A summary of things you should know about Do Less Better according to John R Bell: Introduction In this episode John R Bell takes a deep dive into his book,Read More
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]]>In this episode John R Bell takes a deep dive into his book, Do Less Better, where he explains why sacrifice in the right places cuts through complexity and clears the way to competitive advantage.
In his book Bell provides a tool-kit of road-tested strategies for keeping companies lean, creating cultures of innovation, and knowing when to expand and yet, remain streamlined. The goal of the book is to teach you how to “think smaller,” when everyone around you is firmly entrenched in the “do more” strategy in order to become more agile, adaptable, and resilient than your competitors.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who are struggling to outweigh the competitors in their market and need a new yet effective approach to reinvent their current strategy.
It’s certainly not the first book on focus and nor will it be the last but I think the element that separates it from the rest is how people can successfully cut through complexity and achieve focus.
I’ve written it to flow as a beginning to end read and I think that will benefit every reader.
The most important takeaway is the fact that leaders and managers don’t have to keep doing more and more to be affective and successful. Doing less and doing it better is a viable strategy at all levels within the company.
I begin the book by establishing the breadth and depth of complexity, the fact that it’s pervasive. Complexity in business is a cancer that stifles and if you leave it unchecked it can bring a company to its knees so I establish that as the main problem. The other thing is that companies have chosen diversification as the means to grow and these seem to be the ones that suffer the most.
The second chapter I call The Steel and Steal of Strategic Sacrifice. The whole idea here is that the strategy is a steal because good strategies cost no more to develop than bad ones.
None of this happens without leadership so I move to a leadership chapter. It certainly helps when top management buys into the idea of doing less better and if top management does it can become the culture of the company.
From there we go into The Urgency for Action chapter. I suggest that it doesn’t matter whether you’re entrepreneurial or not, success comes from those who think like entrepreneurs. And until the digital age innovation was the way of the entrepreneur. Giant corporations have a habit of gobbling up competitors and dominating markets and in the process many of them have lost their competitive edge. I go through the reason for the complexity; I talk about the strategy being important and leadership leading the way.
Chapter six is for marketers but it will benefit every reader because I reiterate the power of differentiation and I titled this chapter KISS is not a Rock Band. If you want differentiation you have to ask yourself this question. What are you prepared to sacrifice to get it? You have to be prepared to give up a benefit or two or three.
That leads into branding which everyone knows is big business today and my chapter on it is about those who do it well and explains why others have lost their way.
Towards the end of the book I make it clear that there is more to clarity and coherence than cutting back product lines, markets, and projects. I make the point that coherent companies align every function and every aspect of their organization with their capabilities.
The last book is titled Regrets: I’ve had a few. In this chapter I share with the reader some of the regrets and mistakes I’ve made along the way so that you can learn from my mistakes.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 7:35
“20% of the new initiatives deliver 80% of the rewards. Choose carefully and you save money, reduce complexity, and ride the fastest race horses to the future. “- John R Bell
I am a retired CEO of a consumer packaged goods company that was sold to Kraft back in the 90’s. After the sell to Kraft I decided to become a management consultant and I did that until I retired about two years ago. By the time I hung up my hat I’d helped a couple dozen companies including Campbell Soup, Starbucks, and Interbrew. I love to write and still like to play games such as golf and tennis.
Earlier in my career I was faced with the challenge of turning around a near bankrupt company. This company had too many products, too many brands, and too many categories. So by closing or selling the majority of the brands we trimmed that company down to a shadow of its former self. We decided that we were going to be an expert in one category and at the time that happened to be coffee. By focusing on coffee and nothing else we were able to swim out of the raging river of red ink and we called that means to the end the do less better strategy. I describe that as the opposite of doing more with less or even doing more with more and that whole idea stayed with me for the rest of my career. So when I became a consultant I saw a similar pattern of unnecessary complexity in both troubled and successful businesses and I think today business complexity has reached pandemic proportions and there has never been a greater need for simplicity and focus.
The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander.
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Buy Do Less Better by John R. Bell on Amazon today
Visit DoLessBetter.ca to learn more about the book and download a free chapter
Follow John R Bell on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
The Road to Reinvention by Josh Linkner
Aligning Strategy and Sales by Frank Cespedes
Invent Reinvent Thrive by Lloyd Shefsky
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Customer Experience 3.0 according to John A. Goodman: Introduction In this episode John Goodman takes a deep dive into his book, CustomerRead More
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]]>In this episode John Goodman takes a deep dive into his book, Customer Experience 3.0, where he shares his high-profit strategies in the age of techno service.
In his book Goodman provides a roadmap to enhance the customer service experience by using the best tools and strategies available today. The goal of this book is to teach you how to create an effective customer access strategy, use customer feedback properly to enhance your product, improve your marketing efforts, and use CRM systems and other tools to deliver customer satisfaction.
This book is for entrepreneurs who struggle to take advantage of and properly manage the customer service tools that are available on the market today.
We find that everyone talks about customer service and customer experiences really good because you’ll win more customers but there is no quantification done in a way that finance guys will ever agree to. The book is aimed heavily at how to quantify the payoff of better service and quality and customer experience in a way finance will actually accept. Another difference is that all the new technology has now allowed one to deliver great service and wow the customer at very low expense. We focus on the financial implication and how one intelligently implements technology.
You can jump in and out but to give yourself the ammunition you need to get finance and marketing to really invest with you it makes sense to read it from front to back.
It would be that the revenue and word of mouth implications of a better customer experience are 10 to 20 times the cost required to achieve it. So you are guaranteed 1,000% return if you do your quantification in the right way.
The first chapter is Why Good Service Might Not Result in a Great Experience and that’s about knocking down all the myths that everybody brings to the customer experience arena.
The second chapter is about how service is more than people. It’s more than smiling and being courteous. There has to be really good processes because most of your staff are implementing processes and if they’re constrained by that then they are backed into the corner oh well sir I’d like to do that but I can’t because. This is basically setting the stage that you need to have technology and processes that support the people.
The third chapter is about winning over the chief financial officer. In this chapter we show how you can quantify not only the revenue payoff of better service and quality but also word of mouth because successful companies have very positive word of mouth.
Chapter four is about how to deliver a product right the first time which entails setting proper customer expectations.
The next step after delivering the product is getting the customer to reach out to you if they have problems.
The sixth chapter is when someone comes to you for service you want to be sure that you satisfy them. Two things that most frontline staff lacks are flexibility and clear believable explanations.
The seventh chapter is Listen Passionately which is creating a unified voice of the customer. Most organizations say the voice of the customer are their surveys and their complaints but there are two other sources of data that are critically important and in many cases more powerful. The operational data internal to the company is going to tell you hours before the customers do. The fourth piece is the employee input because employees know real time and in many cases in advance what is going to happen. So we find that these data sources integrated in such a way that they create the economic imperative for action make a voice of the customer system that is dramatically more powerful than the average company has.
The last three chapters of the book focus on three key implementation issues where I see everyone is driven nuts. The first one is taming technology and here we have come up with a number of mechanisms for how the costumer experience area can play nicely with the IT department. I suggest how 10 different technologies can be used to enhance the customer experience.
The ninth chapter focuses on empowering the frontline staff and creating emotional connection with the customer. This chapter looks at a lot at training and incentives but the most critical factor that doesn’t work well in most corporations is the supervisor. The role of the supervisor is not catching people doing things wrong its recognizing people for doing things right.
The final chapter is about surviving as the customer experience leader. In this chapter I suggest seven roles that a customer experience leader should be performing and two that they should be avoiding because they are keys to disaster.
“No news is not necessarily good news.” – John A. Goodman
I am an engineer by trade and have been in this business for about 40 years. We started out doing research for the government and since then have worked with about 45 of the fortune 100 and a bunch of nonprofits in 17 countries around the world. We have worked literally in every industry enhancing customer service and the customer experience.
In 2009 I had written a book, Strategic Customer Service, which was how companies needed to array their operations to deliver really good customer service. In the last five years I saw technology coming in in so many areas that I felt I needed to update it.
In Search of Excellence by Thomas Peters and Jan Carlzon
Buy Customer Experience 3.0 by John Goodman on Amazon today
Visit CustomerCareMC.com to learn more about John and download the national rage study
Follow John A Goodman on Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Moving Targets by Gabriel Aluisy
Hooked: How To Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal
Aligning Strategy and Sales by Frank Cespedes
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Simple Ways Entrepreneurs Can Attract Customers
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Aligning Strategy and Sales according to Frank Cespedes: Introduction In this episode Frank Cespedes takes a deep dive into his book AligningRead More
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]]>In this episode Frank Cespedes takes a deep dive into his book Aligning Strategy and Sales where he brings business strategy and sales together in order to make your business scale.
In his book Cespedes teaches you how to bring together your strategy with the behaviors you’re going to need in selling in order to execute that strategy. The goal of the book is to offer a road map to articulate strategy in ways that people in the field can understand and that will fuel the behaviors required for profitable growth.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs or CEOs who are looking to scale a new startup or create new sustainable growth of an already established business.
The world needed a book that brings together strategy and sales. My book is not simply a strategy book or a selling tip book but it is about how to bring together your strategy with the behaviors you’re going to need in selling in order to execute that strategy.
Value is created or destroyed in the marketplace not meetings.
I start from an assumption that I think is a pretty darn good assumption. In business value is created or destroyed in the marketplace with customers. The market includes the industry you compete in, the customers segments where you choose to play and the buying processes of the customers that you sell and service. If a company has a strategy, as opposed to a wish list, those factors should inform a strategy and that strategy sales task. From there you need to align actually selling behaviors with the required task and ultimately entrepreneurs, managers and incorporations basically have three levers to do that.
First and most importantly are people; who your sales people are and what they know. The second lever is control systems; the company’s performance management practices. And the third lever is the sales environment; the wider company context in which sales initiatives get developed and executed. I think companies can use this framework to do a few important things. First, make sure in their strategy meetings they are having the right dialog and part of that dialog must include what that strategy means for people in the field. Secondly, if you are a CEO, entrepreneur or an investor I think the framework can save you money and redirect how you spend that money.
The book has four parts. Part one outlines the basic idea and framework in the book and provides examples of what happens if you don’t think these things through.
Part two of the book is Linking Strategy and Sales. This part of the book focuses on the core elements of each side of linking strategies and sales. In this section there is a chapter that looks at the foundational prerequisite which is the presence of coherent strategies. Many companies confuse strategy with their value, mission and purpose and those are all important things but very different.
Another chapter in the book is about communicating strategy which is a very, very big issue because companies are typically very bad at this.
The last chapter of section one provides a step by step process for thinking about how to identify what I call the idea of core customers for your business.
From there I take you into a chapter about hiring, development and organizing sales people. The average American company has a turnover in sales somewhere between 5% and 30% annually. That means that every four years or so the average American company has to replace its sales force. So hiring is a very important issue.
The next chapter is about sales compensation and incentives. You must think about the appropriate compensation system as a necessary but not sufficient cause of getting the behavior that you want.
The final chapter in that portion of the book looks at a key the dimension of sales performance do’s which in my experience is probably the most underutilized lever for effecting behavior in most companies.
The final portion of the book is called closing which is about making connections. The connections I am talking about in those final two chapters are of two sorts. One is developing sales managers that can actually manage. The other is about the cross functional connections that require for effective selling.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 06:00
“The desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” – John le Carre
I am currently a professor at Harvard Business School. I was a professor at Harvard for 11 years before leaving to run a business for 12 years, sold the business and returned to Harvard about five years ago.
My academic research always focused on go-to market elements including channels and sales management but when I left Harvard and ran a business for 12 years I had to meet payroll and sales. After getting lucky in business and returning to Harvard I taught strategy for a few years. The fact is that despite decades of attention to so called strategic planning there really is remarkably little research about how to link strategy with the nitty-gritty of field execution.
Managing for Results by Peter Drucker
Buy Aligning Strategy and Sales by Frank Cespedes on Amazon today
Visit FrankCespedes.com to learn more about Frank
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Hyper Sales Growth by Jack Daly
High Profit Selling by Mark Hunter
The Trusted Advisor by Robert Galford
Relevant advice and tips:
7 Reasons Why Your Sales Skills Suck
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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