Tag Archives: Revise

What New Business Options Should You Pursue? Five Guidelines

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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?

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How Are You Preparing for Next Year? Two Approaches

Situation: A CEO and his team are preparing for next year. There is a lot of uncertainty as to how the year will unfold and what the economic and financial environment will look like. What are others doing to plan for next year and beyond? How are you preparing for next year?

Advice from the CEOs:

One company built a 5 year plan to 2028 about a year ago.

    • They are now reviewing the plan. Their core has been growing faster than anticipated as a result of the new sales effort. For next year and beyond they are revisiting the plan and revising it both to take advantage of the new sales effort and to leverage this success into other areas.
    • Within the plan, priorities for growth have been identified, and the company is on target to double the size of the company in 5 years.

Another company established a Strategic Priority Team a few months ago.

    • They started by setting goals for 2025 to 2030. They followed this with a plan for what they need to do year by year until 2030 to realize this plan. They recognize that there may be speed bumps along the way but have established the internal discipline and capacity to address these.
    • Within the plan, they are looking at expanding ther facilities in 2nd half of 2026, and plan to double both their space and staff over the planning period.
    • An additional area where they will focus is their current and new business development effort.

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How Do You Manage Major Projects? Seven Points

Situation: A company conducts both engineering feasibility studies and development projects. These are high budget projects and must be managed diligently to prevent cost overruns. What have others done to assure that projects are planned and managed to budget? How do you manage major projects?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • What is the structure of most contracted projects?
    • Most projects are fixed price. They come from feasibility studies which are essentially “marketing” for future sales. Typical terms are 30% up front, with the other 30/30/10 upon achievement of milestones and completion of the project.
  • Get complete buy-in from the customer as part of the initial negotiation.
  • Stay ahead of expenses by billing in time to maintain positive cash flow from the projects.
  • Structure pricing so that custom work is profitable if the project mix is 50/50 custom vs. standard work.
  • Push-back if the customer wants to reduce project cost up-front.
  • Carefully document work papers – above what is required by the contract. Get buy-in for this in advance, during the initial negotiation.
  • Once the feasibility study is completed, revise the scope and deliverables of the work agreement based on findings from the study.
  • Separate the “concept” phase from the execution phase and charge a premium for the concept work.
    • Position this as a value to the customer.

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Should You Combine Sales and Marketing? Five Points

Situation: A company is considering combining its marketing and sales teams. The company’s overall objective is to expand their marketing presence and to bring on new customers. Some team members believe that these two functions are distinct, while others believe that they should work in tandem or even be combined. What do others think about these options? Should you combine sales and marketing?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The skill sets required to create and operate an effective marketing effort are different from those required to create and operate an effective sales organization.
  • Sales and Marketing are two different sides of the same coin – they complement each other but are distinct.
  • Direction begins with the CEO; however it is imperative to make certain that everyone in the organization buys into both this direction and the organization to achieve it.
  • Some feel that it is not a good idea to have one person covering the role of Sales and Marketing. Sales is tactical while Marketing is strategic. It is Sales’ job to implement the Marketing Strategy and report back what is working and what is not. Marketing’s job is to take the feedback from Sales into account and revise the strategy accordingly.
  • Challenges which can create a constant battle between marketing and sales are due to:
    • Lack of common direction, and
    • Poor or inconsistent communication between Sales and customer on one side and Sales and Marketing on the other.
    • These challenges need to be resolved to have an effective Sales + Marketing organization.

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What are Effective Website Features and Metrics? Five Options

Situation: A CEO wants to revise his company’s website to be a more effective source of leads. What has worked well for others gaining leads from their companies’ websites? What has intrigued potential clients and prompted them to contact the company about its products and services? What are effective website features and metrics?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Have as much usable content as possible – useable by those who visit the site. This will drive traffic to the site. Traffic will produce leads from a certain percent of users who are impressed by the company’s capabilities.
  • Does the site meet the company’s target customers’ needs? If so, are the search terms optimized to attract them to the site when they perform searches?
  • Create an interactive demo on the site that will be of interest to the company’s current customers and potential customers.
  • Use the company’s customer extranet to create a “wow” experience that will create buzz within client companies and help to attract additional business from those companies.
    • An extranet is an intranet that can be partially accessed by authorized outside users, enabling businesses to exchange information over the internet securely.
  • Put a freebie tool on the public site and extranet that helps clients to solve a frequent problem. This helps to segue customers and potential customers from personal use to product or service choice.
  • Whatever tools are used, include a unique link to each approach or tool and offer the customer a modest discount for using the link.
    • Counting the frequency of links used is a simple way to determine which tools or features are most effective with customers.

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How Is The Economy Impacting Your Sales Plan? Five Views

A company is revising sales forecasts for 2016 and seeks the advice of others. A combination of low energy prices and shaky financial markets sparked by the Chinese decline has left many questioning whether they should revise their plans to account for an economic contraction. How is the economy impacting your sales plan?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Niche Software Company – we are coming off of a good year. Our industry has seen low impact so far. Going forward we are cautiously optimistic. A couple of clients have delayed projects but didn’t cancel.
  • Services Company – hiring has been frozen. Adjustments to staff count have already been made. Clients are asking us to contact them again early in the second quarter. Opportunities exist in the health care area.
  • Hardware Company – we are running scared. We have cut business and personnel expenses to assure survival. A large customer just announced new plant construction earlier this week – this may help to turn things around. We are assuming this will be mean a longer term rather than a short-term opportunity.
  • Niche Software Company – cutting personal/business expenses. Long term things look favorable, but we have to survive the short term. Attendance at a large trade show this month was a little above last year but we don’t know whether this will yield a significant increase in sales.
  • Trades – Projects with big bank backing are on hold. We see large scale bidding wars for projects. Where there used to be 3-5 bids there are now 15 or more. Looking for consolidation of competition – especially union–based shops.

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