I once heard a doctor say the human body was designed to live to 140 and it was those things we do with our life that starting subtracting from that number.
Most real businesses (those that have at least two or more years with real customer business) can be healthy long beyond 140 years if the leadership doesn’t do things to lower that number.
The first thing to stop doing:
Stop believing what you learned about sales and “Revenue Generation” is true.
The 20th Century was an anomaly in how business works. It was 100 years of a mass production bubble fueled by the world’s first mass of steadily employed people with disposable income. There were people with money ready to buy things they had never owned before and product fulfillment became the value this market would pay for.
In North America there was one bubble after another. Housing, cars, appliances, travel, entertainment, recreation, electronics and so on. The bubbles created a series of problems but some of the most serious were the buyers in these bubbles were not wise in their purchase and they taught the sellers bad habits. The sellers learned their most important value was to have a product available for the buyers. The sellers weren’t good at cost control, marketing, sales or customer support because none of that mattered during the bubble.
Every theory of management, sales, marketing, and logistics through at least the first two thirds of the last century had studied organizations in bubbles. Those theories and learnings did not capture good business science then and are even worse given this century’s realities driven by the internet, technology and things like 3D printing.
Almost everything we have learned from the past is wrong and dangerous, so stop believing it. Just because something works once does not mean it is repeatable.
The second thing to stop doing:
Stop just doing more of the same thing and expecting something more or different.
When a company wants to grow today they get capital to hire more sales people, buy more advertising, improve the website, contract with lead gen firms and increase the velocity on everything. They also believe to sell more there needs to be more cold calling, increased flyers, sales with price reductions and free stuff.
The teams are trained, measured, coached, and compensated to grow, to get bigger wallet shares, cross sell, up sell and do anything possible to get deeper in the customer’s pocket.
The key is doing more and doing it better since we know that the market wants what we do, so let’s give it to them.
Stop doing that. Stop doing more of that. In the 21st century the “buyer is in charge.” The internet shows buyers the difference between what a company “says” and what a company “does.” No customer gets up in the morning and says “who can I do business with who wants a bigger share of my wallet?”
Companies are transparent, the buyer is in charge and they want to opt-in when they see a company that has something that interests them or solves an important problem. Stop doing more and work on something new and important to the buyer.
The third thing to stop doing:
Stop trying to tell the world what you do is valuable.
Even little kids don’t like to be “told” – they have curiosity so they can be taught or they can figure stuff out for themselves. Customers are the same – they don’t want to be told. First, very few customers believe you have any idea what they are all about or what they need or what prompted this conversation.
Not only don’t they want to be told, they are sure what you think is valuable and what they value are more likely to be different than the same.
If a potential buyer will opt-in to talk with you they are hoping you will care enough about them to have a conversation and share what each of you know to arrive at a place where both of you get and receive value.
Stop telling, be clear about what you are really good at when helping customers solve problems. See if that is anything like why the customer reached out. Then facilitate a conversation of equals to learn the details of what the customer is working on in order to see if what you do has any value to the customer now or for the future. This can be done in seconds on line, in minutes in retail or weeks in business to business enterprise engagements.
My career started as a caddie on a private golf course. One of the people I caddied for was a blind lady who played as well or better than half the women at the course. What she taught me was the importance of not doing dumb stuff; instead do the right things, only the right things and do them every time.
Later I taught people to play golf and I believed I could get any golfer to shoot 90 or below all the time by using just what the blind lady taught me. The teaching was simple; stop doing dumb stuff. Practice and play the course with only the right stuff. Don’t go for the longest drive of your life on each hole, don’t try to hit the ball under the trees and around the corner to run it up on the green from the middle of the woods.
The health of your business works the same as your golf game. Stop doing dumb stuff. Dumb stuff is why a golfer who could shoot 90 shoots 110 by working way too hard. Dumb stuff is a parasite a business owner invites to rob the business of health.
We have all been given a parasite from the 20 Century myths. Now is the time to run the best business of your life and play your best golf of your life parasite free.
To get healthy you first have to dump the parasite by stopping the dumb stuff. Then as you get healthy you will get stronger and more skilled by adding “Revenue Science™”.
The forth thing to stop doing:
Stop thinking about competitors.
Every day has 24 hours, every organization has a limited number of dollars to invest. There are only so many conversations to have in a day and when a team is told to FOCUS (the center of interest or activity) the intent is to “FOCUS” on a very limited number of things.
A google search on “business books on competition” gets About 102,000,000 results (0.52 seconds) and a search on business articles on competition was predictably even more popular with About 161,000,000 results (0.49 seconds).
Most organizations talk and think about competitors but some do research. The “market research on competition” a subset of those two searches above found a respectable About 4,940,000 results (0.50 seconds).
When the focus is changed to customer’s problems to solve (business books “providing value” that solves customer problems) google has to work a lot harder to find a lot less with About 900,000 results (0.68 seconds).
The point to this is that organizations build strategies for competition, do research, train sales and marketing to compete against our competitors, develop “competitive messages” to spin to the market and add features to the products to match “the other guys.”
The only place a company get business is from its customers so why does it spend so much money and focus on competitors for NO return.
Beyond that if competitors are so similar then the market must believe the products and services are commodities. If that is true, the market buys primarily on price and availability. Of course some buyers care about packaging, color options and spokesperson, but the only way to know how to take advantage of that is get in the customer’s brain not in the competitor’s brain.
If what the seller wants to sell is supposed to be High Value Vs Low Price than the only place to study is the customer, since the customer is the only one to determine value. The only way the customer can determine value is by making a buying decision and paying the amount justified by the value.
The way organizations focus on competitors when there is little if any long-term upside in the market raises the interesting question of “why do they do that?” Are they hoping the competitor knows something that was missed or that doing the same thing the competitor does (only better of course) protects leadership from being a scapegoat?
The other question is “why don’t they spend as much time as possible with customers to understand the problems to solve.” Don’t misunderstand; great sellers who understand customers see problems to solve that the customer perceived as part of the landscape. Companies like Apple, IBM, Disney, Google, LinkedIn and 3M have made billions when they solved compelling, high value problems before the buyer could write an RFP or do a google search to define the problem.
So stop the focus on competitors and transition to the place where you are part of your buyer’s team and their best possible choice for today and the long-term.
The fifth thing to stop doing:
Stop thinking from the company’s frame of reference out.
Leaderships sets 5 revenue goals for the next year:
- Increased wallet share per account 5%
- Deploy strategic farming to go beyond the 5% wallet share by develop net-new business for 3% short-term and a 7% long-term
- As part of the strategic farming get 2% from cross sell of new technology
- Grow net-new business from 2 referrals per-farmed account with at least one contract
- Grow 3 new named accounts by territory with at least $500k per account first year and a 50% growth commitment for year two.
Those 5 goals are what is called HQ (Head Quarters) think and speak. The goals and those words are from the “frame of reference” of HQ. The people who think and speak this way “make money from” their customers. The goals are to get as deep into the customer’s pockets as possible, stay there and grow any time possible.
This image is a good example of how these HQ thinkers and speakers view their (“their” -being the operative word) world.
How interesting that the author of this HQ graphic doesn’t have customers in the picture at all. Customers don’t even show up in the Secondary Stakeholders level. HQ organizations and team members who think and speak this way almost always really believe they are “Customer Focused,” since that is where the money is (like robbing banks because that is where the money is).
Every business makes a decision (intentionally or unintentionally) to “make money from” (HQ frame of reference) or “make money with” (buyer frame of reference) their customers.
Those “buyer frame of reference” sellers would set goals that look like this:
- Have 30% more ideal customers in our niche review our thought leadership content showing best practice options that solve their compelling problem
- Of all those ideal customers that review our thought leadership content get 40% to ask for a conversation about how the solution fits for them within 60 days
- Of those 40% achieve 50% moving on to a joint SOW to define how the buyer meets or exceeds the value they need from the best option the seller can support
- 80% of those who fully complete the joint SOW based on value expected are confident and compelled to move to contract.
- 100% of those who contracted are delighted with the outcome and received at least the value expected.
- 60% of those delighted have problems we can solve for the future.
- 50% of those delighted by 2nd level (partners, customers, etc.) with problems they want us to develop a joint SOW around.
- Buyer conversations over the year have developed at least 10 problems we can address for buyers in the short-term and 20 to be considered for the long-term.
If HQ and Buyer frame of reference are this different these are the outcomes in the market:
- HQ out is perceived as a vendor providing commodities
- HQ out has to resell every deal based on price and availability compared to competition
- HQ out has few repeat and referral deals
- HQ out has low margins
- HQ out has low win rates
- Buyer frame – is a partner (short-term and long-term)
- Buyer frame – gets paid for value delivered and only negotiates the joint SOW not the price or margin
- Buyer frame – gets lots of repeat and referral deals
- Buyer frame – gets help from the buyer for next problems to be solved
- Buyer frame – is normally sole source and fixed fee
- Buyer frame – is strategic in relationship and delivery
The only time a buyer wants HQ out thinking is when they want to buy something cheap one time.
The rest of the time buyers want someone who thinks about the world from their frame of reference so both the buyer and the seller make a lot more money with a lot less risk and effort.
Start learning the skills and apply the discipline to live from the buyers frame of reference.