There’s a skeleton in the elevator 1 September, 2009
Posted by varoom in Uncategorized.add a comment
Elevator pitches are a key part of business, both for raising investment and winning customer approvals that 90 second explanation of your proposition can make a huge difference. The elevator pitch was coined, originally, in the USA to describe the opportunity arising from the chance encounter in an elevator (Lift for UK readers) with a senior member of an investor organisation. You have 60-90 seconds whilst the elevator is in transit to make your pitch. The recipient has nowhere to escape.
Most people make their minds up about you and your proposition in the first few seconds so you don’t have long to win their interest.
I coach people regularly in this skill and I begin the pitch development effort by laying out a basic skeleton to hang your pitch on. The advantage of this is that it initially focuses the development on the messages and not the structure. Of course there are an infinite number of ways to spend your 90 seconds but this way seems to work for those who’ve tried it.
Essentially it’s a form of key messaging, see my blog of 7th Oct 2007 to read more on key messaging, where you extract out of your proposition the critical Key Messages that you want to get across and have retained in the mind of the receiver after you have parted ways. With only 90 seconds in total these key messages need to be sharp and to the point.
So back to my skeleton, I break the 90 seconds into 10 second blocks. The first block is 10 seconds to introduce yourself and your company. May seem like a long time to do that but remember first impressions are made in the first few seconds so get it right.
The next 6 x 10 second blocks are for your key messages. So here you need to choose the most important, exciting, valuable key messages and hone them down to a sharp 10 second statement. This ensures you don’t over state and spend too much time on one single point resulting in some key messages losing out altogether. Remember there’ll be more time later to do each key message justice if you succeed.
A single 10 second block is allocated to summarising all the 6 key messages in a high impact set of words that makes them memorable and easy to recall.
Finally the last 10 second block is the close. Too many people do a great elevator pitch but forget to ask for something or close the deal by getting agreement to move forward in some way. So you have 10 seconds, at the end of the elevator pitch, to ask for something. Maybe you want to arrange a meeting for a full presentation, a follow up call or arrange to show a demo. Whatever you do make sure you continue the engagement.
If you have done a good job the next step will come naturally but success will only come with practice.
Grev
PCWorld don’t sell Pizzas 7 April, 2009
Posted by varoom in Selling.add a comment
Apologies to PCW as I’m sure they could sell Pizzas if they really put their minds to it! This point is related to the importance of choosing the right sales channel for your product based on skills and customer recognition. Two main problems with selecting the wrong sales channel, firstly the channel may not be skilled to sell your product and secondly, much worse, the customers will not recognise the channel as a supplier of products of your kind.
In order to select the right channel, initially you will need to do detailed analysis on buying practises in your targeted market and use this data to drive the development of your channel strategy. How do customers find products like yours, where do they expect to find them, how do they normally purchase these products and how ingrained are these behaviours? Getting customers to change these behaviours can be quite difficult, your sales channel strategy needs to take account of what behaviour change you need.
One sales channel strategy is a partnership with a major player in the supply chain. In one agreement you can avoid creating a new channel and also build credibility with customers by being associated with a known supplier. There will be some effort for the first channel partner to take your product, there is some risk too, so be ready for them to request some exclusivity even for a period of time.
Another mechanism is to adopt a disruptive approach. Enter the market deliberately through a unique channel to cause a breakdown in the existing pipeline and force players to change their approach. To do this you need a disruptive product or service which compels the market to take it seriously. Not all products can do this and you need to consider, carefully, which approach is feasible.
There are many past examples of channel disruptions, EasyJet with it’s internet based solution caused a behaviour change in the buying practices of travellers, Amazon caused a change in buying practices of book and music buyers, other examples being EBay, Google, and Dell.
The success of your product depends on having the best sales channel, gaining behaviour changes in the customer base is difficult unless there is a further disruption that helps your strategy succeed.
When you enter the marketplace not everyone will welcome you but adopting the right market entry strategy can make a big difference to your business.
Grev
37% of strategies fail 15 March, 2009
Posted by varoom in Strategy.1 comment so far
On reading a Harvard Business Review article by Mankins & Steele in 2005 I found it very useful to study the causes for failure in strategy development and implementation. The word strategy has become an overused and misused term in modern business. We attempt to make something more important by attaching the word strategic to it whilst failing to really make things change. Having set long term goals your strategy is a plan on how you will achieve them and this strategy must lead to actions or it is doomed to fail. So in short your goal is what you want to achieve and your strategy is how you will achieve it.
The Mankins & Steele article studies the failures of strategies and a lot of these failures occur during the implementation of the strategy. These failures fall into many categories but can be summarised into;
- Inadequate resources
- Poor communications
- Poor definition of actions
- Unclear accountabilities
- Organisational culture blocking strategy
- Inadequate monitoring
- Inadequate consequences or rewards
- Poor or uncommitted leadership
- Inadequate skills
No matter how much time, effort and research you put into developing your company strategy if the organisation is not engaged or the resources are not available or you do not follow though with strong leadership, your efforts will be wasted.
So in order to be successful in implementing your new strategy you should;
- Develop resource plans, and allocate resources to implement the new strategy
- Define the required organisation structure to deliver on the strategy
- Communicate to convince the organisation to engage with the strategy
- Manage the change(s) within the organisation, avoid distractions
- Monitor, measure, feedback, assess
Make your strategy more successful by ensuring change occurs then communicate the successes resulting from those changes.
Grev
