Getting on the internet marketing bandwagon can prove to be the best decision an entrepreneur decides to take when they start their new business. This is because this form of marketing aligns along with the nature of customers who make decisions regarding purchases. Marketing through internet allows the business to build a relationship with their customer and even their prospects. This method of communication with both is cost effective, regular, and is a form of mass marketing. Here are some more benefits of internet marketing for small businesses online.
Convenience for International Customers and Prospects
The internet allows you to do your business around the clock and that too internationally. No more worrying about getting your store open on time anymore, or about keeping an eye over your employees. By offering products directly to the customers online, you are allowing them a convenient option of shopping. They can easily browse though all categories, read through the product descriptions, and talk to an active customer representative when they need help. Not to forget the payments options, which they can select, according to which one is best suited for them. If they have the experience they were expecting from your services, they will refer your website to more customers, increasing the amount of traffic.
Costs
Doing business online and doing business in a physical retail outlet has differences when it comes down to the cost. When you own a store online, you do not need to hire many employees; one or two are enough. In addition, you will not need to buy displays, shelves, freezers, coolers, or anything which may increase the amount of money you are investing. An online store needs someone who can attend to customers, someone who is handling calls and emails, and a couple of helping hands who are stocking the inventory in the warehouse. No need to pay rents, property tax, and major saves on utility bills as well.
Social Platform Advantages
Internet marketing allows an online business owner to make the most of the internet in almost every aspect. Free publicity through platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, drive massive numbers of traffic back to the business’s website. If everything is properly managed, the business will be a major success, and majority of the reason behind this success is going to be none other than internet marketing.
This instructive and astute montage centers around Brad Sugars’ formula for the 5 Ways to Massive Profits. The author of “Instant Cashflow” and “The Business Coach,” Brad Sugars explains step-by-step his “business chassis” to increase profits and build an amazingly powerful, super-producing, profit-yielding business
A proactive strategy in a business involves anticipating the dynamics of the market and the probable changes in competition, well in advance. This approach includes predicting and identifying the change before it actually occurs and adopting a suitable alternative strategy as a result.
This approach revolves around the concept that it is essential to be well aware of the dynamics of the market, and thus, take actions to prepare in advance, and shift the organizational responses to different altered environmental factors.
Businesses that are active in the technological industry; need to keep abreast of the new ideas being introduced within the market, and design appropriate plans of action to quickly adapt to an ever changing market environment.
Adopting a proactive approach helps spend time and money in the right way, while building the organization. It helps the organization save both, time and money, in the short and long term as well. With a clear idea of what to expect in the future, an organization and its employees are prepared with a strategic plan, to counter the effects of a major policy change or critical alteration in the industry procedures.
By opting for a proactive approach, a business can build the company right, from the start, by designing a structure which is well aligned to their own goals, mission, vision and objectives, with the future in mind. This will help the organization take every business decision on the basis of their short and long term objectives that are planned in advance, keeping the probable changes in the market dynamics in mind.
A reactive approach is tantamount to giving a reaction, once a major change has taken place in the market. It is just like opting to change the entire outdated software and technological system within the company, after the latest advancements have taken the industry by storm; speeding business processes and leaving you unable to cope.
As opposed to this, an organization which works with a proactive approach, will update its system processes with the first proved advantage of the new technological systems, and will improve their efficiency to increase their market share, where a reactive approach organization is still scrambling to regain their former clients.
Given the marked differences in both approaches, which approach would you want to opt for in your business?
My definition of a business is a commercial, profitable, enterprise that works without me. 80% of businesses fail within 5 years of start-up and most fail because the owner didn’t know what to do. Business is like a game, if you want to play the game, you need to learn the rules. You need to learn from someone who’s succeeded at the game, not from scorekeepers (accountants), the rule makers (lawyers), the spectators (employees), the money holders and collectors (Bankers) and not from D- grade players (business owners who are just going to fail).
Here are the 5 Levels of Entrepreneurs to give you a framework that’ll allow you to understand yourself and the thoughts you have that got you to where you are now, as well as the tools to grow from where you are now to where you want to be…
Level 0 – The Employee
Everyone starts here but it’s not the most recommended strategy for wealth creation. Your income is at the mercy of someone else’s decision on how much they decide to pay you. Many employees relate to money that it is scarce, that there never seems to be enough, but that’s not true if you look a little deeper.
Level 1 – The Self-Employed
Here is the first jump someone takes from being an employee to being-self employed, however it is quite common that people will get stuck here. Rather than it being their business, they’ve become an employee to their own business. You get stuck working IN the business rather than working ON the business.
Level 2 – The Manager
You’ve finally grown your business and now have employees and you’re starting to feel like your business has started gaining momentum… It’s easy to get stuck on this level as well, especially when you find yourself working harder, longer hours, doing your own work and fixing other people’s mistakes. In order to get out of this level you want to work on your systems, you must have good systems that allows the business to function smoothly.
Level 3 – The Owner/Leader
If a business stops growing, it begins dying. As the Owner/Leader you have more time on your hands than you ever had before. Previously your focus was on cashflow and now your focus will shift into profit. At this level you will now be receiving profits rather than making and/or earning money.
Level 4 – The Investor
Investors have a very different way of thinking when compared to those on previous levels. As an investor you make your money selling businesses, not running them. You buy the business, build them up and then sell them to other people. Look for the best investment return.
Level 5 – The Entrepreneur
This is the most exciting level to be on. At this level you begin making money by raising capital. You use other people’s money to build paper assets like shares, franchises and licenses. Sell the dream, and then work like heck to make it a reality. Never give up. Stay focused and committed and always keep your mind focused on what isn’t real but soon will be.
Trust yourself and your team, to turn it into a reality.
Many project challenges and failures catch executives by surprise. But not all such surprises are truly unforeseeable — if you know where to look.
Why do so many projects fail to meet their goals for time, cost and performance? Regardless of the answer, many project managers and their executive sponsors seem to be surprised when a new project gets off track: “Why didn’t we see that coming?” Even projects that employ sophisticated techniques for risk management can encounter surprising derailments. Those methods, while powerful, can only manage known risks. But projects are new and unique. What about the things that we don’t even know that we don’t know? These “unknown unknowns” — often called “unk-unks” — are lurking in every project, just waiting to emerge, surprise and derail plans. To what extent are they inevitable? What could we do better?
Project knowledge comes from learning about the project — its overall context, its goals and objectives, the process for achieving them, the people, tools and other resources to be deployed, and how all of these affect one another. This learning begins in the planning stages. One might think that planners would consider all of the scenarios, evaluate all of the options and identify all of the risks — but that is seldom the case. Many planners resist wasting resources on planning projects that may never happen. Even after a project gets the green light, a typical attitude of many managers is: “We’re already behind. We know what we need to do. Let’s get started!” As a result, the distinction between what is knowable about a project and what is actually known can be quite large.
Many so-called “unk-unks” aren’t really unk-unks at all. Rather, they are things no one has bothered to find out. Indeed, there are two kinds of unknowns: unknown unknowns (things we don’t know we don’t know) and known unknowns (things we know we don’t know). (See “Converting Knowable Unk-Unks to Known Unknowns.”) Every project has some of both. The techniques of conventional risk management apply only to the known unknowns. Yet some unk-unks areknowable and can be converted to known unknowns through a process of directed recognition.
Converting Knowable Unk-Unks to Known Unknowns
Some “unknown unknowns” are actually knowable. With directed recognition, they can be converted to known unknowns — to which the conventional techniques of risk management can then be applied.
This article provides an overview of the targets, methods and tools — the where, why and how — of directed recognition. (See “About the Research.”) First, we introduce six project domains in and around a project where uncertainty resides (and where recognition of that uncertainty should occur). Second, we describe six characteristics that increase uncertainty in projects and explain whythey make unk-unks more likely. Finally, we present 11 techniques for converting knowable unk-unks into known unknowns. The goal is to reduce the unwelcome surprises in project management.
Where the Unk-Unks Are: Six Project Domains
Projects operate as systems. Project outcomes and performance result not only from individual project elements but also from how the elements work together. Every project has at least five key subsystems,1 which are enmeshed in the project’s broader context or environment. These five subsystems plus the project’s context comprise six important domains, each of which contains both known and unknown unknowns.
Result Subsystem
The desired result of most projects is a product, a service or some other deliverable. Results have many components, all of which must work well together to deliver success. Problems in one area can spill over into other areas, causing a cascade of problems. For example, the HealthCare.gov project at the heart of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 was more than just an e-commerce site selling insurance; it was a system with complex interfaces to other government systems across a wide range of departments. In October 2013, when there were serious issues with the launch, it was evident that the project had run into messy integration problems with its key product.
Process Subsystem
The work required to execute and manage a project is another type of system, one made up of activities, tasks and decisions related by the flow of information, work products and deliverables.2Efficient and effective processes depend not only on the activity content but also on the relationships among those activities. For example, a lean, value-adding activity could fail to add value if it receives bad inputs (which in turn could impact other activities and cause problems later). Because the network of activity relationships and its implications can be hard to see and manage, the process subsystem is often rife with latent unk-unks.
In March 2008, for example, British Airways and the British Airport Authority suffered a huge embarrassment at London’s Heathrow Airport Terminal 5. After the project’s use of the latest thinking in lean project management had been touted, the opening of BA Terminal 5 turned out to be a debacle, with hundreds of canceled flights and thousands of lost bags. BA lost $32 million, and two senior managers lost their jobs. While the BA project team had focused on the technical side of the project (such as getting the building equipped and testing the building’s services), it neglected operational logistics and staff training. On the opening day, many staff were late for work (they couldn’t find parking) and weren’t able to log into the computer system. BA’s experience underscores the fact that many unk-unks lurk within the complex network of tasks and relationships composing a project.
Organization Subsystem
The people, teams, groups, departments and functions collaborating on a project represent another type of system. In many cases, this system breaks down due to what is often referred to as “poor communication.” However, the solution isn’t for everyone to communicate with everyone else. Rather, it’s necessary to strike a balance between effective information transfer and information overload. When the organization subsystem is suboptimized by miscommunication, a lack of communication or information overload, the risk of unk-unks grows.
Tools Subsystem
To manage activities and transfer information, people in organizations need tools, facilities and equipment. Today, most tools needed for activities such as information exchange, compatibility and service support are software-based. Unfortunately, many software tools are unable to transfer data due to various incompatibilities and organizational decisions. For example, computer-aided design tools can work well in some settings but not in others. When an aerospace design project wanted a certain CAD tool so it could collaborate easily with its partners, the project’s parent organization said it had already standardized around a different brand. Adversities in the tools subsystem can be a significant source of unk-unks for a project.
Goals Subsystem
Most projects have goals for time, cost and performance (functionality, capability provided, quality, scope, etc.). These three areas compete with each other: Improving on functionality, for example, often means increases in cost and/or time. The same often goes for performance: Increasing one capability usually requires a trade-off with another. The goals subsystem influences what is and is not possible, permissible, desirable and effective. As these trade-offs become more pronounced, the possibilities for unwelcome surprises increase.
All five of these project subsystems are related to each other. To accomplish the project’s goals, the organization uses the tools to do the work (execute the process) and produce the desired results. All of these relationships imply no small amount of complexity — which, as we will see, provides a fertile breeding ground for unk-unks.
Context
Every project exists within a larger context. A project may be part of a larger portfolio of projects, or it might have multiple stakeholders who have competing visions and requirements for success. A project’s ideal software tools might be consistent with its parent organization’s standards for multiproject commonality, or they may be completely incompatible. The project context contains a mix of known and unknown unknowns, and it interacts with elements in each of the five subsystems. As managers look to convert unk-unks to known unknowns, they need to consider all six of these domains and their relationships.
Six Factors Driving Uncertainty
Several characteristics of a project’s subsystems and context make surprises more likely. Although unk-unks are by definition specific things we don’t realize we’re missing, it’s possible to look at a project and its context and come to the realization that unk-unks are likely to exist — and why. For example, a large, complex project is more likely to encounter unk-unks than a small, simple project. An organization that is actively looking to uncover unk-unks is more likely to convert them into known unknowns. We have identified six factors — characteristics of a project and its context — that tend to increase the likelihood of unk-unks.3 (See “Factors Contributing to Unknown Unknowns.”) By evaluating a project in terms of these factors, managers can learn why their project might encounter unk-unks — and thereby justify why they should invest in taking a closer look for them.
Factors Contributing to Unknown Unknowns
The six factors shown here tend to increase the likelihood of unk-unks (surprises) in projects.
Complexity
A complex system contains many interacting elements that increase the variety of its possible behaviors and results. The five project subsystems described above each have many elements (components, activities, people, tools and goals) that interact in various ways to generate many kinds of outcomes. All else being equal, the complexity of a project (or a subsystem) increases with the number, variety, internal complexity and lack of robustness of its elements. A project with more tasks, more people and/or more requirements is usually more complex than a project with fewer. When a project’s elements have greater variety (for example, they do three different tasks rather than doing the same task three times, or have a team with representatives from four different functional organizations versus a team with four people from the same function), complexity also increases. The internal complexity of an element (for example, a project composed of five huge tasks versus a project composed of five small ones) also matters. Furthermore, if a project’s elements are robust in the face of change (such as engineering design changes, requirements changes, etc.), then they can act as change absorbers, preventing the propagation of change throughout the system, whereas elements lacking this robustness will amplify complexity.
Other aspects of project complexity depend on the relationships among the project’s elements. As the number, variety, criticality and internal complexity of these relationships increase, so will complexity. For example, a project to develop a product with many interconnected parts (for instance, some requiring close proximity, some needing to transfer energy) is extremely complex — and that is just the product subsystem. Collectively, the subfactors of element and relationship complexity can increase the level of complexity significantly, thereby adding to a project’s likelihood of encountering unk-unks. (See “Situations That Increase the Likelihood of Unknown Unknowns.”)
Complicatedness
Regardless of its complexity, a system may appear more or less complicated depending on one’s point of view. In contrast to complexity, complicatedness is more subjective and observer-dependent. For example, an automobile with automatic transmission is more complex than one with manual transmission; it has more parts and intricate linkages. To drivers, it is less complicated (even though it can be more difficult to fix).4 Similarly, a software application may seem more or less complicated depending on the simplicity and elegance of its user interface, regardless of the complexity of its underlying code. A project’s complicatedness depends on the participants’ abilities to understand and anticipate the project. That depends on subfactors such as the intuitiveness of the project’s structure, organization and behavior; its newness or novelty; how easy it is to find necessary elements and identify cause-and-effect relationships; and the participants’ aptitudes and experiences. The more complicated a project seems to the project manager and other participants, the greater the likelihood that something important will be missed, thus increasing the likelihood of unk-unks.
Dynamism
A project’s dynamism — its volatility or the propensity of its subsystems’ elements and relationships to change — adds to its complexity. A project’s external dynamics are especially likely to affect its goals. Regulatory agencies may impose new rules, customer preferences may change or competitors may alter their strategies. Changes in goals may lead to changes in a project’s results (the product or deliverable) and its means of achieving them. Portions of a project might be outsourced, customers or suppliers might become formal partners and so on. Such changes realign the components and relationships considered to be “part” of the project. And increasing complexity and complicatedness increases the likelihood that a project will encounter unk-unks.
Equivocality
Project work requires a lot of sharing of information. If the information is not crisp and specific, then the people who receive it will be equivocal and won’t be able to make firm decisions. Although imprecise information itself can be a known unknown, equivocality increases both complexity and complicatedness. For example, some projects require a number of participants to attend meetings “just in case” an issue comes up that might affect them. The inability to pin down exactly who needs to be at any particular meeting increases scheduling complexity and the length of meetings and makes for “too many cooks in the kitchen.” In such cases, an attempt to avoid one area of unk-unks ironically increases the likelihood of other types of unk-unks.
Offering incentives for candor can show people that there are advantages to owning up to errors or mistakes in time for management to take action. At the same time, it is imperative to eliminate any perverse incentives that induce people to ignore emerging risks.
Mindlessness
We refer to the perceptive barriers that interfere with the recognition of unk-unks as mindlessness (as opposed to mindfulness). Examples include an overreliance on past experiences and traditions, the inability to detect weak signals and ignoring input that is inconvenient or unappealing. By mindlessly relying on past data, book inventories and existing documentation or components instead of requiring physical verification, managers may be inviting unk-unks. Individual biases and inappropriate filters can keep periphery-dwelling knowledge in the shadows. A project manager’s limited “bandwidth” requires filtering out the “noise” while letting important information through. Unfortunately, filtering is prone to errors, and the information that gets screened out, willfully or not, can be critical. Although it can be tempting to suppress or dismiss negative information while accentuating the positive when promoting a project, that can be a slippery slope. Mindlessness increases a project’s susceptibility to surprising unk-unks.
Project Pathologies
Whereas mindlessness pertains largely to the individuals associated with a project, project pathologies represent structural or behavioral conditions in and around projects as a whole that allow unk-unks to remain hidden. Project pathologies include mismatches among the project subsystems and context (for example, goals for which no organizational unit is responsible), unclear expectations among stakeholders and dysfunctional cultures. A dysfunctional culture can manifest itself in numerous ways: information asymmetries (for instance, some stakeholders have key information about a risk that others lack), shooting messengers, covering up failures, discouraging new ideas and making some topics taboo for discussion. A manager might interpret a lack of active opposition as positive support, but in many organizations people who harbor doubts keep quiet, knowing that opposing views (either negative or positive) simply aren’t welcome. Each of these project pathologies can make unk-unks more likely by decreasing the likelihood of uncovering them before they become unwelcome surprises.
How to Reduce Unk-Unks
Each of the six factors that increase the likelihood of a project encountering unk-unks can affect each of a project’s six domains, yielding 36 places to look more specifically for knowable unk-unks. How should a manager go about looking? What techniques can a manager use to shine a light on these areas? We have identified 11 tools that can help managers with directed recognition: seven are project design approaches and four are behavioral approaches. (See “From Unknown to Known Unknowns.”)
From Unknown to Known Unknowns
Directed recognition, which can entail both project design and behavioral approaches, can convert knowable unk-unks to known unknowns.
1. Decompose the project.
Modeling a project’s subsystems — to understand their structures, how their elements relate to one another and the subfactors of complexity — builds knowledge that helps expose unk-unks. Decomposition should begin with the natural structure of the overall purpose of the project (the “problem”), identifying the subproblems relating to key areas (such as customer need, product functionality and the venture team) and complementing it with experience and experimentation. For example, one company was able to decompose a project5 by:
a) Identifying the problem’s goals, context, activities and cause-effect relationships
b) Breaking the domains into smaller elements — such as product modules, process activities and stakeholders
c) Examining the complexity and uncertainty of each element to identify the major risks (known unknowns) that needed managing and the knowledge gaps that pointed to areas of potential unk-unks
d) Managing the selected pieces of the project in parallel with different project management methods — for example, treating various project threads as “options” and determining further actions contingent on the outcomes.
2. Analyze scenarios.
Scenario planning involves constructing several different future outlooks.6 Unlike many approaches to forecasting, it accepts uncertainty, tries to understand it and builds it into the reasoning. Rather than being predictions, scenarios are coherent and credible alternative futures built on dynamic events and conditions that are subject to change. Scenario analysis looks at how indirect threats or situations affect stakeholders, competitors, suppliers and customers,7 and it is particularly suited to uncovering unk-unks in projects.
3. Use checklists.
Codified learning from past projects can enlighten future planning. This often shows up in the form of checklists or prompt lists. Of course, providing such tools won’t help if they are viewed as obstacles rather than facilitators of success. Checklists and categories need to be viewed as helpful prompts, not substitutes for thinking. Although some professionals such as doctors have sometimes resisted using checklists, airplane pilots have long known that a good checklist helps smart people free up thinking for higher-level problems.8
4. Scrutinize plans.
Project plans are merely a hypothesis for how success will occur. At a minimum, plans should contain information about the expected work (for example, when it should start and finish, projected costs, anticipated results, responsibilities and resource requirements). These expectations need to be scrutinized closely by project participants and other stakeholders. The scrutiny can come in the form of reviews, audits and even formal verifications of how the content was generated.9 Just as reliable products may require some redundancy, project plans may need predefined contingencies. An independent board of overseers composed of experienced experts, empowered to obtain all kinds of project information, can help reduce potential unk-unks lingering from planners’ entrapped mindsets. In a well-known case in 1992, NASA’s Mars Observer was lost due in part to a lack of independent verification and validation.10
Although it can be tempting to suppress or dismiss negative information while accentuating the positive when promoting a project, that can be a slippery slope.
5. Use long interviews.
Long interviews with project stakeholders, subject matter experts and other participants can be effective tools for uncovering lurking problems and issues.11 However, interviewers need to be careful not to be too enthusiastic about the projects they’re examining and not asking “yes or no” questions. The best interviews probe deep and wide and ask “out of the box” questions, which can help managers identify latent needs that project stakeholders are unable or unlikely to articulate readily. Consider Silverglide Surgical Technologies, a Boulder, Colorado-based company specializing in nonstick electrosurgical instruments.12 It came up with what it thought was a novel product — a nonstick surgical probe. Although surgeons were intrigued by what the new product could do, they weren’t accustomed to using a probe to operate, so the product bombed. Subsequent studies revealed that had the surgeons been asked, they would have preferred nonstick forceps to a probe. That was a knowable unk-unk.
6. Pick up weak signals.
Weak signals often come in subtle forms, such as unexplained behaviors, confusing outcomes or a realization that no one in the organization has a complete understanding of a project. Recognizing and interpreting weak signals requires scanning local and extended networks, mobilizing search parties, testing multiple hypotheses and probing for further clarity.13 It’s also helpful to include tools we have previously discussed, such as long interviews and diverse scenarios.
7. Mine data.
When vast amounts of data are available from a plethora of databases, electronic data mining can be a particularly powerful tool for extracting implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information. By simultaneously reviewing data from multiple projects, data mining could enable project managers to identify the precursors of potential problems. The NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) was established to improve safety by proactively identifying precursors to potential problems hidden in NASA’s diverse databases. The NESC found electronic data mining to be a particularly promising tool for the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information toward accomplishment of this goal.14
8. Communicate frequently and effectively.
Regularly and systematically reviewing decision-making and communication processes, including the assumptions that are factored into the processes, and seeking to remove information asymmetries, can help to anticipate and uncover unk-unks. The 1998-2004 Ladera Ranch earth-moving project in California, for example, needed to find a way to deal with any unk-unks related to discovery of prehistoric Indian ruins or rare animal or plant species the dig might uncover.15The project manager and the team met weekly to discuss whether the project or its current plan needed to be revised and how. Effective and frequent communication is essential for project adaptability and agility. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean communicating large volumes of information, which can cause information overload. Rather, the key is knowing how to reach the right people at the right times.
Managers can stress the limits to what can be known about a project, especially at its early stages. They can cultivate a culture of healthy skepticism about projects purporting an absence of risk.
9. Balance local autonomy and central control.
Many unk-unks are obscured by the relationship complexity and dynamism of a project — dictated by diverse technologies, geographic sites, interests and external influences. Such confusion makes the project management team vulnerable to unwelcome surprises. Using decentralization of control to grant autonomy to the local nodes of a multinodal project facilitates adaptation and innovation as well as recognition of unk-unks (such as the effect of regulatory changes and customer preferences). Although decentralization helps project managers compensate for their knowledge gaps, it creates challenges for governance. Local nodes are less willing to report problems. To achieve adequate control, project managers may adopt an approach that combines bottom-up empowerment to correct errors with top-down efforts to embed learning across the project.16
10. Incentivize discovery.
Some of the most promising ways to identify unk-unks include timely and honest communication of missteps, anomalies and missing competencies. Offering incentives for candor can show people that there are advantages to owning up to errors or mistakes in time for management to take action. At the same time, it is imperative to eliminate any perverse incentives that induce people to ignore emerging risks.17 Among the most common perverse incentives are organizational tendencies to stress short-term over long-term results — a key contributor to the financial crisis of 2008.
11. Cultivate an alert culture.
An alert culture is made up of people who understand how unk-unks can derail projects and who strive to illuminate rather than hide potential problems. Managers can cultivate a culture of alertness in several ways. First, they can emphasize systems thinking, which recognizes that deciding what to do in a complex system is not simply a matter of repeating what was successful before. Systems thinking also emphasizes the use of multiple perspectives to reach a decision, does not expect to be completely right and changes course in the face of contrary evidence. Second, managers can stress the limits to what can be known about a project, especially at its early stages. They can cultivate a culture of healthy skepticism about projects purporting an absence of risk. Third, managers can seek to include and build a wide range of experiential expertise — intuitions, subtle understandings and finely honed reflexes gained through years of intimate interaction with a particular natural, social or technological system. Fourth, they can seek to develop the characteristics of a high-reliability organization: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience and deference to expertise.18 And fifth, managers can attempt to learn from surprising outcomes. In their eagerness for resolution and clear explanations in reviews, managers should eschew the rhetoric of justification and hold out for the possibility of a deeper understanding of the causes of failure.
PROJECTS ARE COMPLEX and complicated. A project’s desired results, planned process, performing organization, tool suite, goals and context all lend themselves to complexity and complication. What’s more, any of these areas can harbor unk-unks, the undetected problems that are buried in the morass of elements and interactions in and around a project. Some unk-unks are actually knowable, but individuals and organizations acting in mindless or pathological ways will allow the unk-unks to remain hidden, where they can fester into even bigger problems before becoming evident. Fortunately, there are tools and strategies to help managers. The 11 approaches described above give managers a tool kit for directing recognition toward uncovering the knowable unk-unks lurking in projects and converting them to known unknowns. By providing guidance on where and why unk-unks exist in projects and how to recognize their clues, managers can reduce the number and magnitude of unwelcome surprises.
REFERENCES (19)
1. These five project subsystems have been noted in several prior works, including T.R. Browning, E. Fricke and H. Negele, “Key Concepts in Modeling Product Development Processes,” Systems Engineering 9, no. 2 (summer 2006): 104-128; S.D. Eppinger and T.R. Browning, “Design Structure Matrix Methods and Applications” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2012); and R.V. Ramasesh and T.R. Browning, “A Conceptual Framework for Tackling Knowable Unknown Unknowns in Project Management,” Journal of Operations Management 32, no. 4 (May 2014): 190-204.
2. S.D. Eppinger, “Innovation at the Speed of Information,” Harvard Business Review 79, no. 1 (January 2001): 149-158.
Think your team has a “closing” problem? Think again.
How often have you heard leaders say, “My salespeople can’t close”? If you’re a sales manager, you’ve probably even said it. But failing to close is never the real problem. Never. That’s just the symptom. The problem is that sales reps neglect important activities during early stages of the sales process.
Unless you address the broken links in your prospecting system, your sales reps will continue to struggle. It’s like back pain. You can stretch and put heat on an aching back, but unless you treat the source of the pain—a pulled muscle or degenerating disc—your back will continue to hurt.
Put Your Finger on the Real Problem
When you start analyzing what really went wrong with missed sales opportunities, you’ll typically discover that your sales reps didn’t make time to prepare for their meetings. They didn’t plan agendas, do their research, tailor their pitches, or even check the clients’ LinkedIn profiles to identify shared interests, connections, and similarities.
Other common prospecting problems:
The initial prospects were unqualified. They had no idea why they were meeting with the salesperson or why they should be interested.
The salesperson didn’t ask enough discovery questions.
The salesperson left without getting agreement on next steps or scheduling the next call.
Follow-up consisted of a series of emails that promoted products, didn’t address the client’s unique concerns, and had no calls to action.
The salesperson was clueless as to why his emails were greeted with radio silence.
This is not how you wow prospects, build relationships with them, and convert them into clients.
One of my clients was on the way to a high-profile meeting. If his team wowed the client, they had an opportunity to close a million-dollar deal. I asked my client how the sales reps prepared. His answer: “Oh, we talk about it in the car on the way to the meeting.” Was their sales manager clueless, or what?
Start at the Source
If your team has trouble closing, go back to the beginning—qualifying prospects—and examine your entire sales process for missing links and broken tactics.
Ask these pointed questions:
How are sales reps getting leads?
How are these leads qualified?
Are salespeople asking the right questions to identify prospects’ problems and propose thoughtful solutions?
Do sales reps demonstrate product features, or do they talk ROI?
What is the marketing plan for following up?
Don’t even think about training your sales team on closing techniques. Save your money. Instead, give them a sales process that works.
The ROI of Referrals
More often than not, the problem is with a team’s prospecting methods. If your reps are chasing cold leads, they’re pretty much set up to fail. There’s only one kind of lead that should be in your pipeline. Only one kind of lead with a 50-percent conversion rate. Only one kind of lead that sales managers should care about.
That’s hot leads—the kind you source through referrals from trusted allies.
Every sales professional agrees that referral selling is, hands down, their most effective prospecting strategy. When you prospect through referrals:
You bypass the gatekeeper and score meetings with decision-makers every time.
Your prospects are pre-sold on your ability to deliver results.
You’ve already earned trust and credibility with your prospects.
You convert prospects into clients at least 50 percent of the time (usually more than 70 percent).
You land clients who become ideal referral sources for new business.
You score more new clients from fewer leads (because all of your leads are qualified).
If your team is getting in front of the right prospects and still can’t seal the deal, they’re not engaging in insightful discussion or asking compelling questions.
Thoughtful and provocative questioning has a huge impact on close rates and sales revenues. When sales reps ask smart, probing questions to understand what their clients really need—not just what the clients think they need—the scale of projects increases, creating win/wins for everyone. Your company gets bigger deals. Clients get solutions that actually solve their problems and create measurable business results. And they are happy to offer referrals to their networks.
Bravo! You’ve addressed the problem, not the symptom. Your client looks good, your team is prepared, and deals are yours to win. You are now a true sales manager.
Our world is nothing like our “father’s Oldsmobile.” Change is a constant yet those four words do not adequately capture what is going on. We are in the midst of a world shift that will forever change our and the lives of our grandchildren.
The shift is not about a faster more fluid global world or the rise of new technology, it is more profound than that. We, individuals and organizations, are losing our separateness and becoming a collective. The catalyst as well as what binds us together is technology.
Call it the Internet of Things (IoT) or the connected economy, the bottom-line is that technology binds us – individuals, communities, economies – together and is reshaping how we value and define relationships. What affects one, affects us all.
For marketers this is an exciting and terrifying time. We understand the customer in ways that was unimaginable in the past. We’re moving beyond customer interactions to emotional engagement. With new depths of data and analytics marketers can guide every corner of their entire organization on how, when and with what to create meaningful emotional connections with B2B and B2C customers. We continue to automate repetitive process and data intensive tasks and empower machines to make routine decisions so we can get out of the weeds. Our time is better spent on things like long-term strategy, social responsibility, and consciously with intent defining how we want our world to be in 2020 and beyond.
Technology coupled with the rise of customer has set an irreversible course forward that is redefining marketing and what it means – to customers, marketers and the C-Suite. To understand where we are in this transformation we need to understand how we got to this point.
I had the pleasure of interviewing a number of B2B CMOs from Fortune 10 down to Fortune 2000 companies at the request of Marketo who funded this research. The interview focused on the most significant trends that shaped marketing today as well as those on the horizon that CMOs are closely watching.
These five trends that shaped the state of marketing today:
1. Social media mainstreams
Social media is pervasive and has been embraced by B2B and B2C buyers as a key mechanism for taking full control of their brand relationships. The ease with which buyers can reach their peers has forever changed the influencer landscape. Brands and sales teams are increasing losing their role as trusted sources of knowledge. Both are increasingly viewed as a commodity. What drives a customer to purchase from a brand is not price, product or brand cache but their reputation within the buyer’s social graph, past experience and their ability to build value-based human-to-human relationship.
Buyers give more credibility and weight to the opinions and advice of their peers than they do to brand content, media relations or campaigns. That reliance on peers, easy access to customers and digital sites like G2 Crowd has all but obsoleted traditional industry analysts and media relations. The effect has been a complete redefinition of how trust is built and who communicates brand messages. Increasingly it is not the brand but customers, peers, communities and thought leaders that define positioning, messaging and the company’s reputation. Savvy marketers have embraced these trends by shifting their marketing culture, skill sets, programs and investments to be customer-aligned.
2. Death of outbound marketing
There has been over the past two years the steady decline in the effectiveness of outbound marketing. CMOs are finding that over 50 percent of their leads come from inbound marketing activities and they are shifting spend accordingly. Inbound marketing is more effective in pulling buyers to the brand and through their journeys though all would agree the practice remains nascent.
A significant portion of the early stages of the buyer’s journey is driven by buyer self-discovery – from understanding the problem, alternative solution approaches, outcomes their peers have realized and best practices. Brands have realized that the awareness-attraction-engagement cycle needs to be redefined to educate-enable-engage. The result of this trend has dramatically reshaped marketing team competencies.
3. Marketing’s street cred, finally
Marketing has struggled for decades to be seen as a value-adding member at the board table. Being seen as a cost center, the “colors” or “party team”, or the blamer for when things go wrong gets old real fast. Gaining street cred with peers and boards has been a major focus for CMOs. Technology has not only improved marketing execution but data driven decision outcomes as well.
Marketing automation, ERM, CRM and predictive analytics technology are enabling CMOs and their marketing teams to significantly improve their ability to credibly and transparently measure and report on marketing-attributable revenue and ROI. The ability to measure and predict how various marketing activities will perform and be able to adjust on the fly based on detailed insight into how buyers are reacting to marketing campaigns is the baseline to success. A number of CMOs have invested heavily in building very detailed market models that predict the yield from spend in various categories. Being able to confidently (and accurately) forecast pipeline and booked revenue from B2B marketing spend is changing the perception of marketing. Challenges remain in achieving full customer lifecycle visibility and using data science to advance customer engagement.
4. The link between employee and customer satisfaction
Organization theorists have long touted the importance of employee satisfaction. Yet CMOs have only recently recognized the strength of the linkage between employee engagement and customer satisfaction and loyalty. To that end, programs have been implemented, often in partnership with Human Resources, to keep employees up-to-date on company developments, news and product information. That information comes in many forms ranging from product announcements, knowledge bases, technical information, and financial news to real-time customer feedback.
CMOs are realizing that employee engagement and satisfaction doesn’t come from free lunches, Friday beers and fussball but from making sure that employees have meaning, mattering and belonging. The data shows there is a direct correlation between how happy, informed and trusted an employee is and the satisfaction of the customer they interact with. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the contact center, field maintenance, sales, marketing or finance – the linkage is real. This trend has focused organizations on equipping employees with the information and insights they need to better understand and respond to customer needs and expectations.
5. Only talk about revenue
Some things haven’t changed, namely B2B Boards of Directors and CEOs continue to only be interested in revenue pipeline metrics. While CMOs have made great strides forward in accounting for the revenue impact from marketing spend, Boards and CEOs have little interest in understanding the softer attributes that impact revenue such as reputation, reach and customer experience.
The frustration for CMOs is that the conversation has so narrowed that neither understand the power of marketing or how the discipline’s dramatic changes impacts how companies spot and respond to opportunities. Having been burnt in the past by pushing non-financial issues, CMOs are sticking to the script.
There were a number of surprises from these interviews. One was that the sophistication of an organization’s marketing was not defined by company size, budget or CMO’s vision but by their customers. Regardless of company size, progressive CMOs are constrained by how comfortable their customers and Boards of Directors are with new methods of engagement.
These past trends have dramatically reshaped what marketing means today and what it will look like in the future. Everything from competencies, organization structure, reporting metrics to how CMOs keep their organizations agile and healthy is being rethought.
The future of marketing is exciting as well as challenging. CMOs are faced with the duality of managing breakneck pace of change within their customer segments and marketing practices while educating their peers and boards on the new role of marketing, revenue impact of customer alignment and the value marketing brings to the table.
