This is Innovation

Service Innovation!!…think Experience

November 1, 2009 at 9:49 pm · Filed under Service Ace

In a service based business there is plenty of evidence to suggest that there is no correlation between client retention and price increases. In other words, your customers won’t leave simply because your organisation raises its prices.

However…

There is a correlation between retention and your organisation’s net promoter score, which measures how likely a customer is to recommend the organization to someone else.

It turns out that if customers like your products or services enough to recommend them to others, then you can raise prices, even in a down economy, without losing any of your customers. But …

If you downgrade the customer experience, then not even lower prices would prevent your customers from leaving.

What’s true for organizations is true for people as well. Understand your unique value, leverage it to fill a need, and you can write your own ticket.

On the other hand, neglect your value, or don’t develop it, and your customers (and bosses) will go elsewhere.

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7 rules to woo VCs

October 30, 2009 at 8:58 pm · Filed under Show me the Money

What are the gotta-have factors for a successful VC pitch?….but wait…

One important question to ask before you begin pitching: Are you really ready?

Venture investors will have an equity stake in your business, have representatives on your board and influence company direction. VC investors also look to the ‘exit’ and drive the company toward either a sale or initial public offering by year 5 (typically).

Bearing that in mind, and you’re happy with the expectations, then you’d better understand what VC investors look for.

1. An Experienced Team

Experience counts for a lot. VCs consider a successful track record with at least one previous startup essential. If you have no entrepreneurial experience, consider recruiting an executive to your team who would lend you some startup credibility. Good judgment in business comes from experience and that includes those who’ve already made their mistakes and struggled. Moreover people who can get VCs excited and have an infectious enthusiasm for what they’re doing.

2. A Problem-Solving Product or Service

Be clear about the problem your company solves; Do you save customers money? Time? Be specific about why customers will switch from whatever they’re using now to your offering. VCs refer to this as solving a “pain point” or difficulty in the marketplace. Many people fall in love with their technology and fail to apply the ‘So What!’ principal.

3. Assets

What does your company offer an investor in return for their cash? More often VCs are looking for companies with assets of some kind. If not tangibles with an existing product, patent, manufacturing process, piece of software or service perhaps intangibles with an established customer base or a proven, high-powered management team. Your company also knows what your assets are and can properly describe and create excitement around them. VCs don’t invest in companies that are just ideas.

4. Customers

Oh yeah!! Customers… Geez these VCs want it all Uh! Lets be honest the development of technologies is sometimes cheaper than the trials/approvals or marketing and creating awareness, so you shouldn’t need funding just to create a product prototype. VCs want to hear from happy customers…and they will call them to find out. If you don’t have customers yet, scoring funding may be tough.

5. Metrics

VCs expect you to know the hard numbers of the business. One of the most important figures to know: customer acquisition cost. How much does your company spend to bring in a new customer? This figure is needed because VC funding commonly is used to acquire more customers, so know the growth the investment will deliver. VCs are also keen to understand the value proposition to the customer; how does your product or service improves customers’ return on investment.

6. A Demo

To extrapolate on an old saying, a demo can be worth a thousand words…and will beat a static PowerPoint slide any day. It also proves its not all hot-air.

7. A Plan

Shock-horror but you do have to present a clear plan outlining what they would do with the money you’re seeking. It doesn’t inspire confidence if you have only a fuzzy idea of how they would use more money to build the business.

Adapted from an article in Entrepreneur magazine.

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Built on Free

October 29, 2009 at 9:38 pm · Filed under Bottom line, Show me the Money, Tools

Much hype surrounds the sustainability of ‘Free’, however thats the problem for those businesses with Free as a business model. For the rest of us who intend to charge for our products and services -

Can you really build your business on Free?

Not really…but you can get bloody close. Here are some of the ways you can save your pennies on productivity tools when starting out.

Security

Of course you are never fully protected unless you pay. However plenty of free entry level options including AVG. Ive been running AVG free anti-virus for ages without any problems.

Enterprise Software

Microsoft Office to you and me. Pick between Google Docs and OpenOffice. No it isn’t the same, but 90% of the time I dont need the full capabilities of Office. Google has the added benefit of being hosted on Google and is accessible from any computer and creates pdfs when you print.

Presentations

A tricky one this..Ive an aversion to using Powerpoint but sometimes its easy and convenient and does the job…but you need a professional look..so don’t use the Microsoft templates. Try Templatewise or Presentation Load for some really cool designs.

Alternatively bin Powerpoint and go for Prezi a non-linear dynamic presentation tool; good for turning into flash and popping on your site,

Website

When its DIY and involves investment of your time it isn’t really free…but it can be fun and you will certainly learn more about the most important aspect of marketing your business should you decide to commission a developer at a later date. Try WiX.

e-Marketing

Campaign Monitor is hands down the most comprehensive e-marketing tool. Customisable html pages and built-in analytics..just like Big Brother. $5 setup and 1¢/mail..not Free but so good you’ll want to pay for it.

Project Management

Loads of ‘cheaper than MS Project’ options however GanttProject is Free and easily accessible. Gantt & PERT charts and resources

Communications

diMdiM is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and conduct a session via webcam. For more straight forward conference calling try Pow Wow Now

CRM

Any sales led organisation needs to manage its customer related information. OK, so open-source isn’t Free…but this is great value for a growing organisation

Image Editor

In the same way MS Office has become cumbersome, expensive and frustrating in its attempts to be clever. As most us would never use half of what Photoshop has to offer, Pixlr & Gimp are essentially stripped down simplified versions. Gimp even has an animation package.

Blogging & Social Media

If becoming a respected resource for your market is a key part of your strategy then blogging will be a needed tool. Typepad and WordPress are free along with Twitter, a great microblogging tool.

Footnote

As with all things ‘Free’ there are limitations, and when you want to get more sophisticated, you have to open your wallet. So with all this power and information and none of it has to sit on your PC…so bin the servers and a £250 netbook will do nicely thank you.

If anyone has any additional productivity tools, leave a comment

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Teaching Innovation

September 30, 2009 at 9:43 pm · Filed under Culture Vultures

No…..Not the tools…the people bit

Here are some principles to ensure you start to get different results

1. Its a process…..not a gift!

Don’t let innovation be thought of as some special, innate talent that only certain people have. It takes roughly 2 years to learn a new language. Innovating is a skill just like any other technical discipline. When perceived as a gift or the sole reserve of the company ‘chosen-ones’ it creates an artificial barrier that prevents people from trying to be innovative. Innovating is a skill, and it can be learned by anyone, even those who are not creative in the traditional sense.

2. De-emphasize patents

For some reason, engineers and scientists are fascinated with patents. They tend to see patents as the ultimate reward of innovation. Patents do not equate to successful innovation; rather, they equate to getting legal status regarding an invention. However if your technical people invent something that has already been invented, this is a huge success because it shows an ability to create novel ideas that have a track record of success. The message: if you can invent something that is already shown to be successful, you can definitely be the first to invent something new and useful….and commercially successful

3. Apply innovation across a wide variety of situations

It is not just for inventing new products. Teach you staff to apply innovation methods to many other situations.

4. Distinguish between innovation and problem solving skills

Both are useful, but are often confused as the same. They are related, but different. Help them see problem solving as what to use when the problem is very well defined and must be solved. Help your staff see innovating as the set of tools to use when new approaches are needed for an existing task.

5. Be a Leader

Most importantly people will struggle unless you demonstrate those skills themselves. Whether it is table manners, proper grammar, or how to treat other people, as a leader you must set an example or “walk the talk.” Innovation is no different.

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Selling to BIG Co

May 14, 2009 at 8:48 pm · Filed under Favorites, Sell it to me ·Tagged innovation selling, selling to a large company, technical innovation sales

Without a doubt selling your innnovation is CRUNCH time. Not only must the product be right, but have you the savvy and strategy to make the technical success a commercial success.

I came across a resource from those clever people at Xplane some while ago, and thought I’d share my experiences to the series of challenges as portrayed in ‘Selling to Big Co’; so…

Welcome to BigCo, land of the complex sale, where each meeting could be your last. Each step in the sales process can move you forward or torpedo the business for good.

All along the way, the people of BigCo will have numerous conversations about your product; with each other, with their leaders and managers, with consultants – even with your competitors.

HOW CAN YOU BE SURE YOUR SOLUTION WILL BE FULLY AND COMPLETELY UNDERSTOOD, EVEN WHEN YOU CAN’T BE THERE YOURSELF?

Here are some of the challenges you will need to be prepared for….

Your well-meaning but bumbling champion miscommunicated your value proposition.

You invested at considerable risk to your business in an idea you all think is a winner. Will the value be so obvious to the customer you wont need to sell it?; ‘if we build it – they will come’. If the answer is no (and it will be!) then why put it into the hands of someone who is not prepared, or does not have a stake in its success? Sound outrageous? Its done every day with distributors and agents, sales people with improper incentives and/or the wrong tools.

Frontline managers and workers couldn’t see how your solution would help them to do their jobs better.

Consider this.. on the whole people don’t like change, especially if they don’t have to, so what would persuade them to change vendor or adopt a supposedly better solution. Whats in it for me!!

In order to address this, sell benefits..not features. How does your offering make your customers job easier, faster, better, cheaper, more productive etc etc? OK then prove it…show me the data, demonstrate it.. here…now!!

A competitor used technical jargon as a ’smokescreen’ to confuse buyers about your solution.

You know who your competitors are (I hope), put yourself in their shoes and think about how they would claim a superior proposition or attempt to expose your weaknesses where they have strengths. Be prepared for such a rebuttal have data, facts and evidence as per the last point.

A consultant who has ties to your competitor recommended against you, and nobody knew enough to disagree.

Technical businesses will work with academics or leaders in their field of chosen work. They often perform private consultancy and therefore have allegiances to companies they have worked with in the past. Who are influencers in your field? Who do they work with? Consider trade association, societies, conference organising commitees, speakers and chairs, researchers. Make sure you get the opportunity to sell the merits of your solution. Work with your own sectoral gurus and develop them into advocates.

The VP of NO, who must approve all purchases over £100k didn’t understand your solution.

A Power player can make the decisions about how dollars are spent. Period. Sometimes referred to as the “VP of No,” they don’t have to ask permission, and they care primarily about results.

By the time you talk to a Power Player, you’d better understand the company and the problem and you’d better have a solution to offer ideally advocated by other organisation members, but mmost importantly demonstrating a results based benefit. Power players make their decisions and move on quickly, so be prepared to move fast if this person says yes.

The gatekeeper didn’t understand how you were different, so you never got to meet the commercial people

And don’t underestimate Gatekeepers like Secretaries, PAs and potentially anyone else meant to be organise and control. Their job is to manage the traffic moving in and out of the organization. They are responsible for keeping the “wrong” people out and letting the “right” people in. A Gatekeeper can be a powerful ally who can put you in front of the buyer — or, if alienated, they can be a powerful foe.

The buyer skimmed your proposal, but didn’t understand the key differentiator you had worked so hard to establish.

By this time, you have hopefully many advocates and developed a tailored argument specific to the benefits your product will bring. However you must be able to communicate all all levels and prevent creating your own smokescreen with jargon. Dont forget the buyer is concerned with Quality, Cost and Delivery. How do you stack up, this might be a differentiator if your competition fails to deliver on-time and has unreliable product; even if they are cheaper.

Know your stuff, know your customer, know your competition and be prepared.

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Try many things, fail cheaply

May 2, 2009 at 8:45 pm · Filed under Product Beautiful, When the going gets tough ·Tagged LinkedIn

Its widely proposed that to succeed and be innovative you have to had plenty of the failure experience. Therefore failure should be acceptable facet of innovation.

While acceptable, this is far from desirable, not because we dont think there is much to be learned in the process of failure and that consequential outcomes are valuable, but that by implication innovation should be a free-spirited and spontaneous process and what will be, will be.

Failure would be fine, if it wasn’t so expensive. Because failures cost money (and time), high failure rates can cause corporations to become very gun shy about innovation.

Of course, one way out of this problem is to increase the innovation success rate. A noble aspiration for sure. But be careful. Following that seemingly sensible path can lead to some perverse behavior.

A company can almost always “succeed” by introducing “new and improved” products that cannibalize what they already sell. A company can confidently state that all of its revenue comes from products launched within the past two years, feel good about its innovation efforts, and actually be falling further behind competitors.

In fact, when we look at the numbers it is estimated that only 10% of our ideas are worthy of testing, and only 10% of them will be winners. Thats 1%! . So, we are not managing a programme of success, we are actually managing a programme of failure; therefore the real answer is to dramatically decrease the cost of failure. Here are 3 ways…

Lower the costs of experiments. Running experiments need not be expensive. There are tons of low cost ways to test critical assumptions. Be creative, imagine you hadn’t a budget, imagine this was your business and you dont have the cash. Beg, borrow, steal, collaborate, even postpone expensive testing until the project has been de-risked.
Prioritise your unknowns. Many companies spend a lot of money answering the wrong questions. They’ll seek to perfect a technology without understanding whether there’s a market need. Assess strategic risks first, because they are often what sink an idea. Chances are someone else has already thought of your idea.
Increase the pace of decision making. Entrepreneurs with clearly bad ideas typically don’t have the luxury of spending money on those ideas for too long. Companies, however, can let bad ideas linger for inordinate amounts of time because of slow decision-making processes. Shutting down flawed projects early avoids needless spending — and focuses resources on the best ideas.

Projects are often expensive because companies seek perfection in their own eyes before they run any sort of test. Remember, the less you’ve spent, the more freedom you have to change your approach.

As Seth Godin says ‘ Stop being perfect and start being remarkable’. Good enough will be good enough

And finally, remember that failure is not a dirty word. The odds are pretty high that your first idea is wrong along some meaningful dimension. If you fail fast and fail cheap, you can accelerate discovering a winning idea.

Of course, it’s one thing for companies to say they embrace the right kind of failure. It’s quite another thing to create a culture that rewards low-risk failures and savors surprises.

In fact why shouldn’t we succeed cheaply too.

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We need the next big thing!…are you sure?

April 12, 2009 at 10:27 am · Filed under Product Beautiful, Sell it to me, When the going gets tough

Right…. its a downturn, things are tight, only those who innovate will survive, we need new ideas, we need the next big thing…..

But how can you when you have already decided to suspend your expensive ‘next big thing’….priorities after all; a natural reaction to a slowdown in purchases of existing products. However we get so enamored with new products we forget about the products that carried the company. With the next new thing on hold, it’s time to focus on products in the portfolio and make them relevant to buyers.

Its important to remember (even with your next big thing) that products sell when they satisfy a need in the market that is urgent, pervasive and buyers are willing to pay. In good economic times this rule is relaxed because companies are flush with cash. In tough economic times the rule is absolute.

Your challenge is a direct result of a change in the buying environment. It has changed violently and you must respond to regain a position of relevance.

Adopt the 4 Rs of selling more stuff

Reacquaint yourself with your buyers and their problems. Have your customers been let down by othe vendors, competitors and the like. Don’t fool yourself. Your buyer’s problems and priorities will have changed so get out there and talk with people. Go talk to your angriest customer, its a humbling experience, you will learn a lot and they will appreciate that you are listening.
Revisit your product portfolio. Hopefully some of the products can solve problems that are urgent, pervasive and customers are will to pay for in today’s market. Focus on the products that have the most promise. Be prepared that this may shake the foundations of your core product beliefs.
Realign the products in the portfolio within your new understanding of your buyer’s problems. Re-position the products that can solve those urgent, pervasive problems that buyers are willing to pay for. Add incremental features to support the new positioning, if necessary. The goal isn’t to re-engineer the productbut to re-align to market conditions, and quickly.
Relaunch the repositioned products emphasizing customer problems and how you solve them, not the features. Present a fresh perspective ( or even a perspective they never saw value in before) to your customers and regain a position of relevance that well enable you to sell more stuff.

Focus on what you can do, not what you can’t. As Dave Daniels at Launch Clinic says ‘don’t put lipstick on a pig’; it’s too transparent; but there is value in your portfolio you can mine and repurpose to gain new revenue. It’s up to you to find the value and share it with your customers.

Adpated from Dave Daniels at Launch Clinic

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3rd Step to a new image (free)

April 5, 2009 at 7:28 pm · Filed under Sell it to me, Tools

Ever wondered just how easy it would be to do your own website if you had the time.

Think no more…

Following our 2 previous steps to new image for free, heres the 3rd.

Step 3: Create a New Website.

Get your free website here>>

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Why Innovate now?.. Some links

April 4, 2009 at 10:03 pm · Filed under When the going gets tough

Why Innovate now?

It always happens. In tough times, there is a tendency to retreat and take on a defensive posture. Survivalist thinking takes over as uncertainty in the business climate grows. But with the worst of times also come the best opportunities. Now is not the time to shrink investments in the future. Quite the contrary, now is the time for innovation. Here are five reasons to innovate now!

CLICK HERE >>

There are still opportunities to thrive

It looks like being as bad a recession as we’ve ever had. Businesses have had little time to prepare for these challenging conditions, but I know from experience that there are things you can do to mitigate the circumstances and come through strongly.

CLICK HERE >>

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Pitching ideas….The elevator pitch

April 4, 2009 at 9:24 pm · Filed under Ideas, Sell it to me, Tools

What’s an elevator pitch?

An elevator pitch is a brief e-mail summary of your business. Or a short story that you can tell in the course of a elevator ride.

4340392_a136ff594b_o You use the elevator pitch to get meetings with prospective investors. Typically, you ask someone whom the investor trusts to pass along your elevator pitch with a thumbs-up.

And if you don’t have an introduction, an amazing elevator pitch is critical to a successful cold e-mail.

Your elevator pitch is more important than a business plan or executive summary. In fact, with a good introduction and elevator pitch, you don’t really need a business plan or executive summary.

We crafted this annotated elevator pitch using information we gleaned from one of Marc Andreessen’s blog posts about Ning (Marc is also the founder of Netscape):
Subject: Introducing Ning to Blue Shirt Capital [A useful subject line!]

Hi [Middleman],

Thanks for offering to introduce us to Blue Shirt Capital. [Reiterating the social proof of the introducer.] I’ve attached a short presentation about our company, Ning. [He attached a deck.]
Briefly, Ning lets you create your own social network for anything. For free. In 2 minutes. [What's the high concept pitch? What does the product help the customer do? Who is the customer?] It’s as easy as starting a blog. [What's the metaphor?] Try it at: http://ning.com [Link to the product, screencast, or screenshots.]
We built Ning to unlock the great ideas from people all over the world who want to use this amazing medium in their lives. [What's the big problem or opportunity?]

We have over 115,000 user-created networks, and our page views are growing 10% per week. [Traction.] We previously raised $44M from Legg Mason and others, including myself. [More traction and social proof.]

Before Ning, I started Netscape (acquired by AOL for $4.2B) and Opsware (acquired by HP for $1.6B). [Team's past successes.]

Blue Shirt’s investments in companies like Extensive Enterprises tell me that they could be a great partner for Ning. [Why are you interested in this investor?] We’re starting meetings with investors next week, and I would love to show Blue Shirt what we’re building at Ning. [Call to action and subtle scarcity.]

Best,

Marc Andreessen
xyz@ning.com
415.555.1212 [Contact information -- how thoughtful.]

Notice the email uses good grammar, punctuation, and capitalization, as well as short paragraphs and sentences.

Your e-mail should be no longer than this example, which is already too long. Challenge yourself to keep the pitch under 100 words. And keep the product description brief — this pitch describes the product in one paragraph with 29 words.

When in doubt, follow this template exactly. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have Marc’s past successes, just explain the success you have. The rest of the pitch should be devoted to your traction, team, and social proof.

CLICK HERE >>

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This is Innovation

Service Innovation!!…think Experience