Archive for September, 2005

Granted no one assumes that potential customers know your firm exists just because it does. Yet a lot of decision makers still overlook the simple things that make finding and buying from their companies easy, thus capturing sales.

As the President of the Virtual New York State National Speakers Association, I had the responsibility of finding a venue for an important event coming to my home town, Syracuse. We expected to draw attendees from Toronto, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York.

My first inclination was to call a few venues in the local area to obtain pricing. I would have opted for a mass email if I only had the names and email addresses of all the potential hotels in our geographic area.

I then remembered my local Chamber of Commerce has a division called the Conventions and Visitors Bureau whose purpose is to help companies and organizations with their event needs so they bring business to the region.

Oh, but what was their URL? Was it CVBSyracuse.com? Was it Syracuse.com? No that was taken. I could not remember.

My next strategy was to look up the names in my CRM; everything on file pointed to the chamber’s site. So I tried it, found a little link (not in the navigational bar) to visitsyracuse.com. I should have thought of that myself.

Once there, I found on online form for an RFP that could be filled in and forwarded to sales staff at local hotels.

I filled out the RFP to the best of my abilities. Constantly it would not send as I had to clarify or fill in boxes, but I had no clue what was needed. Then when I finally pressed send for the last time…their script did not work, and the form did not send.

A little frustrated I called the CVB and verbally told them what I needed. The positive result was I had quotes on my desk by evening time from two of several hotels.

The management issues here are multifaceted.

1. If I had not known of the service I would never have even attempted to look for the site. My wife planned an event for 150 people, and she never used the service at all, because she didn’t know about it. She did the old manual routine.

How many people would love to know about these services offered by their local CVB? With better marketing, better use of several URLs pointing to the same service, listings on their chamber websites and publicly letting those that need to know the service exists is a start.

I’m also considering the individual that is on the board of a local nonprofit that has no meeting experience and needs a venue. Those are the people that need the help the most, because they don’t do this everyday.

2. Systems must work!!!!! Even the CVB was surprised that I picked up the phone to call. What they find, and research has shown, is that if a website is cumbersome or does not work, people don’t return.

3. Forms should be automated with an algorithm. Even with all this web stuff, it appears that the incoming email is then manually forwarded to those venues that they have on their list. Hands on is 1990′s not 2005. When the email button for send is pressed, an algorithm should determine who gets the email instantaneously. An advanced program could extrapolate and calculate pricing needs or service needs, check calendars and build the proposal for the salesperson to call or an email to be shot back within seconds or minutes.

With so many small things going wrong, I’m still grateful to the CVB for saving me time and money. For their sake and the convenience of potential users, I hope they can move beyond only touching the surface of what they are capable of achieving. Use this example to look at your own organization to insure that you are managing your operation to its fullest potential.

Too often I hear people say, “If I had it over to do again, I would…” or, “I wish we could have…” What comments like this mean to me is that they are doing two things. One is second guessing their past decision making, and two is spending too much time in the past.

Here’s my simple approach to past decisions.

Say to yourself, “At the time I made the decision, it was the best decision I could have made.” On a higher level what it means is that when you make decisions you often take into account all the variables and make the decision for that moment. A year down the road you might not remember all the challenges you were facing at that time. There could have been a whole lot going on that you’re forgetting.

If your regret is that you knew you were being sloppy in your decision-making process and didn’t feel you gave it your best, today is a new day. Forgive yourself and move on.

There may have been economic issues in your industry, cash flow challenges, and employee concerns. In hindsight, these extraneous items are often forgotten. In addition, there’s the point that you can’t fix the past.

One last comment. I’m making a huge assumption that you did try to make the right decision.

If your regret is that you knew you were being sloppy in your decision-making process and didn’t feel you gave it your best, today is a new day. Forgive yourself and move on.

After reading the History of Management Thought by Claude George I thought I’d put some of my observations on paper. These are 17 that came to mind quickly in 2005

1. Management does not plan well nor does management know how to plan.
2. The scientific method is used far less than one would expect in business. Often management is flying blind.
3. Fire fighting is not only a buzz word about managing business, it’s one of the most common activities management and leadership engages in on a daily basis.
4. Few strategic and tactical business tools are used while conducting business. Too often gut and hunches are the decision maker’s tool.
5. Those in management are searching for answers and yet most of what they read and are taught is not solutions but information that in practicality only creates more questions.
6. Managers don’t eliminate fire fighting because they don’t know how!
7. Managers and leaders jump from new concept and initiative to new concept and initiative based on best-selling books and the lack of understanding of how project management, on a big scale, works.
8. Automation is confused with “technologically manual.”
9. Coaching and empowerment are not carried out well. To make matters worse, much of what is being taught is passed down from OJT learning by those who don’t know how to teach what they actually know.
10. The same challenges exist in management and leadership from industry to industry with time management being high on all the lists.
11. Economic dreams of having it all have driven management to lose personal balance in the pursuit.
12. Management and leadership often confuse action with progress.
13. Few managers know how to strategically think. The jump is right to tactical.
14. Managers don’t have any formalized sales skills to know how to sell internally or to outside of their organization. They wing it or learn from their mistakes.
15. Those in management who ask and address questions that are burning to be asked tend to be in growing organizations. Those that have no big questions are in organizations that are not growing.
16. Succession planning is low on the importance scale.
17. There is little difference between those with MBAs using the vast majority of tools they’ve learned with those that learned it the hard way.

All management challenges can be fixed, solved, unraveled if the right tools, systems and structure were added to the management equation.

Surprise. Surprise.

While working on strategy with the management team of a $200-million a year firm, I hit on the topic of operational efficiency.

My goal was to show the link between operational inefficiencies and lost sales opportunities. When your firm isn’t operating efficiently, interruptions, problems, and day-to-day activities pull sales people from their work. In addition, operational inefficiencies cause prospects or customers to go elsewhere, even when the sales force is competent.

Immediately after the discussion, we took a break and I checked my PDA. I found a long-overdue email from one of my insurance agents; he had finally sent me a (very long) response to some of the policy additions I had requested a quote on.

In the email he
• apologized for the almost 20 days he had taken to offer me the pricing.
• recommended that I not use internet services since he can meet me face to face
• inferred that I was also purchasing his smarts in this package.

Because he took 20 days to get back to me, I did like any other internet savvy person would do. I researched on Quotesmith.com. I found my pricing in minutes and with several different options to choose from. Ironically, as I read the email, I found my agent was quoting me the same policy, but charging me almost $200.00 more. Same vendor. Same condition.

After reading the email, I reminisced about speaking to the Kansas Association of Insurance Agents and making a point about how not everyone wants to speak to their insurance agent, and in the future, as our youngsters reach adulthood, they will want in-person attention less and less. The group of agents was FURIOUS that I would make such a statement. (It’s not always safe to speak the truth while on the platform.)

Think of your relationship with your bank. Do you want to talk to a teller? Do you want to have to deposit your paycheck in person? The trend is more and more heading to electronic errands that save you time. You probably love having an online service and having the freedom to move your money at 2 AM if you wish.

Using the selling point of face-to-face contact is no longer an order winner…no longer the special service that closes the sale. In the case of me and my insurance agent, I had not spoken to him in two years. He’s a nice guy, but in our busy world, I don’t want to have to talk to him to take care of business. He’d have been better off saving the 20-day delay, visiting Quotesmith.com himself, and used the figures from that to send an instant email. I would never have checked up on him, if he had.

This face-to-face garbage also is such a misnomer. I use a different company for our homeowners’ insurance; the firm is at the other end of the country and we’ve never met anyone from there. The insurance agent responsible for the coverage on our rental property did not come running when I had a disaster. They sent someone from another office since they don’t work on claims. Insurance, like any other service,e will be dominated by those that respond quickly and act even quicker.

I shared parts of my email with the group only to outline how they, too, might be coming in second place due not to the sales staff, but the tools necessary to win faster and more completely than they had in the past.

My recommendation to you and to management in any company is that no longer can you just count on sales personnel to bring in the business with the old tools. You need a combination of speed and an understanding of a buyer’s needs. Management must them supply these individuals and the buyers with the tools that can help them to react on the fly (and even generate that face to face).

If you’re thinking my key point here is the internet, let me clarify. It’s about setting up the systems and structure to win in any deal. With the company I was consulting, face to face is by far the best way for them to win big ticket deals. The challenge for them is they need to think differently and have the tools to get the job done in addition to that.