Pain vs. Performance

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Sales, Web presence on October 29th, 2009

Web renovation as strategy work

Posted in Sales, Web presence on August 3rd, 2009

I’m reading a new tome.  It’s not available at Amazon, but it’s damn good.  My team put together a ‘website renovation’ recommendation document for a client of ours, where they analyzed the sites of this client’s two biggest competitors and then suggested a series of actions our client take.  What’s striking is that this tome (70 pages of quality, not quantity) is enhancing the client’s strategic direction, not just its website.

The questions that are posed and answered in this piece of work are the exact questions a good strategy consultant would ask; what is your customer segmentation? how does your approach change based on the different segments?  what kinds of experiences do you want your customers to have?  what kinds of thought-leadership will be most engaging to your targets?  how do you think about yourself and where you are heading?

What’s so powerful about using a website renovation to answer THE key questions about your strategic direction is that you end up with a visual manifestation of your work. Whereas the usual strategy work gets “cascaded” throughout an organization via various communications channels and inevitably gets diluted and absorbed, your web presence snaps the conversation back into place.  I’m wondering if a web renovation shouldn’t be a required deliverable for all strategy work..

Throw a party

Posted in Marketing, Sales, Web presence on July 23rd, 2009

Think of the best party you’ve been to in the past year.  What was it like?  For me, the best party had a great setting, delicious food, cool people, and – most importantly – excellent conversation.  It feels great to go to a party and mix with people you know and people you don’t, and to have a cool, thinking conversation emerge from the milieu.

But think about what it takes to create the environment for that conversation to emerge.  Isn’t this challenge the exact same one we are trying to tackle in our businesses…namely, drawing people together to enter into a conversation that takes them (and us) somewhere??  What is the engine that drives marketing and sales?  Conversation!  But then why the heck do we spend so much time on the setting (website design) and food (content)?  No question that this stuff is really important.  A party without food and drink will not go very far.  But if everyone is sitting around stuffing their faces and no one’s talking, what reason do they have to stay?

To stretch the party metaphor a bit farther, consider that our blogs are the pieces of conversation that we share with each other, our tweets are the fly-by funny comments made as the jokesters walk through the party, and our analytics are the ‘after-party’ where a precious few clutch well-handled bottles and debrief the scene.  Now, THAT’S a party.

Slow down! Speed up!

Posted in Entrepreneurship, Measurement, Web presence on June 27th, 2009

My kids are getting to that age when they are now telling me how to drive! The other day, they were in the backseat of our Mini, and they kept telling me that I was going too fast. But that got me thinking (and slowing): my kids can monitor (and improve) the way I’m driving from the backseat, because in the Mini the dashboard odometer is HUGE. What if we could all see the dashboard for our company? What if the metrics were there such that we could make real-time decisions?

This is starting to happen. I was in California recently with a client CEO who, in the middle of a meeting, pulled out his iPhone and showed me an up-to-the-minute look at some of his key business metrics. Very powerful.

Most businesses now have the systems in place to build a dashboard that will allow them to make better, faster decisions. How many dashboards do you have in your life? It doesn’t stop with the car’s dashboard. This blog has a dashboard. My Facebook page, LinkedIn page, Twitter account, my iPhone screen…all are dashboards. Cripes, even my home thermostat looks like a dashboard now. Actually, we are surrounded by dashboards. I just built a very powerful version in salesforce.com for my firm’s sales efforts. So…at last count, I’ve got about 12 dashboards I check on a regular basis…some hourly, some daily, some weekly (or when my kids tell me to).

If you could put together a dashboard for your business, what would it measure?