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Develop Your High Potentials into Results-Driven Leaders

High potentials usually have good ideas, but what transforms a high potential into a genuine leader is the capacity to move agendas and get results. Ideas must be implemented. Samuel Bacharach believes that leadership is about “executing” and getting things done. Leadership need not be driven by charisma or personality, but by the exercise of specific microskills that allow leaders to move an agenda through an organization.

In this world of mergers and acquisitions, turf and uncertainty, in which the solution mindset is replacing the product mindset, your high potentials need to have the political skills to mobilize groups and the managerial skills to sustain momentum.

This webinar will discuss some of the specifics of these pragmatic skills and elaborate on how you can implement a program to help high potentials within your organization develop these skills.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EST

Samuel Bacharach is the McKelvey-Grant Professor in the Department of Organizational Behavior at Cornell University (ILR). He is also the co-founder of the Bacharach Leadership Group (BLG), an organization which specializes in leadership development programs with an emphasis on microskills of change, innovation, execution, negotiation and coaching.

Sam writes a weekly column for Inc.com, focusing on issues of pragmatic leadership, and has published over 100 academic articles and over 20 books. He is the author of Get Them on Your Side, Keep Them on Your Side and the forthcoming volume, Moving Your Agenda: Leading for Innovation and Change.

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Asking the Right Questions is Your Smartest Investment

The success of any organization—whether private corporation or philanthropic foundation—begins with a clear understanding of customers and their needs. If you want to make an impact in your organization, regardless of your current role, this knowledge is essential. How can you make the right business and career decisions if you don’t understand your company, its products, its market position, and its value to customers?

What they say is true: It’s really all about marketing.

Or, more precisely, creating and sustaining a competitive advantage for your organization is all about cultivating the marketing mentality. The first step? Understanding the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of marketing strategy, and how these are linked to your business and role.

Asking the Right Questions: The Three-Level Map

The first level of the map is the foundation of our marketing strategy. Here, we’re asking “What’s the general situation, the corporate and strategic context in which we’re making marketing decisions?”

At the second level, we use the S-T-P framework (segmentation, targeting, positioning) to narrow our focus to address specific marketing strategy issues. The answers to these questions form your overall marketing strategy:

  • “How do we segment, or break up, the market?”
  • “Given our strategic position in the marketplace, the strategic issues facing our company, and the opportunities available to us, what target market or target markets are most attractive for us?”
  • How do we position ourselves in the marketplace to those target customers, against the competition, to best meet their needs?

The third level of our map is where we execute our marketing strategy by using the four Ps—product, price, place (distribution), and promotion:

  • These tactics must fit together within one coherent strategy in order to deliver your market positioning to your target customers.
  • Strategic pricing is the tactic that most directly impacts your bottom line—not only in terms of being able to attract customers and deliver value, but also in terms of profitability.

Making Better Business Decisions

Even though you may not set market position or pricing in your role, you’re still executing on some facet of your organization’s marketing strategy. To be successful, cultivate a marketing mentality to ensure you’re asking the right questions, making the best possible business decisions, and aligning your activities to the big picture. Becoming fluent in marketing concepts and tools isn’t just a business elective; it’s a necessary, worthwhile investment for you and your organization.

 

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Measuring and Improving Business Performance

Management reporting systems are like power tools.  They can help organizations measure and improve their performance, motivate workers, and achieve strategic goals quickly and effectively.  But if you aren’t careful, it’s easy to make big mistakes, and maybe even injure yourself in the process.

In this presentation, Professor Robert Bloomfield of Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management will review best practices in management reporting and provide some essential “safety” tips.  Key topics include:

  • The importance of seeing beyond the measures to the true performance those measures are trying to capture
  • Using a Balanced Scorecard to define, achieve and improve your strategy
  • Choosing the right way to measure financial performance for your organization’s goals (whether it is a for-profit, not-for-profit or governmental concern)
  • Tying pay to performance, and more!

Original air date: February 25, 2014

View the video and download the slide deck here.

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Engagement is the #1 KPI

Traditional KPIs—or Key Performance Indicators—include things such as new customers, new subscribers, turnover rate and so on. However, how your community is engaging with your online marketing content—opening emails, commenting on blog posts, downloading eBooks, registering for webinars—is an important factor in how successful your overall marketing program is. And a successful marketing program often leads to companies exceeding their KPIs!

While engagement may seem like a “fuzzy” marketing metric, it’s actually something that can be measured and tracked – just like a like, a social share, or an email click-through. It’s time to think about engagement as another KPI!

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Get Proactive About Customer Success

As more and more companies have embraced the recurring revenue business model, it has become easier for customers to try new products and services (sales), and conversely, just as easy for them to leave if they aren’t realizing value (churn). This new reality has made way for the Customer Success movement—a renewed focus on driving customer lifetime value by monitoring health factors such as product usage, sales and billing data, survey responses and others. As the economic climate heats up, businesses are quickly realizing that in order to be successful, they must ensure that their customers are realizing success from the use of their product. Otherwise their bottom-line is at risk.

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Our Customers are in Control: 5 Factors for Success

Until recently, the most significant developments in customer service have been those envisioned and implemented by organizations—e.g., 800 numbers, routing systems, web-based services, multimedia capabilities, and real-time analytics, to name just a few. But we are now seeing a fundamental shift: developments on the customer’s side of the equation — the meteoric rise of smartphones, social media, broadband and mobility—are the most significant factors driving customer expectations and services.

What does your organization need to do to respond to these changes? I believe there are five key success factors:

  • First, ensure your executive leadership team spends time “in the trenches,” observing how interactions are handled, understanding the work of internal development teams, talking to customers, etc. This provides invaluable insight into direction and development priorities.
  • Second, commit to providing a broad range of access choices to customers, enabling them to reach the information and services they need through the channels they want to use (mobile, social, self-service, phone, etc.)
  • Third, tend to blocking and tackling—e.g., manage workloads effectively so that as customer needs evolve, your organization is accessible and provides consistent high levels of service and quality.
  • Fourth, take every opportunity at each customer touchpoint to build customer relationships and capture insight from them that is used for innovation and product improvement.
  • Finally (and this is both a prerequisite to the above and an ongoing responsibility), build a strong organization (hire right, train well) with a cross-functional commitment to understanding and serving customers.

This is a season of significant change. Organizations that understand the trends and respond appropriately have enormous opportunity to differentiate and thrive.

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David vs. Goliath: Compete Like A Dollar Store

Walmart is a retail Goliath. The company operates:

  • 11,000 stores in 27 countries,
  • E-commerce websites in 10 countries,
  • 630 U.S. Sam’s Club warehouse stores,
  • And grocery stores through 3,267 Supercenters and 322 Neighborhood Markets.

Enter the dollar store. It doesn’t look like much from the outside (a “no-frills box,” as Dollar General CEO Richard Dreiling described it to the NY Times a few years ago). Yet something (besides a flagging economy) is propelling dollar stores to become some of the fastest growing retailers in the country. How are dollar stores successfully battling the low-cost market giant Walmart?

Focus on the right competitive advantage

How does DG compete with Walmart on price? They don’t. DG isn’t delusional; it knows that going head-to-head only on price with Walmart is a losing proposition. True, DG does strive towards low costs, but their true competitive advantage is convenience. Maintaining a competitive position focused on convenience requires selecting its store locations, size, product selection, and pricing accordingly (more details below).

You can start to see the subtle but important differences between Walmart and DG by looking at their taglines (and also check out this). Walmart’s tagline is “Save Money. Live Better.” But moreover, here’s a line from a weekly ad circular: “Get it all in one trip.” Dollar General’s (DG) tag line is so similar, you might miss it: “Save time. Save money. Every day!” So, DG is looking to lure customers who are looking to make a few quick purchases, not do their weekly shopping all in one go.

Choose your position, then own it

DG and other dollar stores compete with big box stores by making it easier for consumers to buy everyday, popular brand items at a low price. With ease of purchase as the main customer value proposition, dollar stores own the category by:

  • Building small, no frills stores in residential areas along routes consumers travel frequently to and from work.
  • Carrying a low variety of products, mostly essential non-perishable items consumers need weekly (laundry detergent, toilet paper, snack food, and basic toiletries).
  • Reducing the number of brands and price points in each category.

The result is that dollar store shoppers spend less than 10 minutes inside the store. Contrast this to a usual Walmart shopping experience. If you need toilet paper, milk, and dish soap, would you rather spend a half hour meandering through a cavernous Walmart and comparing prices on 20 brands, or run into the Dollar General? This is another reason it’s common to see dollar stores located in the same shopping centers as a Walmart. While both stores draw cost-conscious customers, the dollar store picks off those who’d prefer an easier, quicker low-cost shopping trip. It doesn’t matter that Walmart actually has the lowest prices.

Hit them where it counts

The dollar store lesson is simple, but not easy: Know what your competition is capable of, and define your market carefully given what you know about your competition and customers. Define it for the specific problems you’re helping specific customers solve. Don’t try to be all things to all people. Strive to be the right things to the right people. Your well-defined market position is your weapon; take aim and hit your competition where it counts.

The ability to do this—whether you’re up against a market Goliath or creating a new market from scratch—will determine your fate in the short and long term.

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Maximize Social Media ROI with Strategic Planning

If you feel challenged to measure ROI of social media, you are not alone. But you can measure ROI in social media. Gone are the days of faith-based investment. In the year 2014, social media have been around long enough for us to know how they create value, and to estimate how much value they could likely create for a brand. The value levers are known, and the likely costs are known.

If you are interested in learning how to improve your ability to estimate ROI from social media, or how to build a business case for social business transformation, please join me in a webinar with eCornell on January 7 1PM EST, where you will discover how to:

  • Better understand and present the business case for creating a social media plan that delivers targeted, organization-wide results
  • Use a proven framework for implementing your social media plan and put the right infrastructure in place.
  • Increase social media ROI for brands of any size.

For those unable to attend, here’s the archived video of the webinar.

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Prediction for 2014: The Subscription Economy

After sitting down with some of the industry’s top executives at Dreamforce ’13 in San Francisco, it became pretty clear that some big changes are on the horizon for 2014. One that most agreed will play a major part in the coming year is the Subscription Economy, or the Recurring Revenue model. Zuora CEO Tien Tzuo defines this growing trend and shares a few examples that you may be using right now.

In the last 10 years, there’s been a dramatic shift in the way both consumers and companies want to do business. Today, people would rather subscribe to services than to buy products. It’s happening everywhere. And it will have a dramatic effect on your business. Source: Zuora

Everything is Going Subscription Based

Aria CEO Tom Dibble has seen a massive shift outside of the technology industry for early adopters of the Subscription Economy, or Recurring Revenue model. It’s no longer just apps or Amazon Subscribe and Save –– even old school giants like Ingersoll Rand are jumping in too. Remember those combination locks for your locker? Now you can subscribe to a digital security system for your home or office that can be controlled remotely via mobile devices.

 

Keep an eye out in the coming days for our second major prediction for 2014: The Internet of Things.

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The Major Flaws of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is a popular exercise that many marketing executives consider an essential tool for understanding customer buying behavior. In the era of the “enlightened customer” how relevant are theses maps in understanding and building a customer centric organization? In this two part series on journey mapping, I’ll look at the 7 basic flaws and then provide 6 tips to make them more relevant.

Why customer journey maps make me cringe

Often when organizations or people talk about customer journey maps, I cringe. My reaction isn’t a fundamental dislike for journey maps, but instead is caused by the common use of a problematic approach in trying to “map” the journey, and outputs that consistently miss the mark. Customer journey mapping emerged as companies tried to become more customer centric, and at least in concept, could prove extremely valuable. The problem I think, is in the way that the maps are developed and used in many companies. The customer journey map should be an underpinning for a complete customer experience (CX) strategy, but unfortunately there are enough issues with most of the ones I’ve seen lately that I just don’t think they are effective for most companies.

What’s wrong with customer journey mapping exercises and outputs?

There are some basic flaws in the base assumptions, process and outputs that need to be addressed. Here are a few of the issues:

1. Information

The Internet and it’s broad availability has created new information channels, including social networks of trusted people that can serve as information sources. In the early days of the Internet, companies provided a web site that contained what the company wanted the prospect to know about their products and brand. That was fine as long as the prospects went there (or to ads, TV commercials, or sales people) for information and advice. Once new sources became available people trusted them over company provided information (in many cases anyway). The company can participate in providing content but it must do so in a way that builds and respects a trust relationship. Because of the availability of information, content and the connections to trusted advisors outside the control of the company, the entire sales model is in flux.

2. Limited view

The role of marketing is changing. The traditional outbound view / approach is outdated and way too limiting in a connected business environment. Outbound does not create conversations with customers, it does not build relationships, and it is only half of a marketing strategy at best. Inbound marketing, or tools like social media monitoring and response, community platforms, blogs, public social networks, etc., are all playing an increasingly important role in a complete marketing strategy. The outbound only view is about shouting until a prospect notices you (if they don’t just ignore you) and inbound is about providing valuable content that draws attention and provides useful information.

3. Projecting

Projecting is a psychological term that describes the phenomenon of mistaking your own personal view as that of someone else. In this context, it’s about employees assuming that customers want the same things that they do, that their needs and preferences are aligned. In general this is not often true and in customer interactions, it’s likely to be misaligned.

4. Identification

Identifying your customers, this sounds simple but is it? Does everyone across the company know how to identify the target customers for each product line?  The answer is three part, 1. data, data, data, 2. analysis, and 3. education and training.

5. Organizational Silos

There’s a lot of talk about collaboration, particularly employee collaboration, but unfortunately many companies have not been successful (yet) at breaking down organizational silos. Interdepartmental competition persist, while self interest and incorrect incentives discourage collaboration. To build a CX strategy and a customer journey map, you need to work across the entire company to gain the complete view of customer interactions. If the company is still locked in its organizational silos the effort is likely to fail. Politics is a part of this issue as well, egos, the unwillingness to share or cooperate, perceived loss of control or power…all of these are barriers to successfully mapping touch points and processes.

6. Ownership

Who “owns” the customer, or at least who owns the CX strategy? This isn’t that easy to answer in most companies; marketing, sales, and customer service all feel ownership. Now that may not be a bad thing if the departments work together and focus on understanding the view from outside in. In some unfortunate circumstances though, the competitive nature between the departments leads to friction and even out and out war. In these situations the customer loses in the short term, but the company loses in the long term.

7. Journey

Is the customer’s set of interactions with your company a journey? Really? Maybe in the strictest sense, there is some starting point (chosen by the customer by the way) and there are some (or many) possible end points but the path from start to “finish” is not straight nor is it one that the company controls. Because of new information channels and the empowered, self educating customer, the customer rarely interacts with a company in a rigid, predefined way. Adaptability and flexibility of process is the key, and honestly, in the past processes were designed with the opposite trait in mind, we built rigid systems and the system maps reflected that. We spent our time defining interactions (by our definition, not the customers) versus defining opportunities to interact.

Look for part two of the series, where I’ll explore six tips for making the customer journey mapping exercise more effective and relevant to today’s marketing needs.