Creating a High Achievement Culture
In 2001, the great David Maister published the results of a research study of 139 offices of 29 firms in 15 countries in 15 different lines of business. His book, “Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High Achievement Culture”  became a huge global bestseller and it it he demonstrates very clearly that it’s employee attitudes that drive financial results, and not the other way around.

From this premise, Maister went on to develop his Causal Model and we write about this in our value proposition book, which David kindly contributed to. In it, we highlight the importance of employee engagement in bringing your value proposition to the whole organisation.

New study
“CEOs who put stakeholders’ interests ahead of profits generate greater workforce engagement and therefore deliver superior financial results” – so says a survey(1) using data from 520 business organisations in 17 countries. This survey tested the hypothesis that employees develop negative feelings toward their organisation if the CEO’s primary focus is solely on profit maximisation. Perceiving the CEO as autocratic and focused on the short-term, they report being less willing to help the company, which ultimately leads to poorer corporate performance.

So put the command-and-control behaviour away and truly focus on your employees. Develop your employee value proposition which must become embedded in every aspect of your organisation.

Cindy

(1) Mary Sully de Luque of Thunderbird School of Global Management, David A. Waldman of Arizona State University West and Robert J. House of the University of Pennsylvania. Research reported in Harvard Business Review December 2009.

Related posts:

1. “Our survey said…” – What are your thoughts on value propositions? Through our work, writing and speaking etc we get lots...
2. How to Invent a Profit “If Bill Gates had been British he’d be running the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A former Design Council chair once remarked. We seem to be great in the UK at innovation but not so good at bringing ideas to market and making a profit.  Why are we so bad at commercialising innovation?

I think there are 4 main reason gaps for this –

1. Culture gap

Unlike the US we fear failure more and take rejection more personally. Maybe we need to learn to accept failure more as part of business and stop being so risk averse. Recognising that the US sets the standard for entrepreneurship, the UK government and the Kansas City based Kauffman Foundation have set up scholarship programmes for British innovators to learn from American entrepreneurs.  Some of the participants have been struck by the level of altruism among successful, self-made Americans. The participants say that in the UK people are more reticent to help in an altruistic way. The American mentors will give their time for free and open up their Rolodex and give them contacts.

2. Skills gap

Commercialisation for many inventors is a barrier as they have little experience of the commercial world and an adverse nature towards spending money on bought in expertise. Some view commercial assistance with hesitation and mistrust due to the blood sweat and tears that have gone in to creating their baby. Why should they just hand their baby over to someone else and also pay them to look after it? Sales and marketing is deeply mistrusted and misunderstood. Any new money that comes in will be used for more R&D, as this is their comfort zone.

3. Valuation gap

Inventors are often cash-strapped, good ideas people or academics with a major inability to communicate with business. Often inventors try to use money spent already on R&D to value their equity stake which just doesn’t cut it with commercial investors. They’ll over value their ideas and are reluctant to give up any of their ‘asset’ when it comes to wanting finance to move towards final development or commercialisation. They are largely adverse to releasing equity or control to attract further investment, preferring to own 100% of nothing as opposed to 50% of something.  We see this all to often in the Dragon’s Den!

4. Funding gap

Funding is often available from seed funds and grants to get the idea to a point of final development and to prove a first version. However after that time, any funding is given through a different scheme with its own specific sets of criteria which the companies are not at the right point yet to comply with. There is therefore a funding and assistance gap from final development to commercialisation.  Even before venture capitalists went into hiding, they only invested a fraction of their cash in early stage UK technology (£200m out of £34bn in 2007) and commercialisation capital often falls below minimum venture capital levels.

James Dyson was rejected by the UK government under the previous technology grant SMART scheme 6 times. His project was deemed commercially unviable as they could not see how he was going to take on the current market incumbents. However he did and sold 64 million units in 2008. Why was he rejected? Dyson spends around 11% on R&D per annum. A much higher average than others in the UK I would bet.

So what can be done?

Government – needs to look at more funding towards strengthening the link between R&D and business, as opposed to putting it all into R&D itself. After all, what is the point in inventing something if nobody gets to reap the benefits?

Market test early – the sooner you can bring a prototype to market, the sooner you’ll get good market feedback and the sooner you’ll be able to launch. Never underestimate the power of early customer experience feedback in helping to design a product or service that will be a market winner.  I have known too many inventors who polish their diamonds for years and years before even engaging with the market. Ideally build your value proposition from the beginning and refine it regularly with customer experience. My experience of working with early stage companies suggests that if they build their value proposition early in this iterative way, they get to market much faster and start generating profits much faster than companies who don’t.

Build whole-brain teams – innovators are often discerning, thoughtful and meticulous and have a certain intellectual snobbery about their creations. They are often not the best people to bring their creations to market and sometimes view sales and marketing with suspicion, even contempt.

Recognise that there is a need to bring the detail, rational types together with the more relationship focused, doer types into whole-brain innovation and commercialisation teams.

Some of the best innovation and commercial marriages are between the so called left brainers and right brainers. The Pixar director Brad Bird and the producer John Walker are “famous for fighting openly”, Bird has been quoted as saying, “because he’s got to get it done and I’ve got to make it as good as it can be before it gets done.”  (the CTQ tool can be used to help profile people to create whole-brain teams)

What are the other key ingredients to making the UK better at bringing ideas to market?

Cindy

With thanks for input to this article from Ian Heywood, UK Grants Ltd.

Acknowledgements to The Design Council’s ‘Inventing a Profit’ paper and the Harvard Business Review article ‘Innovation in Turbulent Times’.

Related posts:

1. Left brain, right brain When times are tough, you’ve had to lose good people...
2. Focus on people (not profit) to make profit Places with happier employees make more money. Any CEO worth...
3. 8 Tips to Building a Sales Person’s Value Proposition? What is a sales person’s value proposition? This very interesting...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Everyone who answered this question mentioned relationship building and communication as being key for sales people but I don’t think that’s enough without the ability to really listen, really hear what you’re being told and to be creative with what you’ve heard.   This is always the starting point to building your value proposition as this is the customer experience part of the process,

As we become even more polarised from transactional selling (where the buyer knows what they want) to consultative selling (where they don’t know what they want), the merits of a good consultative sales person become clearer and clearer.

A good consultative sales person will translate what they’ve heard into some in-the-moment innovation crafting and keep offering this back and forward with the client until they have a starting point of a solution. I deliberately chose the words innovation crafting rather than solution crafting for consultative selling as it must be co-created with the buyer rather than a fixed solution the sales person has in their mind. This needs innate creative ability as well as good listening and relationship skills.

Really listening and building a good relationship over time also means dropping your ego.  You may not make the sale today, tomorrow or next month and you may not sell what you wanted to sell, so let that go.  In consultative selling the relationship with the buyer over an extended period is key and it can’t be faked, they will see straight through that.

 
My 8 tips to building a sales person’s value proposition are:

1. 1. Listen, really listen
2. 2. Hear what you’re being told
3. 3. Replay what you think you’ve heard back to your buyer
4. 4. Use your creativity for innovation crafting
5. 5. Drop your ego
6. 6. Build good, real relationships
7. 7. Ask for commitment to you early in the process, but not too early – it’s like dating!
8. 8. Stay for the long game

As we continue to move more and more towards automating transactional (often commodity) sales then I think this aspect of consultative selling for more complex products/services will become even more important. It’ll be one of the few differentiators left.

Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Cindy

Related posts:

1. Consultative or Transactional Selling – is there anything in between anymore? Waiting in my local florist last week I was struck...
2. Review your Offerings to stay Profitable A travel industry client of a colleague recently reduced its...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

As strange as Paris Syndrome may seem, I thought this also illustrates different cultural attitudes to customer centricity. As much as I love France, as a frequent visitor I am no longer surprised at the almost total absence of what I perceive as good customer service.  So how very customer-centric, I thought, of the Japanese embassy to respond in a pre-emptive way to Japanese visitors to Paris.

The perennial problem with gathering customer experience is what to do with it.  You can use it tactically, as the Japanese embassy have done, and respond to particular issues that were highlighted.  And you can use customer experience strategically and look at what the whole experience is telling you and implement holistic changes to the structure, process and people – the whole value proposition.

Customer experience is one of the new business buzzwords, a bit like value proposition. Everyone wants to know what their customer experience is, but once captured (and it should be captured on a regular basis, not once!), few people know how to use it, other than implement a few tactical changes.  The Value Proposition Builder™ is a holistic framework that takes you step-by-step through how to create your value proposition from your customer experience.

So the next time the Japanese embassy get a call from a distressed tourist on their hotline, I was thinking about offering to help them create a value proposition for Japanese tourists visiting Paris.  My ‘flu has clearly been giving me delusions of grandeur, so I’ll just send them a copy of the book instead…once it’s been translated into Japanese, of course.

Cindy

Related posts:

1. More jam, anyone? Or, ‘how does having more to choose from affect your...
2. 8 Tips to Building a Sales Person’s Value Proposition? What is a sales person’s value proposition? This very interesting...
3. What do the following have in common…? Customer experience, voice of the customer, market selection, client selection,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

So at the end of this year, and indeed this decade, I rather like Pulitzer prize winning journalist Ellen Goodman’s view of the New Year:

“We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives, not looking for flaws, but for potential.”

I wish you all the wisdom and capability to make the most of your potential and I wish you health, happiness and prosperity for the New Year and the new decade.

Cindy

Related posts:

1. The True Value of Christmas I was musing recently if my true love had ever...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Now, I know this isn’t the true meaning of the value of Christmas, but with my mind (sadly) focused just on money, I then started thinking about the cost of Christmas, as I do at this time every year. You’ll have got by now from the value equation that value is not the same as cost, as some retailers would have us believe with their ‘value ranges’.

I came across this amusing economic analysis by PNC Wealth Management for 2009. It’s based on the cost of gifts in the seasonal carol, The Twelve Days of Christmas.

The 2009 price tag is a total of $87,403 for all of the items in the carol, purchased repeatedly as the song suggests. The cost of buying each item just once increased this year to $21,466. Not bad considering the price is up just a bit at $794, or less than 1 percent, from $86,609 last year. PNC, who have been calculating the cost of Christmas since 1984, attributed the modest increase to lower energy costs and fewer wage increases.

Watch their great video to explore the 2009 PNC Christmas Price Index in detail.

Cindy

Related posts:

1. Selling to the Post-recession Buyer In the developed world, until last year we had 15...
2. Bringing in the New Year and New Decade The end of one calendar year and the beginning of...
3. What do the following have in common…? Customer experience, voice of the customer, market selection, client selection,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Then there was me, I was on my way home from work, I knew exactly what I wanted and would have been happier not to wait but to self-select my flowers and pay automatically as I was in a hurry, but this wasn’t on offer, so I had the choice of waiting to be served, or leaving without my flowers. I stayed and learnt an awful lot about wedding flowers in the process!

I was a transactional buyer, I knew what I wanted and how much I wanted to pay. The bride-to-be was a consultative buyer, she didn’t know what she wanted but she knew what she wanted to achieve, and she was flexible with her pricing.

The sales assistant however had to do consultative selling to the young girl as well as transactional selling to me. I was impressed, if not a little frustrated, at the flexibility of this sales person. Consultative salespeople are problem solvers and conceptual thinkers who look at the big picture. He was doing this perfectly in helping the bride-to-be choose her flowers. He knew his products and knew what would work in different situations and what wouldn’t.

It struck me that all retail stores these days need to offer a self-service option for the transactional buyer like me. In the way that some supermarkets have self-check outs and newspaper vendors have an honesty box in which to drop your money. Of course the ultimate transactional sale is an online sale like Amazon for example, where some browsing is possible but you often know what you want, self-select and self-checkout.

So is there anything in between these days or is every sale either consultative or transactional? I couldn’t think of an example, maybe you can?

Related posts:

1. 8 Tips to Building a Sales Person’s Value Proposition? What is a sales person’s value proposition? This very interesting...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that BA has lost its way and is increasingly devaluing its value proposition which hitherto has been based on providing an excellent customer experience and brand clarity. Competition with low-cost airlines will be increased, not decreased, by its recent moves as the competitive playing field is being levelled by BA itself.

BA may well boost flagging revenues in the short term but at the risk of alienating its loyal customer base and thus destroying its hard-won value proposition.

Related posts:

1. The True Value of Christmas I was musing recently if my true love had ever...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Have you ever felt so daunted by the amount of different things to choose from that you ended up not choosing anything at all? If so, you are not alone, as the results from the following experiment show. A stall was set up in a supermarket for jam tasting. On one day the stall had 24 jams, and on a different day only 6 jams. Although the stalls with more jams attracted more attention (60% of the people passing by stopped, compared with only 40% for the small-selection stall), of the people who stopped only 4% at the stall with the larger selection subsequently bought a pot, whereas 30% of the people who stopped at the small-selection stall went on to buy a pot(1).

Too much choice can make us feel overwhelmed and not know what to choose, thereby often not making any choice at all. Even when we do choose something, we are often dissatisfied, thinking we have probably made the wrong choice (2)(3).

So what does this mean for sales and marketing?

In our B2B world we often meet very clever, very technically brilliant people in great companies who want to tell the whole world all about how technically brilliant they are. Technically brilliant people are also most often very analytical people, so they are more left-brain dominant rather than right-brain dominant. This leads them to believe that telling all of their customers about all of the facts, about all of the features and benefits of all of their products or services will just demonstrate how brilliant they are and their customers will naturally fall at their feet and want to buy their offerings. This rarely happens. This approach just frightens or baffles customers and then they’re just paralysed into doing nothing. The worst possible outcome for our technical company.

Rather than focusing on technical brilliance we believe it is much better to spend time on developing your corporate value proposition – determining exactly what your customers’ value. Spend time defining your customer groups, what offerings you have, what benefits you generate. Then do the same for your separate offerings ensuring your offerings are in alignment with your corporate view. Then develop very clear communication around the few things you want to be famous for, so long as they fit in with the corporate position.

Just think about the best retailers. Does Harrods have everything that they sell crammed into their shop windows? No. They might have one window with nothing more than a beautiful, strategically placed coffee pot on a simple table. But this coffee pot says everything about Harrods, opulence, beauty, quality, precious objects, etc. Also, all the windows will be co-ordinated together into one main theme that reinforces the main message, the main brand. So Harrods signposting is very clear to their customers.

So stop giving customers too much choice, too much information, and you might sell more jam!

I’m very interested to hear about examples of B2B companies who do this very well and also those who fall into this trap, so please let me know your examples.

Footnotes:
(1)1 Iyengar S and Lepper M (2000) ‘When choice is demotivating: Can one desire too much of a good thing?’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, pp. 995-1006
(2) Schwarz B (2004) ‘The Paradox of Choice: Why more is less’ New York, Harper Collins
(3) This article was inspired by Behavioural Economics, New Economics Foundation, London, July 2005

Related posts:

1. Selling to the Post-recession Buyer In the developed world, until last year we had 15...
2. Discounting Europeans 70% of world-class organisations say that if they do give...
3. What do the following have in common…? Customer experience, voice of the customer, market selection, client selection,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

• A demand for simplicity
  Even before the recession many people were feeling overwhelmed by the proliferation of choices (see the article More Jam Anyone? in this blog) coupled with 24/7 connectivity and were starting to simplify. The recession is accelerating this trend.
  The authors say, “Consider the rise of edited retailing (consumers are offered limited collections of coordinated product choices), a growing demand for trusted brands and value, an increasing desire for advisors – ranging from social networks to product ranking web sites – that can simplify choice making, and enthusiasm for less complicated, more user-friendly technologies.”
• A focus on the boardroom
  Like the simplicity trend, this issue has been building for years, spurred by major governance failures such as Enron and WorldCom. Misbehaviour in the boardroom is no longer acceptable. The huge tax payer bail-outs of badly managed businesses will accelerate this trend. This also builds on people’s well established reflex to punish companies for unethical labour or customer practices, as Nike and Nestlé have learned the hard way.
• Discretionary thrift
  A desire to be more wholesome and less wasteful is prevalent, with people recycling more and buying more used goods. “People are imbuing their children with traditional values – behaviours that dovetail with the growing demand for simplicity and a solid, though currently slowing, interest in green consumerism.” Many post recession purchases will be less extravagant versions of pre-recession ones.
• Mercurial consumption
  Buyers are more agile and more fickle due to technology and social networking. They are more likely to shop around and shift allegiances.

So what does this mean for sales and marketing? Here are some of our recommendations.
1) Focus on how to help people realise the true value of your offering. It amazing what great and simple ideas can come out of doing this
2) Be honest. In a world of mistrust, ’spinning’ your messages is turning people off fast.
3) Don’t start by focusing on price! Price is relative and it’s a bad place to start any sales and marketing efforts. Get your customers talking about what really matters to them and then you can reframe the whole ‘price’ discussion.
4) Network. As buyers are shopping around and using technology and networking as part of their decision-making process, then you need to be part of it. Linked In, Twitter, Blogs are proving to be powerful influencers. If you’re not tweeting, then you need to start!

In what ways are you changing your sales and marketing efforts for this economy? What’s working for you?

⁽¹⁾ Understanding the Post Recession Consumer, P Flatters and M Willmott, Harvard Business Review July-August 2009, pp 106-112

Related posts:

1. The True Value of Christmas I was musing recently if my true love had ever...
2. How to Invent a Profit “If Bill Gates had been British he’d be running the...
3. What do the following have in common…? Customer experience, voice of the customer, market selection, client selection,...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.