Know your employees well

I've always thought that the best ideas in sales and marketing are applicable to managing Human Resources too. So when I heard about Harvey Mackay and his 66 item questionnaire I was convinced that managers need to use it to manage their people - and HR professionals need to use it to manage their clients - line managers.

But first about Harvey Mackay:

Harvey’s first job out of college was working in the shipping department of an envelope company and two years later rose to become a salesman. Three years after that he left to start his own envelope manufacturing company, Mackay Envelope Company, which he built into a $100 million company today with 600 employees.
In 2002, Harvey was inducted into the Minnesota Business Hall of Fame. In 1979-81, he was elected by his peers to lead the Envelope Manufacturers Association.

All this fuss for a envelope salesman? You might ask.

Harvey Mackay is not just any salesman - he views his business as one that builds relationships - he's just happening to be selling envelopes.

Fortune magazine called Harvey Mackay "Mr. Make Things Happen." As a successful author, businessman, speaker, and nationally syndicated columnist, Harvey Mackay's energy and enthusiasm are infectious. Two of his books, Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive and Beware the Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt, were ranked #1 on the New York Times Bestsellers List. Both books are also among the top 15 inspirational business books of all time, according to the New York Times.
After the success of Swim With The Sharks, Harvey followed up with Beware The Naked Man Who Offers You His Shirt, Sharkproof, Dig Your Well Before You're Thirsty, Pushing The Envelope, The Rolodex Network Builder, and We Got Fired. . . And It's the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Us

So you might ask - what's the secret to his success with customers - well its this questionnaire - with 66 items on it which he asks all his sales people to know about his customers. You can download the pdf from his website.


So here's what I am asking you to do. Instead of your customer use the same tool for your employees. Find out how much you really know them

I'm guessing you won't know more than 20 answers in that document.

Action plan after that - raise the number of answers you can get higher by really getting to know your people and understanding what makes them tick.

Blogging for Consultants

Looks like there is some sort of Consulting and Blogging meme going around. Guerilla Consultant has a well thought out argument what kind of consultant should be looking at blogging:

Blogging is the perfect Guerrilla Marketing tactic. You can reach a large audience quickly, and repeatedly. The cost of blogging is low, and the technology is simple to use. It's an excellent way to stay in touch with your existing clients and help prospective clients get to know you. 

With all that going for it as a marketing tool, shouldn't every consultant be blogging?

The marketing tools that work best are those that you can execute most effectively. If you get tongue-tied in front of an audience, it doesn't make sense for public speaking to be the centerpiece of your marketing program. That just leads to foot dragging, and the results aren't likely to be stellar either. 

The same point applies to blogs. Do you like to write--a lot? If you don't enjoy writing regularly, or you aren't very good at it, you may want to hold off on that blog. 

The technical aspects of blogging may be a no-brainer, but content drives the success of a blog. Can you feed your blog with content that your clients really want to read? Finding relevant content takes time. Even if you have plenty to say, you still have to draft, edit, and publish, all of which are time-consuming. 

You often hear bloggers say that blogs invite informal writing, and that typos and grammatical errors just come with the territory. Maybe that's okay for Max the Golden Retriever, but it's the kiss of death if you are marketing a high-end professional services business. Be sure you have the skills, time, and patience to write valuable stuff on a regular basis.

That's right folks. If the buyer of your services is out there searching on the internet (and who's not?) having a blog, specially if you like writing is great. But GC didn't get it fully right. For consultants who look great on camera, and those who can speak well have options too. Embedding videos and podcasting.

Blogs are just a tool. Embrace the tool to suit your strength. Build links with other consultants and pagerank will follow. Once PageRank comes, authority follows. 

However if you think your clients don't search for services that you offer on the internet you can possibly hold of from blogging.

Can you be sure that your client's junior who has been asked to compile a list of potential consultants does not, however?

Alan Weiss on Consulting and Social Media

Dr. Alan Weiss is of the opinion that blogs are of not much use if you are trying to leverage them to build a consulting brand.

Here are some of the interesting observations:

1. Blogs are only effective if you already have a brand. People come here, or go read Seth Godin, or Marshall Goldsmith, or Jeffrey Gitomer, or David Meister, because we’re all well known in our areas of expertise. That is, a blog follows a brand, not the other way around. You can’t create a brand just with a blog, unless you’re ridiculously lucky, and business can’t be based on luck.
3. You can use up all your time following blogs. Buyers of consulting services don’t visit blogs as a rule, and certainly not to make buying decisions. They may visit a blog AFTER they have a relationship with the consultant, which just proves my point.
4. Twitter is pretty nonsensical. Watching someone wash their hair or walk to their car is irrelevant to marketing consulting services. It is idiosyncratic. I think it’s fine if people want to do this as a hobby, but for solo practitioners and entrepreneurs, it can drain your life away. It is to marketing what text messaging is to writing a novel.
5. YouTube I find useful in that you can access some outstanding resources there, such as the lectures given at TED. But you also find all the schlock in the universe, and there must be a law that, to post comments, you have to have flunked both basic English and civility in primary school, because the proportion of dolts and louts who post things is frightening. It’s like being at a hockey game, but you can’t get a hot dog.
6. Facebook, linked-in, and all the rest of the social crawl space is fine for trying to get a full time job, or finding out who’s divorced, or sharing your latest hairstyle, or flirting. I abhor the linked-in automated messages about “good friends” who have asked me to join their network whom I can’t even recall, and I find it reprehensible to dump your entire contact list into this morass and annoy everyone who’s ever written you an email or sent you an overdue notice. I find linked-in to be the worst kind of spam.

Provocative? Maybe.

Dr Weiss does make some points. Don't make blogs/social media the "only" source for building your consulting brand. Speak at seminars. Network at industry events. Write for journals. Maybe, even publish a book.

Unless you wish you consult only about social media.

I'm kind of ambivalent about his observation that business can't be based on luck. Innovative business, alas is about a lot of luck. How do you ensure that you beat the chance factor. You increase your variety and spread. That's one of the rules of 11 1/2 weird rules of Innovation according to Dr. Bob Sutton. And sometimes you count on luck, to explore:

When you know that you need to head in a new direction, but you don't know which road to take, sometimes the best thing is to do whatever is most ridiculous or random. Thinking up the dumbest and most impractical things that you can do is a powerful way to explore your assumptions about the world. When you get people talking about products, services, and business practices that they believe are misguided, dumb, or even destructive, it can help bring the beliefs of the group into broad relief and crystallize what the company should be doing.

So if Alan does not believe that blogging can help in bringing in consulting business, why the blog after all? The About page does not give any reasons why.

Maybe he just doesn't want to be left behind by other consultants who are blogging. Like, Tom Peters.

The Elevator Speech

I like what Ford Harding calls the Stern Elevator Speech - before you get scared, it's not stern (being named after someone called Stern) and it's not a speech. In fact, it's less than the 140 character Twitter speech :-)

I use variations of similar introductions, without necessary getting into a spiel about what I do. It's great to get business development opportunities from social occasions.

Some weeks ago I took my kids to one of their friend's birthday party. Got talking to one of kid's father.

Turned out that he was a promoter of a niche manufacturing firm. Then he asked me "So what do you do?"

Me: "Oh, I help organizations set up HR systems and process." (I say that because saying "I'm a HR Consultant" makes them think I am a headhunter, and the conversation goes into a different direction and too much effort goes into making them come around to what I want them to remember. Saying "Am a strategic HR and OD consultant" would ensure another round of clarifications)

When you are trying to build a business relationship, choose to let the person do most of the talking.

"Really?" he said "What kind systems and processes?"

Me: "We work a lot with small and medium enterprises, and because they can't usually afford to set up large HR departments, we develop their recruitment, compensation & benefits system, Performance managment systems so that they can get the most suited talent to come and work for them"

"Hmm"

After a couple of minutes he said "I heard what you said. We are also facing a lot of talent challenges in our business. Competition has gone up, and we are losing people to them. Do you have a card on you so that I can call you later?"

"Sure"

It was a social occasion. I did not want to be the one making the 'sales approach' and seem pushy. It was the elevator speech that made he CEO ask for my card.

He called me back, too. Last week.

We had our first meeting today.

Update: And if you think you in HR, Finance and IT don't need to know all this stuff. Here's some advice. Tom Peters thinks if you want to get anything done [and implementaion is paramount to Tom], then you are in sales.

Another interesting article by David Perry and Kevin Donline on How to make your Job Outsource Proof. First thing to do:

Whether or not it's in your job description, finding new business is everyone's responsibility. Cash Flow is the lifeblood of every business looking to grow, prosper and create a stable environment for its employees. So, even if you're in accounting or information technology, what one thing could you do to bring in more revenue? If you're not sure, buy your company's top sales superstar a cup of coffee and ask. Then take action to help bring in more money--and make sure your boss knows about the time you've put in.

Marketing and HR have to talk

On CNBC-Tv18 one of my favourite programs is Storyboard. A week ago they ran a special episode anchored by Nokia India's head honcho Shivakumar.

The theme for the episode was advertising and branding of pure services businesses. They did a feature on airlines and showcased Kingfisher Airlines as a case study and also looked at a pure consulting business and talked to a Partner at Bain & Co, in India.

The learning was that services businesses are people related. Their behavior and skills is the actual product that the client/buyer is paying for. And then reporter said one thing "Marketing has to get off its ivory tower and talk to HR to actually build the brand in reality"

That's so true.

If your brand promise is something else and your recruiters and HR generalist select and measure people against other standards, you're setting up your services organization for a failure in front of your customers.

Is your a services organization? How much does Marketing and Branding work along with HR?

Everyone is replaceable?

Maybe, but in the new economy, there are certain differences. Alex blogs on the ReadWriteWeb:

For a startup, two months is an eternity, but even for large companies two months is a long time. Today, people need to be replaced real-time - one is out and the next one is in full-speed, day one. This is difficult, particularly because of the incredible amount of information that we end up processing daily.

Increasingly, modern business is becoming a complex, distributed information processing system. The nodes of this system are employees, tirelessly passing bits around to each other, crunching and filtering with the goal to compute, to gain competitive advantage, and to help the business survive.

The problem is that unlike factories or boxes in the computing cloud, employees in the modern company are not identical. Each one knows a unique piece of the information puzzle that makes a company tick. Two weeks is not enough to do the transition and two months is way to long to waste training up the new guy. This is why the old adage that everyone is replaceable may need some re-thinking.

Recently, my insurance broker switched companies. He quickly contacted me, offered an attractive new package, and then drove 1.5 hours from his office to my home to sign the papers. His commission would not want warrant the trip, but he was smart to make the investment of his time because he won me as a client. On the other hand, the cost of losing a talented employee for his old company just increased - they also lost a client, and I am sure I was not the only one.

Although my insurance agent lives in the technical world, he is part of new breed of folks that I call the digital elite. He uses Facebook to keep in touch with his friends, he was savvy enough to look up my company on the web, and he knows all the cool financial web sites. In other words, he is on top of what's going on. He knows all about the speed of information in our world. And this makes him a serious and important player, of the type that is really hard to replace.

As organizations become smaller and focused around the talents their employees bring in, we're going to see a lot of employee-organization branding together. Specially the "superstar" employees (a rainmaker in consulting organization, for example)

Yes, a lot of things are going to change, subtly but slowly :-) HR and management groups must be aware and open to these changes, specially in the small creative hotshops.

Brand yourself through lots of tools

The personal branding blog talks about how in a recession personal branding takes on much more meaning.

It's true. A lot of people think that blogging is a great tool for personal branding. While it remains the case, blogging is useful for a certain type of people - People who are great at writing to get their points across. It's a skill that most people don't really build when they are growing up.

Today to stand out and brand yourself as a blogger with some authority, one needs to choose a niche which has a handful of noteworthy bloggers focusing on it. Great content is one thing, getting the community to notice you is another thing.

One gets noticed by two means - either if one is a known brand in a field or if other bloggers are talking about your content. The second case can happen if one is a handful of people blogging on that subject. Sure, you won't get traffic like Gizmodo or TechCrunch but that should not be your aim at all.

That brings us to the question we started off with. What if one's writing skills are below par to engage the attention of blog writers?

One can then showcase one's work on business and social networking sites like Linkedin. Even Facebook is a great way to be on people's radar. The only drawback about these sites is that a lot of time investment is required to build a community you want to be visible towards. The temptation is to be transparent about all that one does, however can result in unforeseen negative impact on oneself.

Video is an option for people who are great at presentations, but being in front of the camera and appearing natural is also a skill that needs to be learnt. Video alas, cannot be searched except by text tabs added around it.

One also has to use microblogging formats to brand yourself, without turning into a spam generator.

On why RFIs and Proposals are so lengthy

S Anand, one of the first business bloggers I started reading has an insight into why things are so long in work life...specially consulting. Hat-tip to Alok for sending this gem by email.

I got involved with a proposal. I wrote a few bits of it. (One page, actually.) Others wrote a few bits of it. And then some standard appendices were added to it. Finally, it ended up as a 180-page document.

The interesting thing is, I can bet no human ever read those 180 pages end-to-end.

I know no one at our end did, because we turned it around in 1 week, and I was the last to assemble the document before sending it out.

I'm guessing no one at the client end did, because they'd have gotten 5 such documents, and had a week to shortlist down to 3.

So if we didn't read it and they didn't read it, why did we put it in?

An innocuous sounding statement: do more. I tremble whenever anyone suggests it. There's no defence.

There's a fundamental belief at work here. That more is better.

This is fueled by a lack of confidence. Put in high-sounding words. They look impressive. What's missed is that experts use jargon because they understand what it means, and it conveys a lot in few words.

Firstly, you've got to believe that less is more. The response to "What's the harm in adding...?" is "It dilutes the message". There's two things here. Believing it. And having the courage to say it. Trust me, you really believe it only when you say it.

Next, you've got to understand -- really understand -- before you write or speak. That requires not fooling yourself. And it requires a lot of practice. I've had nearly 20 years of training in fooling myself, so it's an uphill task. Many people are worse off, never having tasted true understanding.

Third, you've got to be brave enough to shut up, or say "I don't know". Initially, this was tough for me, but I learnt from a friend. I always thought him not-so-smart, but honest. He'd ask, "But why?" and when I'd explain, he'd say, "I don't understand it." After two hours of trying to get him to understand, I'd realise that I was the one who never got it in the first place.

So will the consulting methodology change? Maybe not. On saturday my CEO and I were involved in redoing our firm's marketing presentation. It was 12 slides long. And it was made a couple of years ago. So instead of adding a couple of slides here and a couple of slides there, we focused on our message. Putting the client at the centre. And not talking about us too much. I remembered a powerful sales message from my pharma marketing days....features, advantages and benefits of our products/services is what we like to say. However the client wants to hear the benefits first. Sometimes just articulating the benefits is enough. You get distinguished from your competition :-)

when you hear a presentation about too much "we are this" and "our people have done this" maybe the presenter hasn't really given a thought about how his/her clients will be benefited.

Blogging and Business Development

After I posted about Ford Harding's blog earlier Ford sent me a thank you mail. We got into a conversation and I started telling him about how blogging has benefited me and my ability to get consulting clients. Ford then asked me if he could share my story on his blog and he has :-)

Ford also offered to send a couple of his books to me to read, and I received them yesterday. They are Creating Rainmakers: The Manager's Guide to Training Professionals to Attract New Clients and his earlier book Rain Making: The Professionals Guide to Attracting New Clients

As you might have guessed Ford Harding and his company help professionals become "rainmakers" as their site says:

If you're an accountant, attorney, architect, engineer, executive recruiter or management consultant, you've spent years learning your profession.

But now, if you and your firm are going to prosper, it turns out you're going to have to become a rainmaker, too. And no one ever taught you that in school.

Harding & Company helps professionals learn to sell and market. We help them make the transition from doing and managing client work to bringing it in. We help build the sale behaviors that are a vital part of any professional service firm's success.

I have just started browsing through the books and have found that some activities that I have been indulging over the last few years (unknowingly) is what rainmakers do as second nature. Two aspects being, looking at every thing always optimistically and cultivating a network without the thought of immediate business gain.

In fact, before the days of blogging and before the days of Yahoogroups.com I interacted with students from other B Schools and CAs on a Rediff chat site called "A Smoke Filled Cafe". I am still in touch with them. One is a retail consultant with AT Kearney and the other is a KPMG auditor at London.

Other examples have been to create a community of HR professionals and KM practitioners in 2000. Many members of these communities have become personal friends and people who sound me out for advisory help.

Then of course, there is this blog, and the Linkedin community and connections through Orkut and Facebook.

As Ford says in his book, developing network is a pay-off that is a J shaped curve. It starts very slowly, probably leading to disappointment in the short term...but when the curves starts going up it moves very steeply :-)

Keep an eye out for my detailed review of Ford's books coming soon.

HCI webcast

Yesterday night (or rather, today morning) I co-delivered a webcast with Mitzi Adwell of the Newman Group on Staying Ahead of Change: The Importance of the Employment Value Proposition.

It was a great experience for me, for this was the first time I was delivering a webcast :-) Well I have delivered and attended sessions on synchronous e-learning (or virtual classroom) specially when I was in Hewlett Packard, but doing so when I was at home through my laptop and cell-phone was a totally new experience.

My co-presenter, Mitzi Adwell, had a great method to demonstrate what are the components of of EVP and how organizations can get maximum ROI by focusing on what's important for them and what acts as a differentiator.

There was a couple of great questions and discussions post the webcast. In case you missed it, there would be a recast soon. Keep an eye on the HCI webcast page.

My thanks to Mitzi and her colleagues from The Newman Group as well as the team from HCI, Bill Craib, Keith Vencel, Amanda Craig and Sasha Thompson for their support and help.

update: A blog post by a participant on the webcast. Thanks Sevi !

Nostalgia for earlier times

Diptakirti, a batchmate from my B School reminisces about some phrases. Even I in 1996 during my short-lived sales tenure have been guilty of "Push-Selling" (ie. load the dealer with enough goods and you will get sales) Are such times really over? Over to Dipta

Boss, company is not understanding the problem…
When I started off in FMCG sales, it was a time without mobile phones and with floppy drives.
Companies wanted to sell irrational amounts of soap, toilet cleaners and other such products of eternal consequence. And they had already convinced a large group of MBAs to execute the plan. These MBAs – with their data interpretation and presentation skills – in turn, convinced another group of lesser mortals. The guys who repeated this problem to me some 482 times were these lesser mortals.
We would be at the depot, trying to invoice truckloads of stock without too much of an idea what the Madhubani distributors would do with 330 cases of soap (which can bathe all of Madhubani for about 7 months). And when all pleas not to do so would fall on deaf ears (mine), this phrase would come out with a deep sigh!
This statement of despair did not deter them from their duties, as they would still do what the company required of them but made this small complaint anyway. Companies no longer believe in those kinds of absurd billing nowadays. And in any case, I have moved out of frontline sales.
I miss that statement because it was a momentary despair of a soldier. He would still fight. He would probably win as well. But his wisdom and profound experience forced him to make that one note of protest before he moved on.
I miss the loyalty, tenacity and the cynicism of those guys.

Small is better

As far as acquisitions go, according to a study by BCG (via Sify)

"The Brave New World of M&A," a recent study by Boston Consulting Group, says, "Deals that are above $1 billion destroy nearly twice as much value as transactions under $1 billion, reflecting the difficulties of integrating large targets."

BCG has studied more than 4,000 M&A deals and says that the number of mega deals in excess of $1 billion is rapidly increasing.

BCG's M&A findings come at a time when some domestic companies have just gulped down foreign companies that are larger than their own size for deals worth several billions of dollars.

The companies that went for multi-billion-dollar deals in the recent past include Tata Steel which acquired Corus Group and Hindalco which bought out Novelis.

However, BCG says it has not looked at these companies and cannot comment on any particular deal. BCG, however, has mapped most of the value-creating deals done so far and has studied 20 Indian companies involved in the M&A game.

"The complexity of the integration gets more complex," says Harshavardhan, partner and director at BCG. "The returns are less for bigger acquisitions," he adds.

I'm no expert on M&A but I suspect mergers are carried out for different purposes. One is the nature of the Tata-Corus deal. The focus of the acquiring entity is to gain scale and markets. The merger that might be better is the one that is carried out to gain capabilities like technology or expertise. The third kind is to acquire iconic brands, and that should be great way to build value too.

Airtel's big email blunder

Today I received an unsolicited email from Airtel touting its Indian Independence Day based Jayahe commercial promotion. Normally I delete such mails without a second thought, but was stunned to see that Airtel's mass mail to its customers had sent such an email with email addresses visible in the to field.

Take a look (I've obscured/erased the email ids for privacy) at the screen shot of my email. Over 500 email ids were visible to potential scammers and spammers.
I hope this fiasco is limited to Airtel's AP circle and hopefully is more minimised. If any of you know higher ups in Airtel I hope you'll escalate this potentially disastrous issue to them.

The Kurkure train

The Frito-Lay India blog tells us that they have a tie-up with Indian Railways to brand a train !

In yet another first, Kurkure became the first brand in the country to have a branded train. In a path breaking initiative, Kurkure has tied up with the South Western Railways to brand 3 summer special trains emanating out of Bangalore (Bangalore-Chennai, Bangalore-Hubli, Bangalore-Nagercoil). These Summer special trains would be branded by Kurkure and would be called the “Kurkure Masti Express”.

According to newsreports South Western Railway had called for bids for a unique initiative called Brand Train, under which a brand name would feature along with the train's name in all announcements, on reserved tickets, on reservation charts, on destination boards of the train, coach indication slips and during all information dissemination about the train.

Hmm, I wonder if they will also offer Kurkure on the house (or train?) for all the passengers?

But seriously, does it make sense for Kurkure to brand a train in today's day and age? Should they not be targeting the family that is flying budget airlines as a more lucrative demograhic? Or does that demographic care more about health food than stuff like Kurkure?

Also remains to be seen what are the other brands jumping on to the wagon (pun intended!)

The future of media and adverstising

Interesting comment on the ZDnet blog that not only the future of online world is advertising, but that slowly content will become advertising and marketing, in the light of Google's acquisition of Doubleclick.

I guess that is true to some extent. Traditional TV in the US is being TiVo'ed. People are sick of content being interrupted by advertising.

Contextual ads online is just the beginning.

The real online commerce will take off when global micro brands and large conglomerates use content as marketing.

Indeed, most blogs are marketing something intangible right now. Points of view, actually. But some are marketing something much more tangible, like English Cut, the blog of a Savile Row tailor, and people are reading and engaging with that marketing.

I guess this is what permission marketing is all about !

Rex Harrison and Tata Sky

What's the connection?

Well as Dipta tells us, it's a word called 'jhingalala', which Bollywood buffs would recall as a refrain in a Hindi song in the movie "Shalimar"

Quite correctly Dipta points to the mistake Tata Sky is doing in trying to usurp that word into its advertising campaign.

Coming from a marketing and sales guru, that's some advice Tata Sky should listen to.

What would be your nomination for the worst byline in an advertisement?

On a lighter note, Dipta has thoughts on branding and film-makers as brands. Enjoy !