with running a review into the circumstances surrounding the capsize of the Artemis Racing AC72 on Thursday, Regatta Director Iain Murray says consultation with stakeholders is already underway.  “The meeting with the teams is a crucial next step,” Murray said. “We need to establish an open flow of information to ensure this review meets its goals of fact-finding and putting us in a position to recommend changes, if necessary.” There are also investigations by the San Francisco police and the US Coast Guard.

However, it makes it very difficult for the various bodies to have the time and privacy to conduct their reviews and come up with a considered response. The press, bloggers and sailors are hungry for answers. And in the absence of the official answers, they will fill the vacuum. And may influence the outcome before the reviews are even completed.

Companies have found to their cost that customer-power through social media is a very real and tangible force as a recent Forbes article highlighted. There are numerous examples, but here are just a few.

• Maker’s Mark reversed itself on their decision to lower the proof of their standard bottling.
• Starbucks, has offered to pay UK tax, to avoid a boycott backlash
• BP’s official Twitter account: 16,000 followers. Satirical (anonymously-run) BP Twitter account: 180,000 followers.

Back in 1986, there were a serious of accidents in World Rallying involving the very powerful Group B cars. It reached a critical point, rather like the current situation for the America Cup, when the death of Henri Toivenen and his co-driver, made the organisers consider the cars and the rules. Within hours Group B cars were banned. And the World Rally Championship (WCR) was the better for it. Viewing figures increased as people could relate to the cars that were being driven. Spectators do not watch sport to see crashes and fatalities.

Social media should help inform the decisions

The analysis of the accident is happening behind closed doors. Which is right and proper. But to ignore the voice of the sailing community, which has been made possible through social media, when deciding on the future of the Americas Cup would be wrong. Canvassing the views from that wider community before social media would have taken weeks. Now is is all available – now. It should make it easier to make the better decisions more quickly. Which is what is needed for the good of the America Cup.

Social media is with us. It cannot be ignored. It cannot be switched off. It should be harnessed.

In the world of B2B marketing a hidden secret is the humble printed book. Although eBooks are taking off there is still a place for the business paperback.

Books are a little like PR and sausages. The more you know what goes into them, the less you want to have anything to do with them. However, books are brilliant marketing tools for a few reasons:

• Give a client a brochure and they may look at it
• Give a client a book and they will read it and refer to it.
• A book is a trusted source, a white paper is marketing lies
• A book is kept by potential customers long after your marketing brochure has hit the trash
• A book can be cheaper than a brochure, especially for small print runs.
  • No charges from the graphic design house for design, layout, clever copywriting and images
  • Print on demand means smallest print run is ONE book (£10 or less per book)
  • Print on demand means no over runs and waste
  • Changes or updates can be added quickly at limited cost

eBooks have blurred the line between the white paper PDF and a true book. But a printed book is really a book and therefore is more valuable as a marketing tool than an eBook.

But who will buy it?

No-one. It is not for sale. The value of a book is not from book sales, but the influence and credibility it gives. In fact you should give it away. The value very based on the author and business

• A book can build personal brand. Increasing promotion prospects for employees.
• For independent consultants it can raise their profile, and increase consulting and speaking fees.
• For a company, a book can raise awareness or change expectations far more cost-effectively than a traditional PR or marketing campaign.
• The author gets invited to speak at conferences, rather than their company having to sponsor the conference

How to use a book

The book is a critical piece of marketing collateral and should be used aggressively in campaigns:

• Guerrilla marketing – books are the No. 1 weapon to change expectations.
• A book can be a very valuable weapon, particularly if it is considered impartial. It can be used to:
  • Educate a marketplace
  • Seed key questions in client’s minds
  • Position you as thought-leaders
  • Reset expectations of you vs. competitors
  • Used as 3^rd party endorsement for your ‘approach’
  • Drive up PR interest and start conversations with clients
  • Protect your IP: You share your ideas and walk away hoping for a sale or you share your ideas and leave a book with your ideas in copyrighted form

So books can be given away at conferences, seminars and other marketing events or people can “order” them from the corporate website.  Don’t be tempted to set up a dedicated website for the book. This is what authors who want to sell books do. The book is intended to drive traffic to your corporate website and improve the stickiness of the website.

Types of book

Before you start writing a book you need to consider what type of book. There are 4 types of book in 3 categories:

The types of book are:

• Public; written by independent authors, promoted and purchased
• Sponsored; public book that has customised content (foreword, case studies)
• Private label; book that is branded by an organisation with customised content and not directly available to the public
• Social need; books that need to be written and read for free, such as ‘Running a charity’

The categories are

• Business  such as ‘Launching in China’, ‘Implementing CRM’ or ‘Using PR’
• Life Event  such as ‘Sending kids to private school’ or ‘Emigrating to Australia’
• Lifestyle  such as ‘Buying a high-performance sportscar’ or Running a marathon, triathalon or ironman’

Audience and objective

Next you need to be clear about the objective of the book and the audience. The more focused the book the greater its success and impact. If you want to reach multiple markets, why not write multiple books with a large overlap (copy&paste).

Be very clear on the objectives before you start thinking about the book structure.  The simplest and quickest book to write which has the most marketing impact is either a Smart-Questions book or a Dummies book.

Smart Questions

SQ provides the template, cover design, proof reading, publishing and listing on on-line sites (Amazon etc) and printing. Books are print on demand.

Every SQ printed book follows the same structure, making it simple and quick to write.

• Cover (follows standard SQ layout)
• Reviews
• Author bio(s)
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements & Foreword
• Who should read this book
• Chapter 1 – The situation (could be more than one chapter)
• Chapter 2 – The complication (could be more than one chapter)
• Chapter 3 – Ask the Smart Questions approach (standard)
• Chapter 4 – The structure of the questions in this book
• Chapter 5 – The Questions (could be more than one chapter)
• Chapter 6 – Anecdotes or case studies (to bring the questions to life)
• Chapter 7 – Summary

Dummies:

The Dummies brand is well known with over 100,000 books covering 120 topics. The books are both customer focused (eg Keeping Rabbits) sold to the general public and sponsored by businesses and given away at events ( eg BPM)

The books very in structure but all follow a similar style which is light hearted and makes them accessible.

Who writes and how long will they take?

Writing again is a learnt skill and many business people have managed to get to senior positions without the ability to write or speak well in public.  Writing a book takes weeks not years but it needs to be written by someone close to the business. It cannot simply be outsourced. You need to find someone senior who is passionate, wants to help the business and has an ego.  Ideally 1 && 2, but sometimes 3 is a good substitute.

The fastest I have written a book (out of the 6) is 3 weeks. But that was a little hectic but the deadline was driven by a conference and we thought of the idea a little too late!!

What are you waiting for?

Dear Virgin Media,

I’m really sorry for my Father in Law not paying his bill last month, but what with him being dead and all, it’s probably slipped his mind. Some people, eh?

You, however, are to be publicly commended for swooping in with all the sensitivity of a charging rhino and instantly fining him an extra ten pounds for having the unheard of nerve to be dead and therefore being unable to pay you (some people really have no idea of priorities do they? It’s your profit first, THEN anything else. The cheek!).

You also win extra points for noticing his bank had returned his Direct Debit informing you he had passed away, THEN still slapping on a fine anyway. That’s a special kind of meanness right there. Oh, and despite my wife telling you our sad news as well. I am intrigued – how exactly did you imagine him paying this extra fine from beyond the grave?

You also deserve a further honorable mention for promptly sending us next months bill as well. I’m simply not paying it, as ever since passing away, I have noticed a sharp decrease in the amount of television my Father in Law has been watching. I simply cannot think why that would be.

I might pay it if you can prove to me he’s been watching any of your channels in heaven, but given that British Sky Broadcasting is beamed in directly from the clouds I think he’s much more likely to be enjoying that. Your infernal cable pipes seem only to come up from the ground (same location as Hell – spooky coincidence) where I imagine your train people in the art of customer service.

I am bitterly disappointed in your attitude, probably automatically generated by machine and unchecked by any caring human heart. The only saving grace is that my Father in Law had an excellent sense of humour and is probably laughing his arse off about this as we type, giving you the Vs, waving ten pound notes around, planning to haunt you and enjoying the content of Sky TV.

Fail.

But improv is a valuable skill for business. Most meetings are essentially improv. Also for it dramatically improves your presenting especially if you have Q&A. Here are 2 great examples. The first it straight Q&A, but the second is when it all goes wrong.

Rather than go with the tried ( tired ) format of getting a client to present a hours worth of Powerpoint slides to a lifeless audience, we thought we’d go for a slightly higher risk interview format.  I interviewed a client on stage with my questions and those submitted by the audience as the session progressed.

Benefits

• More interesting for the audience who feel engaged
• The audience feel they got their questions answered
• No “death by Powerpoint”
• You get remembered as you stand out
• You get a far more senior client to agree to present because they have to do very little (no Powerpoint deck to prepare and get through their PR team, no rehearsal, no anxiety about presenting)

Negatives

• No slides for people to have after the event
• Higher risk because it is a level of “improv”
• Requires skilled interviewer who understand the subject

BTW Improv is a really powerful business skill.  Download the free ebook to find out more

Results

After using this format at the recent Gartner BPM Conference in Washington DC, it was a huge success based on the reaction from the audience when I announced the session format and the positive the comments from the audience after the session. It showed the no-slides, informal interview format really worked well.

PPPPP: Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance

Like everything, there is quite a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make the session seem ad-hoc, relaxed and freeform!!! Below are the steps I go through to be able to make the person I am interviewing feel at ease and make sure the session goes well for them and the audience.

When speaker confirmed

• review any written case study info
• talk to account manager
• prepare draft structure of questions
• 30 min with person to be interviewed covering
• structure of questions
  • supporting videos that are available
  • no-go areas (eg revenue, market share, competition)
  • how comfortable with curve ball questions
  • should we take audience questions
• redraft question structure

At least 2 weeks before

• get video(s) and review and think how they will be incorporated
• another conference call (if required) to review structure

At the event

• meet for a hour at the event to talk around the questions  (that is my chance to see how well the person thinks on their feet / deals with tricky questions)
• think about additional / padding questions if the session runs short
• think about which questions can be cut if time running out
• get a feel of progress markers – ie which question do you need to get to by half way to make sure you cover most of the material
• prepare introduction and summary and cover slide
• install cover slide and any videos on machine and test
• make sure the AV guys and Question takers understand the format
• make sure you have 2 stools.

Run session

• concentrate like hell (read Improv 3 principles)
• think about the session from the audience’s perspective to incorporate questions

What next?

Rather than take written questions, take them as  Twitter feed with a hashtag specific to the session

Watch and enjoy this really natural, genuine moment.

Killer products don’t sell

You’re a major corporation with a track record of strong sales for your current product range. You’ve worked long and hard to produce a unique innovative product that you know the market needs. It should have flown out of the warehouse, but sales tanked and it has hit the morale and commissions of the sales team. Why?

Alternatively, you are a nimble start-up with experienced founders, who have built their reputation on sales in previous large corporations. Again, you’ve developed a ground-breaking product and made some early sales. To really ramp up revenues you have decided to sell through the channel, or you’ve hired a hotshot salesman. But nothing is happening. The only sales are being made by the founders. Why?

History is littered with promising products which faltered badly or ultimately failed in both the business-to-consumer (B2C) world and the business-to-business (B2B) world. The consumer world has the best-known stories, such as VHS vs. Sony’s Betamax in the 1980s. A replay of VHS vs. Betamax was the battle for the next-generation DVD player market which, in the end, was won by Sony with Blu-ray and that signaled the end of an 18-month campaign and a multimillion-dollar investment by Toshiba.

The B2B market has an equal number of examples of ‘nails hit squarely on the thumb’. Why did a killer product like IP Telephony take so long to pick up? Why weren’t SGI’s blisteringly fast servers adopted by data centers? And whatever happened to the Psion Organizer? Why is it not up there with the iPhone and the BlackBerry?

On television we watch programs like The Apprentice or Dragons’ Den, where eager, passionate, blinded, and desperate entrepreneurs and inventors believe they have created the killer product. The product which will have the world beating a path to their doors. These people are a microcosm of the greater business world, where large and expensive R&D departments go through essentially the same process. Possibly the greatest output from R&D departments is blind faith.

These days it is easy to build products, and there are more places where they can be used – which sounds great. But remember, success isn’t proportional to the quality or the degree of innovation of the product – and business buyers and consumers are swamped with choice. Paint all this innovation on the canvas of a rapidly evolving marketplace and truly global competition, and the statistical chance of failure is huge.

But that hasn’t stopped innovation. More products are being brought to market every year, and that can only spell one thing: 98 of those 100 products launched will be stillborn, with the entrepreneurial flames burning within many talented people being snuffed out, along with their savings or investors’ funds.

Sales is sales is sales – right?

Our 15 years of research and consulting on sales has spanned the range of organizations – from the largest global corporates turning over $100 billion down to small companies with two employees who are just starting out. The research has revealed some remarkable results: the accepted thinking on sales methodologies is fundamentally flawed. The methodologies will help fine-tune your sales team and increase their productivity, but they will not determine whether your killer product will find its way to the customers.

It’s your ability to engage with the customer’s very clearly defined buying culture. And the buying culture is determined by product maturity. There are four buying cultures, which are distinct, and each requires a different engagement approach. These buying cultures, not surprisingly, show some degree of congruence with the different buyers described in Crossing the Chasm and Inside the Tornado.

It may be hard to believe that corporates like Cisco struggle to sell innovative products. Surely they have the brand, marketing muscle, and distribution channel to be able to bring a product to market and stuff it through the channel? And yet, they openly admit that the established approaches haven’t worked.

At the other end of the food chain there are small start-ups who are trying to establish a market for their ‘new, innovative, ground-breaking, paradigm-shifting’ product with no marketing resources and with the founders doing the selling. They probably get some early success but more often they falter and never break the $5m revenue barrier.

Most sales and marketing teams do not recognize that there are different buying cultures. They engage every customer against a backdrop of a simple sales process, where every sale is seen as a conquest. There is a winner and a loser. It is a matter of life and death. How many start-ups, after their initial flurry of success, find themselves debating how to grow to the next stage and hire experienced and expensive salesmen.

One Sales Director of a very large software company[2] said to me when he first understood the buying cultures, “I always thought I’d had twenty years of sales experience, I now realize I’d had one experience for twenty years!”, i.e. selling to only one buying culture.

4 BUYING CULTURES

Buying Cultures

There are four buying cultures, which are distinct, and each requires a different style of engagement. These are: Value Offered, Value Added, Value Created,and Value Captured. We represent them by suits of playing cards.

First, we need to understand the dynamics of the different buying cultures and agree on some terminology. Imagine that each buying culture is an organization’s way of saying to a supplier “This is what I want you to do for me before I actually buy from you.”

 Value Captured: Why Hearts: Because you’re worth it… the relationship between supplier and customer is interdependent.

The Value Captured buying culture occurs when the customer is willing to put themselves in the hands of a supplier in order to generate change or value. An example here would be an organization that is hoping to increase its flexibility and reduce costs through outsourcing. The customer will ultimately share responsibility with the supplier to get the value in their cooperation.

Example: Accenture used eBay to sell excess inventory for corporates on a commission-only basis. eBay, the customer, became the supplier as Accenture took all the risks developing the market but reaped the rewards when the ‘service’ gained momentum.

Value Created: Why Diamonds: There are diamonds in the rough, but they are difficult for the customer to find.

The Value Created buying culture occurs when the customer senses there is an opportunity but can’t describe it. It takes the supplier to bring it into clear focus and suggest a solution. An example might be an organization that has recognized they need to drive operational effectiveness and improvement, but it takes a supplier to show how they can engage their employees in adopting shared processes, how they will deliver it, and what a solution might look like.

Example: Nimbus has been selling its process management software, NimbusControl, to manage corporate processes as a valuable asset (as opposed to drawing boxes and lines in Visio). It requires educating customers about its existence and the benefits of the approach and NimbusControl.

Value Added: Why Spades: This is about hard work and digging in. Calls multiplied by Demos = Orders! You win 2 out of 5 bids. You negotiate hard and fight for your corner.

The Value Added buying culture occurs when the customer recognizes that they need to find a solution to a pain or opportunity, and they are looking for options. An example is a customer looking for a CRM system. CRM systems are known to exist and the benefits are understood, but it requires the supplier to explain the value of their product over those of their competitors. The majority of technology is sold in this way.

Example: TIBCO competes in the established and understood BPM market. Winning requires better functionality and a lower per seat price in comparison with the other credible competitors.

Value Offered: Why Clubs: You need a club to beat the customer and the competition into submission – it’s a commodity/price thing.

The Value Offered buying culture occurs when the customers know what they want and all that is left to do is decide what color it will be. The customer will conduct his own research and make a decision about which model or version. He will then use the Internet to identify the lowest price or go back to his preferred supplier list. For the supplier it’s about establishing a brand and having the lowest friction sales and delivery channel.

Example: Dell laptops are ordered and delivered over the Web and the customer decision is based on Dell’s brand, the price, and availability. Dell needs to optimize its supply chain to maintain margins.

Crossing the Chasm

There are clear parallels. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore shows the customer’s perspective. The real pioneer of this thinking was Everett Rogers in the 1950s at the University of Chicago, who proposed that adopters of any new innovation or idea could be categorized as Innovators (2.5%), Early Adopters (13.5%), Early Majority (34%), Late Majority (34%), and Laggards (16%), based on a bell curve.

Moore argues that there is a chasm between the early adopters of the product (the technology enthusiasts and visionaries) and the early majority (the pragmatists), and these two groups have very different expectations. The diagram below shows the mapping of buying cultures to chasm theory.

IMPACT

What is IMPACT

There is a pathway or process that all organizations follow to reach purchasing decisions. This process does not vary across industries or even regions of the world, because it is inextricably linked to instinctive human behavior. It is just the speed that organizations or individuals travel through the process that differs. The process is called IMPACT.

The IMPACT process may be followed in a formal way or it may be tacit and informal. It may involve large numbers of people, both inside and outside the organization, or it may be driven by one individual. It is guaranteed that any idea which leads to a purchase in an organization, be it corporately or personally driven, has followed this process.

The six key phases of the process are easy to remember as they have an enormous IMPACT on your company’s performance:

Identify – Mentor – Position – Assessment – Case – Transaction

Every purchase goes through all six phases, with or without the supplier’s assistance. What differs between the four different buying cultures is the point at which the supplier is given permission to engage with the customer. The reason that most salesmen don’t recognize this process is because the customer goes through the process on their own, and only invites the supplier in for the last one or two steps. But more of this later. First, let’s understand the IMPACT process.

Phase 1: Identify

The identification of ideas for changing or improving a business that are good enough to warrant investigation.

This is the ideas phase. This may be the executive team going on an offsite with strategic consultants to plan its future. The executive team will be looking for ways to grow revenues, create competitive advantage, increase shareholder value, contain or reduce costs. That is, it is ‘blue sky’ thinking looking out into the future to see how technology will help the company become more competitive or impact its markets.

Phase 2: Mentor

Enrolling a mentor (evangelist) to the idea to validate it.

The executive team will take the breakthrough ideas or big bets and give them to someone in senior management to act as a mentor for the ideas. These ideas are not for public consumption, and the mentor should only work with his close team and trusted advisors to ratify the thinking. The mentor will be scoping and testing the ideas for feasibility, credibility, and political acceptability as much as he can without drawing undue attention. If the decisions are not accepted then the ideas get buried – forever.

Phase 3: Position

The public decision to make resources and budget available to invest further in the idea.

Buy-in is the big challenge because it involves managing politics. But why do politics play such a major part in this phase? The answer is simple. The announcement of a new initiative is an announcement of impending change. And change will always produce an upsurge of emotions, both positive and negative. The mentor will need to find a sponsor, because to move forward into the next phase will require resources (money, people, time) to assess the value of the initiative. The sponsor will be the person or body of people with enough political muscle to get the resources.

Phase 4: Assessment

The assessment of the good and the bad in the idea.

The Assessment phase plays a very important part in the post-Enron corporate world where legislation now ensures company officers are held accountable for their decisions. Particularly ones involving investment and strategic direction, which has made the Assessment phase a big hurdle.[4] But the Assessment phase is not about cost justification, it is an evaluation of everything, both quantitative and qualitative.

Phase 5: Case

The creation of a quantified business case and assignment of resources/budget to it.

The mentor will use the output from the Assessment phase to build a business and investment Case, possibly including solutions. Then, the Case can have a budget actually assigned to it and will be made public. If the organization requires that all external purchases are done via competitive tender, then this is when those tender documents are created and distributed.

Phase 6: Transaction

The confirmation of the project to all internal and external stakeholders and to the suppliers.

Procurement will raise a purchase order and negotiate contracts for the solution put forward in the Case. Depending on the solution, market and company approach procurement may need to drive a formal procurement with competitive tendering, beauty parades, and all the fun and games that this entails.

Choosing the correct buying culture

A question we get asked a lot is, “Which buying culture should I choose, and which is the best?” Firstly, you don’t choose how you want to sell. The customer, or rather the maturity of the product in a marketplace, determines the buying culture at a point in time. All you get to choose is how you react and organize yourselves – what we will call your operational culture. The smart money is in being able to determine which buying cultures you need to support or align to. Note, we said buying cultures – plural. If you have a range of products then it’s highly likely that you will be supporting multiple operational cultures.

A clear understanding of the buying culture of a customer leads to a clear realization that the entire organization needs to be aligned to mirror that buying culture. If you can align the core processes of both the primary and secondary value chains to the correct operational culture, you will be able to optimize sales. As a result, your killer product will become just that – a killer product. We are talking about the entire organization’s orientation to an operational culture to mirror the customer’s buying culture. R&D, Marketing, Sales, Sales Operations, Professional Services, Support & Help Desk, Legal, and Alliances are all affected. The only functions that are innocent bystanders are HR, IT, and Finance.

4 BUYING CULTURES with IMPACT

Exploring the buying cultures

Let’s explore how each of the buying cultures feels from a supplier’s sales engagement perspective, starting with Value Captured.

Value Captured:The supplier shares full risk and reward by capturing the value jointly with the customer.

If the customer is at the Identification stage is likely that it is making itself aware of the major change issues in their world. But the supplier will probably know more about the issues for the customer than they do. Marketing will focus on insight through white papers, conferences, and maintaining high visibility with business and organizational leaders. So, the supplier is responsible for recognizing and delivering the value of their product for the customer.

A good example of this is Accenture. Back in 2002 they spotted the opportunity to use eBay to sell excess inventory for corporates, giving them 20 percent higher prices than dumping them through their normal channels. Up to this point eBay was an ‘electronic car boot sale’ for individuals. Accenture took responsibility for developing the market, recruiting corporate sellers, and were paid a commission on all sales. eBay assumed no risk, but received a proportionally smaller revenue share. It rapidly turned into a multimillion pound revenue stream for both eBay and Accenture.

A Value Captured company feels massively entrepreneurial. Enough to give any corporate CFO a sleepless night, unless the company is extremely well funded or is a subsidiary of a very understanding or entrepreneurial group company. Every business model is different. It is based on the deal struck between the customer and the supplier. Although at times it could seem that the relationship between the customer and the supplier has been reversed. It could be a Joint Venture (JV), a commission paid to the customer for the use of the product or service, equity ownership and earn out, or purchase lease back. You name it. Anything goes. This is the area of financial innovation.

Value Created: The supplier reveals unforeseen risk or opportunity for the customer (thus creating new value for them) and will assume some kind of responsibility to realize the return.

The customer is studying its strategic options. The starting point for sales here is the perspective that the supplier has of the customer’s market, organization, culture, operations, and strategy. The supplier will be able to see things that the customer cannot possibly see itself, so the sales engagement is more likely to be initiated by the supplier and supported by thought-leadership marketing and industry insights. The customer will not be out looking for a supplier because it probably doesn’t realize that a product exists to satisfy a requirement that it is only just realizing it has.

The supplier will need to grab the attention of a mentor with an opinion about the customer’s organization, and issues in the customer’s market. Early meetings will be a ‘conversation of possibilities’ and not a discussion of products or solutions. The product’s existence is not well understood by all customers and market isn’t sufficiently developed for the analysts to create a comparison matrix. Therefore, IT will be uncomfortable with purchasing it. And they may even block it.

An example of a product in this area is Nimbus Control 2007, which is an application for capturing end-to-end processes and publishing them as an organization’s Operations Manual. Quite often an alternative product is used to satisfy the business need. But as it has not been designed to meet the real need, it is not a complete solution. Nimbus needs to educate the market before it can sell to it, and it also needs to establish itself as a thought-leader, requiring it to develop a strong professional services practice to support its product.

The whole company is genuinely customer-focused. Not in the false sense of “our customer is our No. 1 focus – Your call is really important to us, please hold for 10 minutes…” I’m talking about a really deep interest in the customer and their world. Your professional services and sales team are expected to live in the customer world to the extent that they understand the emotional highs and lows of the customer. They are part of the furniture at the customer. They count the customers as friends. This is the world where the account manager takes customers out to lunch whether there is business on the table or not.

The big thing here is to grab the customer’s attention and then, once it’s grabbed, hold onto it forever.

 Value Added: The supplier responds to the customer’s needs or pain and uses its knowledge (adds value) of its products and services to build a solution.

Products are well known and there is a broad understanding of their capabilities. Therefore customers, once they have established their needs, are able to source possible solutions. The really important thing about a Value Added customer is that they have a recognized and quantified need or pain or opportunity. The supplier needs to ensure that its profile, driven by traditional advertising and marketing, is high enough so that it is contacted by customers. The role of sales is to qualify the customers and add value by using knowledge of the products to build a solution which will meet the customers’ needs and be differentiated from their competitors. Once the solution has been specified, designed, and priced, the sales person does not want to accept any responsibility for the realization of value from the solution – his job is done once the deal is closed.

The majority of business software such as CRM, ERP, or Accounting is bought in this way. This is where IT has been delegated to make the purchase, or the business has abdicated responsibility. The customer will have identified the business need and compiled a list of requirements. They then use third-party advice, such as from an analyst, research, or a consulting firm, to draw up a short-list of suppliers. Normally, the market leader and three to four others will appear on the short-list. Then, there is a formal proposal/bidding process to select the winner, which is decided on the balance of functionality vs. price.

The executive team of a Value Added company would like to think that they were Value Created – thought-leaders with the customers hanging upon their every word, but without all the hard work and complication involved. A long-term relationship without the courting. The reality is very different. Value Added companies are in a fiercely competitive marketplace trying to differentiate themselves from other, similar-looking products. A blend of macho sales and heroics in delivery. Trying to outsmart the competition on features and functions. Trying to get closer to the customer without burning too much free pre-sales consulting. Maximizing margin on every deal. Sales guys live or die by their numbers. Discounting at the end of each quarter is rife to close a deal. Therefore, most deals are done in the last five days of a quarter.

Value Offered: The supplier makes the products available (thus offering the value). The customer or partner applies their own knowledge to exploit them

What is the customer doing? It knows what it wants and is looking at the choices. This engagement is very much as it sounds – where the role of sales is to get the product out there, and cover as much ground as possible with short, sharp engagements. The product needs to be of a nature such that the customer can easily understand where the value is for them, because there is not the margin for a field salesman to have to explain anything beyond features. All the responsibility for recognizing where the value is in the product lies with the customer. In Value Offered we will only want to engage with the customer when it’s quite clear what is wanted, solutions are already defined, and budgets and time frames are quite clear. The leads will come from marketing and direct sales activity, which will probably be some kind of inside sales organization. The marketing angle will typically be the price-to-feature leverage. The engagement takes place when the customer is in the Transactions phase. Customers only want to deal with the market leaders, provided they are cost-competitive, so brand value and recognition is everything.

Dell is the perfect example on PCs and laptops. It established a superior product build and delivery model and was able to drive down prices to enable it to gain market share. Interestingly, when Dell tried to apply this to the server market, which is still a Value Added market, the Value Offered model didn’t work – which is why you see Dell changing its operating model for servers.

Value Offered companies follow a trend of being very numbers-driven, gung-ho, focused on sales. Volume is key as margins will be razor thin therefore the organization is streamlined. If we look at the value chain for a Value Offered company we will see that everything from product innovation right through to service delivery is clean and simple, and designed to extract as much money as possible from every transaction. The product will in no way involve leading-edge technology; everything about it is known, tried, and tested.

IMPLICATIONS

Why Value Created

There is a challenge creating and maintaining a Value Created operational culture. But why focus on Value Created as opposed to any of the other three? The answer is that from years of consulting we’ve learned that Value Offered, Value Added, and Value Captured are all obvious sales entry points for suppliers. However, Value Created is very rarely used because it is not understood. It is almost always mistaken for ‘Value Added, but where the salesmen are a bit more consultative’. Yet, Value Created is the only effective way of selling innovative or disruptive products, and is very different from Value Added. It has a different process, runs at a different rhythm, and requires a different set of personalities. The move to Value Created is the most needed and most difficult.

A good way to understand the Value Created salesman is to compare him to his nearest neighbor, the Value Added salesman, against a whole range of attributes:

Remember, it is the product that determines which buying culture, and hence which operational culture, is required. More precisely, it is the product in a specific market which determines the buying culture. So how can you decide if your product requires a Value Created buying culture or not?  There are vital signs that suggest you should be selling as Value Created, in the table below.

Why is Value Created difficult?

How can this be so difficult? Before this book was written, companies got launched and products got sold. True. What we are describing is not new. We are simply giving you a framework to understand what has been happening by trial and error, so that you can take out some of the costly time wasting mistakes.

Why do so many companies not make the move to Value Created when they should? Normally, because they are unaware that there is any other way. Sales is sales is sales. If the founder or CEO is an engineer or inventor, their only direct experience of sales may be as a consumer. In the B2C world, Value Offered always appears to be the norm.

But there are people who do recognize that there is a different way and still don’t make the change to Value Created. Why not? They probably have a perception that it is too tough, too complex, too risky, and blind faith tells them that good times really must be up ahead. So over to blind faith and trust – if we keep doing what we have always done (only a little harder) things might get better.

THE PERFECT STORM

A salesman who really understands the Value Created engagement can drive significantly higher value engagements with greater margin. But timing is critical, as is that initial entry point.

Richard Beasley, Sales Director at BT Global Services, describes a perfect Value Created sales engagement. This is what it’s like when it all comes together:

“I remember a really good example from when I was at Equant (now Orange Business Services). Actually the credit goes to the sales guy for originally picking up an article in the press about the merger between the two organizations Colep and CCL, both manufacturers of metal and plastic packaging. We felt that the merger of these two organizations, one predominantly US based, the other European, was an opportunity since clearly there was going to be significant change in the new organization. This sales guy had the confidence to go to the top. He quickly engaged with the CIO and was able to demonstrate that Equant had an understanding of their particular business situation. It turned out the two companies were integrating and the CIO’s remit was to provide an IT infrastructure to support the globalization of the business through a single global brand. Managing the business across a number of continents required the implementation of an ERP system, which in turn meant they needed a secure and highly available networking infrastructure. By demonstrating our value to their business in achieving these goals we were able to keep the discussion just with Equant, which in turn the customer benefited from a fast tracked implementation and savings on a costly RFP process. We did a main board presentation which resulted in a services contract covering not just their global networking infrastructure, security and mobile worker requirements, but also their voice services with plans to extend services to their local area networks and over time converge all ICT services onto a single IP based architecture.

If it hadn’t been for the confidence of going in at that high level talking about our opinion on how we could manage their merger risks and the business benefits we could bring, it would have been completely different. At best we would end up responding to an RFP that came from the organization and for a deal would have been worth about a quarter of what we actually won and at a lot lower margin.

The ease and simplicity was surprising. The initial engagement was done within the sales team itself. It was sales account manager and myself looking through the merger report, pulling together some information from the internet and between us coming up with an opinion that the sales guy was going to present to the CIO when he called him up. For me the two key elements of Value Creation are first you can create the interest with the client but then second you have to back it up with some substance. If you don’t do that then you are very quickly going to lose the confidence of the client and your dialogue will just fizzle out.

From the internal perspective we’re all competing for resource. We needed technical resource to design a solution, but we were able to quantify the opportunity in terms of value, our USP, who the key decision makers were and the politics. I was one of a number of sector managers. The Value Created engagement helped me ensure I could get the right resources on the opportunities that my team was working on. It allowed me to put together a well reasoned case of why we thought this opportunity was a good one to follow.”

OCA METHODOLOGY

Transformation – the OCA methodology

So, every great achievement starts with a small committed decision. From the experience of 15 years’ research and countless client engagements, we have identified a five-step methodology – which is called the Organizational Culture Alignment (OCA). But you should give it an emotive name which means something for your business, such as Project Diamond. These steps build on everything that we have discussed in the earlier chapters, but set them out in a practical blueprint for ACTION.

This methodology is all about analysis and transformation. Analysis to understand where you are and then what is transforming from your current mess of operational cultures to an organization where the products are correctly aligned. This is not the sales methodology that your sales teams follow. It is the steps to get you from where you are to where you need to be.

The methodology will help you understand where you are in terms of operational culture vs. the correct buying culture, and then realign your operation, building the operational culture and then getting it adopted and engrained into your organization. Sounds simple? It’s a major analytical and transformational activity – but the prize is worth the effort.

The OCA methodology has five steps:

1. Interpret business strategy.
2. Analyze sales mix.
3. Establish current structure and resources.
4. Develop best practice.
5. Transition to the new world.

Of all the steps, the last is by far the most difficult, as any project manager of a major transformation program will tell you. It’s a topic in its own right and is covered in my first book, Common Approach, Uncommon Results..

The FINAL WORD

Andy Berry, GM of Fuji Xerox Global Services, explains how they have used IMPACT to help make better management decisions, and really drive the sales process:

“We’re quite clear on our use of the IMPACT process and the different operational cultures to drive the sales engagements. Previously, we believed [we] had a ‘one size fits all’ marketing and sales management process. We used to assume that we were engaging the customer at Identification and we would try and get our sales force to go through Mentor, Position and Assessment on every single deal. Now, what the operational culture model has given us is the ability to acknowledge that quite often we are actually engaging with the customer at Case and this is [a] Value Added deal. We have also recognized that frequently the customer has got to Case having missed out many of the risk analysis steps within the earlier phases which are very important to make a sound business decision. Sometimes it’s so important that we need to help the customers go back and mend holes in their own internal processes. When that happens you have the added benefit of getting closer to them and becoming a trusted advisor. This protects our customer relationship, qualifies our risk investment and protects us from any competition.”

He sums up the benefits as.

“We achieved pretty well all we set out to achieve: our average deal size trebled, our largest deals are not only far bigger but there are more of them, and our resource usage is much better aligned. On top of this the main benefit was speed. I’ve no doubt this is what delivered a quicker return to the business.”

Enough said.

Having spent 2 days at the Gartner BPM Summit in London a couple of things struck me.

BPM is still mired in the junior levels of organisations desperately trying to gain the attention of senior decision makers.  It has not gone mainstream in the way that CRM, ERP or analytics has. And there are no signs that it ever will become the “Tornado” in Geoffrey Moore’s terms. Which is very sad as it has so much to offer.

The critical question for both the delegates attending the conference, 80% of them newbies to BPM, and the vendors is,  “Why”. And no-one had an answer for me at the conference.

Same old problems

The same issues are being raised now that I remember when I was a newbie at one of these conferences 15 years ago.

1. Sponsorship: Getting senior executives to understand the importance of BPM and its potential impact on company performance and therefore profitability.
2. Metrics: Identifying the key measures that show the benefits of implementing BPM, which is often a problem when the processes are so chaotic or disparate.
3. Business Case: Building a strong ROI / business case to justify the projects to senior management, which takes us back to Point 1.

Some new technologies

There were a few new shiny faces sponsoring the event, flushed with the excitement of being named Cool Vendor. There were the regulars such as Oracle, Pega and TIBCO, and a few notable absences – SAP.

A key theme is that vendors have broadened their capabilities in line with Gartner’s iBPMS concept. Now it is no longer good enough to have a good workflow/execution engine or clever point solution. Now the suites need to have at least the following

• front end modeling / discovery capabilities; no, Visio is not good enough in an increasingly compliant-needy world.
• an execution engine which has everything from user friendly forms generation to sophisticated back-end integration, supported by rules based work routing
• business events which can spot or sense patterns and initiate actions
• social collaboration capabilities to allow informal work and process improvement
• analytics to provide instrumentation on operational performance.

The rise of the mega vendors

The marketplace is consolidating, just as the ERP market did 10 years ago. This will make it increasingly hard for smaller vendors as the market is dominated by a few $1billion plus revenue mega-vendors. Now a smaller vendor can make money filling niche capabilities, but they need to be nimble enough to stay ahead as the larger vendors add new capabilities to their suites.

So whilst there is no huge market expansion, there is clearly growth in the market as many of the vendors are still showing profitable growth. My employer, TIBCO grew 11% last year to break the $1 billion barrier and that growth is continuing.

Technology is not the issue

Gartner recognizes that BPM is almost trapped in a time-warp and clever new technology  or the Nexus of Forces will not help it break free. That is why it was refreshing that the conference had an illuminating keynote on the “politics of power” and “how to engage the CEO”, and also guest presentations from the analytics and customer experience analysts. Both these areas recognise the tangential importance of process.  Interestingly 35% of the 2100 people who have the title Head of Customer Experience have a process background.

BPM professionals do not need more techniques for modeling, analysis or development. Nor do they need cleverer technology. What they need is to be more business savvy in terms of picking the right project areas and engaging their sponsors. A project that doesn’t get funded won’t make a difference. The delegates need to be credible operators at the C-level.

Until that happens, next year’s conference will be very much like this years – or possibly even smaller.

The funny thing is, we equate making money with the daily grind, yet the people who make the most money rarely treat it that way.

The most successful people I know feel relatively inspired on a daily basis. And they were like that before they made their money.

It’s so easy to forget that money isn’t the thing that motivates our highest selves, even if it’s the thing we spend most of our day pursuing. I believe we’re made for higher things.

The question is, whether or not we actually believe it

As the video below shows, companies and industries are disappearing.

Brian Solis is principal at Altimeter Group, a research firm focused on disruptive technology, and the research for his latest book WTF (What’s The Future) his has revealed some frightening statistics on the failure rate of new businesses.   He has put them together in an infographic which you can access here and makes fascinating reading.

Summary: If you survive 1 year you are doing well, but if you survive 5 years you are remarkable.

Entrepreneurs focus on success not failure

As frightening as the statistics are, it does not stop the true entrepreneur. If you focused on the raw numbers, you would be paralyzed and do nothing. A couple of passing thoughts:

• Nimbus was 14 years old before we were acquired. We didn’t realize how special that made us.  We just focused on driving the business forward, day by day. And the founding team were still with the business when it was acquired. And even more remarkable is that the CEO (me) was one of the founders, something that is coming back into vogue as the recent Fortune Magazine article highlighted.
• For the Nimbus founders, it was their 3rd venture together. Yes, the 2 previous were not a success, but not such a failure that they extinguished the entrepreneurial fire.
• Some of the Nimbus founders are now launching their next venture – www.LessAdmin.com – rather than retiring to the South of France or becoming career non-exec’s.

Now is the time for opportunity

Despite the economic backdrop and the scary statistics of Brian Solis’ latest book the 4 Nexus of Forces identified by Gartner are opening up unprecedented possibilities. As Vivek Ranadive, TIBCO CEO and Founder often quotes from Dicken’s Tale of 2 Cities – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” to illustrate that you can look at the current changes as dire problems or massive opportunities.

Now is the time that real entrepreneurs look at the title of Brian Soli’s book WTF and see not “What’s The Future” but instead read it as “What The F*ck” and just get on with creating the next game changing business, despite the risks and challenges.

Analysis by CACI shows that the prospects for 2,750 of the UK’s 4,000 shopping locations (including high streets, out-of-town centers and large malls) are so poor that they may struggle to survive as viable locations for retailers selling non-food items beyond 2015.

It seems that the USA is again leading the trends. Whilst the UK laments the death of the high street, this decline started years ago in the USA. Kaid Benfield recently wrote in The Atlantic that the rise of shopping malls spelled the demise of small downtowns, and this started in the 1960’s.

But now the dominance of the fashion, food-court and family-focused mall is ending. And the decline started some years ago.  No new enclosed malls have opened in the U.S. since 2006. General Growth Properties, one of the largest mall operators in the country with more than 200 properties in 44 states, entered Chapter 11 with debts of $25 billion in 2009.

As more stores have closed, the last couple of years has seen mall vacancies at their highest point in almost a decade, according to Reis, a research company, which said the vacancy rate of regional malls is 8.6% and Neighborhood and Community malls (strip malls) is 10.7%.

Who is to blame?

Government’s are searching for an answer to stop this decline as they seem to believe that a thriving town centre or mall leads to a happier community. So where do we look for the “culprit”.

• Is it the rise of on-line spending? Certainly on-line spending has increased dramatically with this Christmas being the largest ever.  But retailers are being hit with a “double-whammy”. Shoppers are using their stores to look at products and then using apps on their phones to compare prices on-line, often choosing to buy online and have the convenience of home delivery.

• Large soul-less, but cheap, supermarkets? The supermarket experience is very sterile and utilitarian. You can fill your basket, pay and leave and need never talk to anyone. With the economies of scale that drive down price and the convenience of “open all hours” you can understand why they are successful.

• Small retailers failing to meet expectations of shoppers? The shopper now is fare more educated and sophisticated. The internet enables global price comparison and unlimited choice, all delivered within a day or two. No small retailer can hope to compete, unless the product requires specific personal attention.

So, the answer for the politicians is that it is all 3 trends are causing the decline, none of which are reversible. So looking for answers is pointless (although it may win them votes).

Inevitable

Why fight these forces? Just like the print industry and the music industry have had to change with the onslaught of digital disruption, surely the retail industry needs to understand that it needs change. Forrester highlighted the impact of the combined forces of social, mobile and cloud in what they called the Digital Disruption, which is summarised in this blog.

This new world is on-line, self-service and can be a very “cold” experience.  The alternative is a cutesy / charming village centre. But charm costs time and money.  You have to visit 6 or 7 shops, and one might be closed. And the total cost of your shopping bill will be higher.  Most shoppers are time poor and money poor and for them this sounds like an unaffordable luxury.

Charm may be a luxury, but does the customer service experience need to be so unpleasant or in some cases, non-existent? The answer is no, but with increase in online purchases much of the customer experience (broader than customer service) is set by the delivery service which is outsourced to courier companies. And in many cases couriers don’t deliver as this blog explains, and it tarnishes their great on-line experience.  Not that every company’s online experience is that great, as this brilliant Google video illustrates. Think back to your latest purchase online from a smaller vendor.

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What can retailers do?

Firstly, they need to think about the overall customer experience, from thinking about purchasing something, search and comparison, selecting and paying, and finally delivery / collection.

Depending on the market, retailers they could decide to mimic Apple or Burberry who have made the store retail experience fantastic. But that requires a high margin product.

If they have a highly competitive, commodity product then online may be the only way. But there can be some differentiation around delivery or collection. For working families, getting parcels delivered is a pain. So the retailer could identify partners who have physical premises and can provide a “Click and Collect” service. Retailers should be creative and look outside their normal partners or competitors. Shoppers want to collect their purchases after work, so what businesses are open in the evenings, but also during the day to take deliveries?

The future is different

Using the latest technologies can improve every aspect of the buying cycle, but it requires process thinking and then technology overlaid on top of it.  We can wish for the small local stores that are the centre of the community, but those days are gone.

Retailers need to move on and grasp the new challenges. Those that are successful embrace the world of on-line but combine it with an exception customer experience.

Town planners and local groups need to rethink how they will build communities.

I used to think that couriers, especially the large players, were pretty reliable but recent experiences backed up by wider research is that they are dropping the ball. This is at a time when the increase in online purchases should be enabling them to grow very profitably.

I find it staggering, because couriers have a pretty simple business model;

They pick stuff up and need to deliver it to somewhere else, safely and securely.

But, as my first hand research is proving, they are failing. Either through a lack of a transparent end to end process, thought through from a customer perspective, or from a staff engagement / attitude perspective.

I haven’t delved into the detailed financial business models, but it is pretty clear that if they take more than a couple of attempts to deliver a package then all profit on that package has evaporated.  So courier companies need to be good at 3 things (from their perspective):

1. acquiring customers
2. the logistics of shipping packages
3. minimizing costs when unable to deliver

From a customer perspective they have to do 3 things:

1. pick up the package when they say they going to
2. deliver the package when they say they going to – or if they can’t deliver it…
3. make it easy to get the package redelivered or collected

It is the last 10 yards

In most cases courier companies fail in the last 10 yards; getting the package to the recipient. And I have been amazed by how many ways they can get it wrong.  There are plenty of isolated examples, but one recent example covers a wide range of the issues. The company we will nickname “Fedup and Exasperated”.

• An important US package – my US tax return for signature – was due to be delivered to my home.  I was notified by email the expected delivery date so I worked from home that day.  I was able to track the package as it made its way from San Francisco to the UK. That gave me a great deal of confidence.
• At 12:15pm I received an automated email saying that the courier was unable to deliver because I wasn’t there, and a card had been left. Not true. My office looks out over the front drive which is 100 yards of gravel. Not even a small car can sneak up the drive without making a noise.
• I checked on their online tracking system to see where the package had got to. It was on the way back to the depot. Eventually I found a number of a UK call centre. After negotiating their automated call routing system I spoke to an operator who said that I had an 11 digit not a 12 digit tracking number and I needed to talk to another call centre so I needed to redial.
• I redialed and negotiated another, but different, automated call routing system. The operator failed to find my package on the system and tried to get rid of me, but after I persisted she located it some 5 minutes later.
• We agreed that I would collect it in person from the local depot – an hour’s drive away – as it was critical that I got it quickly.
• The next day I appeared at the depot to be told that the package was being redelivered and there were no notes about personal collection. On checking the tracking system local depot operator told me that the delivery of the package had already been attempted but could not be delivered as there was no-one there and a note had been left (remember that line?). So I called my wife who was at home all morning. No attempted delivery and no note.
• I left with a promise from the depot operator that he would personally ensure it would be delivered the following day.
• When I got home later that evening a neighbour knocked on the door with my package. Incredible.  But not as incredible as her story of why she had the package.
•  She was walking her dog in the rain and as she was about to go inside she noticed the white courier van was outside for some time. She walked out and asked if the driver was lost. He said he was looking for No. 67. She pointed down our drive to the house. He said “It is raining pretty hard, can you take the package”, gave it to her and left. No signature.  And remember the system said “No delivery, left note, returned to depot”

So there are clearly breakdowns in process along the way compounded by inconsistent data, multiple call centres and finally van drivers who are sugar mice and dissolve in the rain.

Redelivery – where courier profits evaporate

The area of huge customer confusion and cost for courier companies is often the note that is left if the package cannot be delivered.  Clearly in my recent example I cannot comment on because a note was never left. But the research shows it is probably the least well thought through process, especially as it involves several different groups of people (call centre, local depot, delivery driver) and systems (package tracking  and call centre call routing).  Each potential path through the process needs to be modeled from a customer perspective, anticipating the different scenarios.

This is not very difficult to do. A previous article called “Can silicon-based life forms excel at customer service? “ looks at what exceptional customer service looks like when this approach to process analysis is taken seriously.

And the great news is that it probably doesn’t need expensive and complex changes to back end systems to be able to move from poor to exceptional. If may be operational process changes or small updates to the card that is left.

Opportunity knocks

We have survived probably the busiest time of the year; Xmas. This year broke all records for on-line purchases, and the growth shows no sign of diminishing.  Now is the time as a process professional to suggest some serious process analysis which will directly to high profits.

His research shows that futureless thinking means the individual is 30% more likely to save.  But then looks at other aspects of life where today’s behaviour has an impact on a future outcome.  If saving is current pain for future pleasure, then over eating and smoking are the reverse; current pleasure for future pain. So you would expect that futured thinking would lead to over eating (obesity) and more smoking. And that is borne out in his research.

But the debate online after his talk was heated and his hypothesis and research was questioned.  Listen to his talk and see if you are seduced by the math.

As an investor in a startup, apart form having money the other critical asset is patience. It takes time to get a software application to market. And as an investor, rather than working in the business, all you can do is cheer and encourage from the sidelines. In some ways, my involvement has delayed the launch. Because I am not as close to the application as the founder and development team I feel I can give a more objective view. Therefore I insisted that certain elements of the UX (look and feel) were changed to make it more intuitive, and also encouraged the team to make sure that the application was architected so it could scale to 100,000′s of users from Day 1. Sounds like overkill, but my motto is “let’s plan for success”.

FREE for LIFE Programme

So LessAdmin is now open for Beta users.  Beta does not mean testing. It means using the application and giving feedback on usability, identify killer uses, and helping the team understand how to make this go viral. For that LessAdmin, users who sign up during the Beta period will be on the FREE for LIFE programme.

So it is easy to sign up.  Just go to http://www.lessadmin.com/register

Why do I need LessAdmin.com?

There are some propositions where LessAdmin is a no-brainer. The effort of starting to use LessAdmin is so closely linked to the benefits.  Examples are

•  owning and managing a 2nd home which is rented
• managing a racing yacht or chartering a yacht
• organising an event; sporting, charity, or social

But there are other uses where the benefits of using LessAdmin may not be apparent for a while, such as:

• Add yourself as an Asset and add scanned copies of passport and driving license; if you have ever lost your passport (I have!!) you will recognise the value of being able to access a copy of your passport wherever you are in the world
• Any investment and tax certificates when they are sent to you; make next year’s tax return far easier
• Add any valuable electronics (laptop, camera, MP3 players) along with proof of purchase so if they are lost or stolen when travelling then you make sure the insurance company pay you what you are due.

I’ve added a bunch of the Assets I own – cars, boats, electronics, investments  - and I was staggered how quick and easy it was. I was also surprised by how many documents that are really valuable that I couldn’t find!!!

Sign up now

So it is easy to sign up.  Just go to http://www.lessadmin.com/register

There are great many products, services and ideas out in the marketplace. With the internet, you can now access them no matter where they are in the world. Users are swamped with potential options, and choosing what to focus on is the challenge.

Prioritisation not more time

People tell me that they don’t have enough time.  I read a recent blog about “being busy” used as a status symbol of their importance called “The Busy Trap”.  The most successful people on the planet (by whatever measure you choose) have the same number of hours per day as the least successful. It is what they decide to do with their

hours that determines the results.  Interestingly “decide” comes from the Latin dcdere, and means to cut off i.e. remove the other options.

The benefit gap &  *RBI

When we start thinking about getting someone to buy and adopt our product or service, it normally  includes some change in behaviour or activity. Now the issue with getting anyone to (buy and) change is the gap between the effort of changing and the benefit of doing it. In business terms I used to call this the difference between “Important” and “Urgent”. We need the demand to be Urgent.

It is human nature to do things that take us towards pleasure and away from pain. And change, any change, falls into the category of “pain”. So the trick is to make the pain very clear and shorten the time to getting the benefits.

With cloud based applications the time to implement is quicker because there is no software to install. I used to joke that there was *RBI with TIBCO Nimbus, not ROI.

*RBI = Return Before Investment, because they were getting benefits before the first invoice had even been sent!!

Roses are red, violets are blue, I’ve got something nasty, and now so have you

You make me so hot just thinking about you.  Lots of love, Mum

You’re perfect person for me – pissed and gagging for it

Dear Valentine – do we have to go through this shit every year

Dearest wife.  Happy Valentines Day. Roses are red, violets are blue, valentines day is consumerist bullshit, no haven’t you got some ironing to do?

There are just 3 words…  Dream On. Bitch.

You see. Romance isn’t dead.

LessAdmin has launched as a “closed” Beta. That means it is now available for a smallish group of early users they can start managing their assets, projects and jobs online. After over a year of planning, designing and coding we are finally here!!!!

For the rest of you there are 2 ways to become a user:

1. hope that one of the current Beta users invites you to be a co-owner of one of their assets, a friend on one of their projects or assigns you a job.
2. beg and plead with us to be invited as one of the first full Beta users which will be at the end of February

Why should you care.? Well, anyone who joins during Beta is enrolled on the FREE for LIFE programme.

LessAdmin explained

As the website says….

A picture is worth a thousand words

But I think it is far better explained as a picture.

“Can I scan your badge,  Sir?”  Doh!!

Traditionally the “badge and lead retrieval” systems provided by the event organisers are stuck in the dark ages. It is normally a bar code on a plastic badge and then each exhibitor has to rent a bar code scanner. When a delegate wanders onto a stand, their barcode is scanned and if any notes are taken they are laboriously pecked out on the miniature keyboard. At the end of each day they return the barcode reader to the event organizer to get the leads off it.  Whilst this is a profit center for the event organizer it is a horrible experience for the delegate and exhibitor, and labor intensive for the event organizer. Don’t want to pay? No problem. The alternative is paper.

Result; Unprofessional, inaccurate lead information, poorly followed up leads, wasted paper.  An expensive way to waste 2 days standing around. And no way of quantifying the benefit.

“80% of leads gathered at a show are not followed up.”  -Center for Exhibition Industry Research (ceir.org)

Which is why the Event Production Show has embraced the latest technologies. 

As delegates arrive they have their badge printed with a QR code that encodes their name, company, job title and a host of other information. No wasted badges for no shows, or handwritten ones for walk-ups. Before the show starts, exhibitors can download and install Marketpoint Tradeshow iPad app. They can create a centralized set of customized questions for their show workers. When a delegate walks onto the stand a show worker scans the QR code on the badge with the camera. The app interprets the data and creates a lead record and then steps through the pre-defined questions. Once finished the record is sync’d to the cloud and is shared with the other iPads on the stand.

What is even more powerful is that the app can also hold marketing brochures as PDFs which can be presented to the delegate and then emailed directly from the app to the delegate. This eliminates printing brochures, flyers and datasheets that will never be read and that often fill the waste bins outside Olympia, or are junked after the show.

Finally, there are some great analytics that can be gleaned from the app as it syncs data from all the iPads on the stand; busiest times on the stand, most popular marketing materials, most effective person on the stand…..

Result: effective lead follow up and a true assessment of the effectiveness of the show

Overkill – we only have 3 people working our stand

Now most of the stands at the Event Production Show have fewer than 10 show workers so some of these analytics may seem overkill. But some of Marketpoint’s customers, such as Caterpillar, have shows where they have over 100 staff working the stand for 5 days. For them the analytics are gold dust.

No matter what the size of the exhibition  or the exhibitor’s stand, leveraging the QR code technology with the Marketpoint Tradeshow iPad lead retrieval system is just a better way. Cleaner, slicker and more professional.

Welcome to the future of exhibitions.

Within minutes of the blackout someone created a Twitter username called @SuperBowlLights who at one point when I looked had 14,000 followers within an hour or two of the event.  Many in the Twittersphere wanted to catch what @SuperBowlLights had to say.  They were curious and engaged.  This person was genius in using the moment to create a cult following and entertainment.

But Oreo cookies is the clear winner when they got this ad out. This image summarises the power of social in the hands of a switched on and responsive marketing team.

Now they are running this ad at this Sunday’s SuperBowl on Sunday which pokes fun at the recent lawsuits between Apple and Samsung.

None of this comes cheap. Last year spent $191 million on marketing in the US, but this year it increased to $349m.

But is swearing acceptable in the workplace? Here is a lovely clip from Love Actually.

Swearing in the workplace

Does the person swearing does it make them feel somehow more powerful or does it indeed demean them in front of their team?

A new study by CareerBuilder.com shows that 81% of employers believe cursing brings an employee’s professionalism into question. The study showed that 64% of employers think less of an employee who swears repeatedly, and 57% said they are less likely to promote someone who using curse words. A further 71% of employers said that swearing shows a “lack of control,” while 68% says swearing demonstrates a “lack of maturity.” Perhaps most interestingly, says CareerBuilder.com spokesperson Jennifer Grasz, is that 54% of employers said that swearing made their employees appear “less intelligent.”

For a fuller breakdown of the CareerBuilder survey there is an excellent Forbes article.

Leadership

The tone of the company is often set by senior management, and their behaviour and language may differ when dealing with peers, subordinates and clients. When you start a new job, you’ll realise pretty quickly whether people swear or not. Now, that does not mean that you then have to throw in expletives just because others do, and you will need to watch your tongue if you find yourself in a more formal setting.

So in summary.

Shut the f*ck up.

UPDATE:  Sean Lock (UK comedian) on swearing

A simple enough question.  My children understand that if I am in my office, or I walk into the house after a business trip and am on the phone that I may still be at work.

• Cloud means that companies are happy to put more and more applications and data in the cloud so that being connected to the corporate network or VPN is not critical. Interestingly, even “Big-Pharma” is now agreeing to put mission critical, secure process information in the cloud. However, the networks are not quite ready for 100% cloud all the time.
• Social means that with social networking tools and web conferencing people no longer need feel as isolated. I remember one of the reasons for going to the office was “You need the office, the office needs you”.  It was about social interaction.
• Mobile includes smart phones and tablets. They can be used to catch up, connect, engage, transact without waiting to boot up a laptop or - increasingly – can be used instead of a laptop.

“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide,” Napoleon said. The Frenchman definitely made some major calls, such as invading Russia. Now that was a decision. A big, cold decision 1,000 miles long, with no food, bad clothes, and a lot of unfriendly locals. And you see what Napoleon was talking about. Some decisions leave you wearing an emperor’s crown; others leave you in pajamas on Elba.

Now a question for you: Are you serious about decisions? Start with the Latin decidere. It means, literally, “to cut off.” Decisions force us to foreclose other opportunities—jobs not taken, strategies never attempted, options unpursued. Would that sales gig in Houston have worked out better? You’ll never know.

Bad vs wrong

There are bad decisions and there are wrong decisions. It is fine to make wrong decisions, but unacceptable to make bad ones.

But there’s a big difference between a wrong decision and a bad decision. A wrong decision is picking Door No. 1 when the prize is actually behind Door No. 2. It’s a lousy result, but the fault lies with the approach and information you used to make the decision. A bad decision is launching the space shuttle Challenger when Morton Thiokol’s engineers predict a nearly 100% chance of catastrophe.

A little bit of snow

England has had snow over the last week or so. The roads have been icy with the councils working hard to clear the snow from the major roads, but the back roads are still deep snow. The country has not ground to halt and people have been getting on with theirl lives; getting to work, going shopping, taking the kids to school.

But it has highlighted some very bad decision making. Everyone seems to be talking about how they wished they had a 4×4 car, or that they were glad they purchased a 4×4.

When I tell them that is spent 50 times less and I am far safer on the roads they are staggered. How come?  Well instead of spending £25,000 on a 4×4 I have bought a set of winter tyres for £500.

Wrong thinking

This is where the flawed thinking comes in. The 4×4 car manufacturer’s marketing teams have hoodwinked the population into believing that 4 wheel drive is what everyone wants.  The tyre manufacturers have done a relatively poor job of explaining the benefits of winter tyres. So with incomplete information (4×4 vs winter tyres) people are making wrong decisions.

Now you have that information, can you make a better decision? It is not just about snow, but every day below 4 degrees that  you are safer if you have winter tyres. Plus you have the added benefit of being extremely smug when it does snow. You can drive anywhere with confidence and YOU. WILL. GET. HOME.

So what other wring decisions are you making?

40 years ago, Amancio Ortega founded Zara on 2 key principles; give the customers what they want and give it to them faster than anyone else. As the story illustrates even today, those 2 key principles are at the heart of Zara.

Zara stores refresh their stock twice a week and receive order in 48 hours or less. That has required some key organizational and supply chain decisions. “We never go to fashion shows” says Loreta Garcia a 23 year Zara veteran who heads up Zara Woman’s trends department. “We track bloggers and listen to customers, but we change our opinions all the time”, she says. “What seems great today, in 2 weeks is the worst idea ever.”

The old man in the car was the reclusive founder of Zara, a Spaniard who is now the 3^rd richest man in the world worth over $56billion. The empire he has built has revenues of nearly $20 billions and stores in 80 countries.

At a time where Spain has 24% unemployment and crippling debt, Zara announced revenue was up 17% yoy for the first 3 quarters. And that growth shows no sign of slowing.

There can be no better proof of the importance of speed to market, or the 2 Second Advantage as TIBCO’s CEO Vivek Ranadive describes it in his latest book; 2SA – How we succeed by anticipating the future – just enough. But combine that with driving great customer experience and the results can be stunning. Which his why the acquisition by TIBCO of LoyaltyLab is so critical.

The story of Ortega, from 14 year old folding shirts in the local Gala store to leader of arguably the most successful fashion retailer is compelling. If you want to understand the whole story read the excellent Fortune article Meet the 3^rd richest man in the world, which inspired this blog.

So, 40 years ago with a small chain of shops in Northern Spain you can probably understand how Ortega achieve his objectives. But, how can he still with a huge business spread over multiple continents and global on-line competition?

The secret is the effective use of technology everywhere, but nowhere more so than in logistics. The 400,00 sq foot logistics building is organized around a labyrinth of conveyor belts extending up 5 storeys. From here customized orders are delivered to Zara stores around the world with an SLA of 24 hours for Europe and Middle East and 48 hours for the rest of the world.

But to make the company function so effectively is the culture – “entrepreneurial, self-critical, completely flat organization”. Ortega has an uncanny ability to connect with employees at every level. Perhaps this is borne out of his upbringing. Which was dire poverty with little education.

This is another story of a fantastically successful business founded on some strong customer-centric philosophies which has exploited technology to stay ahead in a globally connected world.

Inspiring.

But how do you accelerate growth without piling on expensive sales guys? And how do you make it easier for the large corporates to find you and get comfortable placing big orders with you?

ANSWER: You create relationships with the analyst community. And here’s why.

Analysts are important

Analysts have the ear of people with the purse strings. When they speak, the C-Suite listens. When a company goes out to tender for a third party product invariably an analyst will be involved in the decision making process, whether directly as a result of a consultation or indirectly through a research paper. They are able to influence not only potential customers, but they also coach and advise your potential acquirer on their product strategy including which vendors to buy.

Being included in an analyst research note is worth more than 100 blog posts, column inches in the FT/ WSJ or exhibiting at the next xyz conference. You need the analysts, whether you like it or not, to survive in both the short-term and thrive in the long term because their word carries weight. If a customer refers to an analyst for a product shortlist and you’ve never engaged with the analyst you can guarantee you’ll never make that list no matter how mind-blowingly awesome your product is.

Analyst Relations (AR) can deliver far greater short term and long term tangible benefits than any PR campaigns. Yet many vendors start engaging PR before they even consider AR.

It’s never too early

It takes time to build a relationship with the right analysts that cover your product’s area. Let’s not confuse a relationship with meeting the analyst once or twice and fire-hosing them with your product pitch. You are aiming for a relationship of mutual respect, and that takes time to develop which is why engaging as early as possible is critical for survival for a startup. Done well it can position a vendor ahead of the short list in product selections and gain the attention of the leaders of industry, the media, and the competition. Poor (or no) analyst relations can result in your product being ignored by potential clients and it may limit your penetration in your existing clients

Being spotted by an analyst early on is major kudos for a small company but also for the analyst because they love to be the one who discovered a cool new vendors and write about them. And it’s also their opportunity to help you out and form part of your success. Analysts are no different from anyone else, they love being part of the action and have an ego to fuel. And again, it can’t be stressed enough, if they don’t know you neither will their clients when they ask about the market.

But they are expensive and we don’t have the time!

Certainly there are costs with engaging with analysts. Most charge an annual fee to be a client and have access to the analysts and research. But don’t think that you can buy your way to the top of a Magic Quadrant or Wave, or into the minds of the analysts. Or that paying for one or two consulting engagements with the analysts will do it. Think relationship, not prostitution.

Often it is the amount of money that vendors perceive they have to spend which stops them building a relationship with the analysts. The issue is most vendors spend too much money in the wrong places. It doesn’t have to be that way.

And apart from the hefty fees they ask you to sign up for there’s also the potential overhead of someone in an Analyst Relations role. Traditionally this is a new, fairly junior hire or it is outsourced to a PR/AR agency. Both of these lead to the wrong relationship being developed with the analysts, but it is a very common mistake.

Analysts need to be briefed on product functionality, but they are far more interested in customer stories. However, meeting or calls with analysts, understanding their needs and providing the information they need in the format that they want can be time consuming. They often feel like they are more difficult to deal with than clients. But they can afford to be as their influence and value is so much greater than even your best client.

What is required is a carefully crafted strategy and deep understanding of what drives analysts and how they operate. It also needs someone who has the ability and gravitas to engage them as peers and forge that professional relationship your company and product deserves. It’s not about booking appointments or grovelling for time. It is the role of a senior exec or founder who inevitably has other priorities – company operation, client sales or product strategy.

So how do I make this work?

Few senior executives have engaged with analysts or developed an effective analyst strategy. And with conflicting priorities they do not have the time or luxury to learn. But companies readily hire a Non Exec Director to add an external perspective, exercising their ancient Rolodex and to sit on a board. Their brief is often financial or governance and they offer pithy advice like “if you sell more and spend less”.

A more cost effective approach is to hire a Non-Exec Director or Advisor who understands Analyst Relations and can help shape the analyst strategy, coach the senior team on the best way to engage with analysts, and act as a sounding board for decisions. They will add more value to the business as your go to market plans are meaningless without the visibility in the market that strong analyst relationships will bring.

For the price of a junior in your AR/PR firm you can bag a NED or Advisor who knows how to tango with the analysts.

In summary: Brains, not budget. And leverage the skills of others.

This post was co-authored with Theo Priestley  He has written analysis on the industry and tech space in general since 2007 which isn’t long to get the notoriety and recognition he has earned. He has collaborated with and advised the large and the small, from stealth startups to industry established players, introducing new ideas and connections, adding value, industry insight, analyst relations and marketing analysis for those who ask for it.  As an independent business transformation consultant of over ten years he is closer to the real enterprise issues that keep the execs up at night and what they’re looking for to solve them.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.
One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving, which is unlikely. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today.
Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.
So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, ‘It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,’ and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct….. …leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting ‘Oh my God.’

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED AN A+

I cannot describe the keynote, so best that you watch this set of edited highlights.  If you want to see it in all its gory details through photos and Tweets, then The Verge did a great job of documenting the horror as it unfolded.

Ouch..

Customer Strategy

But your customers are calling you less, and only when they really have to. I would suggest that CRM stands for “customer rejection management” rather than customer relationship management; and this is by design. There are three strategies that companies are adopting that are driving customers away, giving you less insight into your customers and their needs, and, ultimately, alienating them.

These strategies are:

• Outsourcing: lets a call center operator talk to your customers;
• Self service: lets them find their own answers; and
• Search/social networking: lets someone else help them.

All three strategies are driven by a cost-center/cost-reduction mindset.

But the one time you force your customers to contact you is when they don’t want to. This is called non-value demand. In other words, you are making your customers do something that has no real value for them.

Either you make them call a number and sit on hold after they have navigated through a labyrinthine list of menu options; or you make them go to an unintelligible website, register by entering a huge list of personal information, wait for a validation email, and then make them try to navigate your website – all with little or no guidance or step by step instructions. Sound familiar?

Here are some examples of non-value demand:

• Report a fault or error in a product or service.
• Fix a problem in a product or service.
• Confirm or acknowledge a change of contract or other details.
• Update personal details.

The opposite of non value demand is value-demand. This is something initiated by the customer that they want for their benefit. They may not want to talk to you but it is worth their time and effort. Some examples are:

• Ask for an increase in credit limit.
• Cancel a product or service.
• Order a product or service.
• Give feedback.

What makes both non-value demand and value-demand non-functional is that companies often compound it with poorly thought through, inadequately tested and inconsistently applied business processes. I am not just talking about the screens in the CRM application but the end-to-end process: the customer journey.

This makes the experience even worse for everybody. The customer is confused and frustrated. The call center operator is uncomfortable and frustrated; i.e., the customer leaves the call upset, no matter how good, positive or cheerful your call center person is.

Good process design

The explosive growth of social networking means that there is now a wide range of ways that a customer may get their question answered. They can call you, search your website, email you, search for the answer on a forum, post the question on a social networking site like LinkedIn or Facebook, or on a micro-blogging site like Twitter.

This is the perfect opportunity for you to take a look at front office processes, and take a customer-centric perspective. Put the customer at the heart of the situation and think about their journey.

The good news is that most of the back office processes can stay the same.

This is the opportunity to take a faster, more effective yet proven approach to process capture/discovery, CRM design, and the adoption of new working practices for your customer facing staff. This can be done through interactive, collaborative process mapping sessions, rapid CRM system prototyping or role-based guided process walk-throughs delivering links to systems, videos, on screen entry, documents and forms, in the context of an end-to-end process.

Gone are consultants interviewing staff and producing complex flowcharts that cover the entire wall of the project office. The end to six to 12 month CRM/IT-centric projects. Say goodbye to offsite CRM systems training courses.

Just theory? No = Success.

Is this approach just theory, you ask? No. It can be seen on every street in the UK in Carphone Warehouse stores, with an initiative they call ‘How2’. (Full disclosure: Carphone Warehouse is a TIBCO client.)

If you can’t make it out of the office, Carphone Warehouse has documented its project in videos from several perspectives including a retail store, back office, the project sponsor. The results speak for themselves. Just from the deployment to 815 stores the ROI was 1100% in year one, customer satisfaction (NPS) was up 25%, an additional revenue of £5M in the first year and they’ve saved £50,000 per year on telephone support calls to stores. In fact, the company has just won a Gartner BPM Excellence Award in the Leveraging BPM Technology category.

Just theory? No = FAIL.

I’ll contrast this with the non-value demand experience of another UK retailer … which shall go unnamed.

Last year I moved the family to the USA and before we left we rented out our house. We called the UK-based retailer, 30 days in advance to cancel our TV/phone/broadband service (value demand). The person at the call center was very helpful. A letter arrived in the post confirming the cancellation of the TV. The letter read:

“Sorry to hear you decided to cancel your subscription. Your viewing will stop on dd/mm/yyyy. (The date was wrong: non-value demand contact required.) We are delighted that you want to continue your service etc., etc., etc. (Wrong again = non-value demand contact required.).”

So we make a non-value demand call. A very helpful and friendly call center representative said that we would be receiving separate letters from each department (telephone, broadband, TV) cancelling the services.  Each, presumably, saying the other services would continue, confusing us or prompting more non-value demand calls. We were advised to simply ignore these letters when they arrived, which we did.

About a week ago we were sent a letter prompting another non-value demand call. There is a credit on the account and they wanted me to call them to let them know if we would like a check and where to send it. Far better would have been to credit our bank account or attach a check to the letter.

Processs-led thinking leads to happy customers

The people who design operational processes should think about how it feels from a customer perspective. Then how the effective use of technology can enhance the experience for everyone. The social media revolution taking place is the perfect catalyst.

Ahhh!! I feel better now. Who should I call to tell?

Web designers seem to forget 2 things:

1. Their job is to remove as much friction from the process as possible

2. Customers can and will go elsewhere.

Sit back and enjoy:

According to a recent Oracle report 61% said they would pay more if it guaranteed better customer service. What also came out of the survey was that consumers will eventually turn away from brands who just don’t service them the way they’re expected to. For those of you who follow my regular column “Mr Angy on Customer Service” on the Process Excellence website will realise that most companies fall woefully short of the basic minimim, for customer service; banks, telco; courier companies to name a few.

I am currently in the Four Seasons Hotel in the Maldives.  I can tell you that paying (vastly) more does get you exemplary customer service. But what I have observed is that money does not buy class. The well-healed young Russians, Japanese and Americans here are rude bordering on obnoxious and treat all the staff like dirt. The staff all smile sweetly, but privately I hope they piss in their coffee.
So money does buy you customer service. But having money does not make you a good customer.

So are the reports in conflict ie wrong? Or is there something else happening?

Let’s explore the reports in a little more detail.

Ofcom’s report, which you can download here, shows that the UK has one of the highest levels of penetration of smartphones in the world at 58 per cent of the population, while just fewer than one in five owns a tablet computer. As a result, British consumers are downloading the most data on mobiles and tablets. In December 2011, the average UK mobile connection used 424 megabytes of data, higher than any other leading country, pushing Japan into second place at 392 megabytes and the US into sixth at 319 megabytes.

One-sixth of all website traffic in the UK was on a mobile, tablet or other connected device, higher than any other country in Europe. James Thickett, Ofcom’s director of research, said: “Our research shows that UK consumers continue to benefit from one of the most advanced markets for communications products and services.”

Overall, the average UK viewer watches more than four hours of television every day, with only the USA, at 293 minutes, and Italy, 253 minutes, watching more.

Whilst at the other end of the spectrum, apparently 7.63 million adults in the UK have never used the internet. That’s 15 per cent. So who are these technophobes who have never gone online? Roughly half, it seems, are over-75s and/or defined as disabled, and not in a position to use a computer. But that still leaves over 3.5 million.  How dot the conduct their lives without email and Facebook?. But more importantly how to they managed to get things done with more and more Government and commercial services delivered as on-line, self-serve websites.

So is there an issue with the reports from the 2 organisations? Or maybe this is the consumer equivalent of the Data Divide that exists in the commercial world. The Data Divide came from a research project by Vanson Bourne and was highlighted by Mark Darbyshire, TIBCO’s EMEA CTO in some recent interviews.

The report highlights were covered by CIO.co.uk in this article, and Mark summarised neatly the challenges for UK businesses:

“It looks increasingly like UK companies are lagging behind their continental counterparts. The ability to alert and then convert a transient opportunity or avert an impending threat will be crucial for long term survival. Those trapped by the data divide will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.”

,

So we are all signing up for stuff we didn’t realise.  But look on the bright side. Lawyers are spending evenings slaving over a PC for hours crafting words THAT NO ONE CARES ABOUT and WILL NEVER READ, rather than going out and getting a life.

Watch and enjoy (or cringe) – except if you are a lawyer.

http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6851490/facebook-law-for-idiots

The key theme for Gartner’s annual Symposium IT Expo was the “Nexus of Forces”.

A Nexus of converging forces — social, mobile, cloud and information — is building upon and transforming user behavior while creating new business opportunities. Research over the past several years has identified the independent evolution of four powerful forces: social, mobile, cloud and information. As a result of consumerization and the ubiquity of connected smart devices, people’s behavior has caused a convergence of these forces.” Source: Gartner

Whilst most people recognise these forces at work in their personal and business lives, it is the implications that are either liberating or terrifying. For those business leaders looking to leapfrog their competition or a nimble start-up looking to wrong foot an incumbent it is an exciting time. However, Gartner raised a warning to senior IT leaders: “Existing architectures are becoming obsolete.”

But there is another group of people who need to be aware of the coming forces. The COO and their operational team. Why? Because these forces are dramatically changing business operations. In some cases destroying the current business model causing a complete reinvention. Think about the music, media and publishing industries. But every business model is at risk.

Forrester has described the impact of these business trends as “Digital Disruption”. The key principles behind digital disruption are that it creates new business models, changes value streams, and is faster, more disruptive and more pervasive than any earlier change driver. Why? Because it is digital. And Forrester says that for those thinking that hunkering down and letting it blow past, as with previous trends – forget it. This is not a trend. It is a permanent shift.

Where does the process professional fit in?

There are a number of different responses to these forces:

Conscientious objector: You can fight the forces to maintain the status quo to keep the business that you understand and fit in. This enables you to stay inside your comfort zone.  Sadly, as many, many industries have discovered that is unlikely to be a good long term strategy. These forces are too pervasive and powerful. You will lose.

Innocent bystander: You can sit and wonder as the forces amass and change the company you work in day to day. But you are too busy with your day job to be engaged. Or maybe you are happy to play with whatever cards that you are dealt. This approach is fine if you are happy with the consequences and that you are part of someone else’s plan. You need to be comfortable with the excitement of what life may bring. The flotsam and jetsam approach.

Enabler: You can put your hand up and ask to be part of the teams thinking about how the forces change the business and the implications on the operation. This is of course requires someone in the company to be thinking about the forces. But you will have a critical role as the forces change entire business models, and the root of any business model is a robust process or operational model. That model will enable the impact to be analysed financially and also from an HR/skills and business change perspective.   I remember just after University I was a graduate trainee for British Rail Engineering. There was a headquarters team reinventing the entire maintenance strategy for the whole UK. I was bright, PC literate and willing. I volunteered to help them on the modelling side. Sure, I was junior dogsbody, so it was easy to decide who made the tea. But I got to attend senior meetings and was at the heart of a critical project that did my career no end of good, and it was also brilliant fun.

Innovator: In some businesses the senior management are unaware of the implications of the Nexus of Forces. They recognise that things are changing, but it hasn’t been spelt out quite so explicitly. Rather than simply being an enabler you can catapult yourself into the upper echelons of the senior management by raising their awareness of the forces, then explaining the implications for your industry and specifically your company. And then suggest that you work with a key individual on a think tank to “reimagine the business”. The person to lead the think tank should report to the CEO, should be open minded and courageous, and should by tech savvy. If there is no-one at Board level with all these skills then it should be the most open minded person who forms a team with people who collectively have the right skills. This is the greatest opportunity that you will ever get in your career to get real Board level visibility.

And no one does this better than Apple. They have managed to penetrate the business by providing devices that are the electronic equivalent to jewellery. Now, please don’t think that I am an Apple bigot. I own multiple Apple devices, love their engineering (hardware and software) and applaud their marketing flair.

I am simply observing behaviour.

• Jewellery does not have an ROI, desire is justification enough
• Jewellery does not need a reason for replacement for a newer, nicer piece
• Jewellery is admired and coveted by others
• Jewellery purchases are not made by comparing the specification / price / value for money of other similar items from other manufacturers artists
• Jewellery is bought from smart, glossy shops where helpful sales staff are on-hand, not off the internet
• Jewellery is not recycled or upgraded
• Jewellery has massive profit margins

Question. Can you replace the word Jewellery with the Apple iXXX in each case and the sentence still be true?  Of course. More so for the consumer oriented devices – iPod Nano, iPhone, iPad than the Macbooks.

Now we agreed that Apple makes jewellery. But that is not a bad thing. The current world of trashy consumerism needs the beautiful things in life.  I rather like the up-market, aspirational advertising of Belvedere Vodka – Living the Beautiful Life: Necessities are for Nicompoops.

But let’s not pretend that this is green. Recyling or upgrading  – “Really darling!!”  Who ever heard of a necklace where the gems could be replaced. An older model is simply discarded for a newer one.  And the older one gathers dust in a box until it is thrown away. You couldn’t give it away. Who would want it – “I wouldn’t be seen dead with last year’s model, darling”.

Apple is set to make a killing this Christmas. And it deserves to.

The professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open areas between the golf balls. He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it was.

There is a great game which I learned at the Business Improv Lab, but we play it at home with our 2 children (Gabriella – 13 and Max – 11) .

Imagine that a 1,000 year old man has walked into the room.  You are then told which thing (eg fridge, camera, TV, microwave, car….) which you need explain to him. Tricky. Trickier than you think.

Try it now.  What did you discover?

“You need get back to first principles. You need to assume nothing. You need to keep it simple.”

Perhaps every technology marketing company should play this game before they vomit up a load of marketing-techno-babble onto their website and brochures.  Here is one good and 2 awful examples.

We said a 1,000 year old man.  But what about a 100 year man?  Just 100 years ago was 1912 and below are examples of the latest car and plane.

BTW the same goes for the titles of the presentations. With 4 parallel streams running, analysts round tables and ITExpo Theatre sessions, you are fighting to get an audience to your session. Those few words will either draw a crowd or leave you with an empty room.  That empty room may be a just lost opportunity if the presenter is the company sales rep, but how embarrassing is it if you have persuaded a key customer to speak?

Here is my favourite title from the 4 days. It was a close run thing with some other fantastic contenders:

Developing Outcome-Driven Business Operating Anchor Models

The problem

You get out your iPad Mini or iPhone5 to admiring and envious looks. You look cool and feel great. And then you get out your headphones which have inexplicably tied themselves in a knot.  Not good.  You spend seconds, minutes untangling them. You are no longer cool. Just humdrum.

The solution

Gartner can help you regain your cool. In 3 very easy steps

1. Unravel your headphones (for the LAST time)
2. Cut 2 slots in the top left hand corner in your Gartner name badge or invite card
3. Wrap your headphones around the card

Now you will never need to waste valuable time un-knotting your headphones, with the added benefit of being reminded of the fantastic 3 days at Gartner with TIBCO.

At the recent Gartner Summit they talked about the Nexus of Forces which are changing the face of business.

“A Nexus of converging forces — social, mobile, cloud and information — is building upon and transforming user behavior while creating new business opportunities.”

I covered this in more detail in a recent blog Gartner Nexus of Forces. Scarier than Halloween.  And whilst most people recognize these forces at work in their personal and business lives, it is the implications that are either liberating or terrifying, depending on your viewpoint.

CEOs of companies should be elated or terrified. They can use these dramatic forces to leapfrog their competition. But they are also at risk from more nimble start-ups who are not hamstrung by legacy thinking, operations and systems.

Can you trust your CEO?

However, if you look at all the surveys of CEOs, Gartner’s analysis is it is clear that they are asleep at the wheel, and this should be worrying for their shareholders, employees and customers.

It is not that CEOs are not aware of the forces as IBM’s recent comprehensive b-annual survey of CEOs has shown. The 4 Nexus of Forces – social, mobile, cloud and information – are rooted in IT. So harnessing these forces means understanding, be the close confidant as the CEO formalizes strategy and looks to drive innovation in their business models. That person is the CIO.

But who does the CEO go to for advice and counsel on strategy and innovation? The surveys say it is the CFO or COO, neither of whom have the deep IT skills. It is not the CIO. In fact in another fascinating survey it shows that CEOs do not believe that the company’s IT strategy and the CIO’s expertise is ANY competitive advantage to the company. When asked the potential next career move of their CIO, the answer for in a staggering number of cases was “CIO of a competitor”.

You could say that this is a problem for the CEO, which it is. But the CIO should be taking some of the blame. CIOs need to massively raise their profile and their perceived value.

CIO – examine yourself

So the CIO needs to take a hard look at themselves in the mirror. But there is a clue in their title –  CIO. What does the “I” in their title really stand for; IT, Infrastructure, Innovation, Information, Insights.  The CEO thinks the “I” stands for IT or Infrastructure; providing hardware, systems and some reporting.

They need to evolve or reinvent themselves. They need to think and act more like entrepreneurs, but this may be counter-culture for many who have spent their lives being the steady, risk averse managers tasked with keeping the lights on and driving down costs.

For some it may not be in their nature. Being creative and courageous and entrepreneurial is not a learned skill.  So, if a CIO does not have the natural skills they need to align themselves with those who are. And then they need to make sure that the CEO understands that the CIO should be a critical ally as the company battles the Nexus of Forces.

TIBCO has the same problem as the CIO

Whilst it was interesting to hear about the plight of the CIO, many of the messages resonated when I think about TIBCO. Great engineering and sales but poor marketing. So growing and profitable, but considered by most customers to be “infrastructure or integration”. But over the last 5+ years through R&D and M&A the TIBCO portfolio of products has expanded to include social, process discovery, analytics, in-memory, master data management, loyalty, mobile and integration. But alongside that the professional services teams have helped company drive some transformational change.

But TIBCO needs to raise its profile from very competent IT product provider to trusted IT platform provider that not only the CIO but also the CEO/COO/CFO of a company can turn to. It is a journey that has already started in TIBCO and is gathering pace. The first steps were painful, expensive and uncertain, but every step becomes easier.

CIOs need to start that journey or reinvention, no matter how painful it seems.

In summary, the article highlighted the key weaknesses of tablets.

“At work I am a ‘power user’. I write books and white papers, I give presentations, I tweet and blog   So the bluetooth keyboard has made like immeasurably better.  But I cannot review and update that MSWord document I was emailed. I cannot quickly develop a presentation pulling pictures from my huge library of images.”

The iPad experience had made me realise what I REALLY, REALLY wanted.

“Tablet 3.0 : It is a tablet with the same form function as the iPad with a high-definition touch screen that rotates.  But one with a ‘proper’ OS so I can run business apps, a large solid state hard disk, a couple of USB ports, a separate bluetooth keyboard and mouse, ….  oh and a battery life of 8+ hours.”

At the Gartner Symposium, I stopped by the IT Expo and the Samsung stand. And they showed me a Tablet 3.0.  It looks like a laptop, but the keyboard is detachable and it operates like a tablet, but running Windows8.

The key question “Is this too late?”  or maybe this is Microsoft’s chance to leapfrog Apple and their hold over the business-oriented iPad users. It maybe for many users. Sadly it is too late. I have left Microsoft and gone to the dark side. I LOVE my Macbook Air.

Here’s the Apple ad, which gets no credit

In light of your failure in recent years to nominate competent candidates for President of the USA and thus to govern yourselves, we hereby give notice of the revocation of your independence, effective immediately. (You should look up ‘revocation’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.)

You should be. The opening keynote was inspiring, theatrical and terrifying in equal measure. The key theme for Gartner’s annual Symposium IT Expo in Orlando last week and this week in Barcelona for nearly 10,000 delegates was the Nexus of Forces.

 The Nexus of Forces

“A Nexus of converging forces — social, mobile, cloud and information — is building upon and transforming user behavior while creating new business opportunities.

Research over the past several years has identified the independent evolution of four powerful forces: social, mobile, cloud and information. As a result of consumerization and the ubiquity of connected smart devices, people’s behavior has caused a convergence of these forces.”

Whilst most people recognize these forces at work in their personal and business lives, it is the implications that are either liberating or terrifying, depending on your viewpoint. For those business leaders looking to leapfrog their competition or a nimble start-up looking to wrong foot an incumbent it is an exciting time. However, Gartner raised a warning to senior IT leaders: “Their existing architectures are becoming obsolete.”

But it gets worse. These powerful forces are reshaping industries with a frightening ferocity. Those in the music, print, news and media industries have seen their world ripped apart in the last few years. Existing business models no longer work, and the incumbent players have had to completely reinvent themselves to compete with startups who have been able to scale rapidly unfettered by legacy operations and systems. But more critically, the startups are not constrained in their thinking.

CIO challenge: reinvent yourself

The challenge that Gartner set from the keynote was to CIOs to reinvent themselves. To think more like entrepreneurs. To obsolete their businesses before someone else does. That means the CIO cannot spend time thinking about “keeping the lights on”.  Whilst that is clearly important, designing the future state business alongside the CEO and CMO is far more important.

But, how many CIOs have the skills, vision and courage to think and act like an entrepreneur who is not afraid? Not afraid to fail. Not afraid the future. Not afraid of the unknown.

You’re excited about a new secondment abroad. But it is a new country, in a new office, with a new team. The expectations of you are high. So you need to be on the ball despite the jet lag, emotions of leaving family and friends , and the logistics of moving your entire life (in boxes).

That’s why you probably need a boy you can trust to move your personal stuff so you can turn up to work on day 1 on fire in your own clothes. Rather than leaving it to a faceless courier company who makes you track your own shipment through an impenetrable website…. that shows that you are in San Francisco and your boxes are somewhere north of Seattle or Sydney.

I used to think that couriers, especially the large players, were pretty reliable but recent experiences is that they are failing to meet the demand of online purchases. Quality of service is dropping rapidly. In fact it has fallen so far that they are a subject of my next article on my monthly column “Mr Angry – on customer service”. The article is called Why couriers don’t deliver.

I find it staggering as couriers have a pretty simple business model. They pick stuff up and need to deliver it to somewhere else, safely and securely. But as my research is proving, they are failing. Either through a lack of a transparent end to end process thought through from a customer perspective or from a staff engagement / attitude perspective. This is leaving the market open for a reliable more personal service. Which is why I have high hopes for a service offered by a friend called the Baggage Boys.

They are not aiming at the small package or document delivery, but shipping personal belongings. So professionals on secondment. Sending Antipodeans back home or moving them into Earls Court to work in bars. Foreign students into UK University digs and then storing their stuff when they go on their travels.

What is interesting and different is that they are building a company with a personality. Which should not be too hard as the founder, Daryl Catterall, has a larger than life persona and a real love of life. It is impossible to spend more than 5 minutes with him and not be inspired by his passion for Baggage Boys, cooking and dancing – probably in that order!!

That personality starts with the brand. The name Baggage Boys and then the logo, website and social media presence. And finally it is team on the end of the phones.

So in the world where everything where everything seems to be on-line, automated call centres and self service to drive out costs, how can Baggage Boys afford to be successful with a softer more personal touch? Surely, it will cost too much? Clearly this is a delicate balance of costs and revenues. Firstly their focus is on customers who are relocating so the shipments are one or more standard sized packing boxes.

This means that the revenues per customer are higher than traditional couriers. The standardization of the box sizes allows delivery and storage costs to be kept down. But probably the biggest difference is that this is a company “born in the social world”. It has not bolted social onto an existing organization as an afterthought. It understands how to harness the power of social media to drive down the cost of customer acquisition. But it is also it is critically important to maintain customer engagement and retention. Because if Baggage Boys shipped someone out, they want to ship them home again.

 But to achieve that they need to be able to deliver – reliably.

And talking to Daryl that it is clear that Baggage Boys are just not delivering boxes of personal belongings. They realize that they are delivering piece of mind, which they take very seriously.