In Hard Times, The Best CEOs Wear Rose Colored Glasses

At lunch today with friend and marketing expert Brian Massey, we pondered companies we know who seem unfazed by the current mood, and agreed it seems that the best companies view economic downturns as opportunities rather than mandates to hunker down.

Difficult times can certainly clear the mind and shake things up. But some companies to take things further by tightening their core business and strategy and doubling down when everyone else is running for cover.

When I returned to my office I did a quick search and found a great study from Bain & Company describing several companies who deftly took advantage of the last recession by acquiring other companies on the cheap, gaining market share with targeted pricing, and taking advantage of more favorable terms from vendors and suppliers, among other techniques.

Bain’s tips for contrarian growth?

1. Stay focused.
2. Identify your key strengths and weaknesses.
3. Define your core strategy.
4. Maintain strategic discipline.
5. And–if you don’t see early results, reevaluate and be ready to cut your losses.

Even during boom time, the study says nearly 20% of U.S. industries will be battling downturns in any given year. For companies hoping to get ahead during down times, you may not have to wait long: your sector may experience some turbulence-well before the next recession. Great news, right?

So cheer up! Silver linings abound…

3 Top Questions For Good Business Karma

I recently found myself on the receiving end of a pitch from a potential ‘referral-friend’ at a coffee shop and, though I liked the guys, they spent very little time getting to know me, instantly relegating them in my mind to “Vendor I Know” rather than a trusted advisor whom I would feel comfortable sending to my clients. They even sparked up some slides (Uh…more coffee please!?)

In fairness, they were new to networking and the “give-and-give” of modern business relationship-building. They just went at it as if they had a lot of information to spew and little time to spew it in.

Most successful executives understand the value of “karmatic goodness”. They tend to have highly evolved empathic skills and seek out ways to help others in business. Thus they are generally more successful than those who merely seek out opportunity. (Ironically, opportunists wind up with fewer opportunities.)

Before (or preferably, instead of) launching into a pitch, here are three good questions you should ask potential referral partners:

1: “How exactly do you provide value to your customers?”

2. “Who (title, company type) is your ideal target customer?”

3. “How can I help you?”

To step it up a notch, come up with one prospect/lead for the person and help make a meeting happen. Though it may feel funny at first to help business people when “they’ve never done anything for you”, but rest assured, more likely than not they will eagerly reciprocate if they know what’s good for them. Conversely, you are almost guaranteed a wasted meeting if you trust that just because someone knows who you are they will refer leads to you.

Nothing builds a relationship faster than true service coupled with energetic follow-through. Make serving others your number one priority and you will find karma to be very kind to your business.

Got an interactive strategy, or just a web site?

Just returned from Houston with a new gig helping companies increase their revenue via innovative digital marketing. Having enjoyed a stint at another interactive firm recently, I’m excited about bringing companies a few leaps forward in their interactive efforts.

First thing I did was go to Fry’s to get a printer for my home office, and after gathering product info about the printer I want, I walked out with nothing. Why? I needed to get to my computer to compare shop, of course.

We live and work (and importantly, shop) digitally.  You should market and sell to match. Methods of reaching customers are changing radically (see my 9/4/08 post ”Please  Come Fire All My Salespeople“). A comprehensive digital marketing strategy is essential for our always-on connected world.

So what’s wrong with traditional marketing approaches? Nothing as part of the mix, but modern marketing should lean quite heavily toward Interactive and digital. All roads lead here. Print and top-down broadcast are simply too slow and static for today’s consumers, and analytics and measurement mean the right money is spent reaching the right audience.

Simply prettying-up your web site won’t cut it. Any real digital effort should involve a holistic strategy, experienced implementation, and disciplined measurement and refinement.

Free advice here so ping me!

Don’t let The Office become your office

Just caught another great episode of NBC’s The Office and (business nerd that I am) it got me thinking about what motivates others and how that aligns with a company’s vision…

There are basically three methods to motivating others: 1) Delivering on their needs/wants 2) fear, and 3) intimidation. Certainly you can tell employees what to do, but if they don’t buy into your vision they will usually do the bare minimum required of them because they don’t have any understanding of where they’re headed, or why. And unless they do, they’re not exicited about their work. So you end up with a morose or frustrated bunch of people who need to be cajoled constantly to produce. Like the good folks at Dunder-Mifflin.

A better route to motivate is through a vested interest in your company’s direction. This can be done with all types of rewards, not just financial. 

How about a sense of purpose as a reward? Today’s professionals, especially in creative or rapidly changing industries and especially younger employees, need to know the work they are doing means something to them, their families, their co-workers and/or the world at large. For your vision to become reality, everyone in your organzation must share it. Create a vision and what it stands for, build trust, and outline the rule of the road to get there.

Otherwise, just move to Scranton and get it over with.

Beware the trade show guy offering beer

Before you man your company’s booth at the big industry shin-dig, you might have a shot of paranoia to go with your company’s Koolaid…

I’m in D.C. today meeting with the other charter members of the International Business Development Council. One of my fellow leaders is Ken Garrison, CEO of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP). The first thing Ken hands me when we meet is SCIP’s fascinating book, “Conference And Trade Show Intelligence” which essentially maps out how you, yes YOU! can outflank your rivals by chatting up trade show booth monkeys and getting them to blab.

Trade shows are tremendous sources of information. You can learn about new products, customer feedback, competitor strategy and all sorts of juicy info. SCIP recommends planning and strategizing information gathering, right down to pre-show recon and wearing clothes that “blend in.” The younger and more enthusiastic your target’s booth attendant, the better.

Among tips for successful intelligence sourcing? Feign boredom, don’t drink, dress down and just be plain so people don’t take notice of you… Sounds like most of the conferences I’ve been to!

The New Entrepreneurs don’t need no stinkin venture money

In my role as a Bootstrap-Austin subgroup leader I am consistently immersed in entrepreneurial issues at the grassroots level. I love it. I am always fascinated by the journey nearly all start-ups go through. The soul-searching,  the freedom, the riches! …Er, ok… the freedom!

Entrepreneurs look a bit different these days. They are more practical. And typically more creative than they are technical. 10 years ago, for instance, it wasn’t uncommon for two engineers to hit on an idea and build a new system, then go try to find venture money to scale it, hoping to eventually take the company public and of course, become gazillionaires. 

But it didn’t quite work out that way for most of us start-up guys back then. Assuming you could build a solid product, land institutional funding multiple times, with few mistakes, there was still that prickly revenue problem. Even if you brought in a few customers, chances were by the time any exit ever happened your equity had dwindled sharply. Not exactly a yellow brick road to Richistan…

Take a look at all the Austin venture-funded companies for the last 10 years –you will find few relatively few founders who became extremely wealthy by selling their company in the end. Yet a sale is what generally happens to the more successful venture-funded companies, if they’re lucky.

It seems that the shakeout that followed those times has created a new and improved entrepreneur, one who understands the market limits of cool technology, the perils (and scarcity) of venture funding, and the idea that not all companies must go public to achieve sustained success.

A common characteristic among these entrepreneurs is humility – they see a business need, figure out how to tackle it, build a demo, get a few customers to take a chance on them, and grow organically. Venture money, even if it were available, would likely corrupt the journey and actually become a journey in itself, always focusing on the next round rather than on customers and products. These are cornerstones of the Bootstrap ethos, which I encourage any budding entrepreneur to check out. 

With technology as easily accessed as it is now, the costs of developing products has declined, which means creative, non-technical entrepreneurs can look past technology, and funding, and zero in on customer pain.

From TechCrunch50: New web technologies rocket tech start-ups

Interesting convo on TechCrunch50 LiveStream panel on angel investing. The Silicon Valley-based panelists, mostly angel investors themselves, are debating what it takes to get new technology ventures off the ground these days. Highlighted as a key difference (certainly from what I remember in the “good old days”) was that the cost of building new web-based products and services has dramatically declined — new start ups can have a product built and tested in an open source or even .NET framework in a fraction of the time it used to take. I enjoyed this “ease of entry” recently with the launch of the SBDP.org, a fairly sophisticated site that two years ago would have been prohibitively expensive for us to build.

Interestingly and to some protest, panel moderator Jason Calacanis enthusiastically quotes an academic “study” saying the likelihood of getting a new technology company off the ground outside Silicon Valley is really, really low.  Just a tip for our friends at TechCrunch: Leave Calcanis at home when you come to Austin for the Meet-Up this month!

BusinessDevelopments joins Technorati

Exciting watching this 316-step process come together.

here you go Technorati Gods…Technorati Profile

Collaboration and partnering leads to innovation

BD guru says: Innovation not come only from within, young graasshoppah……

A study by Boston Consulting group says that “two out of the three top sources for the best ideas now lie outside the enterprise.” You don’t need to be a financial modeler to know that companies with strong partnering models are typically the best performing. CEOs are more eager to partner and engage with other organizations than ever before. Why? Alliances can mean a dramatic improvement in the quantity and quality of innovation. The days of “built here” are gone – the market is moving too fast. 

Time to hit the phones!

Please come fire all my salespeople!

With the start of the fall season, many new sales and business development advisory opportunities seem to be crossing my desk. This year, however, they seem to share a pattern: the CEO or VP Sales is “frustrated” with their sales teams (expletives deleted) and would I please come fire them all. They complain that their people “just don’t have it in them” to constantly cold call and keep a high rate of activity which of course will make everyone successful forever. “If only they’d do it my way!” I hear. 

Everyone wants to hire that nearly-deranged person who lives for cold calling and rips through a call list just for the adrenaline rush. But even if you can find candidates with the right mix of experience, the good ones are prohibitively expensive and can be a management hassle. In my experience, someone who gets off to cold calling 100 times a day is usually deficit in other areas and can’t do much else.  And they churn quickly.

Fine! you say. That’s what you want. But think about who your prospects are. If they are more than just meat for a boiler-room phone center, I suggest that you look at the way you currently go to market.

The days of picking up the phone and convincing a stranger to spend large sums of money with you are simply dead. The environment has changed. What buyer in their right mind (especially in IT) actually picks up random phone calls these days? Caller ID and email filters mean never having to speak to a salesperson. 

Update your sales strategy and move your company into the age of collaborative new business acquisition. Utilize the amazing new sales and web 2.0 tools and hire awesome service-oriented sales talent – not phone weasels. This takes a new set of skills, new hiring approach, management style, which of course, starts at the top. 

Next (related) post: “Generation Y Joins the Sales Team” (or “Sally Get Your Gun”)