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.

You can learn to be lucky

Looking at Scott Ginsberg's segment on 20/20 on John Jantsch's blog made me want to go back to an interview with Richard Wiseman that appeared in Fast Company a couple of years ago.

Have a look at the article. Read the highlights I've outlined below, and then look for the business opportunity. If you do any corporate consulting or training, there's a big idea here.

What I'm arguing is that we have far more control over events than we thought previously. You might say, "Fifty percent of my life is due to chance events." No, it's not. Maybe 10% is. That other 40% that you think you're having no influence over at all is actually defined by the way you think.

What are some of the ways that lucky people think differently from unlucky people?

One way is to be open to new experiences. Unlucky people are stuck in routines. When they see something new, they want no part of it. Lucky people always want something new. They're prepared to take risks and relaxed enough to see the opportunities in the first place.

How did you uncover that in your lab?

We did an experiment. We asked subjects to flip through a news-paper that had photographs in it. All they had to do was count the number of photographs. That's it. Luck wasn't on their minds, just some silly task. They'd go through, and after about three pages, there'd be a massive half-page advert saying, STOP COUNTING. THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER. It was next to a photo, so we knew they were looking at that area. A few pages later, there was another massive advert -- I mean, we're talking big -- that said, STOP COUNTING. TELL THE EXPERIMENTER YOU'VE SEEN THIS AND WIN 150 POUNDS [about $235].

For the most part, the unlucky would just flip past these things. Lucky people would flip through and laugh and say, "There are 43 photos. That's what it says. Do you want me to bother counting?" We'd say, "Yeah, carry on." They'd flip some more and say, "Do I get my 150 pounds?" Most of the unlucky people didn't notice.

But the business culture typically worships drive -- setting a goal, single-mindedly pursuing it, and plowing past obstacles. Are you arguing that, to be more lucky, we need to be less focused?

This is one of the most counterintuitive ideas. We are traditionally taught to be really focused, to be really driven, to try really hard at tasks. But in the real world, you've got opportunities all around you. And if you're driven in one direction, you're not going to spot the others. It's about getting people to have various game plans running in their heads. Unlucky people, if they go to a party wanting to meet the love of their life, end up not meeting people who might become close friends or people who might help them in their careers. Being relaxed and open allows lucky people to see what's around them and to maximize what's around them.

Much of business is also about rational analysis: pulling up the spreadsheet, running the numbers, looking at the serious facts. Yet you found that lucky people rely heavily on their gut instincts.

Yes. You don't want to broadly say that whenever you get an intuitive feeling, it's right and you should go with it. But you could be missing out on a massive font of knowledge that you've built up over the years. We are amazingly good at detecting patterns. That's what our brains are set up to do.

What are some other ways you found that lucky people's minds operate differently?

They practice "counterfactual thinking." The degree to which you think that something is fortunate or not is the degree to which you generate alternatives that are better or worse.

Unlucky people say, "I can't believe I've been in another car accident." Lucky people go, "Wonderful. Yes, I had a car accident, but I wasn't killed. And I met the guy in the other car, and we got on really well, and there might be a relationship there." What's interesting is that both ways of thinking are unconscious and automatic. It would never occur to the unlucky people to see it a different way.

Here's the business idea. Wiseman, who teaches at the University of Hertfordshire in the UK,  opened a Luck School to test the proposition that people can learn to be lucky. In year one, he had an 80% success rate.

Now what lucky entrepreneur wouldn't want to teach every single employee how to be lucky? 

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.

 

 

Customer Service

Last night we had a really good conversation about marketing at the Tech Entrepreneurs & Emerging Companies Group MeetUp I belong to here. (Kudos to Matthew the organizer for ensuring that only legitimate tech entrepreneurs are part of the group - it's refreshing not to be confronted by MLM and consultants looking for gigs.)

Sunir Shah, the Marketing and Community Development head for FreshBooks was there, and pointed out how important the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) is for small business and entrepreneurship - good for FreshBooks for committing to build small business, the backbone of our economy.

In a recent blog, FreshBooks talked about another subject close to my heart - customer service. Now one of the things about CS is that it's honoured more in the breach than the observance; we all know what lousy CS is...and then we are often guilty of behaving in the same awful way to our clients!

Here's the commitment to responsiveness, a key component of CS, from Mike McDerment

Since May 2004 when our service went live we have maintained a two hour call return policy. 90% of the people who call us never expect a response. Period. They figure we are an internet website with no one behind it. When someone answers the phone, people frequently say, “I can’t believe you answered the phone. I never expected to get a real person!”...

As for email responses, it’s about the same. Sometimes there is a back log of emails from the night before, and responses to these can take 3-4 hours, but most of the time you will hear back from us in one business hour.

BTW June 15 FreshBooks is hosting a free tele-seminar with John Jantsch. John is the author of The Referral Flood and the man behind the Duct Tape Marketing brand - we are the authorized DTM coaches in Toronto. Hope I get to meet you there!

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.

Women are making the economy "go around"

I'm doing some research for a client on the subject of corporate support for post-secondary education i Ontario, and on the way ran into this from a speech to The Economic Club of Toronto in June 2006, by Barbara G. Stymiest Chief Operating Officer of RBC Financial Group.                                                       

Much of the momentum within this new dynamic is coming from women. If you didn't see it in the Globe a few weeks ago let me recall for you the conclusions reached in an article written by Heather Scofield and Tavia Grant: women are making the economy "go around".

58 percent of all women of working age in Canada now have  jobs. In the United States women are responsible for 100 percent  of the growth in real household income between 1970 and 2004.48 percent of stock market investors are women. In developed markets around the world, women control or influence more than 75 percent of discretionary spending.

In the April 12th edition of the Economist magazine it is suggested that "…women are more likely to provide sound advice on investing their parents' nest egg: surveys  show that women consistently achieve higher financial returns than men do."

Cool. Pay attention.