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.

Excerpt-

“When did the job of selling get lumped in with everything else? Asking a great sales person to clean CRM data, lick envelopes and turn over rocks looking for prospects is about the same as asking your attorney to cut the grass – it could be fun but overall, it is not a good use of skills, time or money”…

Read the article here http://bit.ly/adpHax

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

My two recent customer experiences with American Airlines kind of made me feel like I ate the brown acid at Woodstock and I was on a “bad trip”

Experience #1

I had a round trip to Silicon Valley and back.  When I went to check-in online the night before leaving (so I could use the cool iPhone boarding pass) I was disturbed to see that the seat assignment I made weeks before was blank and I was not allowed to check-in.  No big deal.  It said I needed to check-in at the ticket counter when arriving at the airport.  Sooooo…  I left for O’Hare early the next morning to try and get the best seat from the pool released the day of the flight.  After waiting in line for twenty minutes I got to the counter and relayed my story.  The guy at the counter said, “Sorry sir, I can’t give you a seat assignment.”  I said WHAT!?  He said “The agent has already taken control of the flight.”  I looked at him with a puzzled look and repeated what he said and just shook my head in confusion and disappointment.  He then half-way checked me in so I could get through security, but I now needed to stand in line at the gate.

When I got to the gate I waited for a minute or two and got up to the counter.  The woman at the counter greeted me and asked me what I needed.  I said “I need a seat.”  She then asked me why, I repeated the whole story and she said, “Who checked you in?”  I said, “I don’t know the guy at the counter”.  She said “let me look”.  Then proceeded to rant at me about how this guy is trained as a supervisor, he does this all the time and nobody ever reports him, etc…”  I said “so he should have given me a seat?”  She said “YES!”  Then she continues to rail on this guy at me, writes his name down and says I should report him.  I thought to myself… Why is this bad employee my problem?  Why is she bringing me into the internal politics of the O’Hare American Airlines staff?  After she got me a seat (The very last row in the back of the plane next to the lavatory and the kitchen) I said “You know, now I know why Southwest Airlines is the only airline making any money.”  She said, “You are entitled to your opinion and I don’t care.  I just go where the money is!.”  I assumed this meant she was part of an acquisition or just got a job with American because they are hiring or whatever.  Regardless, this is one of the worst customer experiences I have had in a long time…

Experience # 2

Upon returning from my Silicon Valley trip me, my wife and my 20 month old daughter all became very ill.  The guy next to me on the flight home looked like he might pass out the entire way.  It reminded me of Monty Python’s “Bring Out Your Dead”.  I assume this is where we got it.    This illness, unfortunately, was cause for my wife and daughter to cancel a trip to Miami for Grammy’s 90th birthday celebration.  This is where the fun starts!

My wife made a call to American Airlines the day before scheduled departure to alert them that they were ill and it was possibly H1N1,  we needed to cancel the trip for health reasons and we wanted to re-book.  They said that was fine but there is a $150.00 per ticket re-booking fee.  Considering the round-trip tickets were only $170.00 each, this was a tough pill to swallow.  We asked if there was something that could be done and the agent said…  “Well, you could travel anyway and just bring a lot of Kleenex and hand sanitizer.”  My wife hung up the phone and told me the story.  I said, “what?”  She said, “Yep that is what they told me.”  I grabbed the phone and called right back in to American Airlines and started over with a new agent.  We went through the whole thing and I told her that we had all been to the doctor and they advised us not to travel, we are sick and could be putting others at risk, etc…  The agent said, “well you could still fly if you don’t want to be charged the re-booking fee, but you booked on the internetand in the fine print it says that there is a $150.00 per ticket re-booking fee and that any new ticket must be issued to the ticketed traveler.”  I then said did you know that on Southwest Airlines if I need to re-book they simply put the total amount of the tickets in an account for travel funds and I can re-book at any time and apply the funds without any “re-booking” fee?  The agent ignored the comment and again referred me to the fine print about the re-booking fee for tickets purchased on the internet.  I hung up the phone!

After some discussion with my wife about “Sunk Cost” theory (Thanks Grad School and Dr. Debra Aron!) we decided that we would probably just eat the cost of the tickets as it did not make sense to commit to American Airlines for another flight and pay $320.00 plus for tickets we might be able to re-book for as much or less than the $150.00 fee.  We felt good enough to take the risk and let the tickets go unused…

The morning of the flight my wife, still very sick, woke up early and decided to be nice and actually let them know that they would not be on the flight and………  Viola!!!  An agent got the call that actually knows the American Airlines policy.  As she asked about my wife’s story she said, “If you went to the doctor and you have a note and proof (which we did) you can fax it to us and we will not charge you a re-booking fee.”  My wife was very excited to tell me this and let me know right away.  I said that’s great, but why did it take so much stress, work and aggravation to figure this out?  She said, “You should write a post on your site.”  So that leads me to today’s lessons…

1.  Southwest Airlines makes it much easier to do business with them…  Simple process, easy to book, change and cancel travel as well as a great staff at all of their customer touch points.  Compare the 10K’s for each company.  I wonder if this has any impact on results?

2.  American has a broken culture.  The legacy culture of we are the “big boys”  you can choose us or United no longer exists.  I suggest they start engaging their customers and understand how to be useful.  (Maybe they don’t care and only want frequent business travelers that are in the “Admirals Club”.  If so, just tell the marketplace and you will not have so many bad stories floating around and probably not as many customers too!  Air travel is like the Greyhound of yester-year.)  Do a google search if you care… http://bit.ly/AA_Google_Search) 

3.  Every interface to the market is your BRAND!  It is not the AA on the tail.  It is not the TV commercial.  It is every interaction a customer has with AA.  From research on AA.com, to time at the ticket counter and everything that happens in between.  You had better start trying to get your hands around this or profits will remain elusive!  http://bit.ly/2Xtr6O

4.  Don’t make it hard for your customers to do business with you and try to make it easy for them to keep coming back!  Bag Fees, re-booking fees, bad attitude, people not doing their job, competing on legacy assets (flight routes and a 30 year old market position) in a “customer-centric” 21st century.

5.  Bring in some fresh talent to AMR and American Airlines.  Get rid of the legacy employees.  Things are changing and if they don’t they will be permanently grounded!

I will do everything in my power to NOT fly American Airlines in the future.

P.S.  It took over a week of faxing, e-mail back and forth and digging for a phone number on google (American Airlines - Customer Relations does not give you the ability to call them.  WOW!  That is a great idea!  Unbelievable, they must have a lot of unhappy people trying to reach them…) to get this resolved.  It was finally fixed and they have rescheduled their trip.  I’m glad I am not going on this trip!  I’ve had enough Brown Acid for a while…

“Have you ever been experienced?  Well…. I haaaavvvveeee….”

Are You Experienced?

I thought I would provide a top 11 list.  Why 11?  Simple, because everyone else counts to ten.  11 is one more…  I go to 11!

If you hear yourself saying any of these or you hear any of these at your company it is time to take a step back and understand… why? 

1.  Business Owners and Executives don’t have time to focus on sales right now.  Too busy keeping the ship from sinking. 

2.  What do I pay the Sales & Marketing people for?  Nobody is reaching their targets!

3.  The economy is really hurting us.

4.  We are working on some new partnerships that should really help.

5.  When I used to run sales and marketing we never had this problem.

6.  We need to try something new!  I am not sure what, but let’s do it different.

7.  Our competition is doing worse than we are.

8.  I think 2010 is going to really pick up for us.

9.  If we just used Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn we would generate more leads.

10.  We won’t be hiring anyone for the next year.

11.  The Holiday Party is cancelled since it has been a bad year.  

Remember if you are hearing any of these you need to stop and ask WHY?  These may be signs that you are not keeping your organization “Ready” or you work for an organization that is not “Ready”.  Complacency Kills!

Coley goes to eleven!

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

These are the descriptions given to the people that may be the most valuable to your organization. These folks ask the stupid questions. They also ask why? They are willing to get on board with ideas and change, they offer lots of ideas themselves. They are usually very persuasive (ever think someone was trying to submarine you and your agenda by ganging up on you?) and people seem to magically gravitate to them and want to be around them and work with them.

So why is it that these people get moved around or out of an organization?

This happens because of poor leadership, poor strategy or a myriad of other reasons.  The list is long.   If I break it down in one of my personal terms… I think it simply means there is no “Change” process.  Without good leadership you will probably not have this anyway but even with a good leadership team often the communication process gets in the way and there is a break down. It does not matter if we are talking about a Fortune 100 organization or 3 guys in a garage, the philosophy and approach remain the same. 

There are things that can be done to understand and use a “change” process as an advantage.  It does not mean things change every 3 days,  it means you understand how to manage your organization in a way that makes it possible to uncover opportunity, risk, ideas, new business models, etc…  Here it is the word of the year…  INNOVATION…

So, if you want to “Stay Ready, so you don’t have to Get Ready” when your market shifts or competition is kicking your tail all over town you better think about the “Loose Cannon”.  Maybe they should not be fired.  Maybe they should be used the way they want to be used.  We will save the psychology of it for another post.  

The “Loose Cannon” may be able to help you find growth, innovation, more customers, more employees like them, etc, etc…

If you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal online you can link to the article here.  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124933474023402611.html 

Hey WSJ, thanks for making it available for everyone.  Just sell cool banner ad’s to drive revenue would ya?  Oh, that won’t work?  Well make me steal someones old copy off the train then…

If you google “Starbucks Lean” you will find all of the blogs I am speaking about.  Every topic has been hit.  Bad idea, customer experience impact, not McDonald’s, etc…  This appears to be another “brilliant idea” that lacks an effective change management plan.  The PR department at Starbucks let the article go out with the comments from Starbucks Barista’s.  In my mind they are saying they don’t like it and essentially they are not McDonald’s employees, they don’t want to be McDonald’s employees and if you read between the lines they say it will destroy the brand.  STOP… 

…If they believe that then the customer experience will show it.   You will begin to see turnover in the stores which will be the start of a wave of trouble.

I propose this could have been avoided with a good Change Management Plan.  They do not seem to have the desired behavior lined up with the appropriate incentives.  By not making the vision and mission of this project clear in Barista terms they have allowed the perception to create itself.  I have nothing against McDonald’s employees (Tried the new Angus Burger today, not bad, but not really different…) but if you ask a Barista at Starbucks they will tell you they are 180 degrees apart.

This seems to be another case where communication is going to cause trouble.  It seems like a simple process but it is not.  I paid a lot of money to learn about it at Northwestern (www.msc.northwestern.edu) and it is still not easy.  I have worked in the consulting world for years and this is a critical component but still is not executed well a lot of the time.  If companies understood this better and had better transparency within their communication process they would see much more success. 

It boils down to this.  People do not want to be told what to do.  They also need to have incentive to produce the desired behavior.  The desired behavior must be aligned to the business.  In this case I think they may have assumed that a cup of coffee served 3 seconds faster by an angry Barista would equal a happy customer, more foot traffic and more revenue.  If they monitor social media at all they will be adjusting strategy fast.  I hope…

Venti, extra shot Americano on ice, with a shot on the side… and Super Size it!

Happy Reading!

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/erickson/2009/07/why_generation_x_has_the_leade.html