The 80-Hour Week

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.

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.

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.

3 Extra Hours in a Day - Sleep in Modern Times

On Friday night, I went to see Aretha Franklin with a friend I've had from my agency days working on IBM advertising (we were on the team that launched the IBM PC, the 360 and the 4200 - an interesting story involving accusations of subliminal advertising and inappropriate imagery in a photo of a match flame...but I digress).

In the course of the evening, he told me about some fascinating research by Dr. Thomas Wehr at the US National Institute of Mental Health. Here's a quote from A. Roger Ekirch in the New York Times (you'll probably have to register to read it) about that research: " Until the modern age, most households had two distinct intervals of slumber, known as "first" and "second" sleep, bridged by an hour or more of quiet wakefulness. Usually, people would retire between 9 and 10 o'clock only to stir past midnight to smoke a pipe, brew a tub of ale or even converse with a neighbor. Others remained in bed to pray or make love. This time after the first sleep was praised as uniquely suited for sexual intimacy; rested couples have "more enjoyment" and "do it better," as one 16th-century French doctor wrote."

It now appears that, deprived of artificial light, people go back to that pattern, and, most interestingly, experience feelings of calm that nearly resembles a meditative state, after the "first' sleep.

I've been going to bed about 9 and listening to the radio since I unplugged my TV, then waking up about midnight annoyed that I haven't stayed asleep. Now I see that might in fact be perfectly normal, and uniquely productive. What a terrific time to get some thinking done, or catch up on that darn email, or even write some blog entries. Or, dare I say, get to know your partner better. Life isn't all about work, you know.

Webcast: Historian A. Roger Ekirch discusses his book, "At Day's Close: Night in Times Past"