Thoughts on Accelerating Revenue in a Down Economy: Part 3

There are a host of pains organizations inflict on themselves that present clear and present dangers to their very viability. Among those we often see are:

• Goals and objectives that are out of sync with job descriptions and employee expectations
  
• Compensation plans that don’t reflect the will of the organizations executive leadership
  
• Management who believes it is their prerogative to manipulate sales compensation plans, changing quotas, territories and commission schedules mid-stream
  
• Sales automation/CRM systems that are installed to provide management reporting with sales productivity as a by product
  
• Few understand the complicated nature of channels, how to avoid conflict, and how to motivate organizations they don’t own, yet many businesses just can’t grow organically fast enough. Effective committed channels are a necessity.
  
  So what can companies do?
  
  
• They must learn to hire for a season. Recognize that a significant percentage of employees will move on within a few years. Call it out confront it and embrace by designing the job description accordingly, and eliminate confusion and contention. Hire the very best for the tasks at hand. It’ll require a bit more thought and planning, but it’ll be worth it.
  
• Delicate themselves to serving their employees and to making them successful; not managing them for compliance, rather leading them for significance; leading them rather than directing them
  
• Embrace technology. Many managers are digital immigrants leading digital natives. They resist it and demean it with comments like “I’ll never text.”. We must immerse ourselves in it, admit our fears and frustrations, and join the ranks of the next generation who takes all this technology as a matter of fact and can’t understand why their management doesn’t.
  
• When we employee systems we must think first of the impact on the employee. Implement a CRM to make the sales people more productive, and have management reports as a byproduct. It’s the only way they will embrace it and the data will be accurate and timely.
  
• Hire scientifically. Success at a previous company is no guarantee of success with the next.. It can no longer be acceptable to give an employee 9 months or longer to see if they will succeed. Thai’s as much as 1/3 of their tenure. They must be positioned to contribute much quicker.
  
• Build support tools like the company web site that personalize the web experience, allowing the inquirer to truly understand how your products and services can met his unique needs, and build it a way that leaves a thumb print behind so more and more can be turned into customers. It’s not the number of web hits that counts, it’s the number of customers that are generated.
  
• Have a mission statement that is meaningful, measure ideas against it, reward innovation, and create the opportunities that demand transformation versus incremental improvement.
  

A soft economy can be the best time to gain market share. It’ll take a non-traditional approach, but embracing a win/win mentality, a servants heart for employees success, an acceptance that each employee really wants to make the best decisions possible, combined with an ability to accept effort and failure will help turn a business, even where the economy is having a negative impact, into a consistent winner.

Wyoming Wisdom

A few months ago I shared some of my grandfathers “Wyoming” wisdom. Over the last few days I’ve had a few events that reminded me of a few more of his down home philosophies. I thought I’d share them with you:

“If you get to thinkin’ you’re a person of some influence, try orderin’ somebody else’s dog around”

“Good judgment comes from experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment”

“Remember even a kick in the caboose is a step forward”


Hope you enjoy them

Thoughts on Accelerating Revenue in a Down Economy

Part 1

As an interim executive specializing in helping my clients drive revenue, I am often asked how we can expect to help increase revenue when the economy is weak. Reflecting on numerous engagements I’ve had in a variety of industries, I find myself reminded of Pogo’s famous dictum: “We have met the enemy and he is us!”

Many of the hurdles that slow growth, and arguably most business failures, can be traced to decisions made by the organization, a result of a company’s own actions. Which is why the barriers to meeting revenue objectives can be found and eliminated, replaced by processes and disciplines that leave a company able to meet their objectives predictably and consistently now and well into the future.

There are some major themes we see often. Among the most common is presuming that constant improvement will suffice when transformation is required. The failure to anticipate and transform is a critical failure that stunts growth. An example many of us have heard is that if Henry Ford had desired to incrementally improve the transportation system of the day, and if he had simply listened to what his customers asked for, he would’ve bred a faster horse. He didn’t, and the innovation he brought forth transformed transportation as we knew it forever.
A more current example might be Hewlett-Packard. It was studying how children responded to the web that caused them to re-think their digital and printing businesses. The kids seemed to take “ownership” of a page of data only after they printed it. As long as it was on the web, it was just available data, but not “theirs.” It was this realization that allowed them to connect the dots and the digital camera was invented. Not as result of photographers asking for a new way to take, store, and transfer photographs. The market didn’t know what it didn’t know, and therefore couldn’t ask for it. But some innovative minds under the direction of leadership willing to transform the company saw an opportunity that could be exploited. Who would have dared to bet on an idea that would take on a company that had been dominate for 100 years—Kodak? But they did, and now a vast percentage of all photographs taken are taken digitally with a cell phone! They transformed the very way we take, store and transfer photos, creating a whole new market that has relegated earlier technology largely to obsolescence. And in the process changed the very way we think about taking photographs.

These examples are indicators of not only the vision it took to recognize and create the product, with little help from customers or other sources of traditional input, but more importantly, they are examples of transformation. In neither case did management believe they could succeed by making incremental improvements, they needed radical transformation, and they had the courage to attempt it. Many don’t!

A hurdle we also often see that impedes growth is the insistence on maintaining a traditional hierarchical management structure. Copied from the great Roman and Prussian armies, they served us well when we needed structure to facilitate communication and control quality. The ability to successfully replicate processes while driving out cost and scaling the business was a natural for this proven approach. But technology has rendered the discipline and oversight an immediate manager brings largely unnecessary. Peers will recognize and correct deficiencies long before a remote manger sees it, and long before the rules personnel has imposed on us can be successfully implemented. Organizations that recognize that the systems and technology we now have available allows them to monitor, train, and lead with a much flatter organization structure, will find themselves more responsive, adaptable and successful. The removal of layers of management also serves to reduce cost, and facilitates broader decision making and innovation.