Archive for April, 2009

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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_oYou 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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Enhance your Green USPs

April 4, 2009 at 2:26 pm · Filed under Bottom line, Clean & Green

In most discussionsabout sustainable brands and product or service offerings, someone inevitably asks;

“Will customers pay a premium for green products?”

With the downturn in the economy, this question has been arising earlier in the conversation and is framed more as a statement:

“Customers won’t pay a premium for green products, especially now, will they?”

Perhaps this is the wrong question to ask, and framing the issue this way leads to lost opportunities — for the environment, for customers, and for the business.

Focusing on whether or not customers will pay a premium for green products brings with it a number of constraining assumptions:

  1. Green products do not have any tangible benefits for customers other than making them feel good about helping the planet
  2. That green products are more expensive to produce than non-green products. But for businesses that understand customer insight and innovation, these assumptions are simply not valid.

While customers probably won’t pay extra for the intangible benefit of helping the planet, they will pay for the value of direct benefits they receive. The trick is to align direct customer benefits (for your target segments) with environmental benefits. Offering products at competitive prices that work well while helping the environment gives you a chance to add value for your customers and to increase your market share.

Not all consumers and customers will pay a premium and not in all product categories. You need to do your customer insight homework to identify the opportunities. Understand which aspects of “green” matter to which customer segments and how these attributes compare to other features, functions, and price. Some consumers will place a high value on the safety signaling of packaged food brands that have demonstrated environmental sensitivity even if they won’t pay for a lower lifecycle carbon footprint.

The second assumption, about green products being more expensive to produce, is also a trap. Certainly, green products will often be more expensive to produce if they are made through the same processes that are used to make their less environmentally friendly counterparts. However, this doesn’t take into account the impact of innovation.

Embedding a sustainability mindset up front into product design and process engineering will yield green products that can be priced profitably at parity or below the price of comparable non-green products.

Going green in business should be like any other business decision;

  • Its good to stand for something, you will differentiate yourself.
  • Be sure you’re not a me too.
  • Green credentials can be a by-product of your efficiency, sustainability and innovation efforts….. to increase sales and profitability.

These are compeling reasons to green your business and with customer insight and innovation, we don’t have to put customers in the position of trading off direct customer value and environmental value.

Adapted from HBR article

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New Business model?…..Try standing for something

April 3, 2009 at 9:11 pm · Filed under Culture Vultures, Disruptive Behaviour ·Tagged

Business models aren’t today’s fundamental economic challenge. There’s nothing wrong with simple, one-sided business models. In fact, the opposite is often true: business model innovation is exactly the wrong thing to focus on. Consider finance. Securitization was a breakthrough business model innovation for banks. Everything was remixed by everyone. Yet, toxic junk was mostly what was flowing through that new business model. Business model innovation amplified value destruction. Banks who didn’t play the securitization game — and stuck to simple, one-sided deposit-taking business models — are today’s survivors.

Creating something valuable in the first place is. When we can make valuable stuff, there are a plethora of business models to choose from, some old, some new, some untested, some tried and true. When we can’t, no amount of business model innovation can save us from implosion.

“Monetizing” + “business models” = zombieconomy. The reason monetization is a dirty word is simple. It blinds us to value creation, at the expense of value capture. When we seek to monetize, we end up chasing the same old lame competitive advantage. I win, you (and you, and you) lose. Put another way: “monetizing” toxic junk — from CDOs, to Hummers, to McMansions, to Big Macs – is how we got into this mess.

It is by rediscovering how to make stuff that’s not toxic junk in the first place that we’ll get out of the mess lame, evil, brain-dead 20th century thinking has left us in. That’s the challenge of a new generation of revolutionaries. And it’s not about new business models: it’s about reconceiving authentic, deep, value creation.

Forget business models. Focus on ideals. Reconceiving value creation depends on new ideals. Ideals shape what we wish to achieve in the first place: freedom, peace, fairness, justice — all are ideals vastly more powerful than mere business models. That’s because they are what ensure the value we are creating is authentic, deep, meaningful value — not just the shabby, threadbare illusion of value.

Tomorrow’s prosperity was stolen by yesterday’s so-called leaders. In a world where people are becoming rapidly worse and worse off, there is nothing more revolutionary than an ideal.

So the next time you hear an old dude banging the business model drum, or worse, the sounding the “monetization” bullhorn, let him know the 20th century was yesterday. Today’s challenge is building a better economy — not hawking the same old mass-produced, toxic, self-destructive junk slightly differently. Challenge him with this: you’ve got a business model. But do you have any ideals? Because without the latter, the former is worth about as much as Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, or Detroit.

Adapted from Umair Haque in HBR

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Honest business model.. Pt2

April 3, 2009 at 8:13 pm · Filed under Case Studies, Disruptive Behaviour

  • Got a problem with employee contribution to innovation?
  • Got concerns about succession planning?
  • Got concerns about long term sustainability of the business?

The employee owned business sector in the UK is growing because co-owned companies tend to be successful, competitive, good to work for, and sustainable.

Successive Governments have promoted employee ownership because they recognise its potential contribution to the economy.

A range of factors combine to make employee owned businesses an asset to the UK economy:

  • Independent research suggests that a combination of shared ownership and employee participation delivers superior business performance.
  • Because they’re co-owners, staff in employee owned businesses tend to be more entrepreneurial and committed to the company and its success.
  • Because they’re run in an open way, employee owned businesses tend to have a strong commitment to corporate social responsibility and involvement with the communities they operate in.
  • The employee owned business sector adds to the diversity of Britain’s economy – by offering a vibrant and different model for achieving business success.
  • Because they have high employment standards, involve staff and give everyone a stake, employee owned businesses are good at recruiting and retaining talented, committed staff.
  • Employee owned companies are good at innovation because managers go out of their way to consult, share information about the company, and give staff responsibility.

Doubt the benefits ? Just look at Tullis Russell Grp.

Further info

Cooperative Development Scotland

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