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Shifting to online methods of reaching prospects

Too many executives are unaware of game-changing ways their markets are shifting. Their post-COVID audience of prospects and customers now expects more than message blasts. Instead, they require your company to become better attuned to their unmet needs. Fail to do this and they switch to competitors.

Remember the days when advertising meant print, display, and broadcast messaging? The core idea? Deliver to you a blast of information from the company, targeted at your attention. Then, cross their fingers, hoping that you would respond favorably at a later time and date.

Contrast that method with the effectiveness of social media advertising. On Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, your clickable behaviour is tracked and analyzed. Then, an algorithm decides which advertisements to send. As such, you receive a highly customized and targeted set of messages.

If you are a typical executive, you may be dimly aware of the difference between old and online methods. An interesting factoid.

However, you should pay closer attention.

The companies who are using online messaging are “learning” more about their customer’s unmet needs than you can imagine. They’re analyzing the details to draw powerful conclusions.

It’s an improvement over the prior state of affairs, captured by John Wanamaker’s joke: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half!”

With today’s technology, one can actually tell. How should your business use this capability?

  1. Track changing customer behaviour

If your company isn’t doing business online yet, you may explain that your customers are not to be found there in large numbers.

But that’s not a valid reason: you can use online interactions to learn about your customer’s behaviors, even if their numbers are small.

For example, your firm can test a hundred marketing messages to see which ones bring people into your funnel. Then, in your next step, apply different followups to determine how they react.

Consider it to be a cheap way to do critical research.

This level of detailed information puts your ads on broadcast media to shame in terms of its feedback value. Better yet, you should be able to learn where behavior changes lead to long-term habits that didn’t exist before.

This kind of precision is taken for granted by online advertisers, but few traditional marketing executives understand its power firsthand. The learning curve is too steep. As such, COVID has catalyzed changes they can’t track.

Consequently, many companies are being left in the dark by competitors who are gaining deep intelligence. Your best customers may be at risk.

  1. Conduct experiments on fresh innovations

A side-effect of this new capability is that your organization can shorten the time it takes to confirm an original product or service. This solves an age-old problem: how can you determine which offerings to bring to market?

In the online era, you actually don’t even need to sell anything to find out. Simply create advertisements for a new imaginary offering and see how an audience responds.

It’s a form of advanced market research that works far better than asking people whether they like something or not.

Imagine, you can bring prospects all the way to the point where they enter credit card numbers, revealing their intent to pay. In this approach, you are following their actual behavior, not their surveyed opinions.

Plus, you should gather groups of likely customers in a single place and partner with them to build the first version of your introductory offering.

As your fans, they give you valuable feedback that helps you craft the new product or service for the larger mainstream market.

These experiments deliver you invaluable data quickly, giving you a powerful advantage. The cost? Minimal.

  1. Anticipate Unmet Needs

Finally, you can even track the precursor to prospect’s new behaviours – unmet needs. By definition, these make up a moving target. Why? As customers absorb your prior innovations, they outgrow your existing solutions. Breakthrough technologies accelerate this process, leading them to start looking earlier than ever for replacements.

COVID has accelerated these changes, but many organizations will close down waiting for old behaviours to return. For most, the “new normal” is one they can’t anticipate: they just don’t have the information necessary.

Better, smarter companies will arrive at the same point in time with a bunch of data on their new customer’s needs. They’ll have innovations lined up which might be in demand by customers who know when they’ll be released.

Does your firm believe that after COVID finally departs it plans to launch a big, traditional advertising blast? If so, you could be making an egregious error.

Instead, take action now to develop the sophisticated information to build deep relationships that anticipate customer’s unmet needs.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

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Why “We’re Number One!” Goals Have Become Useless

In times past it was fashionable for corporate leaders to craft vision statements with commitments to be “number one” and “world class”. Lately, these have become less popular, with good reason. They are a sign of lackluster thinking which signals a lack of detailed planning.

Corporate leaders tend to fit a particular profile. They show strong Type A tendencies: energetic over-achievers who are time-sensitive and impatient. They drive themselves hard to accomplish great things, often bringing others behind them for the ride, ready or not.

However, if you have this trait, there may be an added one which gets you in trouble: your tendency to be competitive. If you get a lot of juice from beating other people, this approach works when goals are simple. It stirs up lots of extra effort and leads to reliable, continuous improvements.

Most CEO’s use this characteristic to grab the corner office ahead of others, at which point they often shift their focus to defeating other companies. This compulsion to be the captain of a winning team creates three kinds of problems.

Challenge #1 – CEO’s Play Games Employees Find Irrelevant

Part of being an effective executive involves learning the language of the C-Suite. Over time, this new lingo separates leaders from lower-level employees.

But the big problem is that what excites you, a Type A executive, is unlikely to inspire others. While staff knows there is a connection between EBITDA and their job security, it’s all a theory. Certainly, they feel no emotional bond.

As such, when you conduct a town hall you’re likely to speak glowingly of achievements in words that don’t resonate. You staffs’ needs are far more human, and it’s easy to lose track of them.

To build engagement, you’ll need to uncover employees’ actual aspirations, in order to satisfy them. For example, if getting their kids a decent education and making ends meet is a major part of their lives, you must start there.

Challenge #2 – CEO’s Craft Imaginary Competitions

The world is changing so rapidly that the old ways of thinking about competitors have become stale. In the past it was easier: ultra-competitive CEOs would find similar companies to compare themselves against. Then, they’d choose metrics such as profitability, stock price or revenue to be their yard-stick of accomplishment.

However, in a fast-changing landscape, your “competitors” are actually imaginary: made up. As industries and circumstances evolve, it becomes impossible to find other companies which are just like yours. There may be some overlap, but no perfect fit. Your orange ends up racing to a make-believe finish line against their apple.

As such, your claims to be (or plans to become) “Number One” are increasingly empty. They are a simplistic way to motivate yourself that may suit you, as a Type A executive, but no-one else.

Even aspirations to claim a “World-Class” standard look silly in today’s world. Anyone who cares can achieve this goal by defining a narrow standard. But even then, customers don’t care about such claims.

Challenge #3 – CEO’s Forsake Customers

While most MBA programmes are built around competition, that approach is becoming a distraction…at best a sideshow. It’s far better to develop a sharper focus on meeting customer’s unmet needs.

But this is no solid target. Customers’ needs are evolving due to new technologies so it’s become harder than ever to discover a customer’s “Job-to-be-Done”. (The term refers to the actions a customer takes to meet their unmet needs.)

The pandemic has led to shifts in many customers’ Jobs-to-be-Done, as they adopted new behavior patterns. Many companies unwittingly fell out of touch, and haven’t re-established a unique understanding. They run the risk of missing the mark.

Just observe the way Uber and AirBnB disrupted their respective industries before the pandemic. They used modern technology to tap into idle, low-cost resources (i.e. people’s cars and rooms). Now, they are shifting their processes to accommodate the new customer need for sanitized environments.

In short, they have been adjusting their companies’ business models, in concert with changes in their customers’ needs.

There are other ways your company can meet unmet needs, but when it happens, don’t be confused by your success. Definitely don’t claim it as proof of being “Number One” or “World Class” to start a new round of chest-beating.

Instead, use it as fuel to fire up a fresh cycle of customer research which, in the end, is the best insurance policy against disruptions of all kinds.

Francis Wade is the author of Perfect Time-Based Productivity, a keynote speaker and a management consultant. To search prior columns on productivity, strategy, engagement and business processes, send email to columns@fwconsulting.com

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Why “We’re Number One!” Goals Have Become Useless

In times past it was fashionable for corporate leaders to craft vision statements with commitments to be “number one” and “world class”. Lately, these have become less popular, with good reason. They are a sign of lackluster thinking which signals a lack of detailed planning.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Why New Employees Need to be Gamified, or Else

What’s happening in the workplace to young employees? They seem to operate by a different set of values, showing little interest in company events.

Yet, they willingly give time and energy to off-the-job pursuits. How can executives create an environment in which they direct some of that discretionary effort towards their work?

“The company’s culture was good enough for me, why isn’t it good enough for them?” If your organization’s leaders are asking this question about engagement, consider the presumption: young employees need not receive any special privileges. After all, the argument goes, “I had less than they do and I made do with what I had!”

At first glance, this seems to be a fair statement.

Yet, the result of such thinking is disengagement. Whereas, in past generations, a paycheck was enough to guarantee a certain level of staff engagement, those days are over. Today, the young, post-COVID employee isn’t interested in merely trading time for money. (The only exceptions might be those who stand to earn a windfall which allows them to retire early, and those who are desperate.)

This state of affairs is hardly a sustainable recipe for fostering a new generation of leaders. In fact, if the status quo is maintained, it’s likely to repel the most creative talent, which is neither greedy nor desperate. If this rings true for your company, it might be time to call for a transformation. Here are some guidelines to use.

1. Young Employees Expect High Engagement

Consider that most of their lives before joining your organization were highly gamified. As achievers of better-than-average grades in school, they accepted the default structure and became winners. They filled their spare time with apps specifically engineered to grab their attention for long periods.

The resulting heightened states became the norm. Constant, high-quality feedback followed intense efforts, helping them make clear, undeniable, prize-winning progress. Whether it was CSEC/CAPE, Schools’ Challenge, Facebook or World of Warcraft (an online game), they benefited from great gamification.

Now, consider all of these to be powerful competitors to your company’s best attempts to engage staff. They are formidable: not even our Parliamentarians can resist Instagram or email during speeches at Gordon House.

And if your employees are spending their spare time starting new companies, or hustling side-gigs for extra income, consider that to be more of the same. Some of their interest in becoming entrepreneurs is to compensate for a lack of engagement in a disappointing job.

2. Your Company is Allowing Bad Games

If your leaders aren’t using game mechanics to deliberately engage staff, they do them a disservice. Some may go start new companies, but most will remain in your employment, falling into games which are harmful.

One of my summer jobs as a teenager with a government agency revealed a game of “Cat and Mouse”. Employees waited until the manager left the office to bring out cards, dominoes, and radios. When the appointed lookout spotted her return to the parking lot, shouts of “She ah come!” sent staff scurrying to remove the evidence, and resume the pretense of work being done.

According to one conspirator, “Sometimes she tries to trick us by not pulling up in her usual spot!”

Unfortunately, most Jamaican companies are infected with a cabal of the most disengaged. They make fun of new employees who work too hard (at best) and may even ostracize those who persist in making them look bad with high performance.

Eventually, the average new hire surrenders, dropping their standards (and expectations) just to fit in. This game of “Do as Little As Possible” can last an entire career, even though it may never be formally named.

The point is that these negative games (and innumerable others just like them) are at play in all companies. The only question is one of popularity. Call it a version of “The Devil Makes Work for Idle Hands” if you will.

3. Transforming a Dysfunctional Culture

What’s a way to prevent a culture of nasty games? Get leaders to explicitly create better ones. By so doing, you can scoop up new employees before they fall prey.

If your organization is already overrun by people playing destructive games, start by teaching your managers the principles of gamification. Then, use these same principles to give them a great first-hand experience as they apply them to their departments.

Continue by setting up programmes which place young, new employees in high engagement activities from the moment they join. Don’t let them lapse into the boredom which invites mischief. Just help them experience the reality of positive games which ultimately give them more of what they want in life.

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Why New Employees Need to be Gamified, or Else

What’s happening in the workplace to young employees? They seem to operate by a different set of values, showing little interest in company events.

Yet, they willingly give time and energy to off-the-job pursuits. How can executives create an environment in which they direct some of that discretionary effort towards their work?

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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How to Tackle the Problem of Conglomerate Strategy

How do you craft a strategic plan for a group of companies? Why do so many efforts end up with nothing more than “last-year’s-plan-plus-5%?” Discard this path of least resistance if you hope to capitalize on COVID opportunities.

Conglomerates are, in the best of times, difficult to plan for. Units compete for resources in different markets, creating a headache for whoever must make an optimal allocation. It’s a challenge of comparing apples to oranges by executives who don’t specialize in either fruit.

The hope is that by the end of the day, each business unit has a unique set of marching orders: a custom “breakthrough strategy”. It should be powerful enough to meet customer’s unmet needs, conform to disruptive technology trends and prevent competitors from gaining a foothold.

Furthermore, at the group level, the overall strategy shouldn’t be just a grab bag of ideas. Each individual plan should be part of a puzzle that makes up a single coherent picture.

However, I have sat in group meetings in which business unit MD’s flounder when asked for their organization’s strategy. After a bunch of PowerPoint slides, it becomes clear: they have no real strategy. At most, they have a list of tactics.

Furthermore, in these pandemic times, most are facing game-changing disruptions. This requires them to engineer the “next normal.” More often than not, they simply aren’t equipped to get the job done.

Before your business units drift into becoming another Nokia or Blackberry (i.e. a has-been), how can your group of companies prevent its component businesses from failing?

Step 1 – Engage business units in long-term planning

The simplest request is for business units to lengthen their planning horizons. Ask them to look 15-30 years out. Give them the examples, support and templates they need to produce a feasible, detailed plan. While it needs to account for current trends, the team shouldn’t be limited by them.

After all, this is not an exercise in predicting the future, but crafting one which includes preferred outcomes.

For the average MD of a business unit, this is likely to be a tough activity. But even clumsy attempts will push executives into the right zone of discomfort.

Step 2 – Develop leaders’ everyday planning skills

To improve C-suite skills, don’t turn strategy into a onetime or annual event. Instead, train them to think strategically at all times.

Some group CEO’s mistakenly assume this is easy. In their role, they spend 80% of their time on strategy, and 20% on daily operations. However, the reverse is true for their business unit MD’s. The fact is, in their progress up the ranks, the drumbeat for immediate results kept them awake at night. Their ability to adapt quickly helped them get promoted.

As such, your organization may not be organized to think strategically, and MD’s will find this to be a challenge. Don’t let them languish.

Instead, give them the training and coaching to implement their strategy from month to month. Their environment is changing so fast that if they don’t keep the big picture in mind, they could miss out on opportunities created by disruptions like COVID.

What if they fail to grow the required skills? Expect big mistakes that destroy value and produce a “diversification discount” in which the sum of the parts of your company is greater than the whole.

Step 3 – Make Clear Proposals

Once a business unit has completed its planning, MD’s must advance proposals to the central group organization. This is pure lobbying: an appeal to support the business unit’s strategic plan with tangible resources.

Your leaders may also need to be trained to become balanced, fact-based advocates of the specific value they can bring in the mid to long term.

Their clarity is essential. Why?

As group executives hear a range of proposals, they need to make collective decisions about the direction of the entire organization. Consequently, business units will receive good news or bad news depending on decisions made to allocate funds, attention and power.

As such, MD’s must be clear as the future of the organization relies on the quality of their analysis. If they do a poor job, bad decisions will be made: a harsh reality.

But the worst decision of all is not to make any. Some companies drift along, sitting back to watch what happens next.

By then, the savviest staff members have found jobs elsewhere, looking for real leaders to follow. Customers uncover better products and services, and value is destroyed.

While it’s hard to marshal a conglomerate strategy, it’s a problem which must be tackled to assure the future of the entire organization.

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How to Tackle the Problem of Conglomerate Strategy

How do you craft a strategic plan for a group of companies? Why do so many efforts end up with nothing more than “last-year’s-plan-plus-5%?” Discard this path of least resistance if you hope to capitalize on COVID opportunities.

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Misapplying Psychological Solutions to Practical Problems

Employee Productivity – Are you searching for psychological solutions to practical problems?

As an executive, have you fallen into the trap of looking for psycho-emotional solutions to issues of employee productivity? If so, you may need a fresh lens.

“I just don’t understand these people!”

While this is a common complaint in management ranks, it’s a bit of a racket. The complainer is going down a dead-end…a little like blaming one’s extra pounds on the abundant choices in the supermarket or juicy mangoes on the trees.

To wit, if you were to become magically capable of understanding your employees’ psychological drivers would you be able to motivate or better lead them? The answer might still be no, if the findings of reports such as Why Workers Won’t Work: A Case Study of Jamaica by Kenneth Carter are to be believed. Their performance has much to do with your actions, not their psychological state. Furthermore, due to COVID, we know that staff emotions are a roller-coaster.

Instead, try this: look for practical structures you are failing to craft. What are some actionable steps you should attempt? Here are 3 suggestions.

1 Construct Games at Scale

Many executives mistakenly believe that their employees won’t give discretionary effort. For them, the only thing that wakes them up is more money. Here’s a different twist: top leaders ruin engagement by diminishing gamified structures.

For example, on her way to the MD position, Rose had a mentor who helped her set one goal after another. Their regular meetings kept her on track, especially when she didn’t feel like giving an extra effort.

While it’s impossible to assign everyone a mentor, that’s not the point. The gamified approach to working unknowingly provided that added push Rose needed to stand out from her peers. In retrospect, she finds this hard to see, until she becomes a student of gamification.

Now, the game mechanics which she was lucky to benefit from are easier to appreciate: the measurable goals, the useful, timely feedback, the repeated challenges to hit the mark. And it’s not hard to notice where they are missing for employees, and where opportunities exist to insert them at will. In this context, luck plays a smaller role; intentional design becomes a tool.

Fortunately, in 2021 employees love gamified structure. When surveyed, they might not report this fact. But the most interesting parts of their lives are filled with the mechanics of good games: whether via sports, Instagram, or the church they attend. As such, they are living increasingly gamified lives, except for one place: their jobs. In MBA programmes, managers aren’t taught to manage a workforce of gamified employees.

As the CEO, teach your leaders how to set up games without using psychological language. With some creativity and commitment, they could become just as “sticky” as gambling addictions and video games.

2 Test Games

Managers who try gamification for the first time often adopt examples found in other environments. Unfortunately, it’s hard to find initial success being a copycat. Each corporate culture has its own dynamics which you must respect. But that’s no reason to surrender: instead, gamify your own gamification.

In other words, treat your effort to engage staff as a game for managers to play at the individual and collective levels. For example, within a particular department, encourage employee engagement experiments by supervisors. Reward the one who makes the most attempts, and the ones who succeed.

At the corporate level, promote games between departments to engage employees. But the intent here is not to crown a winner, but to determine which techniques work best. The fact is, the way to discover the handful of successful approaches is to learn from lots of failed experiments.

At a loss for what to gamify? Look for aspects of your work such as meetings and email that are hated across the board. When you construct your games around such public defects which affect everyone, you’ll be starting with areas of high commitment. They should sell themselves and have an impact because they are actually well-disguised improvement programmes. (Definitely don’t focus on pastimes or distractions such as dominoes, which are not included in business processes.)

If this all sounds like it’s easy, I assure you that this is not the case. In Caribbean companies, the challenges around engagement are deeply embedded in our region’s history and culture. However, the solutions do not require additional psychological insight, just strong doses of courage and creativity.

Why? In this case, the pathway to discovering what works runs through a thicket of things that don’t. You must be brave to deal with lots of failure in this area on your way to success. The good news is that if you endure, you’ll be creating practical solutions.

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Misapplying Psychological Solutions to Practical Problems

Employee Productivity – Are you searching for psychological solutions to practical problems?

As an executive, have you fallen into the trap of looking for psycho-emotional solutions to issues of employee productivity? If so, you may need a fresh lens.

“I just don’t understand these people!”

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit longtermstrategy.substack.com/subscribe

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Scheduling an Ordinary Strategic Planning Retreat? Cancel It.

Is your company preparing to conduct it’s customary annual retreat? You may want to scrap it and instead create a breakthrough event.

In the best of times, companies fall into a strategic planning rut. They follow the same routine each year, lulled into complacency by their accomplishments. The company’s leaders go through the motions, staying well within their comfort zones. Maybe this approach has worked for your company until now.

Consider the following: what if your pre-pandemic success occurred despite your lack of strategic planning? In other words, there could be other reasons your organization was successful. Perhaps the founders made smart choices, you exist as a monopoly or your competition is incompetent.

If you are “winning” over your competitors, there could still be a problem. Your entire industry might have lost its way and be under an invisible threat. Therefore, you could be renting video-tapes or making buggy-whips when the world is about to turn away from your offerings.

A very different approach to your strategic planning would be to start with the disruptions that COVID-19 has wrought. While it’s easy to fixate on the enormous obstacles on the road back to business as usual, here’s a thought experiment.

What if the pandemic were a room you have always lived in, with several doors? Suddenly, a number of them have opened while others have slammed shut. A few have remained the same.

Most companies are likely to treat this once-in-a-lifetime disruption as an obstacle to overcome. But what if you were to see it as a collection of doors: opportunities and dead-ends? If you were to do so, you may seize to chance to plan a new strategy in the following two ways.

1. A breakthrough event

Companies whose leaders long for a return to the “good old days” are the least likely to get themselves out of a strategic planning rut. They are probably accustomed to treating the activity as an everyday, low-stakes ritual. If this strikes a chord, use the opportunity to declare your next retreat, the one that creates proactive, game-changing plans.

While this may not be possible to achieve every year, there should be a clear distinction between major and minor opportunities. When there’s a big disruption, as there is now, go for a breakthrough retreat. If nothing much has changed, cancel the event. Pull out last year’s plan and perform some minor adjustments, showing your executives that there is a difference. But above all, make the decision early.

In the case of this particular pandemic, you probably may not have a choice. When multiple disruptions (e.g. health and economic) coincide, you must act differently. By design, move your leaders into a fresh zone of discomfort by putting them together in breakthrough planning sessions. Carefully arrange the activity so that a business-as-usual strategy becomes the most unlikely result.

This teaches your executives that all plans are not equal, and there are moments when a fresh initiative must be launched.

2. A technology refresh

Many executives prefer to have cozy, collegial retreats on the North Coast that resemble mini-vacations. However, important planning involves a series of difficult, high-stake conversations. They can be stressful, purposely throwing a spotlight on simmering disagreements.

When companies give in to the temptation to keep the peace, important decisions are just not made.

For example, many local firms still need to be convinced that the IT department should play a vital role in strategic planning. But this is understandable. Their ordinary IT employees may be preoccupied with issues such as laptop security. Big challenges like digital transformation remain out of reach. Consequently, it’s often difficult to incorporate IT, and doing so makes leaders uncomfortable.

However, today most agree that breakthrough strategic planning must include a view of technology. Unfortunately, it’s awkward to have digital transformation discussions at this level. Board and executive members are usually uninformed. But these vital discussions cannot be avoided.

In fact, the future will include more explorations of hard-to-understand technologies. Not less. And designing retreats to emphasize this reality has become mandatory. As such, your company must use long-term horizons of 10-30 years to take into account the full effect of new innovations.

This requirement frustrates many executives who find it painful to think in such terms. But planning for the distant future is essential in smashing the status quo with immediate actions.

If your organization doesn’t intend to produce a breakthrough plan at its next retreat, cancel it and modify your old one. Save your energy for when it’s really needed: a game-changing meeting of the minds that rethinks your company and industry. This activity could be the one that takes you into a new, unprecedented future.