strategy

Key Takeaways from the Panel Discussion at TechSparks 2011 Hyderabad Regional RoundTable

by Paul Joseph July 17, 2011 Featured

The panel discussion at TechSparks 2011 Hyderabad Regional RoundTable, moderated by founder of YourStory.in Shradha Sharma, engaged the audience thoroughly. The panelists included – G V Ravishankar, Managing Director, Sequoia Capital, Jayaram Pillai, Managing Director, National Instruments(India, Russia, Arabia), Vimal Abraham, Strategy & Marketing, ISV & Developer Relations, IBM India,… (Visit Yourstory.in for full news, other content, and much more!)

Tagged as: audience, content, developer, strategy

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Identifying Your Best Customers – and What to do with Them

by Paul Joseph June 28, 2011 Featured

Who are your best customers? Are they the ones who spend the most? Are they the people who you enjoy dealing with? You might think this is a subjective question, but there is a methodical way to identify the customers that are doing your company the most good. At a conference in Phoenix a while back, author Steve Wilkinghoff presented a very interesting process for this. The method outlined below isn’t necessarily easy – especially if you have a large customer base – but if you want to truly maximize your profitability, it’s essential to evaluate what you’re selling to whom and how. Customer Impact on Your Business It’s important to understand how your customers affect your business. Many business owners will say that every customer is just as important as any other, and all should be treated the same. While delivering great service to everyone is clearly a good idea, it isn’t true that all customers are the same. Obviously anyone who spends money with your company can be considered a customer, and they affect your revenue every time they make a purchase. There are other ways in which a customer can have an impact on your business though, and they can vary greatly from one customer to another. For example, which products or services they buy can make a big difference. Also, how you acquired the customer, how they interact with your company, and the level of service they require after the sale can all make significant impacts. If you want to increase you company’s profitability and experience considerable growth in a short time, a great place to start is by evaluating your customers and making adjustments based on your findings. The numbers side of the evaluation is the easy part, but just as important is customer resonance (how positive or negative interactions with the customer generally are). The best way to determine this vital factor is to go to any and all staff members who interact with the customer and ask them to give each customer a rating from 1 to 10. Their score will often be determined by what some companies refer to as the PITA factor (we’ll let you figure out what the acronym stands for), but it’s important to keep this a positive exercise. You aren’t trying to create an ‘us vs. them’ mentality within your organization. This evaluation can be part objective and part subjective. The objective part is anything like the number of hours of service provided, number of calls into technical support, the length of any particular customer’s sales cycle. The subjective part really comes down to how the customer treats employees.  This type of evaluation is an easier task within a sales and service organization, but even in the most basic retail setting, your employees will know which customers they look forward to seeing, and which ones they dread. Plotting for Success Once you have an evaluation of each customer complete, and each has been assigned a resonance score of 1 to 10, it’s time to create some graphs. Don’t worry – no math is involved. Generally you want to create three separate graphs: one for profitability, one for cash flow, and one for ROI (Return On Investment). They’ll look something like this: Now What? Now that you have your customers plotted on your graph, you have a visual representation of how each group of customers is affecting your business. In the top left quadrant , you have high profitability customers who are hard to deal with. These customers might just be grumpy or picky people, or they might be unhappy with your company. Either way, they are not likely to be loyal, and they are at risk. Depending on how low they are on the resonance scale, you might or might not want to work harder to keep their business. The bottom left quadrant represents customers who are difficult to deal with and result in low profitability to boot. Some say drop these customers immediately. The problem with that is they are bringing in some revenue, and if you dump them, you’d better have a plan for replacing it, or your cash flow might suffer. At the top right quadrant , you find the customers you wish you could clone. These are the folks who are helping your business not only by being profitable, but by requiring less maintenance and just being generally good for morale. This is the only quadrant where a higher cost of acquisition makes sense. Study these customers. Where did they come from? What’s their demographic? Go out and find more of them! Last, but certainly not least is the bottom right quadrant . This is an exciting group, because they represent great opportunity. They might not be buying the products or services you would want them to buy, but they are probably loyal and could be moved into the top right with the right kind of attention. If you want to make a significant impact on your bottom line, pay a lot of attention to these folks and find out what it will take to get them buying what you wish they’d buy. Is this a lot of work? It can be. But it’s well worth it. If you have a large customer base, take them a chunk at a time. As long as you’re working on it and willing to make some adjustments in your methods where necessary, you’ll see a bigger number in your bank account before you know it.

Tagged as: business, business psychology, entrepreneur, people, strategy

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How to Not Have to Eat a Horse

by Paul Joseph May 13, 2011 Featured

Businesses are a lot like nursery rhymes. For every over-worked, shoe-dwelling old woman, there’s another who’s prepared to eat cats, dogs, and horses (whole, presumably) in order to catch a fly. Apparently this second old lady didn’t hear that honey is the thing you need to catch flies. Strange as it may sound, there’s a business lesson to be learned from the old woman who swallowed a fly, though. Namely, if your solution to a problem (any problem, from customer acquisition, to which hand dryer to install in the rest rooms) is purely reactive, you’ll end up like the old woman: Dead, of course. Once upon a time in Redmond … When I read that Microsoft had narrowly beaten Google and Facebook to Skype , for the bargain price of $8.5 billion, my first instinct was that neither Google nor Facebook need Skype, and that they were just in the bidding to push up the price Microsoft was going to end up paying. It sounded to me like Microsoft thought they were going to be left behind – that the opportunity cost of not buying Skype would be tens of billions of dollars – and so they swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don’t know why. I’m sure that Gates and Ballmer will let us know in time. If Microsoft’s motivation in buying Skype was an expensive game of keep-away with Facebook and Google, it may be one of the costliest errors in the computing era. But to say that only large businesses make this kind of mistake would be a grave insult to the thousands of small business owners who make this same mistake every year. Whether it’s a poorly researched software solution, or short-sighted mis-investment in company vehicle maintenance, or remodeling the conference room months before the company decides to move premises, small businesses definitely know how to keep up with the Joneses. And sure, these are all easy to spot in hindsight, but if you think about it, they’re not too much harder to spot in the moment. How to Not Have to Eat a Horse Document the ROI and cost/benefit analysis of every purchase you make. Not kidding about that. You should also explore multiple alternative solutions, not just competing versions of the same solution. Even if the documentation is on the back of a napkin, the simple act of examining how this expenditure will help you improve customer experience, or make your company more efficient, will make you a more informed buyer. If your business is moving too fast for you to step back and take a look at how to fix a problem, that’s your problem. If the issue you’re trying to solve is out of your area of expertise, ask an expert. Paying $400 for an hour of IT consulting and $200 for a new network storage device is a better investment than the $200 upgrade you think will take care of your server problem. You’re not an expert, and when your fix doesn’t work and snowballs into $1000 of hardware and software changes and three days of lost productivity from two of your employees, the cost runs to five figures. And it’s not just purchases, it’s investments of time and resources, too. Before you assign resources to develop video podcasts for your Website, ask if you need podcasts. Just because your main competitor is doing it doesn’t mean they’re doing it well, or even that it’s having a noticeable effect on their revenue. Living Happily Ever After… If you feel like you should invest in something, invest in patience. It’s unlikely that one of your competitors is going to be an early adopter of some ground-breaking technology that takes away all your customers. Be patient, look at your business, and if you need to reinvent it from the ground up, do that. You wouldn’t hope to build a race car by bolting together the best parts of exciting looking vehicles over a three year period. In the same way, tacking the latest must-have project or application to your business will make your product cumbersome, and unintuitive. And then you’ll be left wondering if those magic beans would have actually been a good trade for the family cow after all. Duncan Connor is a freelance writer for www.Company.com. Read more about Duncan here .

Tagged as: business savvy, entrepreneur, facebook, family, microsoft, opportunity, skype, small-business, strategy, success

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Streamlining Your Life for Maximum Effectiveness

by Paul Joseph April 27, 2011 Featured

There are a million and one things out there we have all read about productivity and efficiency. I’ve read The Four Hour Work Week , Getting Things Done , and Rework . These books offer many helpful hints, but they also have quite a bit of theory. Over the past month I’ve made four changes in my life that I can attribute, not just increased productivity to, but increased effectiveness at reaching my goals. We can be very productive at doing things that don’t help us. 1. Supplement output with commission-based assistance. One of the things I do most is speak. I am constantly trying to expand my speaking capabilities. Since the beginning of this year, I have been learning as much as I can about the speaking industry. I’ve always enjoyed being able to mentor and coach other like minded individuals, speaking has given me a way to do this on a multiplicative level. There was just one problem — I couldn’t get enough contacts out quick enough to really drive it as my main business. I didn’t have time to do the leg-work — calling people, pitching, cold calling, and emailing. So I set out to find someone who I could pay a generous commission salary to based on their ability to get me booked. I couldn’t afford another a full time employee, but I could to pay someone well as long as I knew the money was still going to keep coming in. I discovered that I could apply this to market research and product development as well. I discovered that people are picking up more of these type of jobs in order to supplement their existing income during this tough economy. I’ve learned that both my commission based consultants and myself can benefit highly from this flexible model. 2. You’ve got to have your personal life straightened out before you can focus on work. Transitions can be messy, whether it’s preparing to move to a new city (like me), or going through a sort of ‘mid-life’ restructuring. I’ve found that I am not as effective at getting things done or producing quality work if I have personal problems on-going. There are two things I think that must be recognized as a result of this. 1) You cannot control everything that happens in your personal life, you can only do your best to act and respond to it as adeptly as possible. 2) You must find a way to place the two in near perfect synergy if you are to really drive your business forward. What is most important to you? Make a list – both personal items and business items. As entrepreneurs we are usually struggling to maintain a balance between the two, but I will be the first to say, the most effective model might not always be a complete balance.  To really push my business forward I had to make personal sacrifices in some areas and new commitments in others. 3. If something doesn’t contribute to your end goal — say NO. I would love to be able to attend every event where someone wants me to speak for free. I used to up until very recently. But then I realized that they weren’t being fair and respective of my time, my career, or my services. Some people try to get as much as they can from you for free and expect you to be okay with it. I don’t think those people should be on your short list of business partners. You owe it to yourself, your family, and anyone else you are helping support, to respectively decline these solicitations. You should never rip people off, but people must understand that you are trying to make a living too. Strive to compromise on prices for speaking, consulting, and general business assistance. And don’t expect to be able to make everyone happy, because the fact is, you won’t always be able to. Lastly, and most importantly for many of us. Get things done. Anything that has the potential to be more than an hour or so quick diversion respectively decline. I would get people asking me to make websites and I’d take hours in a day out to help them out, this pulled me away from my personal goals. You have to set limits, and if you’re going to help someone for an on going basis, figure out if there isn’t something that they can do to help you in return. Work linearly, work effectively. 4. Evaluate yourself regularly — Evaluate your strategy constantly. I put the things I need to do in a task management program called Things™. It’s a great little program that allows me to see how things should be executed in order of their priority ranking or due date. If I miss a deadline it tells me how many days I’m over due and re-ranks accordingly. As I get things done I check them off, I also spend 30 minutes each Saturday going back over what I still need to do for the next week and ensuring that the things I accomplished were properly implemented and proved to be effective. I want to know if their effective because if they weren’t, say for example a Google Ad Words campaign, I don’t want to keep on running it. The best entrepreneurs are able to constantly react to a changing market, changing customers needs, and changing delivery methods. If you’re not making money after a few months of your current strategy, don’t think that the business will miraculously pick up in a few more weeks. Spend your time re-evaluating your strategy and always seek customer feed back. Having regular conversations with peers in your field is also, I have found, an excellent way to keep yourself at maximum effectiveness. Michael Costigan speaks to teens and adults about effective communication so that they may make better informed decisions together. Read more about Michael here .

Tagged as: business, business psychology, career, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, family, goals, personal, strategy, time

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Create a Winning Facebook Ad Campaign

by Paul Joseph April 1, 2011 Featured

If you are trying to market to a specific demographic, you are going to find that Facebook ads are often more effective the Google Ads.  That’s not to say that they always win, but they are often more targeted to your audience. Facebook knows who is interested in your content and is very effective at bringing your content to them.  However, your Facebook ads won’t do anything for you if you don’t execute them properly.  There are a few things you should do to make sure that you have a strong marketing campaign. First of all, you need to make sure that you have a Facebook page that people will take a liking to.  This is a very important step, so make sure you get it right before you continue.  Check your metrics to see how many people are viewing your page and brainstorm new ways to increase your Facebook presence. You also need to make sure that you maintain a connection with your viewers on your site or Facebook profile.  The strategies that email marketers use don’t work with Facebook.  You need to actually respond to their feedback.  You need the trust and loyalty of your viewers before you can even brainstorm your ad campaign. What is the point of driving traffic to your site if your would-be customers feel like they’ve walked into a ghost town?  Would they bother coming to you if they had no idea who you were?  One of the oldest principles of business is that the best marketing campaigns are useless without a good product.  In social media, your product is your ability to connect with your viewers.  Your physical products and services are meaningless if you can’t satisfy their social needs first. After you have optimized your site for Facebook , you are ready to start building some ads.  One suggestion is that you target a smaller audience with a greater quantity of ads.  It is useless focusing on a bunch of customers who couldn’t care less about what you have to offer.  You also need to remember that a single customer usually needs to be exposed to your product four or five times before you can make a conversion.  In other words: 1. Find the customers that are going to buy 2. Remind them about you until they go through with the purchase Finally, you are going to need to think long term.  Long-term does not mean a few days or probably a month.  You are going to have to put time into your Facebook ads, which means you are going to have to stretch your dollars further.  This is yet another reason why you need to be specific about your audience. One of the biggest reasons why it is going to take time to put your campaign together is that you are going to have to constantly perfect your strategy .  Look at your metrics and get a feel for what works and what doesn’t.  You are also going to be using your ads to promote your Facebook presence.  As you get more friends and followers, you are going to get more conversions in the future. Facebook ads can be a powerful way to drive converting traffic to your website.  However, you are going to have to make sure that you plan your strategy before getting too far into it. Kalen Smith is the founder of Engineer-a-Business, a provider of business-to-business services and informational products for developing technology businesses. Read more about Kalen here .

Tagged as: entrepreneur, facebook, marketing-strategies, social, strategy

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