Learning from Zappos Core Values

I have recently exploring core values.  Every company has them but after hearing an interview with the Zappos CEO Tony Heishe I was struck by how broadly they can affect an organisation that truly lives by them.

It's all very well writing them down but is your company living them?

Core Values, when "lived" by a company should perfectly sum up the relationships between staff, management and customers and act as the yardstick by which all decisions are measured.

Here are Zappos Core Values.  What I really like is the explanation in clear terms what each value links to.

1. Deliver WOW Through Service
2. Embrace and Drive Change
3. Create Fun and A Little Weirdness
4. Be Adventurous, Creative, and Open-Minded
5. Pursue Growth and Learning
6. Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication
7. Build a Positive Team and Family Spirit
8. Do More With Less
9. Be Passionate and Determined
10. Be Humble

Do you know know your company's core values and more importantly do you think your company live them?

How the Long Tail applies to Business Relationships

You are looking for a particular contact but cannot find them in the 1000+ names and phone numbers in your address book.  Or maybe you have just tried to sync to your phone only to find you don't have enough memory. 

We have all had reason to question the value of the contact information we have gathered over the years but somewhere in our psyche is the instinct to hord this information, the just in case gene. Even though you may not frequently interact with many of these contacts, that  is not the point.  It is about having the right contact at the right time.  I call this the "Long Tail" of Business Relationships.

Chris Anderson in his book "The Long Tail" describes the changing markets in a digital age.  There are far more niche goods than hits, production costs are much lower, distribution costs have dramatically reduced and "filters" drive demand down the tail.

If you apply this to your business relationships you see a similar pattern forming.  We all have friends and family we interact with frequently, "the hits", but in relation to the total number of contacts they are few.  The "niches" are contacts we interact with infrequently but for very specifically reasons e.g. plumber in an emergency or past colleague when researching a company.

We have numerous means of building and keeping our contacts: intelligent email, linkedin, facebook, smart-phones and a wide range of search tools provide the filters.  Thanks to cheaper internet, 3G and wi-fi the information is constantly available.  All for free.  Our challenge is to make sure we constantly enrich and update the basic information, personal moderation.

I recommend you review your contacts today and prune those that are no longer relevant but more importantly enrich with as much detail as you can the others.  I guarantee you'll improve your business relationships in the process.

Pizza, Sushi and Account Management at Google

I recently had lunch with an Account Manager from Google and it was an interesting insight into one of the most successful companies on the planet and their approach to customer relations.

"Eat what you want, it's all free".  Someone had said the sushi was great but the pizza looked good too.  Have both?  Why not, who said you couldn't mix them in one meal (except possibly Mr Atkins).  

At Google everything is distilled down to a maths problem.  Each employee contributes an average of $1,000,000 in revenue per annum so anything the company can do to save them time, keep them focused or working a little longer has a significant impact on the bottom line.

What about the customers, partners and even the competition?  Of course things are done a little differently.  My host explained that each account is tiered by adword spend per month and this determines the amount of attention you receive, nothing unusual here. What is unusual is that Account Management means analysing the effectiveness of their current campaigns and working closely with them to generate more business, not necessarily spend more money with Google.  The logic being that if they spend more on online media advertising the odds (I'm sure they have a statistic) are they'll spend more with Google.

Now I understand why Google has made tools like Analytics, AdWords and Optimizer available for free.  It's again simple maths, you have limited resources so use them where they deliver the most value, on the big accounts.  For everyone else make it self service with great tools.  Who knows, some of todays small accounts might be the big spenders tomorrow.

Few companies have the revenue streams of Google to spend on free canteens and other time saving services but surely there's a lesson here for the rest of us.  Who said we have to do things the same old way, why can't we have sushi and pizza together for lunch?

How much time/money might a well stocked fridge at work save.  Could we work more closely with our customers on their business and not just ours?  Are our most productive staff wasting time on tasks better outsourced or assigned to other?

Refreshed blogroll for Relationships In Business

Updated the blogroll on Relationships In Business (.com).  Why not check it out and offer your own suggestions

Downturn hails the return of the Generalist

Marshal Goldberg, the generalist of his day.

Baseball and NFL football has the concept of a two-way player.  They have the ability to fill a multitude of positions both in offense and defense.  A generalist of the game.  In the earlier days of the game this type of player was highly prized because benches were smaller and clubs poorer. With the arrival of big money things got more specialised and the two-way players, the generalists, became a thing of the past.

Business had gone that way too, especially in hi-tech industries.  With the increased demands on resources and less money to pay the specialists now the two-way players of business world are back in demand.

So what does a generalist look like?  Simply put they are strong both offensive and defensive in their approach to business.  Some examples:

Offensively

• They spot new opportunities
• Coming up with new ideas to generate business
• Expand their offering in existing accounts
• Quick to chase an opportunity
• Happy to make slow but sure progress, to the score
• Leverage a win to setup the next deal

Defensively

• Giving no excuse to a client to move providers (lose ground) through excellent service
• Co-ordinating the whole organisation, as a team, to deliver the project or service
• Protecting the revenue (ground) already won
• Constantly keeping an eye on the bottom line to spot any change in business conditions
• Ready to react at the first sign of trouble
• Where a client is not happy, not being afraid to change the delivery model

So where are you likely to find the two-way player of your sector. 

Most probably under your nose, they just need to be given a chance.  That Project Manager who helps with Pre-Sales, the programmer who never has a deliverable late or the PA who manages the calendars of 10 consultants on 3 continents.

Now ask yourself, "am I the two-way player of my sector or company" and what are the implications when it comes time to shorten the bench?

5 Things to Love and Hate about Dynamics CRM 4.0

I've used a number of CRM solutions over the years and Dynamics CRM is the latest and probably the best.  CRM and Service Support applications seem to cause the marmite affect I think mainly because you are using them to track a problem or close some business.  So what do I love and hate about Dynamics?

What I love about Dynamics CRM

1. Usability: Clean, fast, and easy to understand  interface.

2. Integration with Windows: Works seamlessly with XP, IE, Active Directory and especially Outlook.

3. Off-the-self Richness: Out of the box it is packed full of features.  Important when you want to get up and running fast

4. Configurable: More options than a bag full of Swiss army knives.  Granular security, integrated designer tool and a good query tool.

5. Easy of data import: Unless you are converting unusual historical data the job is relatively easy.  Well structured data model and if the data is in outlook the job is trivial.

What I hate about Dynamics CRM 4.0

1. Cost: Unless you have already committed to Microsoft across the organisation this can be expensive.  Even the BPOS model quickly gets expensive after 20 users.
2. Desktop Performance: Even after applying all the patchs, archiving your mail and adding RAM expect a performance hit.  The background process will slow things down and if you have a salesman on an older laptop expect rebellion.
3. No unified search:  In the new Google/web 2.0 world we expect to be able to easily search for a phrase or string.  Any "advanced search" will require you to build a query or report.  This not only seriously slows adoption in an organisation but adds a technical overhead to even the simplest of searches.
4. Stuck in an MS World.  Dynamics misbehaves if you don't use IE and it is optimised for Outlook which is to say runs poorly with anything else.  The client for synchronisation only runs on Windows and you can only launch Microsoft documents in-browser.
5. Processes Assumed: Dynamics assumes you have a mature sales system. Try running any of the canned reports and you'll quickly see what I mean. The relationships, product definitions, pricing tables, invoice module and marketing manager require that all the tables are setup before everything works correctly.  Most SME don't have their services that well defined, this will seriously slow adoption

I could go on about XRM (pretty amazing), realtime integrity checking, Workflows, Screen designer, Report scheduling, etc but for business users it would not impress.  What I can say as a business user is that it helps me maintain better business relationships, track and close opportunities faster and helps my organisation share customer intelligence more easily.  The result is that we deliver a better,more professional service and we all gain the business benifits.

Some great CRM Quotes

While searching around for some new sources on customer relationship management I found a great list of CRM Quotes on small business crm. If even half of them are true it highlights just how important CRM is to every business.  Hope you find them as interesting as I did.

"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency."
-Bill Gates

"The impact on an organisation can at times be subtle and distributed throughout the enterprise...Cost savings and productivity enhancements can be seen in saving a sales person 20 minutes per week in writing activity reports, or answering four times the volume of web-based service requests in the same amount of time."
-Mary Wardley, vice-president of IDC's CRM applications research.

"On average, sales and marketing costs average from 15%-35% of total corporate costs. So the effort to
automate for more sales efficiency is absolutely essential. In cases reviewed, sales increases due to advanced CRM technology have ranged from 10% to more than 30%."
Harvard Business Review

"A business absolutely devoted to Customer Service Excellence will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large."
-Sir Henry Ford

"The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer."
-Peter Drucker

"We've spent the last 30 years focusing on the T in IT, and we'll spend the next 30 years focusing on the I."
-Peter Drucker

“..The 17 leading SMB companies all declared they were doing more implementations now than in 2004, with eight of them handling at least 60 percent of customer implementations… Of the winning enterprise vendors all but one does 70 percent or more of its implementations in house… He notes that CRM implementation by vendors is a trend that he predicts will eventually reach 90 percent..”. CRM Award Winners Survey, March, 2005
-CRM guru, Barton Goldenberg

"Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing... layout, processes, and procedures."
-Tom Peters

"The cost of retention is $180 per customer," he says. "But most automotive dealerships are set up for customer acquisition - which is crazy when you consider the average cost of customer acquisition is $1,000 or more."
-Arthur Hughes, author of several books on using databases to enhance CRM.

As an old saying at PricewaterhouseCoopers change practice used to run,
'OO + NT = EOO' (Old Organisation + New Technology = Expensive Old Organisation).

"Patronage by loyal customers yields 65 percent of a typical business' volume."
-American Management Association.

"Successful CRM is about competing in the relationship dimension. Not as an alternative to having a competitive product or reasonable price- but as a differentiator. If your competitors are doing the same thing you are (as they generally are), product and price won't give you a long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. But if you can get an edge based on how customers feel about your company, it's a much stickier--sustainable--relationship over the long haul."
-Bob Thompson, CustomerThink Corporation

"…. dissatisfied customers would tell between 7-10 people while a satisfied customer would recommend a company to 3-4 of their friends".
– PIMS

"..estimating all customer service problems would double profit growth over a five-year period".
– Ventura

80% of tradeshow leads are never followed up.
– Center for Exhibition Industry Research (CEIR)

The average time a sales representative spends on sales: 47%; on administrative tasks; 39%.
- Selling Power Magazine

Percent of qualified telemarketing leads that have only marginal follow-up: 40%; that are never called 50%.
- LeadMaster

1% of repeat purchases are made out of indifference and not out of loyalty.
- Industry analysts estimate

Dissatisfied customers communicate with 7-10 people while a satisfied customer will recommend a company to 3-4 of their friends.
- PIMS

"The absolute fundamental aim is to make money out of satisfying customers."
-Sir John Egan
–
"How you gather, manage and use information will determine whether you win or lose."
-Bill Gates

Read some more at small business CRM

Deliver on the promise and they may forgive your sins

     

 “We must not promise what we ought not, lest we be called on to perform what we cannot” - Abraham Lincoln

 Two years ago I flew with Ryanair and swore I would never do it again.  This year when booking holidays I reluctantly booked Ryanair again. What nags me is that I will seriously consider using them again despite the below average service, restrictions and stress.

Why, because they deliver on their promise of low cost, every time.

In our business relationships if you consistently deliver on your promise experience has shown me that a client is more tolerant of short comings in other areas.  As a supplier of goods or services we must be clear about what our brand promise is and deliver on it consistently.  To achieve this our who organisation must be aligned behind this promise, whatever it is.

In the example of Ryanair at every link in the chain cost is stripped out to ensure low costs. The same focus can be seen in other world class organisations but the area of focus differs: Fedex-time, Nordstrom-service, Dell-low cost, Amazon-choice, etc

So what is our brand promise and how focused are you on consistently delivering on it?

5% of your profit from new business

  ".....we expect to make only 5% of our net profit from new customers in 2010...."

 I was recently at a presentation on surviving the current down turn.  There were a few interesting speakers but one in particular caught my attention.  It was a throw away remark making another point which probably made it all the more interesting.
 

".....we expect to make only 5% of our net profit from new customers in 2010...."

On further analysis this expectation is well founded for many reasons, here are a few of the more obvious

• Cost of acquiring business from new customers is always more expensive than from existing relationships.
• Existing customers are less price sensitive and more value driven
• The margins are usually sacrificed to win new business
• Estimate are less accurate because you don't know the new customers business.
• Because the trust has not been built up yet, new customers are tighter on budget and tougher in negotiations.
• Scope creep common on initial projects because you want to please in the hope of winning more business.
• The good-will usually traded when a problem arises has not been built up so it comes out of budgets
• Additional consultancy is not as freely available, important given it is usually higher margin.

I'm not advocating that you ignore new business development entirely (you have to plant the seeds for tomorrow) but what I am saying is that if your business is trying to survive on limited resources the best application of those resources is on building your relationships with your existing customers.  The "band for buck" will be higher and it will be more quickly seen in the bottom line

The Rules of Business Relationships

After reading the second book in "The Rules of ...." series from Richard Templar I decided to start drawing up my own "Rules of Business Relationships".  This will be an on going project, check out my first attempt under the tab The Rules

I am sure you'll have some ideas of your own.  Best (or first comment) gets my copy of The Rules of Management.