Tag Archives: Information

What New Business Options Should You Pursue? Five Guidelines

Leave a reply

Situation: The CEO of a company observes that the business climate has been uncertain, but she hopes that it will improve soon. This will open up new options for her company. As these start to develop how do you decide what to do and what not to do? What new business options should you pursue?
Advice from the CEOs:
• Talk to your customers. What do they value about your current product or service and what is less valuable? Build on opportunities that customers value. What options are most consistent with the company’s strength and focus?
• Consider a customer survey – either online like Survey Monkey or by telephone. If there isn’t in-house expertise to design and administer a survey, look for knowledgeable outside resources. Assure that the survey questions will drive understanding of the company’s focus and potential.
• Get an expert to review the survey and administration plan. Before launching the survey to your full customer base, test it with a select group of customers. This will tell you whether it will produce usable information. If it doesn’t, revise the survey.
• Which opportunities will build sustainable recurring revenue vs. opportunistic or one-time revenue? Recurring revenue can be lower margin if the income stream is sustainable. Balance efficiency and utilization. For example, fixed fee service contracts that renew consistently.
• Judge opportunities against your “Hedgehog” as defined by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great: What you are passionate about? What you can be best at in your marketplace? What you can measure by a single economic ratio?

[like]

How Do You Position a Professional Services Company for Growth? Part 1 Three Suggestions

Situation: The CEO of a professional services company wants to position her company for growth. What suggestions do others have to assist her? How do you position a professional services company for growth?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Focus on Dynamic Processes – The world and business environments are changing rapidly in response to economic, business and political stimuli. This places a premium on developing dynamic and highly adaptable business models. Companies that develop these models will have a much more sustainable competitive advantage than those who do not.
  • Leverage Information – Along with rapid change comes a great deal of new information. Companies with a sustainable competitive advantage will leverage information from both traditional and new sources to develop new opportunities and new applications for older but still valuable technologies and processes.
  • Be Sensitive to Cultural Issues – The expanding global economy means that customers, suppliers and employees will come from all over the world, bringing with them different cultural backgrounds. By adapting business models to address and respond to varying cultural needs – by celebrating differences instead of being inhibited by them – a company enhances its competitive advantage.

[like]

 

How Do You Quantify Niche Market Potential? Five Suggestions

Situation: A CEO’s company focuses on a specialized niche market. One of his challenges is that there is little public or chamber of commerce information available on the size and characteristics of their market. How do you quantify niche market potential?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Define the product / service very specifically. To narrow and refine estimates of market size look for the low hanging fruit.
    • What are the high growth segments of the target market?
    • What are the high growth industries of the target market?
  • To determine whether the market opportunity is $100M or $500M:
    • Define the company’s market more clearly – particularly the initial beachhead market where there is the potential to gain the most traction.
    • Recognize that there may be two markets: a high end market – relatively low gross sales dollars but high margins, and a low end mass market – relatively high gross sales but low margins.
  • Contact the originators of available market data to get their assumptions, comparative data and any other findings that may not be published but are beneficial.
  • Work closely with customers to build category / industry revenue estimates.
    • Segment the most active customers and increase the company’s share of their purchases.
    • Develop web site transaction capabilities to offer the company’s line as an adjunct to customers’ web sales.
    • Establish a Customer Council or Round Table to better understand the market dynamics and to differentiate the company within the market.
  • Sell the product and services’ features and benefits to the C-level, not just to engineers.
    • Sell to the CEO / CFO focusing on increasing shareholder wealth.
    • Determine a return rate for conversion to the company’s technology.
    • Reach out to professional segments that will naturally see value in the company’s process.
    • Seek an exclusive relationship with an industry leader to quickly launch new products.

[like]

How Do You Improve Sales Skills? Four Points

Situation: A company is staffed by a team that is not made up of salespeople, per se, but individuals who have grown with the business and who understand the customer. The staff is divided into teams who serve the company’s customers but with differences in effectiveness. The CEO seeks advice as to how they can best increase their selling level. How do you improve sales skills?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Comparing the teams, what are the differences in effectiveness in sales?
    • The individual with the most classic “sales” personality struggles with sales.
    • An individual with an HR background who knows the customer well is more comfortable with sales and is the highest producer.
    • There are instances of hoarding of information which could improve sales, but this is more frequent within teams than between the teams.
  • Dale Carnegie Sales Courses are a wonderful resource that can improve the skills of individuals both with and without a formal background in sales.
  • Engage in customer research to understand and know the customer.
    • Ask the sales leads in each team head up this research.
    • Their task will be to share their observations about customers and develop new strategies for approaching and meeting the needs of different customers.
    • This sharing should be both within the teams and between the teams.
  • Consider a sales coach.
    • Ask colleagues and search the Internet for a local resource.
    • Look for a consultant who specializes in working with individuals to overcome sales blocks, as well as to develop individualized sales styles that are effective for each person.

[like]

When Should You Bring in External Resources? Four Suggestions

Situation: A company provides market research, technical assistance, and related services for clients. It receives most of its work from proposals. Both writing successful proposals and carrying out the work of accepted proposals are critical capabilities. Should they bring in external resources to increase the number of proposals submitted? Where should these resources be focused?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Identify the most critical tasks that contributed to proposals that have been awarded.
    • Determine, between writing and editing, which tasks are most critical. Focus internal resources on these tasks and seek outside resources to assist with the less critical tasks.
    • Provide incentives to those who write grants that are awarded.
  • What portions of the proposals could be written using external resources?
    • Background information, including corporate history, tends to be repetitive between proposals. However, this material is also difficult for an outsider to master.
    • One option is to secure outside resources that will commit to the company for a long time. These resources would have the time to learn and master the historical data.
    • Another option is to use the company’s database to store and code historical data. These data could then be managed by a less expensive internal resource and collected with appropriate filters for each new proposal that arises.
  • Codify the repetitive source material in a database. Secure software that makes it easy to filter and recall selected data for the writers of new proposals.
  • An alternative to using outside resources is to develop an internal coordinator who is master of this database and who is responsible for gathering appropriately filtered data to support the efforts of the company’s proposal writers.
    • By taking care of this portion of the proposal writing task, it will be easier to find enthusiastic project leaders to take on the more creative aspects of new proposals.

[like]

How Do You Engage People in a New Offering? Eight Points

Situation: A founder has created a new social media offering. The concept is to attract individuals with complimentary interests and have them engage each other for mutual benefit as a better source of information and connections. Implied trust is an important component of these connections. How do you engage people in a new offering?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • People are willing to experiment with a new social media offering – in this case because they like to help others. It makes them feel good and they like the role of helping others.
  • People are always seeking good talent. If this does a better job helping them to find good talent, they will try it out.
  • Hiring managers prefer to pass on a resume of someone known to them because a bad referral could reflect badly on them. Strengthen this aspect of the offering through information gathered from participants.
  • A small pool is a negative. Broaden the pool to include those who are looking to step up their careers. Think of this as people-to-people direct hiring and use a social approach with broad appeal. This will increase the number of people willing to play.
  • Be the place where people can come to help others. Add additional tags – help to build confidence and get inspiration. Getting a job happens as a consequence.
  • The element of trust and relationship is important to many – 40% of early users of the current network express this. Assure that the value proposition is also attractive to the 60% who are not concerned about this.
  • The network will build on the energy from the emotional play.
  • Expand the options for how people can help. Investigate allowing trusted referral relationships within the system. Allow people to refer trusted people in their own networks. This can include people who “I would trust to refer good people.”

[like]

Can Social Marketing Leverage Your Competitive Position? Six Points

Situation: A company seeks to leverage the difference between information from traditional media and the richer information available through social media. Their objective, using publicly available information, is to identify individuals’ specific plans or preferences to better target their clients’ marketing dollars. Can social marketing leverage your competitive position?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The principal value proposition is the ability to mine publicly available information from consumers through social media and make it useful to advertisers who want to reach those customers.
  • If the company’s technology allows access to shared data which can be used by many companies this is less expensive than clients’ trying to go it alone.
  • The most important differentiation will be the timeliness of data. Many firms collect data after the fact – for example after a key purchase is made. What advertisers desire is the ability to anticipate purchases. An example is a consumer’s plan to buy a house. This information is valuable to many companies. If data is mineable, it is valuable.
  • The essential question is how the client will make more money from data being near-real time. If the client can use the company’s data to enhance their marketing database, this adds value.
  • Consider partnering with the agencies that B2B and B2C companies hire to advertise their products. Even the largest consumer B2B and B2C companies work with outside ad agencies because these companies have better access to targeted customer lists than the companies.
  • Consider a subscription model, offering access to unique, current data to many customers. The differentiating value is the currency and timeliness of the data. A subscription model generates an ongoing revenue stream.

[like]

How Do You Brand a New Product? Seven Suggestions

Situation: An information services company wants to launch a new product in an existing market. Their current brands are well-recognized with excellent reputations. Should they tie the brand to the company name or current products? How do you brand a new product?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Brand specifically for each product or market – just as consumer product companies brand the same product with unique names for each consumer or commercial market.
  • A brand name is not the company’s identity – Apple as a company has created separate brand identities for computers, iTunes, iPods and serves multiple markets.
  • Attend conventions and survey the target market and current providers. Network to meet people and ask questions about what is important to them and to their buying process.
  • Think about the marketing funnel. The first element is awareness.
    • What are the company and its current brands now known for?
    • Build a brand with value that leverages the reputation and expertise currently valued by customers.
  • Define the current and planned market segments and tie branding to them.
    • Who are they?
    • How do they do it?
    • How will the new product fit?
    • Look at ROI for each market and create a strategy for the optimum combination of speed and profitability of market entry.
  • Tying meaning to a name can be a mistake. When one CEO named her company and service around a specific capacity, she limited the way that it was perceived. She is now considering a complete rebranding to open new markets.
  • Hire expert consultants with experience in developing brands. While this is an investment at the outset, these individuals are better, cheaper, and faster than doing this yourself.
    • Monitor the consultants to assure that they are spending the company’s resources wisely and addressing the company’s needs.
    • Hire someone with a network to gather the data necessary to support the branding exercise, a project manager. Use more expensive resources to plan and manage the exercise, and less expensive resources to gather the data.

[like]

How Do You Launch an Internet Portal? Four Considerations

Situation: A finance company wants to revise its web portal. The objective is to provide up-to-date specialized financial information to clients for a subscription fee. Currently information is provided directly to clients. The portal will allow clients to manipulate the data provided to gain greater insight into their own strategies and operations. How do you launch an Internet portal?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • This presents an opportunity to bring several niche services together under one umbrella.
  • The plan is to make money by selling subscriptions. A challenge will be determining how much clients are willing to pay for this service.
    • Perform an analysis to determine how much clients can either make or save by utilizing the new service.
    • Try a menu approach with varying fees depending upon the number and frequency of services accessed.
  • To more quickly gain recognition and credibility, consider partnering with an existing well-established entity such as Bloomberg. Design your portal to integrate your data into their existing traffic flow.
    • This reduces the development effort because the partner already has the shell and a well-established market presence.
  • As an alternative to partnering, it may be best for the company to develop the portal on its own.
    • In this case, if there is a tightly defined target audience and the company already possesses all the equipment and programming required to launch its own portal, it may be best to carefully select initial clients and for the company to do everything itself.
    • If the company has the necessary access to key target clients, this will save the need to split revenue with a partner.

[like]

Do You Merge, Sell or Revive a Business? Four Areas of Focus

Situation: A company is at a crossroads. They are no longer growing as they have in past years. The CEO is assessing alternatives including a merger, selling the company or restructuring. What are the essential questions to determine whether you merge, sell or revive a business?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Do you really have the information to determine whether it makes sense to merge, sell or revive the business? The questions to ask are:
    • Is your core competency important?
    • Do you have the talent required to revive the business?
    • How much of your business is from repeat customers?
    • Is your platform still being used by a significant number of companies, and are they likely to shift their software soon?
    • If the answers are favorable, then the only remaining question is whether you have the energy and inclination to continue.
  • Having developed a profitable business model, why would you give up control or ownership?
    • Tighten up the business by focusing on the basics and turn the company around.
    • Identify where you can make money, and
    • Determine which portions of the business need to be restructured or eliminated.
    • Essential questions are:
      • Do you have a clear picture of where the profitability lies within the business?
      • Do you have a clear statement of your key competitive advantage – your “Main Thing”?
      • Can you establish a pricing strategy that pays you fairly for the value you provide?
  • Look at bench time among current employees.
    • Identify, and fully utilize the most important contributors, perhaps by giving them additional responsibilities in other areas.
    • See that all retained employees are fully utilized.
    • Eliminate those who are on the bench the most, or transform them into contractors so that you only pay for active time.
    • Utilize contractors to fill the “full service” slots that are important to your service offering but which do not contribute significantly to your bottom line.
  • Most importantly, reformat your role so that you are doing that which you truly enjoy. Your own enthusiasm and passion are the most important long-term drivers for your business, and will be the most important motivators to your staff.

[like]