Being a big fan of Cookie Monster and a bit of a perfectionist, I took the reins and said I would be “in charge of assembling” the cupcakes… I did not realize there would be a great design lesson in this project!

The Prototype or MVP or Whatever you want to call it - the first batch of cupcakes (which my wife kindly prepared) was too small. I could tell by looking at them but, I decided it was best to build a prototype, so I forged ahead…

Next, I dyed the frosting and coconut blue (for the fur) and low and behold it came out robin egg blue! STOP! Cookie Monster is more of a navy blue. This won’t work. My 4 year old (my customer) with a keen eye for detail will surely catch this and it is not working for me as a Cookie Monster expert. STOP! This is an MVP. See what you can learn… I then frosted the first one (the top of the cupcake crumbled and I now had chocolate in the frosting UGH!) and rolled it in the coconut. Good news, I could not really see the cake crumbs under the frosting (a requirements trade- off. Cupcake does not have to be perfect) and the fur stuck to the frosting well. Aside from being the wrong color it looked good for the MVP.

Now, on to Cookie’s eyes…  This is the key component in “selling Cookie Monster” and the googily eyes have to be just right. Vanilla baking candies for the eye balls.  They look good, not completely white, but OK, wait; there is a small raised area in the middle from the manufacturing process.  Oh no!  Cookie’s pupils don’t go in the middle of his eyes, how will I cover it up?  My wife suggests we could file them down and… STOP!  This is an MVP.  I go ahead and apply some frosting to the back of the candies and attach the eyes at an angle to create just the right 3-D effect.  Good enough!  On to the pupils…

The YouTube lady says to use black frosting.  We bought black gel instead. Seems fine, let’s go with it. I apply the pupils at just the right angles and it looks better than frosting! The gel has a glossy finish and provides a better 3-D effect, but wait, it is running and not setting up on the candy, but it seems like the kind of “feature” I want to test, so I do a couple of more and wait… This is the killer feature that will make them better than the cupcake lady and really sell it to the kids… 20 minutes later and eyeballs that look like Cookie is wearing a lot of mascara and crying bring me back to reality. STOP! This is an MVP. Let them sit a while and worst case scenario, get frosting in the AM and apply the pupils last. A trade-off to complete the MVP within the time constraint.

The final step… Cookies mouth with the mini-cookie inside… Seems simple enough, right? Cut a slit and put the mini-cookie inside it. Well the first attempt provides two important lessons. Number one, the knife needs to be very sharp, as the first one crumbled and came apart while cutting it and number two, the cookie is pretty big, so the mouth needs to be pretty wide. Remember, I am working with cupcakes that I deemed too small from the get go. Ha! My assumption was right, but it was only by following the process for the MVP that I can determine the actual requirement for the size of the cupcake! I make cuts that will work, end up with 70% of my MVP batch in shambles but have some finished products to work with. My daughter is in bed (my beta customer is sleeping) so I show them to my wife. She says “well I already put together a new batch of cupcakes and I increased the amount of batter by about 30% for each one and they came out better, cooked through better and have a better top”. This is great! My team is iterating the next version before I am done with the MVP. Simply by collaborating along the way and asking for some feedback from my team, we have progress that will help meet our go to market timeline.

Albeit a bit risky that she baked the next round without direct feedback from production or our customer, this requirement was noticeably off from the beginning so it would be OK if we ended up with MVP version 2. It just would have created stress because our supply chain was depleted and we would have needed another trip to the store and it was 9pm already. Good risk, the size was perfect (Gladwell – Blink?) She just “knew” how much to add by doing her ethnographic study of me in production and listening to my “feedback” (or “frustration” depending on how you well you know me). On to production and release of the Beta Cookie Monster Cup Cakes (we use Beta internally, but as far as the 4 year olds know, these are ready for prime time General Release). There is always a need for good marketing, right?

What did we learn?
1) MVP fast – finished, not perfect
2) don’t get bogged down on killer features in the MVP
3) the customer doesn’t know what they don’t know
4) don’t work in a silo, collaborate with others. There are smart people out there.
5) take some risks. You might win!
6) trust your gut. Your experience matters

The Beta- So with everything ready to go because this is a very quick iteration right on the heels of the MVP/Prototype, I quickly get the cupcakes frosted and fur applied (I stay with the “wrong blue” because I am able to find an officially licensed, by Sesame Street, Cookie Monster toy in my other daughters toy bin that seems to match the color. If it is OK for Sesame Street to put their name on it, then it is OK for me) and am ready for the eyes. The candies go on great and it appears that the gel will just not work or I do not know how to make it work, so I make the Executive decision to abandon the pupils for now and get black frosting in the morning. (Somebody always needs to be in charge to make tough decisions!  Executive Sponsor?)

The mouth is the last piece. With razor sharp knife in hand I am able to quickly cut a mouth in the now “right-sized” cupcakes and insert the mini-cookie without causing harm to the cupcake. It is now time for a beer and bed. It will be a long day tomorrow with a 4 year old birthday party. OK, maybe 2 beers…

The Next Morning!

Show the customer the Beta - My daughter wakes up early and I tell her I have something to show her. I lead her to where the cupcakes rested in a covered container overnight… “Wow Daddy, you made the Cookie Monster cupcakes, but… His eyes… That’s not how Cookie’s eyes are. There is no black. Cookie has googily eyes!” I quickly explain that we had a supplier problem and that the supply chain folks are working with production to get it solved first thing this morning (i.e. Dad is going to the store to get black frosting this morning and will finish the eyes well before the 3pm party) and we will be just fine. More importantly however, my obsession with the color of his fur seemed to be a non-issue. She did not say one thing about the color. Interesting, is this because my assumption about the eyes being the killer feature was correct? Or, is it that I had such a glaring issue on an important feature that it makes it easy to look past and accept other imperfections? This is an important lesson. I might even design this into a project in the real world to test it. (Very interesting concept, intentional flaws to test the importance of a feature?)

I finish the eyes after getting the black frosting and actually develop a technique for application that works well to create the right 3-D effect. Is this because I have focused only on pupils in the morning? Is my focus on this singular task creating extra value for the project (Interesting thought)?  I stepped away from the project for a while, broke down the work to a very small component and focused on it. It resulted in a superior result to what happened when I was managing multiple pieces of the project at the same time.

And we are done! Ready to go! I bring the customer back for a final review. “Daddy these cupcakes are great. The eyes are like they are supposed to be. But the mouth is closed. Cookie has a black mouth when he eats a cookie”. Uh Oh, an unknown requirement! Not a lot of time to execute something. But wait. The cupcakes are chocolate for a reason. It must be for the mouth. What do I already know from the process? 3-D effects help a lot, if you want to cut the cupcake, you need a sharp knife and remember, they are pretty fragile.

Bring in the Risk management team!!! (My wife)

They are good enough to go to market as is. As the designer I think the mouth needs work, the customer has said there is a problem but, risk management says, “We have no time if these get screwed up and you will be buying a cake at the bakery which will not make your customer happy”. Nobody likes the bait and switch but it just seems like a risk I am willing to take for the “customer experience”.

Risk management says “I am leaving the room, I am not going to watch, makes me too nervous”. And with my customer by my side, I take a very sharp knife and begin to dig out Cookies Mouth creating a 3-D effect around the mini-cookie and exposing the chocolate within the mouth. It is perfect and adds to the affect. The customer says “Daddy these look perfect! Just like on YouTube”. That was all I needed to hear. Project finished! Package them up for the party.

So this was a lot of fun and ended up being a great business and design lesson.  Maybe the most interesting part is what happened when I rolled them out to the greater market (The 15 kids at the birthday party), but I will save that for the next post.

The finished Beta below!

The Beta!

How about scrap that plan all together and think about DESIGN!

Design is the new competitive advantage! Markets move fast and companies and industries can go away in the blink of an eye! Anyone have an iPhone 4S and decide to put the digital camera, iPod, Franklin Planner, digital video recorder and the Garmin GPS, just to name a few, in the “yard sale” box?

I like the idea of starting with the experience first. Next time you are trying to re-package your product or service or develop a new one, start with what would provide the most value and do the “job” the customer needs to get done. Forget about whether or not it can scale or will bring x% of market share. That can all be figured out if you can create value for the customer.

If you are building an iPhone app as an example, pick out the single “job” that you want to target for the customer. Give it to 20 people that you “think” are your customer (the MBA’s can probably tell you) and watch what they do in a real situation. Simple is best. (Remember we are in a $1.99 economy here where that purchase is scrutinized like it is a $1999.99 purchase. When is the last time you spent $1.99 without getting a referral or reading 20 reviews?). Then ask them if it did the “job” and what was missing. If 40% of them identify the same thing, then add it and repeat the process a couple of more times. After you cycle through a couple of iterations you will have a beta v1.1!

Take the beta and ask the folks that did your trial if they would ask others to try it (if they won’t something is wrong) and have the MBA’s give you another 500 people to add to the list. Focus on building the capabilities and user experience that get all 20 to recommend it to others. Make sure you nail the “job” first and design the experience around it. Even if it means your back-end systems and processes can only handle 100 customers. You can fix that if you have a product that people want. It is really hard to go back to potential customers and tell them later that “you have fixed it and made it so much better”. It is also really hard to get business leaders, executives, investors and your team to buy in if you are struggling to have success. It won’t help to tell them you can handle 1000 new customers a day if you had something to sell them!

I have been involved with a few of these projects over the last couple of years and each time, getting into the market fast and quick iteration have been keys to learning and measuring success factors. Remember this exercise can help you kill a bad project just as fast as you reinvest in a perceived “winner”. I would rather know sooner than later if we are working on a “loser” and how to adjust or put it out to pasture.

So start with design first and it will guide you to the right stuff faster and give you a clear picture of your likelihood of success. Then call in the engineers, et al and ramp up!

Try it… It actually works!

Come out and join us, as this is a fantastic event that supports a great and very important organization here in Chicago.

Here is some info on the event below and some links:

The annual i.c. stars iOpener conference brings together CIO’s, entrepreneurs, students, alumni of i.c.stars and vendors to explore a technology-development topic of mutual interest.

The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce leads this conference with a presentation on the role of innovation in driving regional GDP. CIOs and Entrepreneurs participate as table facilitators to discuss how to nurture “cultures of innovation”. The discussions seek to answer how IT organizations will invest in innovation in the coming year.

This year’s iOpener considers what it takes to foster a “Culture of Innovation” within an IT organization specifically around mobility, cloud and social media. Participate in facilitated roundtable discussions where insights on these critical areas will be shared.

Learn what a wide range of companies are doing that’s innovative, what jobs are being created that didn’t exist before and how other companies of all sizes are recruiting staff with innovative DNA. Hear how the workforce is evolving and see how companies are training and, in some cases, retraining their employees to stay on the leading edge of their industries.

Don’t miss the opportunity to network with CIOs and entrepreneurs, to gather new ideas for your business and to learn about the emerging trends in workforce development.

Event Page - http://bit.ly/mYtFZ4

Registration Page - http://bit.ly/onO6cH

Through this discussion Paul suggested that I was a “Panning for Gold”.  That is when the light bulb went off.  That is exactly what we do.  We do not build a town, set-up a giant mine and call in the big Caterpillar mining equipment.  We pound some wood handles together, get some wire mesh, grab a tin pan and start testing the creek!

We do this in our sales and marketing process for example.  As a company with less than $5m in revenue we enter new markets, test marketing messages and ACTUALLY ADD NEW CUSTOMERS by using this approach.

What we do…

1.  Define our data – Who is the customer profile?  Where can we get it?  How fast can we load it…

2.  Create our content – What do we want to communicate?  How will we support that communication?  e-mail, website, video, etc…

3.  EXECUTE – send an e-mail campaign and measure the response

4.  Manage – Clean the data, add new data that comes from the process, address exceptions, elevate required response, etc…

5.  Learn – Decide if we have found a place to build a mine!  Is this market segment responding well?  Did we convert customers?  Is there an opportunity here?

This is a process that many companies struggle with due to size, culture, broken sales and marketing process, poor leadership, lack of the right people, process or technology, etc, etc…

It looks like we may be “prospecting” for real.  Miner 49′er!

At this client we are working very hard in an entrepreneurial environment.  We are creating a new business model, we are aggressively in the marketplace, we are on-boarding customers, having success & failure and everyone is working very hard to meet our targets and goals.   We have thrown a global team of people together with loosely defined roles and asked them to do things that they might not be able to do, don’t want to do or simply can’t do, but everyone is giving it  their best shot.

This brings me to the point…  It is my responsibility to build the organization out as one of the founders and a key contributor to strategy and the overall business model.   Everyone involved has great passion for the company, the industry and making an impact.   So the other day as I listened in on our team trying to solve a very complex challenge around how to figure out what to do when and who should do what, I got my normal urge to walk in and try to start persuading them to do it “my way”.  I stopped myself and sat back down in my chair.

Even though we are at a critical stage in the business and we are building toward specific revenue goals and solving this problem will help us accelerate progress quickly,  I chose to do nothing!  Why?  Because we can not build a scalable business on the backs of a couple of people dictating what everyone should be doing and when.  If  we have the right people doing the right things they should be able to figure it out or get pretty close on their own.

The meetings got heated, the tension was building as I listened and the urge to jump in and provide a “solution” was insatiable.  I let it go and spoke to some team members afterward and they looked like they had just completed the climb to the summit of Mt. Everest.  I advised and mentored them and suggested that they re-group the next day and that we meet to discuss their solution the following day in detail.

The solution that was proposed was very close to what I was thinking might be the best approach to try.  The difference is they came up with it on their own in the heat of battle.  They are bought-in to the solution and dedicated to making sure that the execution of the solution is on target.  It cost us one day of time in progress but we gained an invaluable amount of learning in the area of Teamwork and Communication.

It remains to be seen if the solution will work but I know that this team will continue to fight, think, create and execute with passion because they are empowered to do so in our environment and the rewards come back in customer satisfaction and progress toward our goals.  This was a great light bulb moment for me.

The next time you think you have the answer… Stop! and do nothing.

This ties-in to the last discussion about “design thinking”.  When you approach your selling effort as a product development process you can learn much more about what is happening.  If you elicit feedback from your market & employees and understand your competition there is a much higher succes rate in building something that is sustainable and repeatable other than a continuous cycle of hiring and firing salespeople.  If you were to step back from the day-to-day and really examine what you are doing, you might find things are very different than they seem. 

Here are a list of things to look for:

1.  Do you know who you are selling too?  Do you have clean data for them?  Do you have a process to manage data collection, cleaning and communication?  Do you have a collaborative technology platform for the data?  

2.  Do you know how to be “useful” in the selling process?  Do you know what “job” you do for your clients?

3.  Do you have a big idea?  (For instance if you sell services you probably say something like this… “We have a methodology, we hire the best people, we have lots of customer references, etc…)  WHO CARES?  Everybody says this.  Come up with a big idea!

4.  Does everyone on your sales team operate at 100% of quota or more?

5.  Have you tried to buy “appointments” or “leads” with little or no success?

6.  Do you print a lot of “brochures” and create lots of PPT’s?

7.  Do you ask your sales team members to do too many jobs?   Prospect, Help Marketing, Find Data, Cold Call, Trade-Shows, Write Proposals, Manage Partnerships, Close Deals, Support Delivery, Account Manage, Grow the Account, Pick-Up Donuts for the office, etc…

8.  Do you execute “something” every month or better yet every week as part of your demand generation process?

9.  Do you use the web as part of your demand generation process?  Not just a request form but strategically using your site, social media, SEO, useful content, video and other things to drive the demand generation engine.

10.  Is finding more customers and more revenue really important to you?  What if you stayed flat?  What would happen then?  What if you hire and fire in a six month cycle again?

IF you can ask and begin to answer these questions you can start designing an efficient, scalable and repeatable sales process.  You can also begin to understand the roles of the people in the process and start hiring the right people for the right job with the highest likelihood of success.

Don’t hire this guy if you can help it!  Even if he is family…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bECV_yF_I0w

Yes, I said opportunity to reinvent the way you engage with your suspects, prospects and current customers. Design Thinking is a great framework for this.

After an Innovation Strategy class at Northwestern University, I started thinking about improving the B2B sales process using innovation theory. My ideas are still in early beta but they feel solid enough to share.

In a June, 2008 HBR article (http://bit.ly/71NEtr) Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO defined design thinking as the following:

спални комплекти“a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

This idea translates nicely to the B2B selling process. Think of it this way…

“use rapid customer feedback to evolve the solution that adds the most value to the customer and can be feasibly delivered quickly to the market.”

As an example, I have recently been working with a Technology Services firm that fixes broken IT recruiting processes. The company sells to anyone that hires contingent, permanent or project based human capital. They had problems hiring themselves and also saw the problems that existed within their own clients’ process.  So they fixed the process for internal use. When they were done, what they had built was intriguing enough to take to a few open minded customers to see if it fixed their problem. It did.

These early customers are helping the Company iterate and get the service ready for prime time. The process has been very rewarding and successful.

This company didn’t build first then try to sell. They built something that did “just enough” then validated assumptions by engaging customers in a true process of value creation. They achieved buy-in and input into the solution and have confirmed that there is real value. This will create a new market position, a new service and maybe even a brand new business.

It sure beats a cold call, a brochure with features and benefits or a slick “sales system” that is focused on what you think the market wants to buy and “selling” it to them.  This buyer/seller engagement is transparent, problem solving and high value. It is NOT a buyer seller “transaction”!

Rob Wolcott and Mike Lippitz are former professors from Grad School at Northwestern University. I credit them both with having great impact on my professional and personal life through the time that I spent with them in the classroom and outside of that as friends, advisors and business luminaries. Their teachings on innovation have shaped me for the future and the next chapter in my business life.

If you are thinking about how to stay competitive in the “new normal” and are focused on driving innovation, opportunity, new business model creation and REAL VALUE for your organization this book is a must read…

“Grow from Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation” is the book I am recommending. You can buy it from Amazon who has the best deal I have seen by using this URL – http://bit.ly/GFW_Amazon

The book is great from my perspective as it pulls together a lot of the things I learned during my time in the classroom and it also puts it in a context that is great for anyone in business.

Special Idea… If you buy the book and want to see if Rob and/or Mike will sign your copy I would be happy to try and make that happen for you. I think I could get them to do it. 

Leave a comment on this post  if you get a copy and would like to have it signed. I am happy to help you make this happen.

Happy Reading!

Coley

P.S. – In closing here is a note that Rob Wolcott sent to me after a recent meeting when I asked him some questions about the book. It may help you get a better feel for it… Search “Rob Wolcott Northwestern University” to learn more about Rob and his work.

ROB’S NOTE:

Coley,

Great seeing you last week and discussing your current endeavors. You asked for more about the book, Grow From Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation, so ‘voila!’

Grow From Within (GFW) examines how established companies can build new businesses… not just new products or services, but truly new businesses. By researching these ‘extreme users’… someone we refer to as the corporate entrepreneur… we uncover critical insights regarding how to make more traditional innovation (e.g.—new product development, R&D-led innovation) more effective, how to enhance the success rate of everything from corporate lab research and new market entry to changing the way established business units operate or how companies pursue open innovation.

Your question about the audience… GFW will be great for senior executives and CEOs at established companies, as well as mid-level managers tackling the innovation challenges, or aspiring to be a successful corporate entrepreneur. Really, anyone concerned with driving growth, especially organic growth.

You’ll remember the fundamental frameworks from class: The Innovation Radar and the Four Models of Corporate Entrepreneurship, both subjects of our MIT Sloan Management Review articles from 2006 and 2007. Additionally, as you will recall, my co-author, Professor Lippitz, has extensive experience with the Department of Defense, so we have some unique perspectives from government, especially a detailed case regarding bringing Stealth to market and changing the paradigm of defense and offense. Bill Perry, former US Secretary of Defense, is in fact one of the endorsers on the cover of the book.

Let me know if you have any more questions. I’d be happy to discuss this further. It is, after all, my life’s work and passion. Please feel free to send this on to others or mention any aspect of it in your blog. Thanks again for your ongoing interest. Let me know how I can help with your endeavors.

To the Future, W

During a recent unloading of the DW, as we call it at home, I realized that Sales & Marketing is the dishwasher of many organizations.  It is kind of there in the corner waiting to be unloaded.  Yes, sometimes you want to get right in there and unload that bad boy and it can be an easy job.  But usually, when that weird platter is in there and you have no idea where it goes and it sits on the counter for two days waiting to be put away, it becomes a crappy job that is left unfinished.  It gets done in the end but only because you know it should get done so you can cook another meal and serve dinner.  Very rarely do you want to dive right in and do it. 

This is very common in companies that do not have Sales & Marketing as a core competency or consider themselves Sales & Marketing focused.  They end up struggling, hiring the wrong people for the wrong job and not understanding the process.  Revenue goes up and down and there is no sustained growth.  Sales & Marketing feels like unloading the dishwasher.  If you are not a Sales & Marketing focused organization do you think you can hire good Sales & Marketing people?  Who wants to go to work and unload the dishwasher?

How can you begin to transform your organization into a Sales & Marketing focused organization? 

At my house we approach it with these 5 steps as a framework…

1.  Cross -Functional Team (Me – VP of Sales & Marketing, My Wife - President, COO, CFO, VP of Supply Chain,etc…)

2.  Good Strategy and Communication (“I will do silverware, you take the platter that I have never seen before.”  We work on opposite ends of the kitchen, we won’t be in each others way.  It’s efficient, goals and tasks are defined and we measure it by how long it takes to unload and whether or not everything is put away.)

3.  Feedback Loop and Adjustment (“Next time can you take silverware and the dishes for the china cabinet in the dinning room?  It is closer to the silverware drawer.”)

4.  Right People, Right Role (My wife puts away the platter because I have never seen it and I do silverware because my mild OCD wants me to make sure it is all stacked and lined up nice in the silverware drawer insert thingy.  This works great.  We may even be excited about our roles but not quite the idea of unloading the DW.)

5.  An Eye Toward Innovation (“Maybe I can strap the dishes to the dogs back and she can carry them to the dining room while I am putting away the silverware?” – The President did not fund this initiative.  Too much risk for our portfolio.  I am safe enough within my working environment to share this kind of idea without fear of being fired!  This is a pretty important point…)

Good luck and if you need help getting your dishwasher unloaded let me know.  I can bring my OCD and my Rottweiler to help you out.  The President is my competitive advantage and is not available for engagements!

Unloading the dishwasher

“True Marketing Doesn’t Just Sell The Story”…

http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=138760