The 80-Hour Week

What I have learned from the guys who fixed up my house

I've taken a huge step in my already-crowded life and moved to a small town in an area of Southern Ontario I don't know very well. Now instead of a 1930-'s era flat in the centre of a big city, I live in a house built around 1880, with a wrap-around porch, gingerbread trim and a garden. Nothing too grand, and for sure not the biggest house on the street, but charming and just the right size for me and the dog.

My office is on the second floor, and as I write this I have a view of the maple tree in my front yard, a gorgeous pinky-red that glows brilliantly on this rather gray day.

(The rain is preventing me from finishing painting the garage, but that's a whole other story.)

One of the first things I did when I moved here was to meet a  bunch of wonderful tradespeople. Many of you will not have had that experience - I sure have had less positive experiences in the past! You know, marketing and small business often gets awfully complicated, and I've appreciated the whack on the side of the head these guys have given me.

My really estate agent, Laura, introduced me to Mike, my home inspector. Mike introduced me to Bill the painter, Sheldon the HVAC guy, Mike (2) the handyman, Mike (3) the electrician and Doug the floor guy. The girls in the next chairs at the hairdresser recommended a vet, who introduced me to Angela the dog boarding person. Bill the painter invited me to the local BNI group where I met Ken the art director who is currently working on a project with me. Tina who works with Mike (3) found me Norm the plumber.

That's a fair amount of business  with a cost of sales of zero. and it all happened in under a month.

The work these guys have done is miraculous. They showed up when they said they would, did excellent work, shared the learning they had gained in over 20 years on the job, told me when I didn't need to bother doing something so I could save a little money.

Here's what I learned:

• A core value of small business owners in this town is counting on each other for referrals. Over and over, people have told me "we want to support each other."
• They are motivated to do good work:  their friends will know if they don't, and they don't let their friends down.
• Making referrals and then hearing how well the deal went is fun!
• They don't need to prove how good they are.  They don't sell.  They  don't seem hungry.  They talk about the job and what you, the customer, needs, not about themselves.
• They have all the work they want.

The secret weapon to create meaningful and relevant client relationships

The Six Highest-Rated Tools, Tips and Tricks (part four)

We’ve been sharing the ideas participants find most helpful in my Schulich School of Executive Education course Advanced Account Management and High-Yield Selling.

Here is another winner: Curiosity

Successful business owners are addicted to two really powerful hallucinogens: their own stuff, and being right. I've said it before - I've been addicted to both in the past, so I know what I’m talking about.

Here’s how it works: we spend hours working up a sales proposal, bolstered by our own expertise, facts, research and opinions from other smart people.

Maybe we spend more hours writing a document or the ubiquitous Death by PowerPoint presentation, with graphs, and exhibits. Perhaps two or three other people in our organization look at our work, give us their received wisdom, and we rewrite it maybe two-three times, more if it’s for a big contract.

Then we present it.

So let’s suppose someone in the audience at your presentation disagrees with you. Do we engage in a thoughtful exchange of views? Heck no! We argue the point with the customer, in effect telling him or her how wrong they are, and how right we are, because we have so much invested in our proposal we can’t give up being right.

When was the last time you spent a lot of money with someone who told you how wrong you were about your own business?

I’m with an old boss of mine who said, “Let’s be wrong all the way to the bank.”

Give up being right, and start focusing on winning the order. Here’s how: be curious! Don’t tell, ask. People do business with people they know, like and trust – and who better than someone who’s so interested in your point of view he or she gets you talking about it?

Here are some questions people have found provocative, enlightening, and winning:

Open-ended probes that earn you the right to probe further

General Probes:

· Run me through your thinking on this

· How did we get to these assumptions?

· Tell me more about how you (moved from these facts to your conclusions)

· When you said... did you mean...?

Issue Probes:

· What's the most significant issue you currently face?

· What would you like to accomplish with this (program, idea, information)?

· To what extent is (growth, budget, deadlines, staffing) important?

· What other challenges do you foresee?

Implication Probes

· How do you calculate (how much money being late is costing you)?

· How does (system downtime) affect (your customers)?

· What would happen if (worst case scenario)?

Closed ended probes that demonstrate your competence

Asking intelligent and relevant questions tells clients you offer a higher level of competence, credibility and value. Prove you are an expert the customer can trust by asking technically demanding questions

· If you compare the top 20% of your revenue and profit to the bottom 20%:

o What accounts for the top 20%? Your bottom 20%?

o How do your distribution and associated costs compare?

o How does the buyer for the top 20% differ from the buyer from the bottom 20%?

· Describe your cost structure for each segment

You’ve find good reading on this subject in Secrets of Question Based Selling by Thomas A. Freese.

 

 

 

Highest-Rated Tools, Tips and Tricks: Gap Analysis

 

I started to tell you about the ideas participants find most helpful in my Schulich School of Executive Education course Advanced Account Management and High-Yield Selling.

Now let’s take a look at:

Gap Analysis

How to reduce stress, improve client relationships and protect your margins.

Gaps occur between what needs to be done and what is being done - that's not new news! You can reduce stress, improve productivity and manage profit by focusing on the most important gaps – if you can accurately assess what the gaps are.

You can create practical profiles of recurring audiences, tailor every client interaction to individual needs and do the right thing - and it's easy! Here are the questions you need to answer to identify gaps.

1. Present Performance
What promises has this customer received from me in the past 12 months?
What have I delivered?
What measurable results would the customer agree have been achieved?

2. Present Expectations
What has this customer asked for?
What conditions of satisfaction did the customer negotiate and accept? (e.g.
delivery dates, costs, service, support, ongoing contact…)
What things do they expect but not specifically discussed? Why?

3. Present Perceptions
What conditions of satisfaction would the customer say have been met?
What conditions of satisfaction would the customer say have not been met?

4. Customer Concerns
What strategic business concerns do you know the customer holds?
What strategic business concerns do you guess he/she holds?

5. Future Outcomes
What vision of the future has this customer described?
How is it different from his/her Present Expectations?

6. Satisfaction
What complaints &/or recognition has the customer expressed? (Use actual customer language.)
To what categories do they belong? (Process, Service, Cost, ROI)

7. Value
Note the actions you’ve actually taken on the customer’s behalf, compared to the results actually achieved, and the customer’s perception of their value.   

       
8. Doing the Right Thing
Describe the customer’s perception of where improvement is needed in the type of service you provide.

9. Doing Things Right
Describe the customer’s perception of where improvement is needed in the way you provide the service.
To what extent would the customer say there was sufficient sharing on “how to get things done” between him/her and you? Why?

10. Process
What data do need, but do not have, to accurately reflect your customer’s concerns and expectations?

11. Change
What actions can you take to overcome gaps, but have not taken?
What has stopped you from taking these actions?

Now you can decide what Gaps you have with your customer. Good news! There are only six major Gaps: Satisfaction, Value, Do Things Right, Do the Right Thing, Process and Change.

Be careful, though. It's easy - and misleading - to dump everything in the "Satisfaction Gap" pot. You'll need a thoughtful discussion with your colleagues, staff and managers on where to focus your efforts.

Whether you use the back of an envelope, a cocktail napkin or a calculator, doing some basic math can help you build a better business.

As you may know, I write for the Canadian Business Forum on Microsoft Small Business +. This is a great article by a colleague there.

On The Back Of An Envelope
posted July 09, 2007 by David Powell

This was the subject of an article by Jon Bentley, published March 1985 in the British Computer Society’s Computer Bulletin. It has survived many of my paper purges over the years because I so liked the concept: a few rough calculations scrawled on the back of an envelope can save huge amounts of time and money when they unearth some basic flaw in the assumptions. OK, today you’d use a calculator, but who’s going to read an article titled “The Calculator”?

I recalled this article recently, after a consultation with a client who was finding that he wasn’t bringing in as much money as an entrepreneur as he had hoped; in fact it wasn’t even as much as he had been earning as an employee. He had come for advice on improving marketing, so he could do more business. As we heard more about his process, it became clear that each job was taking at least two weeks of mostly full time activity, and was netting him around $1,500. Even if he spent no time on marketing, and still by some miracle filled his year with 26 jobs, he would be bringing in $39,000 a year. $25,000 would be a more likely result allowing for down-time and other overheads, and that wasn’t what he had in mind when he decided against the traditional employment scenario.

A quick calculation on the back of an envelope would have revealed that better marketing was not the issue. In fact he really couldn’t afford to take on more of the same business, if he was to improve his income. That particular consultation continued with us providing advice on pricing and on reducing the time spent to produce his product.

While most small business people develop a business plan when they are first starting, as time goes on, they forget to revisit the plan. Every new job or process should be quickly reviewed to see if it makes sense, and existing practices looked at from time to time to see if changes are needed.

Reality checks need not be confined to financial numbers, either. Without going overboard, think about measuring and estimating every major aspect of your process. Time, space, weight, effort, impact… you name it, it can be measured, and with more numbers, you can make better decisions.

    * You can make $10 on the resale of a fancy pillow - but have you worked out how much space 10,000 pillows will take up in your home-based business?
    * Concrete garden gnomes are going cheap from your distributor, but you’re a mail order business-maybe your carrier has a maximum weight limit, or stronger cardboard boxes will cost too much. And how many can you put on your storage shelving before it collapses?
    * You’re going to build up a mailing list by hiring someone to surf the internet for e-mail addresses-better do a test to see how many valid addresses the person can record and test per hour. Will it be worth it, and will the proposed recipients really appreciate another piece of spam?

When a measurement isn’t available, make an estimate and err on the side of caution. If your pessimistic calculations indicate that the project is feasible, then you’re probably OK, and it’s worth your while to look more closely. If the numbers don’t work out, then investing more time to get a better estimate may not be worth your while. If you do want to get a better fix, do a quick sensitivity analysis on your calculations and re-check the estimates for the numbers that make the most difference to the bottom line.

The four non-negotiable secrets for high-margin, loyal clients

Years ago, I was involved in a project that hoped to solve problems facing retail bankers: how to improve customer loyalty, and, not incidentally, how to keep bankers from burning out as they ran between being super sales people, and advisers in the incredibly stressful world of complex financial decision-making.

A core issue was defining the relationship bankers had with very profitable, loyal clients. How come these customers thought of themselves as the clients of a professional and happily took their advice with no questions asked, while others made decisions based on price and cost the bank a ton of dough?

How could the relationship be more like the one you have with your dentist? When the dentist recommends cleaning, filling or even root canal work, we might blanch at the cost, and we might negotiate it if we don't have insurance - but we still buy with no questions asked. And we don't tell the dentist what to do as she works, or change the specs on the job have way through or decide at the end of the project we're not going to pay, or even switch dentists in spite of the discomfort of having the work done.

There seem to be four key attributes, and I'll bet the way they are familiar to you from working with the clients you like best.

Trust: your client trusts that you will keep the promises you make, and act ethically. You trust that your client will do the same.

Superior Knowledge: you have the requisite expertise in your discipline or business to perform the work. Your clients accepts that you know most about the product or service, and feels no need to challenge that knowledge. You accept that your client knows most about his or her needs, and feel free to probe for understanding.

Process Credibility: the fit between the result you promise, and the means you use to achieve the result makes sense to your client. The fit between your clients' actual needs, and what they ask you to do, makes sense to you.

Single Source Accountability: when something goes wrong or there is a problem, your client holds you accountable - no questions asked, no excuses offered. When your client sees fit to inquire about the work, he speaks to you, not a "Stand in". If there is a problem in how or when you get paid for your work, you hold your client accountable under the same terms.

I'll leave this post with a couple of thoughts for you: do you have any relationships like this right now? What would you have to do differently to create this kind of relationship with more of your clients?

 

Highest-Rated Tools, Tips and Tricks: Atom of Work

A while a go I said I would share the Highest-Rated Tools, Tips and Tricks from participants in our Account Management course at the Schulich School of Business at York University. So here goes.

The Atom of Work
Every project or interaction can be seen as a simple, 4-step process. Think of it as a conversation between 2 players - the provider, and the client. Clients can be colleagues, direct reports or customers: anyone for whom you as the provider perform a service or deliver a product.

Becoming a master at using the Atom of Work can practically guarantee you will get rave reviews,  and high margins for every product or service you provide a client!

Before you can start work, there has to be an overlap between what's important to the client, and what's important to you. If you sell trucks, and the client doesn't need to transport goods, chances are you won't do work together. Or if you are an IT guru, and the client is my 86-year old mother, working together is possible, but unlikely.

It's interesting to think of work, or projects, or interactions - however you want to call it - unfolding in 4 steps centered around what's important to the 2 main players. The steps seem always to occur in the same order:

1. preparation: what are we talking about here? Are we on the same page? Do we have the same expectations?
2. negotiation: what do you and the client mutually agree Value looks like? How will the client assess the end product or service you are providing? (note: if it's price only you're often better off to run away and not play!) Do you agree on the value of financial return, environmental impact, and other ways your work might be judged?
3. performance: this is the stage when you deliver what you have negotiated. A word of warning: don't make a commitment to deliver something you haven't negotiated! And don't forget to go back and renegotiate as conditions change during the project's life.
4. assessment: the client assesses how well you delivered against expectations. If you are really good at negotiation, you will always get rave reviews, because you will always deliver exactly the Value your client agreed

In our experience, you don't get get bad reviews for your work because you are incompetent. Most often, you've left out a step: your basic premise for the project doesn't match your client's;  you don't know how the client will judge your work, or you guess and you guess wrong; you don't renegotiate what will make you client satisfied with the work as conditions change. As a result the  process or working together becomes so painful it's not worth whatever the final deliverable is.

If you want to know more about where Atom of Work came from, let me know. It's very cool, and it works.

 

 

John Jantsch on Referrals and MESH

Hey it's June already! I'll be getting back to exploring what account execs in complex environment find most helpful - but in the meantime, I had the chance to spend time with John Jantsch while he was in Toronto for the MESH Conference.

John led a session on Referral Marketing at the Intelligent Office site in First Canadian Place, making the point that referral generation needs as much discipline and systemization as any other business development approach. Participants found the biggest challenge was to move from simply describing their business to making it intriguing and relevant to prospects - I loved his idea of creating a statement you can use at a party when someone asks "And what do you do?" - one that will get them asking "How do you do that" instead of heading for the bar.

I couldn't go to MESH since I was in the thick of a client meltdown, but here's what some other people had to say:

Jack Kapica reported:

Things got to be much better today in the afternoon, with an intelligent group of people who have had extensive experience with Teaching Old Media New Tricks, as the conference was titled. Jennifer Evans (president and founder of Sequentia Communications), John Jantsch (creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system) and Maggie Fox (president and founder of Social Media Group) offered up their experiences trying to drag companies mired in old-media thinking into the world of social networking...

Jantsch also offered a great way for bloggers to feed the insatiable hunger of the gaping blog, which he recommended updating three to five times a week. “Use a tape recorder,” he said. “Just walk into someone’s office, shove the microphone at them and say, ‘What do you think of this?’”

Parker wrote:
One of the other people that I had the chance to meet at mesh07 was John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing. During his panel discussion with Maggie Fox (who said she liked my shoes) and Jen Evans, someone asked a question about why he blogged and about the return of investment on blogging.

John’s answer was probably the best that I have ever heard to this question. He said that when he first started blogging, he didn’t think anyone would ever read it. Blogging gave him a chance to gather his thoughts, and forced him to research some of the topics he was writing about. As a result, John said that he became a better writer, and was able to speak more confidently about what he was writing about.

Those two reasons alone are enough for most people to start blogging. While it might be possible to make similar improvements by just keeping a journal, a blog forces your thoughts and writing into the public sphere. You become much more accountable for what you’ve written, and as a result are more likely to take it more seriously.

Another point that was brought up in the same panel discussion (I don’t know who said it, but I’ll attribute it to Jantsch just because I like his good-natured attitude) (Note: apparently Maggie Fox actually said this - Liz) was that we don’t try and measure the ROI on taking a client out for lunch. A meeting like that might not result in anything tangible at that moment, but its about building relationships.

Highest-Rated Tools, Tips and Tricks for Acccount Executives in Complex Environments

I've just come back from teaching a 2-day seminar for senior sales executives called Advanced Account Management and High-Yield Selling. This is always a challenging couple of days because the participants are a lot smarter than I am, usually - certainly keeps you from getting uppity!

The course is designed to help with accounts that require a real relationship to make them viable: accounts with long closing times, complex solutions and high lifetime values. We get people in banking, technology and research as well as business owners and entrepreneurs. We also provide a similar course to account executives in advertising agencies through the Institute of Communications and Advertising (ICA).

So what do participants find most helpful? Well, there seems to be three kinds of people in the course: those who love new concepts, or frames of reference (i.e. saying the same thing in a different way, so you can see new approaches to a problem); those that love the analytical tools; and those who find the very structured approach to tasks a huge time saver.

I thought I'd take some time over the next few posts to share the ideas we explore in the course. Thanks as always to my pal Al Offstein, who shares so much of his wisdom with me.

Highest-Rated Tools, Tips and Tricks
The Atom of Work
Every project or interaction can be seen as a simple, 4-step process
Clientship
High-margin, loyal client relationships have four key attributes that must be present
Gap Analysis
There are only 6 gaps you have to identify and narrow between you and your client
Curiosity
The secret weapon to create meaningful and relevant client relationships
The Chunk Outline
How to decide what to say in any situation even with 5 minutes or less to prepare
How Executives Make Decisions
The 6 heuristics senior managers use to decide what to do under pressure

You can let me know if anything on the list interests you particularly.

What? So What? Now What?

I wake up the the radio every morning at about 5:30. Weekdays, that gets me the weather report, a topline on the local news and 15 minutes of business news. (On weekends, I get some fabulous programming from Australia's Radio National that's so good I want to move there.) Anyway, this morning there was an interview with people from a major hospital here who are training armed forces chaplains on how to deal with trauma on their tour of duty in Afghanistan.

I wanted to understand what they were doing, I really did. But it took till the end of the interview to figure out that the chaplain trainees were somehow involved with the hospital Trauma Unit and sat in on a couple of autopsies. There was a lot of fuzzy talk about identifying your personal response to trauma, and how important it all was,  but I till have no idea of what they were actually doing, how it worked, why the program was started - all I have is some theory and not a lot of it at that.

York University's Schulich School of Business   has a course in Critical Thinking that would have been a big help to the people I heard being interviewed this morning. Among other bright ideas, they teach that organizing data and interpretation into three buckets - What? So What? Now What? - helps enormously.

Here's how I use this: if you are making a presentation, trying to sell an idea, enlisting support for a program or going for budget approval, start with a list of things everyone knows and agrees on. That's the "What" and it can be a pretty long list.

Now comes the hard part, and, frankly, where we earn our money: "So What?"  What does this laundry list of  facts imply?  What  insights, implications, and indicated actions do you see?  Anybody can list the "What" but it takes talent and the hard work of critical thinking to identify "So What" (which by the way is what every single one of my senior clients wishes his or her managers would do. Not getting it makes them weep with frustration.)

Then, magically, the "Now What?" takes care of itself. It becomes blindingly obvious what the next steps are - and you are a hero for clearly identifying  what revenue and profit-making action your organization needs to take.

By the way, you'll also find that you can go back to your "What" laundry list and see that about 80% of it is  irrelevant to the problem at hand.

Here's another bonus: you'll find you can make decisions faster, and in my quest to get us all working fewer hours that's enough reason to use this thinking tool.

10 Obscure Word Tricks to Expedite Common Chores

One of the newsletters I actually read is from BNET (http://www.bnet.com/). Recently, they turned me on to something those of you who have memorized the Microsoft Office site probably already know - there are a bunch of cool time-saving tricks none of us have ever heard of.

Check this out from July 2006. 10 Obscure Word Tricks to Expedite Common Chores  You'll also find a link to 34 timesaving mouse tricks for Word users.

My favourites are how to select vertical, rather than horizontal, text (hold down [Alt] as you drag down through the text you want to highlight) and how to add numbers without going to your calculator or another application (add Tools Calculate to your toolbar).

Let me know if any of these ideas work for you.