"...keeping you great"
HEADLINES:
People who own tomorrow are preparing for it today. African Proverb
I could use your help if you're a fan of my book (see below), but first...
Don't Sell Benefits, Focus on Loss Avoidance -- Dr. Victoria Medvec, the negotiations guru from Northwestern University, flew across the pond to keynote our Sydney Growth Summit. As many times as I've attended her four hour course, I had missed this critical piece of advice. Especially during downturns, STOP pushing the benefits of your product/service. Customers aren't interested, especially when they are highly risk adverse right now. Instead, you MUST emphasize the additional losses they'll experience if they don't consider your product/service. People switch to avoid losses; they don't switch to get gains. Read this paragraph over and over and then sit down, set aside your list of benefits, and make a list of all the losses your customer will garner if they don't urgently buy your product/service.
Five Ways the Fastest Growing Firms are Continuing to Grow -- Ernst & Young sponsored our Summit in Sydney this week. Jon Dobell, who leads their Strategic Growth Markets practice and their Entrepreneur of the Year program, shared research garnered a couple months ago from over 250 interviews of Australia's leading firms who are growing ahead of the market. They found these five strategies:
- Expand into new geographies -- a way to grow the existing sandbox
- Target one particular market and dive deep
- Pursue new acquisitions -- many are very inexpensive right now
- Drive reoccurring revenue -- helps secure the base
- Focus on cross-selling
BTW, for those who listened to Michael Praeger's teleconference this week, CEO of AvidXchange, driving reoccurring revenue has been a key to their growth during these turbulent times -- here's a link to listen to an archive of that 30 minute interview of a peer.
Most Interesting Fact -- while all the speakers shared gobs of data, the most interesting statistic came from Ross Dawson, Chairman of Future Exploration Network. He compared the size of the global economy to the physical weight of all products and services (I didn't know this statistic existed!). In essence, if and when the global economy doubles in size, the global weight will stay the same. This means essentially all the growth will come from stuff that weighs nothing i.e. knowledge. Content Rules.
Grade Your Website -- Naomi Simson, founder and CEO of Sydney-based Red Balloon, mentioned a free tool that grades your website for SEO (search engine optimization) construction i.e. how easy is it for Google to find your website. Go to http://website.grader.com and type in your URL.
Manage Remote Contractors/Free Agents -- though this feels a little Big-Brotherish, check out oDesk. One of the challenges of hiring free-lancers/subcontractors from around the world, who charge by the hour, is knowing if they are really putting in the hours for which they are billing you. The oDesk tool captures an actual time-sequence of the work the freelancer is doing on their computer and time stamps it. And if the free-lancer has a remote webcam, it will even show them working (this is optional!). Much easier to understand if you just take 60 seconds and look at the website. And the website also helps you locate subcontractors, who have all agreed to utilize the system to track work.
Best Use of Twitter -- there was a great deal of talk about web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 solutions for companies. Though this wasn't shared at the Summit, Shannon Blake Gans, head of New Deal Studios, sent me a note this week "I thought you would enjoy this story. Heard about Kogi, a Korean BBQ restaurant, on PRI. They use Twitter to tell people where their BBQ taco truck is going to be here in LA and 200 people show up. Now that is a good use of Twitter!" I couldn't agree more. And I love their tagline: We gives you zey grubbin, thanks for zey lovin!
@thegrowthguy -- so at the urging of Mike Jagger, CEO of Provident Securities, I now have a twitter address @thegrowthguy. However, I've been really struggling with what to use it for. Two of the best ideas I picked up at our Sydney Summit:
- Let your "followers" know where you are physically i.e. "I'm in Sydney for three days" -- you might connect with someone you didn't know was there as well.
- Ask a question -- twitter is a great way to garner some wisdom from the crowd i.e. "what is the best tapas bar in Barcelona?" or "which application do you use to...?"
Note from Fred Crosetto, CEO of Seattle- and China-based Ammex -- "One of our 40 SSK (Start/Stop/Keep) goals for the year, which we are diving into in Q1, is to undertake 50 hours of sales training for anyone that interacts with clients. We are starting out with Victoria Medvec's DVD and plan on driving the Synchronous Presentation concept across the company. It's a mystery to me why companies cut back on learning and training in down time. Now is when more focus should be put on training and capturing opportunity." To not teach your sales team Dr. Medvec's process for dramatically reducing sales cycle time is to leave the door open for your competition to beat you to the sale.
Help -- if you feel Mastering the Rockefeller Habits is one of the best management books for entrepreneurial firms I would greatly appreciate you emailing a short note to kate@800ceoread.com -- they are compiling a list of the top books in various categories and I would like to get on their radar. Thank you immensely.