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Leadership Skills for Business Success Part 2
Decisiveness
Decisiveness is an exercise in good judgment, affording well informed, fast and sound decisions when needed from a leader, but it is not to be confused with inflexibility. It’s often conspicuous, which sometimes makes it difficult for leaders to enforce their decisions comfortably. Everyone has some degree of fear of being liable for a conspicuous, albeit incorrect, decision.
However, the alternative is worse. Even though you are less conspicuous if you remain indecisive, the chances of facing more tragic consequences are higher and will be remembered by others much longer. Decisiveness is an important rule in leadership, the decisions you are willing to make will have a direct impact on how you’re accepted as a leader. Deciding by going with your gut feeling or intuition wouldn’t hurt either.
Purposefulness
Every business needs a vision to set its direction and every successful leader can tune into that vision to achieve success. Business books of yesteryears clearly advocate businesses using vision as a resource, but having a vision in the 21st Century may not be enough for today’s leaders. What may be more advantageous today is the ability to own a strong sense of purpose and the ability to convey this purposefulness to your employees and co-workers. Purposefulness can be more powerful than a vision because it shares the ambition of growing your business with others. Understanding what the real purpose behind the vision is will inspire others. Collaborative Skills Technology has opened up new avenues for communicating and working in today’s work force. Today’s business environment benefits greatly from a culture of collaboration within your business and across all departments, both internally and externally. The Internet makes this extremely easy to do at a very low cost.
Collaboration is a technique that can quickly add to your bottom line if you are able to develop a system where everyone can play their part in contributing ideas or increasing sales.
Innovate and Execute
Another advantage of creating a culture of collaboration is the constant exchange of innovative ideas within your organisation. To be a great leader, become the person that everyone approaches when they have a new idea or innovative approach to a problem.
Leadership means understanding that you don’t have to come up with all the ideas yourself; you can also nurture growth and innovation in others that will benefit everyone.
Sales Channel Strategy for Business Success Pt 2
Create Multi-channel Strategies
The channel spectrum that has evolved in most markets is characterized by a wide spectrum of choices, ranging from highly efficient, logistics oriented channels to highly focused, service oriented businesses. Few manufacturers can assure optimum market presence by selling via only a single channel type. Market share leaders will include a variety of channels in their mix and provide a differentiated offering through the channel to reflect the unique characteristics, needs, and market value of each channel type utilized.
Make Smart Choices in Channel Selection
One of the key changes occurring in most channel classes is consolidation. It is rare to find the true independent operator today. Given this consolidation, you run a higher risk than ever before associated with a poor choice of channel partner.
There are fewer alternatives to offer you market presence and share if your existing relationship does not work out. Winning channel managers address this risk through a more considered approach to channel selection. More time is spent up front defining the ideal characteristics of a channel partner. These characteristics usually include financial and management capabilities to support growth, sales and marketing capability to support your programs and goals, and operations considerations to help drive efficiency.
Tackle Channel Conflict Management Strategically
In an environment where multiple channel strategies are normal, conflict management should be considered an integral part of the strategy planning process. A fair and impartial approach to channel management helps control conflict through a variety of ground rules, around access to brand, product authorization, and economics that reflect the role of the channel. Clear policies and consistent enforcement of authorization, channel standing and termination provide the most level playing field for your channel partners, allowing for effective conflict management.
Use Channel Pricing to Manage Market Complexity
You may still base your channel pricing on volume. This approach fails frequently in the environment where you utilize multiple channels with significantly differing business models. The volume based approach invariably favours the logistics oriented channel over the service based models. This leads to channel conflict and puts strain on relationships with the service based channel model.
A more pragmatic approach to channel pricing is a value based compensation model. This approach places a value on each of the functions the channel performs for you, allowing your overall payments to the channel to more directly represent their role in your go to market strategy.
Create Programs for Strategic Advantage
The most successful businesses take the time to assure their programs offered through the channel partners are linked to market dynamics. These programs are carefully designed within the context of the market map. Then you can expect a much higher return on the resource investment.
Leadership Skills for Business Success Part 1
Adaptability
As a leader, adaptability means reacting in an effective manner to shifting circumstances in your business environment. Everybody experiences adaptive challenges, but leaders are keen to resolve these issues with a carefully thought out plan of action. If there is one trait that every business leader needs most in today’s business environment, it is adaptability.
If adaptability is not your strongest asset, then hone your skills. Learn to accept difference as just that, difference, not a problem. Develop ways to anticipate problems and prepare backup plans to effectively cope with those problems. Keep an open mind and commit yourself to learning constantly, learning quickly and reacting accordingly. Adopt an approach of flexibility when faced with any situations that require adaptability.
Remember that if you design your work style around a plan that provides plenty of adaptability, you will be able to provide better support and leadership to your team or company. You’ll also be the person that others turn to for guidance when things change or an unexpected crisis arises. Lead by example, if you show them that you are adaptable, open-minded and flexible you’ll discover more opportunities opening up for you.
People Skills
The ability to observe people in your business. This gives you the insight needed to take the appropriate action required for the right result.
The ability to communicate, effectively. Contrary to popular belief, it is not easy to get ideas across to a group of people when attempting to make the right decision or reach a solution. A leader should be able to communicate effectively to everyone, not just some people, in order to be productive.
The ability to motivate gives you the leadership edge to get the best out of those who work for you or with you.
Developing better people skills, specifically in the areas highlighted above, helps you attain your business objectives much faster by working more productively with today’s very knowledgeable workforce. It is about genuinely connecting with those you work with and who work for you. When you connect well with others, you develop a trusting, productive relationship that benefits everyone.
Self Awareness Leaders who are aware of how they are perceived by others or how they impact the behaviour of others are more likely to succeed than those who are not self aware. Most of us are guilty of believing we are better than we really are because of intent. Unfortunately, living our lives on intent and assuming others can read our minds or instinctively understand us can be a recipe for disaster.Others can only judge us based on our behaviours, which can often lead to misunderstandings and miscommunication. You can not, as a leader, assume that everyone around you instinctively understands the “how and why” behind what you do. You need to practice self awareness in order to establish a more positive working relationship with your employees and co-workers.
Identify your personal strengths and weaknesses and then determine what you need to do to overcome them, whether it is explaining things more clearly, being more willing to compromise or developing better team-building skills. Remember, even if you don’t see your flaws, those around you do. If you are self aware, people will see that you are making the effort to overcome your faults, a very important trait of a great leader.
Business Results – Critical Success Factors
These are the critical success factors that will, if not performed properly, impede all organisations from achieving consistent results:
Communication,
Goal setting and Goal achievement skills,
Attitudes and Alignment
Communication is the key to unlocking the potential within businesses as well as individuals. When the goals are in alignment with the vision and consistently communicated from top down, then performance excellence is much more likely to happen. Inconsistent communication contributes to missed targets and lowers the performance for the entire organisation.
Goal setting and goal achievement are learned skills. Unfortunately, many presume that these skills are acquired during our educational experiences. Also, these skills are not actively taught in the corporate setting. Yet, consistent goal achievement or the results are what every organisation seeks.
Attitudes drive behaviours that result in change. Many companies focus on trying to change negative behaviours because they are experiencing negative change. However, when the negative attitudes are replaced with positive attitudes, those attitudes will drive positive behaviours creating positive change. By failing to address negative attitudes, new trends, changes or initiatives, the result is wasted resources creating a negative drain on the profitability.
Alignment is necessary to ensure that the desired results are achieved. Performance excellence happens when the strategies, systems and people are working together to build loyal internal customers that drive loyal external customers. The much heard adage about “Getting everyone to row in the same direction” is true, but probably should be amended to include the following “by using the same paddles.”
When these Critical Success Factors work together, results happen quicker and create a culture of working, “smarter and not harder.” The following questions may help you to achieve the consistent results that you desire as you work your strategic plan:
Do I know with total accuracy that every employee can clearly articulate the top three goals for the organisation?
Does every person within the organisation consistently set and achieve all of his or her personal and professional goals?
Does everyone within the organisation at all times consistently demonstrate positive attitudes?
Are the strategies, systems and people in alignment, to build loyal internal customers?
Sales Channel Strategy for Business Success Pt 1
Capture and Use Detailed Market Information
A broad and deep understanding of the market is critical to the creation of a sustainable market position. Winning marketers have developed a ‘map’ of their market, including the most actionable segment definition, profit potential, buying behaviours and decision processes, size, outlook, needs, expectations, competitive dynamics and sourcing preferences. The market map provides an objective context for internal discussions regarding strategy alternatives and resource allocation decisions.
Accelerate the Planning Process
Markets are changing faster than ever before and so must your planning process. You cannot get caught in the never ending cycle of analysis planning that is characteristic of many organizations today. The planning process of the future is one that is decision centric, rather than analysis centric. The planning process should be designed to use the existing body of knowledge of your organization. Senior managers should be more involved, and involved earlier, in your annual planning process.
Rather than a management meeting to culminate a lengthy analysis conducted by several layers of the organization, the plan should be initiated by senior management. Use the senior management meeting to kick off the planning process and define the strategy, then let the organization validate the assumptions. The result will be a quicker developed plan, much more reflective of current market reality, and one in which senior managers are much more invested.
Streamline Your Organization for Speed and Flexibility
Effective market management will require speed in decision making and flexibility in action. An organizational structure that supports this will consolidate channel management under one group within the organization. In addition, consolidating all products, programs, and channel relationships will serve to enhance your market power.
Regain the Power of Your Brand
One of the most vital tools you have to retain customer relationships and power in the marketplace is your brand. Therefore, you will be well served to reinvest in establishing brand value. This will be done by clearly articulating the value your brand stands for and consistently delivering against this value. Brand value will be a powerful tool to secure your market presence.
Win at the Local Level
A local market management philosophy may be the single biggest factor that separates the winners today. Customers have a wider range of channel choices than ever before. Information is more widely available. Customer segments are using these choices and information to evolve their buying behaviours in different ways and at different rates. The result is that the ‘map’ of local markets is likely to vary widely, and the most appropriate channel strategy is likely to vary significantly from market to market. The successful marketer will recognize these differences. Local market managers will be given the autonomy and flexibility to customize the local channel strategy to local conditions.
Corporate policies serve as a set of guidelines and programs serve as a menu from which the local manager designs the unique channel mix to optimize share and profitability. Winning marketers have recognized that it often requires different skill sets and compensation for the local market manager operating under this model versus a traditional sales capacity.
Boost Profits In Four Simple Steps
One of the most common mistakes companies make when they are trying to boost their profits is to try and get new customers. Typically this behaviour is a reflection of their history. When they were new, they probably had zero or just a few customers. To survive, they had to get more. Getting new customers made sense.For companies that are out of survival mode, and are instead trying to boost their profitability, acquiring new customers is not the best strategy.
Studies by Cap Gemini and Gartner Group have shown that depending on the industry, it costs 3-7 times more money to acquire a new customer than to get an existing customer to make a new purchase.The best profit boosting opportunities lie in optimising the relationships you have with your existing customers. Here are four simple steps to do just that.
Find and Strengthen Your Pillars
Do you know which five of your customers contribute the most to your bottom line each year? Can you name them off the top of your head? Can all the employees in your company name them? If not, that is a problem to be addressed, and addressed quickly.
Depending on the size of the organisation, a loss of any of the top five customers can range from serious to catastrophic. These clients are the pillars supporting your company. Think of your business as a structure sitting in the middle of shark infested waters. Five pillars are arranged in a circle and your business balances on top of them. What happens if one or two of those pillars shrink. What happens if one of them goes away completely?
Part of the key to optimising profits is securing your pillars. If you look at the amount of time your organisation spends on customer service, and break it down by customer, would you find that your “pillars” are the five customers who get the most service?Most likely they do not. “Problem” customers usually command the most attention, followed closely by efforts to get new customers. Change that. Focus a proportionate amount of attention to customers based on how critical they are to your business.
Take the resources being applied to the problem customers and focus them on the pillars. Task those people with making your relationship with the pillars so strong, that they will never crumble. Challenge them to find ways to help the pillars be successful. Be a pillar to your pillars.
Inventory Your Offerings
Starting with your pillar customers, take an inventory of all the products and services that you currently provide. Rank them in order of profitability. When all the offerings have been identified, categorise them from one to five. Ones should be the twenty percent of the offerings that are most profitable. Twos will be the next twenty percent, on down to five, which will be those products and services that are in the bottom 20% in terms of profitability.
Now comes the interesting part. Create a grid with clients across the top, and offerings down the left side. Arrange the clients in order of how much they impact your bottom line. The client with the most impact should be the first one, and the least impact client should be the last. For the offerings, which are on the left side of the grid, keep them in order of most profitable to least profitable.When you have finished creating the grid, go through and for each client put check marks on the products and services you provide for them. This is your profitability map.
Attack the Gaps
Look at your pillars. How are you doing in terms of providing your full suite of offerings to them? Any boxes without checks represent an opportunity for you to solidify your relationship. Start with the offerings that are ranked low and not being used by your pillars, and focus on getting those blanks filled in.Now look at the rest of your map. Where are the check marks? Where are the gaps?
Every gap represents an opportunity to boost your profits. Start with the more profitable clients, and try to fill in all the ones and twos. Educate those customers about the additional products and services you offer. Find out what needs they have and identify ways you can fill them. These efforts will not only strengthen your relationship, but it will also make them more profitable clients for you.
Learn From your “Lovers”
As you are implementing the above step, take another look at your graph. Find the five customers who use the greatest percentage of your products and services. These are the customers who just love what you do. They represent a tremendous learning opportunity.There is some reason or group of reasons that these customers love you so much. If you can find out those reasons, you can apply that knowledge to the way you interact with the rest of your customers.
Perhaps a particular salesperson has figured out something that is really working. Maybe the account representative or customer service contact is particularly good. Whatever the reason is, you need to know.Interview those “lovers” and learn from them. If they say it is because of a particular person in your company, interview that person and find out what they do that is working so well.
Within those interviews lies profit boosting information. Gather it and then apply the learning to the way you interact with your other customers. Again, start with the pillars and then work your way across the customer list.Most organisations acquire customers by filling a single particular need. The key to boosting profits is not to go out and get more of those customers. Find and strengthen your pillars so that your organisation is well supported, inventory your offerings, fill the gaps, and learn from your “lovers”.
These four steps are the way, to boost your profits and to ensure business success.
Sales Motivation and the Role of Leadership
Leadership is Motivation, the Leader is a Motivator
We’re not talking about the kind of motivator who arrives and excites everyone and then leaves. That is not motivation. Real motivation lasts longer than twenty-four hours. Real motivation is the key to effective leadership, and leadership is the key to effective motivation.
When organisations establish quotas for their sales teams, they should involve their sales people in the process of the setting of their targets. Effective sales managers give their teams, an overview of the full picture and what the company is trying to achieve. Then, they work with each person to establish individual targets that will meet or exceed the corporate objectives.
Every target must be specific and detailed, then, your people can visualise its outcome. Make the target important to the person who is responsible for achieving it, if not, they may lose interest, particularly if it is a longer term objective.
Targets should have a good chance of being achievable while still challenging the individual to push themselves beyond their existing comfort zone. Each target must be relevant to the main objective of the organisation and relevant to the overall success of the company. Set a time frame and deadline for each target and ensure the deadline is realistic but, at the same time, challenging.
Work with your team members to help them determine the targets that would be most appropriate for their development and growth and work with them to develop the appropriate action steps to achieve these targets and you will see a noticeable improvement in their performance. Communicate and tell your team what is happening, sales people are hungry for information and from my experience, can be trusted with company details. Unfortunately, too many corporations and their middle managers feel that people should only be given information that is relevant to their specific job. Keep them aware of the progress you are making in achieving your targets, people are naturally curious and want to know how they are doing. Do not reveal confidential information, but share information about the overall status of the company. If sales are down and you need your people to focus on generating new accounts or business then tell them. If costs are climbing then advise your employees that they need to be aware of their expenses.
Regular update meetings, email correspondence, broadcast voice mails are just some of the ways you can communicate with your team. Another effective method is through casual discussions. Communication must be clear and concise, employees want to know where they stand and, all but a few, want to do a good job. They want to know how, you, as their manager, view their performance. That’s why it is critical that you give them direction and feedback on a regular basis.
Experience has taught me that people will work harder for someone who praises them and recognises the effort they put into their work. Acknowledge their energy and performance, their effort and commitment, how hard they worked and how involved they were with it.Your sales people have a lot of knowledge and information and can often contribute valuable suggestions to improve the business. If you really want to create a team of highly motivated sales people take the time to listen to their comments and ideas. Foster an environment that encourages the open sharing of information. Great leaders are always open to new ideas and methods of improving business and some of the best ideas come from the customer facing employees.
This last point is the most important. If you want a highly motivated sales team, then you must lead by setting the example. You must demonstrate enthusiasm, energy, team cooperation, honesty, integrity and commitment. Treat people with respect and dignity, give them the tools to excel, grow and develop and encourage them to participate and get involved.
Ask them for feedback, listen to their comments, and act on suggestions that will help your business succeed. Set and communicate high standards, provide positive reinforcement when your team members perform and involve them. You will soon see a team that will do almost anything to help you succeed.
Providing Excellent Customer Service Part 2
Customers and clients are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the merely adequate. For them, extraordinary service is the rule, not the exception. Anything less and they’re happy to vote with their feet and their wallets.
For business success you need to help your business establish and maintain an ongoing climate of service excellence.
Share Information
If you run a retail business, business management tools, can be invaluable in tracking critical data, such as what items and services are selling particularly well. If you have that data, don’t keep it a state secret. Sharing the information with your employees lets them know what is hitting on all cylinders. It also helps them promote these products or services to customers. Sharing information with others is a really positive step. In other words, don’t keep critical customer information close to the chest. That holds true with businesses other than retail.
Customer Relationship Management, (CRM), software lets you share valuable information about clients and customers with your entire organization. Customer buying habits, particular needs, interests and other data can be stored in a central location and easily shared.
Share The Commitment.
Nothing can prove more destructive to a commitment to extraordinary service than management for whom the concept is little more than lip service. Walk the walk by buying into that commitment just as much as you hope your people will. Make sure you reward top performance. Invest the time and expense in any sort of training that may help employees carry out and maintain high performance standards.
Don’t forget yourself and others in the front office. Make sure that training takes in everyone, not just sales, marketing and other front line employees. Training is an important part of creating a lifelong culture for service excellence since it helps build an understanding of the concept of service. And that means a top-down commitment. Leadership should set the tone for the entire effort.
Don’t Expect Magic Overnight
Another potential hurdle to extraordinary service is the expectation that it’s like flicking a light switch, on it goes, and everything’s hunky dory.
The truth is, exceptional service takes time to take hold in an organisation, particularly one with an array of people and departments. Give it enough time. Review performance every four to six months. It is essential to stay the course so you can improve service ratings.
Expect Mistakes And React Accordingly
The road to top notch service is not without its bumps. Don’t pretend they are not there. Rather, make them a part of the journey by acknowledging a slip up and, in so doing, recommitting to extraordinary performance.
For example, if a customer receives the wrong item, don’t stop at making sure they get the right one. Let the customer know that you are sorry for the mistake and build their confidence that it will not happen again. When you apologise for problems and really listen, you build a relationship. Build customer loyalty, not just satisfaction.
© James Chapman Business Leader Coachinghttp://www.adversityovercome.com
Providing Excellent Customer Service Part 1
Customers and clients are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the merely adequate. For them, extraordinary service is the rule, not the exception. Anything less and they’re happy to vote with their feet and their wallets.
That makes extraordinary service necessary, not just desirable. And that, in turn, mandates a strategy to help ensure that your business matches that special service standard on a daily basis.
For business success you need to help your business establish and maintain an ongoing climate of service excellence.
Define What Extraordinary Really Means
It’s an easy term to toss about, but knowing what exceptional service entails is essential to establishing the procedures and the mindset with which to achieve it. So, delineate what extraordinary means, is it lower price? Keeping appointments on time or making certain that telephone service reps always say “please” and “thank you”?
By knowing precisely what is merely good enough, and what takes your business beyond that, you get a firm handle on what you need to do to hit that goal on a consistent basis.
That means calling a customer to let them know that the van they are expecting is going to arrive on time. “We pledge to arrive on time, in a clean shiny truck, with two friendly uniformed drivers,” but so can anyone.
What makes it unique is if the truck crew call the customer 15 minutes ahead of time, and let them know they are on time. This has a huge impact on the customer. Calling ahead sets exceptional expectations, even if they are running late, the customer appreciates the call in advance.
Ask If You Are Not Sure
Many companies may find it understandably difficult to genuinely pinpoint what extraordinary service really entails. So, do some legwork. Conduct focus groups with customers to see what they really value. Ask your complaints department, if you have one, to identify topics that are frequent targets of dissatisfaction.
Often, you may find extraordinary translates to a holistic grouping of issues, not just one product or service. Being extraordinary means offering someone a truly exceptional experience. The quality of something may be good, but it’s the overall experience that will really define customer loyalty.
Allow Your People To Be Extraordinary
Saying you would like to have extraordinary service and actually carrying it out is a tough nut without the necessary authority.
One of the biggest challenges of providing a consistently top-drawer performance is shifting conditions. What’s appropriate for one customer may not work with another.
For instance, one customer may be so dissatisfied that a partial refund may be in order. By contrast, other customers who are a bit less peeved may be happy with a problem solved without any sort of refund.
So, allow employees reasonable freedom of choice to read a situation and react accordingly. For instance, giving employees a budgetary allotment which they can use, as needed, to address refunds or other unexpected costs associated with giving customers the benefit of the doubt.
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© James Chapman http://technorati.com/tag/Business+Success
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