Situation: The CEO is moving a key employee from head of engineering to a more customer development focus. To support this, she will have to bring in or promote another employee to fill the position of leader/supervisor/manager of the engineering group. The CEO seeks advice on the best way to approach finding a replacement for this key job. How do you replace a key position?
Advice from the CEOs:
• First, it is necessary to develop a timeline for finding and transitioning the replacement. Realistically, count on 6 months to find a replacement and transition the responsibilities to a new person.
• Keep in mind that anybody you find or promote will be different from the individual who currently occupies the position, and will not handle their new responsibilities the same way as the current individual. Their motivation and their approach to their new responsibilities will be different, at least at the outset, and they will not handle their responsibilities the same way that the current individual does.
• Seek an individual, either currently within the company or an outside hire with strengths that, over time, will add significant value to the organization. Prepare for this by brainstorming and developing a profile of the ideal candidate.
• If you have qualified candidates, the ideal person will come from within the organization. This has the added advantage of demonstrating to other employees that they, also, may become candidates for future positions to grow both their skills and income.
Tag Archives: Profile
How Do You Find and Keep Good People? Seven Suggestions
Situation: A company needs to both find and retain good people to continue its profitable growth. What experience can the group share to assist the CEO in his efforts to address these needs? How do you find and keep good people?
Advice from the CEOs:
• Before starting the recruitment process create specific position profiles including desired skill sets, qualifications, and functional responsibilities.
• Set up a recruiting team to develop current and future employees and candidates. Offer scholarships to new and existing associates to continue their education.
• Once a new person is hired, create a first 90 day skill set plan. Include challenges that they have to pass, as well as scheduled training and support.
• The first 90 days is critical. If someone slips up during the first 90 days it is taken very seriously as a sign or more to come.
• Profile and hire attitudes as well as focusing on skill sets. Lots of people have skills. It is those employees who possess both the right attitude and right skills who make great hires and who will stay with the company.
• Share the company’s culture and goals. Let candidates and new hires know how they fit into both.
• To boost retention, focus on charities that employees care about. Encourage employees to participate in worthy causes and give them time to support these charities.
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How Do You Improve a Company’s Profile and Diversify the Customer Base? Seven Points
Situation: The CEO of a high tech company wants to improve the profile of his company for prospective clients. He also wants to diversify the company’s customer base. How do you improve a company’s profile and diversify the customer base?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Develop a good description that easily expresses the company’s value proposition.
- Test this with potential customers to assure that they easily grasp what the company has to offer – and are interested in paying for!
- If the company is early-stage, focus on funding and proof of concept as early milestones.
- If the company has a novel idea or capability, focus on proving the value of this capability to a buying customer base of sufficient value to interest investors.
- Study and define customers’ needs before trying to communicate what the company can do for them.
- Similarly, define the channels that will be most effective in reaching these customers.
- To monetize the business focus on the seekers – those who need and will benefit from the product or services that is being offered.
- If the company offers a free or low cost service, develop a premium offer for enhanced services.
- To market a core set of skills to different customer markets, focus on a theme of reliability.
- Flavor this theme differently through a branding exercise to address the needs and desires of specific customer segments.
- It is both feasible and desirable to market the same set of skills differently to different customer markets.
- Follow the money – it leads to the heart of customer purchase decisions.
- Growth, momentum and the ability to change are essential parts of a successful business model.
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What are the Basics of a One-Page Sales Plan? Four Points
Situation: A CEO wants a simple, one-page plan for her sales organization to help coordinate the company’s sales and marketing efforts. The objective is to boost revenue growth and market penetration with consistent sales messaging. What are the basics of a One-Page Sales Plan?
Advice from the CEOs:
- The key elements of construction are: research, identification of revenue sources, and construction of a Road Map.
- Three Examples of a One-Page Sales Plan are:
- The Customer Survey-based Sales Plan – Ask the top 15 customers what the company’s current share of wallet (SOW) looks like and what they need to do to gain additional SOW. Use the responses to identify additional revenue sources and construct the Road Map.
- The Service Extension Sales Plan – Construct a grid representing the company’s products and services currently offered to potential customers – particularly the company’s top customers. Create a separate grid showing services that the company does not currently offer and ask customers what the company needs to do to make those services appealing to them. Use the information gained to construct the Road Map.
- The Current and Potential Revenue Sales Plan – Construct a grid representing the customers and markets currently served and by what product or service. Look at additional customer markets not currently served. Estimate the size, new business closure rates, and the total potential market opportunity. Use the information gained to construct the Road Map.
- The advantages of a One-Page Sales plan include:
- One page simplifies the process.
- Summary of current and new targets.
- Easy to track and measure.
- Increases the chance of success.
- Key people get on the same page.
- Filters out undesirable customers.
- A plan that can be completed and implemented quickly, cost effectively with a high ROI.
- Additional Observations:
- The company’s principal challenge is prioritizing business opportunities. Creating an “Ideal Customer Profile” helps to produce the desired result.
- The company has limited resources to invest in new projects. Using an effective, low-cost tool helps to maximize the impact of investment.
- The ideal customer profile will change over time based on the business environment and the company’s long term goals.
How Do You Minimize Hiring while Launching a New Market? Five Points
Situation: A company is planning to expand operations into a new geography. The CEO wants to avoid hiring a new sales person out of the main office as they make this move because he wants the expansion to fund itself. How do you minimize hiring while launching a new market?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Start by profiling the ideal customer for the new geography.
- The definition should include business sector, company size, current capabilities in terms of the service provided by the company, and openness to working with outside service providers.
- Consider a satellite office or franchise option. The two key employees to staff the office will be an engineer and a principal manager for the office. The principal manager will be the sales person.
- Target initial clients that meet the profile of the existing business but in the new geography.
- Use what has been learned over the years in the principal location to build an effective culture in the new location. Select key people for the new location that would fit well into the current location.
- How can the principal manager network in the new location to attract clients?
- Clubs
- Organizations
- White Papers
- Advertising and Mass Mailing
- Author a book or be featured in a chapter of someone else’s book
- Generate partnerships or affiliations for business development
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How Do You Attract Investment to a Small Company? Four Perspectives
Situation: A small company seeks outside investment to support its growth. The company’s industry is dominated by large, well-recognized players. These companies have historically been the company’s customers; however, they have a quarterly mindset, and are increasingly looking to support their own development groups. How do you attract investment to a small company?
Advice from the CEOs:
- What is the company’s ROI and risk profile?
- Positive ROI, particularly taking advantage of new distribution channels.
- ROI turnaround is typically 1-2 years.
- There are about 50 similar companies in the market.
- The company possesses intellectual property that makes it appealing.
- Project maturity is generally considered a risk in the industry – it is not as experienced or mature as other industries.
- An additional risk is that new developments in online distribution are continually changing the industry environment in unpredictable ways.
- Investigate and approach companies in other industries with similar structures – dominated by large players but with a healthy presence of smaller companies. Examples include the movie industry and real estate pools.
- Talk to investors who are familiar with these industries to see whether they would be interested in investing in the company’s projects.
- There is a good deal of money out there looking to beat the current returns available through the stock market and paper investments. Look for an angel investor.
- Given the Risk/Reward structure of the industry, approaching professional investors may be the best bet for the company.
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How Do You Create Buzz? Six Suggestions
Situation: A company wants to quickly create high profile buzz around a new offering. What have other companies done or seen that could help the company quickly create this type of market presence? How do you create buzz?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Buzz is hard to measure. It is also difficult to link buzz directly to sales.
- Getting press, assuming that it is positive, is often called “free advertising.”
- If a company is paying a professional public relations (PR) consultant, positive press is not free. When PR is successful and sustained, however, it arguably has a better ROI than advertising.
- Published articles, particularly those by authors not associated with the company, are viewed by the customer as more legitimate than advertising. Additionally, with the Internet, the longevity of these articles can be quite long. The reach extends far beyond publications’ off-line circulation, and search engines make the articles easy to access.
- Successful companies want to do business with other successful companies. What can the company highlight to show prospective clients that it is successful?
- Substantiation is critical to getting positive coverage – assure that there is no “vaporware.” Given the power of social media vaporware can quickly destroy an offering.
- One member of the group suggested that the ownership of patents might generate positive press and social media coverage.
- Leverage in-house thought leaders.
- Seek help from celebrities – “Hollywood” investors and individuals with substantial social media followings.
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How Do You Balance Scalable Growth with Quality Service? Five Thoughts
Situation: A CEO wants to determine whether and to what extent his company’s service model is scalable. He wants to determine whether it is possible to add additional clients by adjusting the ratio of clients to staff. The tricky part is determining whether the company can increase the client to staff ratio while minimizing the impact on client service. This is critical because client service is the company’s “secret sauce”. How do you balance scalable growth with quality service?
- Start by profiling the current client base from high to low maintenance. For example, set up a grid with axes of sophistication and frequency of desired contact as follows:
- A – unsophisticated and desire frequent contact
- B – sophisticated and desire frequent contact
- C – unsophisticated and desire infrequent contact
- D – sophisticated and desire infrequent contact
- Analyze the client base and assign each current or new client to category A, B, C or D.
- Distribute client relationships so that no member of the team has too many A’s. This may make it possible to assign more clients to each staff member.
- Also consider matching staff to client type. Some staff may be better working with unsophisticated clients, while others are more adept with sophisticated clients.
- As this model is developed and built, try different alternatives for matching staff to clients. This can help to identify additional alternatives for achieving the company’s objective.
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Is It Time to Hire a Marketing Manager? Five Considerations
Situation: A small company has always used guerilla marketing as its marketing modus operandi – trade shows, etc. Their VP Sales recently left. They feel a need for a marketing plan and hired a company to assist them in understanding how they are perceived by their customers. Should they continue to outsource, or is it preferable to bring marketing expertise in-house? Is it time to hire a marketing manager?
Advice from the CEOs:
- How well do you understand your customer profiles? It is important to characterize, segment and understand your customers before you can understand your marketing.
- What is the company size of your typical customer? Small companies don’t spend a lot on big trade shows, other than perhaps sending a couple of people as attendees. Event marketing may be a more effective way to reach small customers.
- The company that you hired should be answering these questions for you.
- Marketing is about creating an environment in which people are aware of you and find you versus your having to go out and find them. Social media have fundamentally changed the marketing challenge, emphasizing pull versus push marketing – commercials, ads, billboards, etc.
- An important role of marketing is perception management so that when a lead or need arises, your company is a natural answer.
- Whether or not you hire a person, you need a marketing plan. Once you have a plan, you need a marketing budget.
- The company is now at 35+ employees. Fischer’s growth curve research indicates that at this size you need a professional in the marketing position – someone with experience who knows the ropes. This person could be inside or outside.
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How Do You Communicate Your Value Proposition? Four Methods
Situation: A company offers a service that can potentially boost clients’ revenues by 50% or more. However, the CEO has found it difficult to communicate this value proposition to potential clients. While some clients understand and have bought the company’s service, too many others have not. How do you communicate your value proposition?
Advice from the CEOs:
- Not everybody will buy any service, no matter what advantages it offers. Here are steps to take:
- Make a list of clients that you have closed, and those that you have not.
- Identify whether there is a difference in the profile of the clients that you’ve closed and those that you didn’t.
- From the commonalities among those clients that have accepted your value proposition, create an ideal customer profile.
- Use this profile to pre-qualify potential new clients and assure that they meet this profile before investing in sales efforts.
By focusing sales efforts on those clients that you are most likely to close, you will improve your close rate and also reduce your sales cost to revenue ratio.
- As you cultivate a new prospect, identify those individuals within the client company who can block your sale. Make these individuals heroes for supporting your offering. Offer them appealing learning retreats. Offer augmentations that appeal to the unique needs of the client. Raise your prices to fund these augmentations, but more than cover these costs with boosted revenues to the client.
- Focus on the key WIIFM – “What’s in it for me” – that will appeal to key purchase influencers. Enlist these people as your evangelists within the client.
- Emphasize not just financial benefits, but quality of life benefits that will accrue to clients through your service. Back this with a guarantee that you feel comfortable making.
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