The JF Guest Author Spot

Bob Apollo

It’s an old story, but one that I still hear far too often. Salespeople complaining that marketing never generates any decent leads.  Marketing getting frustrated that sales never follows up on the leads they have created.  And, amusing though the idea might at first appear, we can’t excuse it by claiming that “Sales is from Mars and Marketing is from Venus”.

I should probably have put the word “leads” in quote marks.  It’s not unusual for part of the problem to stem from a failure to agree what a sales ready lead looks like, or to get confused between an enquiry, a lead and an opportunity, or even (bizarre as it may seem) to regard those three categories as being in some way interchangeable.

Creating a contract between sales and marketing

But the real root cause predates even the enquiry-lead-opportunity definition problem: it arises from the failure to agree and define what an “ideal prospect” looks like.  Without a consensus about the characteristics of a well-qualified prospect, marketing are likely to continue investing resources targeting people who are never likely to buy – and sales will be unable to sign up to a contract with marketing that basically says “find opportunities that look like this, and we will commit to pursue them”.

What does an ideal prospect look like?

I’ve conducted a number of ideal prospect profile exercises with clients – I have come to regard them as the essential foundation for making smart sales and marketing investment decisions – and here’s what I’ve learned:

■ Demographics alone aren’t enough.  The classic dimensions of market segmentation – industry, geography, company size, etc., form the foundation of an ideal prospect profile, but they are by themselves insufficient

■ The devil is in the detail.  When you evaluate recent sales successes, you can usually uncover more subtle characteristics that have a more important predictive effect.  Things like existing systems in use often have a profound impact on the chances of sales success

■ Don’t ignore behavioural factors.  Years ago, when I was working at HP, we uncovered something that had far greater impact than any demographic factor: companies that were highly decentralised (like HP) tended to prefer to buy from HP.  Companies that were highly centralised (like IBM was at the time) strongly preferred to buy from IBM

■ Look for patterns. A more recent predictive factor has emerged from my work with SaaS based offerings: for reasons that are fairly simple to understand, companies that have already signed up for one SaaS based solution are far more likely to buy additional ones.  The pioneering work has already been done

A few simple recommendations…

Here’s what I’d recommend to any organisation that wants to leverage the concept of “ideal prospect profiles” to dramatically increase sales and marketing effectiveness:

■ Establish ideal prospect profiles for each of your significant product or service offerings as a collaborative exercise between sales and marketing.  Be sure to combine demographic, environmental and behavioural characteristics

■ Make a determined effort to progressively enhance your target account prospecting database by capturing the characteristics of your “ideal prospects”.  Include this learning in the information you collect in web form submissions, etc.

■ Help prospects to self-qualify by explaining how your solution is particularly relevant to organisations that exhibit the characteristics of your “ideal prospect profile”.  Ensure that your case studies and reference materials support this

■ Encourage sales and marketing to enter into a contract based on the commonly agreed characteristics of an “ideal prospect” that ensures that if marketing uncovers a suitable candidate, sales commits to follow them up

■ Implement a continuous qualification process that helps marketing and sales to judge – in an evidence based way – just how good a prospect any given enquiry, lead or opportunity is likely to be

Trust me, it will be worth the effort…

Get this right – and continue to refine it – and from all my observations, you’ll spend your marketing money far more wisely and apply your sales resources far more effectively.  And both departments will enjoy working together.

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Bob Apollo is founder of Inflexion-Point - applying a systematic, evidence-based approach to help B2B clients generate customer value, eliminate wasted effort and improve marketing and sales performance. UK-based, Bob previously held senior sales, marketing and C-level global positions in the high-tech sector.

Some News:

Received a message late last week from good chum Michael Benidt. He posted on a wonderful story that I promise will warm the cockells of your heart (quaint English term meaning you’ll find it particularly inspiring) - “Microsoft Shouts Out for Seniors” - you will love it!

The JF Guest Author Spot

Todd Youngblood

Two colleagues and I have decided to profoundly change the way B2B sales is executed.  (Really… We did…)

It all started last November at a barbecue joint in Birmingham, AL.  (Read about our Dreamland experience.)  At the time, none of us knew the other two also had the Don Quixote gene, ever-ready to embark on a grand quest.  It’s been a fascinating ride so far, and the windmills keep getting interestinger and interestinger.

E-Rep – the electronic alter-ego of the “H” or Human Rep – is at the core of our vision.  We convinced a real, live client to buy in.  They’re paying us real, live money to build one.  More accurately, to build them a set of E-Reps; one for each of their H-Reps.  This train has left the station…

There are lots of reasons we think we can pull this off, one of the main ones being Dunbar’s Number.  Based on lots of anthropological data, Dunbar says a single person can maintain a stable relationship with at most 150 others.  We can’t prove it (yet), but we think a rudimentary E-Rep can maintain stable relationships with 45,000.

For just a moment, assume we’re not insane.  Assume is actually possible.  You could enter the business battleground backed by an army of 45,000.  Your competitor enters with 150.  The poor slob brought a knife to gunfight.

Might be worth your while to keep an eye on Dreamland Interactive.

Todd Youngblood is passionate about sales productivity. His 30+ year career in Executive Management, Sales, Marketing and Consulting has focused on selling more, better, cheaper and faster. He established The YPS Group, Inc. in 1999 based on his years of experience in Sales Process Engineering – that is, combining creativity and discipline in the design, implementation and use of work processes for highly effective sales teams.

JF Uncut

Maureen Blandford

Perhaps you’ve heard about Merrill Lynch’s John Thain’s $1.22M office renovation, including $87K for an area rug? Preceded, of course, by AIG’s spending part of their bailout on spa treatments for execs. Nice. And then there was the Big Three auto execs flying corporate jets to Washington to plead for their share of the bailout. Next up: Citigroup. Led by an exec team that the NY Post calls “Citiboobs.”

In this Wednesday’s New York Times, Maureen Dowd asks:
How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?

“Citiboobs,” indeed.

While I am appalled by story after story detailing greed, stupidity, and obtuseness in corporate leadership, and applaud the world’s righteous indignation over the executive termites who have caused irreparable damage to our many fine organizations, there’s a part of my business psyche that is pleased such horrid behavior is seeing the light of day.

For years (actually two decades), I have often felt horror at how the B2B version of  Fat Cats (Marketers and the executives who support them) burn through $s on truly ridiculous marketing tactics, while the Working Poor (Sales orgs) struggle to do more with less.

An $8K shower curtain or an $87K area rug look like wise investments next to spending in Marketing I’ve witnessed over the years. At the same time that sales organizations have seen their training & coaching budgets shrink to next to nothing, marketers think nothing of dropping $100K on new logo development or color consultation. They produce brochures that are rarely read by target audiences. A few years ago, I witnessed a tech client approve a $200K photo shoot (in NYC, of course) for photos that easily could’ve been obtained for a fraction of the cost from one of many fine stock photo agencies.

Why are our field sales folks so often building their own sales tools (wasting valuable sales time), when their corp HQ folks are spending millions on marketing materials? Because much of the corp-produced stuff doesn’t meet real selling needs. Have you ever seen the garage of a pharmaceutical rep? Packed with marketing materials they don’t use.

Very briefly, corporate marketers have been trained solely in consumer marketing, not B2B. They’ve rarely actually carried a bag and consequently don’t understand that today’s great sellers are more about asking great questions rather than selling stuff.  Our marketing materials, if you’ve noticed, are packed with selling stuff. That’s not the kind of sales support we need today.

The dark side to this story is that many B2B Marketers have much in common with our ego-centric execs. They love to be wined and dined by Madison Avenue types and spend hours talking about things like shades of color and the emotions one shade or another evokes. And, this drives me crazy, marketers disdain sellers and sales organizations. Consequently, when a sales org tries to help a marketing org better meet their needs…well, they might as be talking to the hand.

Now, more than ever, responsible leadership will be open to a little righteous indignation over the imbalance in marketing and true sales support spend. If Starbucks is halting decaf brewing after noon in the hopes of saving $400M by the end of the year, I’m thinking leadership will be open to considering many cost-saving options.

Sellers and Sales Leadership: if you happen to have an internal marketing organization who supports your needs – Bravo! You can count yourselves lucky.

If, however, you’re not getting the support you need from your marketing organization, speak up. Consultative/Relationship/Collaborative selling is precisely what we need our sales orgs to be executing. But, it’s not easy. Features/Functions/Benefits selling is part of our DNA, having evolved over thousands of years.

To be effective in transitioning our sales folks over to great selling and ridding ourselves of bad habits takes time.  A sustainable sales support plan must include on-going mentoring, coaching, & training. For both sellers and sales leadership.

The good news here is that the investment needed for GREAT, sustainable sales support is a fraction of the budget that’s being wasted in B2B marketing today. For instance, marketing organizations executing a marketing plan that truly supports B2B selling could do a great job with about 60% of their current budget. I’d recommend redirecting some of the remaining 40% to on-going sales training needs (yippee!). And either saving the rest, or redirecting to HR efforts to hire and retain great sales people.

I’m giddy thinking about this: Sales folks supported by great training and marketing materials that help them move the ball down the field. Now – isn’t that worth some righteous indignation?

Maureen Blandford is CEO of MindTime® Group, a B2B marketing firm, and author of “Branding Doesn’t Work in B2B.” Her team helps B2Bs align their marketing and consultative sales efforts to drive more profitable revenue. You can reach her at maureen@mindtimegroup.com or follow her on twitter at twitter.com/maureenmindtime  For more information on her book: brandingdoesntwork.com

We are pausing to catch our breath after an amazing year, but we haven’t given ourselves much of a breather as we hurtle headlong into 2009, with so many really exciting things happening.

To begin with, it has become apparent that if we are to achieve all of our objectives over the next twelve months, we need additional heads, and so on Tuesday, I will be announcing two new appointments: A new CEO is coming in to steer the Sales Corporation through it’s next phase of development, and the Top Sales Experts group will enjoy the input of a “Strategist” who similarly, will be guiding the whole team to even greater levels of collaboration and involvement.

To kick the year off, we will launch Phase Two of the new TSE Resource Area: This will include an “Ask the Expert” section, allowing visitors direct access to sixty of the world’s top sales experts. We will also have a library of articles and “How To” guides, plus a repository of podcasts.

The “Roundtable” series, involving three or four experts, offering pertinent and usable advice, will initially broadcast monthly, but we may well switch to weekly, later in the year. This will coincide with the weekly TSE Radio show, hosted by Leslie Buterin and me.

Finally, we will have daily interviews with members of the team, which can be downloaded in MP3 format.

That will complete Phase Two and we will immediately turn our attention to Phase Three, which will go live in June. We really are determined to create a one-stop location for everything sales.

We are also determined to develop a number of Top Sales initiatives, but these are still in the embryonic stages of creation, so I’ll share these with you as the year unfolds.

Also in the first quarter, you will finally see the formation of “The Global Sales Council” – this will be a very small, select group of the most respected sales and leadership experts on the planet, who are all committed to taking their expertise and their solutions to a far wider global market. We have been formulating our plans for this since the middle of 2008, and we almost have the line-up completed – again, I will keep you fully updated here. 

However, as I suggested yesterday, the bulk of my time is going to be dedicated to the JF Consultancy next year. We are creating a global network of JF Partners, to market and deliver our solution range, but first we need to invest a considerable amount of time to re-design and re-package.

My intention is to cut back on my “blogging activity” although the JF Blogit, will of course remain intact, with some additional features. However, I am not going to commit to the regular JF Uncut posts every weekend, but rather, when the mood takes me, and I have something I need to get off my chest.  

I am committed to getting that first book out this year, but I have decided to write a trilogy, and it is very important to me that they arrive in sequence: The first will describe my early life in sales; “How To Become A Top 5% Player In The Game Of Sales” The second will reflect on my sales leadership career – “Tougher At The Top” and finally my boardroom adventures will be revealed in “Leading From The Front”

It is a very ambitious project, but one that I am totally committed to complete over the next twenty four months.

I am really looking forward to working with an amazing group of richly talented people next year on a number of key projects, and this will require that I am rigorous with my time management: I also intend to be far more discerning when it comes to giving my time and my support. Those people, who have pushed me back to 25%/50% in terms of reciprocation, will need to redress the balance. Equally, those who have coerced me into working at 0%/100% are going to be in for a rude awakening.

My philosophy in 2009 is going to be WIIFM – “What’s in it for me?” No more free webinars for other people to gain all the benefits, no more free use of my work, no more free publicity campaigns – because it hasn’t come back at the same rate that it has been given for the past two years, and I am drawing a line in the sand.

But, for the people who I know really need my support, and who I know, will reciprocate appropriately, it will be there in abundance, naturally. Giving is one of my greatest pleasures.

Tomorrow: “The Twelve Golden Principles of Selling 2.0”

JF Uncut

With all the gloom and doom invading our every waking hour, I am reflecting on an amazing year, commercially – and looking forward to an incredibly exciting 2009 - but more of that tomorrow.

Let’s begin by looking at the improvements and upgrades we have made to our existing projects:

The Top Sales Experts team has expanded considerably without sacrificing any of the quality of our overall offering. In fact the high calibre of the latest intake has only enhanced our reputation for being the premier location, where the brightest, most knowledgeable and best known sales gurus congregate.

In December, we launched Phase One of our new TSE Resource Area, which included; a bi-monthly newsletter, jobs board, shop, webinars and we also syndicated thirty of the world’s best sales blogs. Phase Two launches early in January and I will be providing more details tomorrow.

I was particularly pleased to be introduced to Craig Klein the CEO of SalesNexus, who are now our sponsors on TSE: Craig is a very forward looking and innovative guy, who fully understands what we are aiming to achieve – he is a pleasure to work with.

The ever increasing popularity of Top 10 Sales Articles has taken us all by surprise. It is a very simple concept, which just seems to have captured everyone’s imagination. As you will know, we are currently in the middle of the “Top Sales Article Of The Year” campaign and already, in the first three days of the public poll being open, more people have voted than for the whole of last year’s contest. It’s very close race at the moment, but there are still another ten day’s to go before we announce the result, so plenty of time for a dark horse to come up on the rails.

In April, the new JF Consultancy site arrived, allowing me to showcase my new range of solutions and this is very much a work in progress: I am going to be spending about 60% of my time next year developing this initiative, with…..well that is 2009 news, so again,  you will have to wait until tomorrow I am afraid.

Many people, even those that know me well, often suggest that they lose track with all my activities, but in fact for me, there is of course a game plan; a short, medium and long–term strategy, which my team are very aware of. What they will never get used to is the steady stream of new ideas, which have to be fully explored and assessed for financial viability. But it keeps us all on our toes! 

As I mentioned the other day, when announcing the 2008 JF Awards nominees, this has been the year of the “Blog Grabbers” – no idea what I am talking about? OK, these are sites that come across and grab your blog post every day – or as regularly post. They then feature you on their site, and send you lots of incremental traffic and help to expand your “fan-base”

Three in particular, are offering an excellent service – The Customer Collective, Blogowogo, and Smart Draw. I am very happy to be working with all three and I can highly recommend them.

Of course, my daily drug is posting here. It gives me immense pleasure and is never, ever a chore – “best fun you can have with your jim-jams on” is how I described it recently. What has really surprised me is that visitor numbers just go on rising, week on week: To give you some idea, visitor numbers have increased by 107% this year, so far. And this year, I agreed to post weekly on The Sales Manager’s Mentor blog over at Sales Gravy, which has been fun.

I became involved with other excellent projects like: CanDoGo, Insightory, Account Maven and Sales HQ – I am looking forward to working with all of them again in 2009.

Finally, I must mention the host of new friends, acquaintances and business colleagues that I have connected with in 2008 – I am a people person, and this is one area of my activity that I most enjoy. They are of course, far too many to mention, but you know who you are!

Finally, finally, what about my existing contacts, friends and acquaintances? I am blessed to have a very wide circle of very good friends, located right round the globe, and I have enjoyed their friendship very much in 2008 – as I do every year!

“What about the book Jonathan?” I hear you ask.

“Wait until tomorrow!” I reply.

Tomorrow: All things 2009 – really exciting times ahead!!

Of the four business meetings I have held so far this week, only in one case was the other person able to produce an up to date and informative business card, despite the fact that they were all very senior executives

As I have said on numerous occasions, a common (and often overlooked) image feature for every would-be business professional, is the business or calling card (the summary information about yourself you choose to give to others).

Although there are no hard facts on the subject, it is estimated that 90% of people do not have a calling card at all. In fact the estimated breakdown looks as follows:

Of the 10% that do have a calling card:

25% have an informative card

35% have cards showing only name, address and phone number

40% have cards with out-of-date or incorrect information

This means that only 2.5% of people have a card that is up to date, accurate and gives a reasonably full picture of who they are and what they do.

Always Carry Your Calling Card

Having no calling cards (or one that is inaccurate or short on detail) is a major inhibitor. Even a supply of blank cards is better than none at all, as you can’t possibly expect people to remember everything that you tell them. Nor do you want to constantly write down names, phone numbers and any other information, in long hand, every time you meet someone.

The design of your calling card can vary enormously in style and look. However, it should be easy to read and include a minimum of name, address and daytime phone numbers.

However, I believe today that it is also appropriate to include fax number, e-mail address, and mobile phone numbers.

Focus On Your Skills Not Your Job

You’ll notice that a job title is deliberately not included in the list. Although in principle there is nothing wrong with including it, it is much more useful to use the space under your name to describe what you do in a precise and concise way that is meaningful to anybody that you meet. Words like designer of roads and bridges or seller of land and property are much better than engineer or sales consultant.

Don’t forget this is the information that helps others to know what skills you have or what you might offer. Hence secretary, for example, is unlikely to be useful in itself but expert in word processing and desktop publishing says a lot more.

Tomorrow: We have a mega week coming up:

On Tuesday, we will be announcing the twelve finalist who will be contesting the “2008 Sales Article Of The Year Award” and launching a poll over on Top 10 Sales Articles.

On Wednesday, the 2008 Sales Book Awards winners will be announced.

On Thursday, I will be announcing the nominees for this year’s JF Awards – winners will be posted on December 23rd.

So, an awful lot of announcing going on next week, be sure to join me - JF

It was around 5.30 am when it happened. The violence of the ear shattering sound which so abruptly broke my sleep pattern and forced me to sit bolt upright in my bed, is what I remember so vividly. What made it all so much worse was the time it took for me to realise where I was.

By the time my brain had worked out that I was not at home, I was already scrambling out of bed and anxiously deciding how to dress. I remembered that it was winter and that it was bitterly cold, so wrapped up well, grabbed my wallet, laptop bag and made my way downstairs at speed – well fairly rapidly anyway.

It is a small, family run hotel, just ten bedrooms, deriving most of its income from its golf course. So there were just a handful of guests that had congregated outside, in various states of dress or undress but all of them wearing a look of total bewilderment.

I am not quite certain what I expected; surely someone would take charge; the fire service would have arrived by now; reassurance – but there was none of those things and we all just stood and waited, making nervous small talk, trying to fully wake up and come to terms with the situation.

After about twenty minutes – which felt more like two hours, one of the guests announced that he had the home number of the owner and proceeded to call him from his mobile. It then began to dawn on me that there was no member of staff on site that night and we were on our own, totally exposed. I also realised that the fire service were not about to arrive and the hotel’s alarm system was not connected to the local fire station.

Whilst we waited, I engaged in conversation with a fellow guest and I related the story of how something similar had happened to me almost forty years ago. On that occasion, I was staying overnight with my girlfriend at her college – an all female establishment in Cambridge, when the alarm went off very early in the morning. I remember the shock on the Principle’s face, as more and more young males filed out of the dormitory block and into the car park.

Years later, I returned to that college for a wedding reception and it was the summer before they allowed in male students. They were still completing the essential modifications, so when I visited the cloakroom, there were no urinals, only cubicles. I still smile today at the memory of lifting the toilet seat to find a note taped underneath which read: “At last, a man”

I digress: It took another fifteen minutes for the owner to arrive and another ten for him to complete an inspection of the entire establishment, before declaring that it was safe for us to return to our rooms – it was a false alarm. I kind of expected something; an apology; an explanation. There was none. Maybe, tomorrow?

It was almost 7.00 am when I climbed back into bed, trying to bring some life back to my frozen extremities and it was 7.05 am when the alarm went off again. This time, I refused to be intimidated and put the pillows over my head.   

No mention was made of the incident that day at reception and I wondered if an apology might be forthcoming the next day when I checked out, because after all, I should be classified as a regular guest – I stay there every month. But nothing; no “We are so sorry Mr Farrington for the inconvenience” or “Mr Farrington, what can we do to compensate you?”

It was almost as if nothing had happened – but it had, and it was much worse than we were led to believe.

The following day, a full twenty six hours afterwards, my colleague, who collects me every day from the hotel, was waiting for me in reception, witnessed two young guys arrive and announce to the receptionist that they were there to service the boiler. She said she wasn’t expecting them and would just telephone the owner.

Just seconds into the call she exclaimed: “Fire, what fire? I didn’t know we had a fire, oh ok” She then related this information to the two engineers with the explicit instructions that they were to be rigorous in their inspection.

So, there was a fire after all and so, we were criminally exposed that night. So many “What ifs”

But here is the burning question: I love staying at the hotel. It provides me with everything I need, and I really do not want to stay anywhere else. But will I feel safe and secure there ever again? I feel as if I have been terribly let down. What would you do?

Tomorrow: What does your business card say about you?

I know you are waiting for me to reveal how I nearly burned alive last week, but fresh evidence is emerging and I am determined to give you the whole picture – so please be patient, it will be worth it.

So, on the subject of customer care……………..

Most of us are involved in some form of business acquisition for our respective companies. We all know that winning business often requires a significant investment in time, resources and energy and that the thrill of the chase is an exciting one. Isn’t it a shame that sometimes the customer, who you worked so hard to win, cancels the order during the initial stages because someone somewhere has let them down.

The sequence of events is often typical – an ‘important’ meeting of department heads is set up to find out who the culprit was and why, but its too late – all you can do is learn from the mistakes – or at least that’s the logical outcome.

In this article, I want to cover issues which your company faces in retaining customers and look at:

• The value of customer service

• Moments of truth

• Recruiting, training and motivating customer service staff

• 10 ways to lose customers

The Value of Service

Looking around its easy to see how many companies have developed customer service strategies using the telephone. Take for example some of the fast food establishments who actively promote 0800 care lines, or the soft drinks cans with care line numbers on the packaging and the cleaning product companies with care lines. Care lines are increasing at a rapid pace in some industries.

So what is the value of good customer service? It increases spend, loyalty, reduces cost, promotes your company through positive word of mouth, differentiates you from your competition and can help you charge premium prices for your products and services.

We all want to deliver good customer service and want our customers to go out and recommend us to their friends, family and colleagues, yet finding the most efficient and cost effective way of doing this can be difficult. The telephone can play an important part in developing a comprehensive customer service strategy and should be looked at not just for the obvious applications of inbound care lines but for proactive applications that could pre-empt issues before they arise.

Think of the times when you have been driving along on a motorway and a large articulated lorry suddenly pulls out in front of you, without warning, causing you to brake sharply. Sometimes our reaction can be destructive (as in the case of road rage) however with the recent introduction of telephone numbers on the back of lorries as in the highly accredited “Good Lorry Code”, your feedback can go straight back to the company responsible for the driver. It’s not all bad news that should be reported though, often calls are taken on these numbers by appreciative members of the public who would like to say thank you for a kind gesture or just comment on how courteous the driver was. All of these contacts create a moment of truth that can be positive or negative.

Service isn’t just about answering calls quickly (within 3 rings is what I usually hear). It’s also important that the person you speak to has all the information and that you do not have to repeat yourself. Unfortunately, I have lost count of the number of times I have to do the latter with companies these days – even by some of the so called top service companies.

Looking at badly handled calls, many of us are aware that 86% of customers would prefer not doing business with a company again if a single call is badly handled but still many companies put inexperienced, poorly trained staff at the front end of their business. Worst of all, when you have a problem you can’t get it resolved easily!

Unfortunately, customer care is still regarded by many as a costly activity or a burden on resources. Some organisations have already recognised the importance of customer care and a few are very advanced in its practice.

Every contact an existing or potential customer has with your company is a moment of truth. It could be how quickly their call was answered, how long it took your company to send out a brochure, what happens when the delivery driver turns up with the product, how accurate the invoice is etc.

Recognising all the moments of truth in your company will allow you to address weaker areas easily – for example, Jan Carlzon of SAS identified almost 1000 moments for customers using his airline. He then set his senior managers the task of improving each of these by just 1% resulting in a substantial increase in service!

Recruiting, training and motivating customer service staff

When recruiting staff use telephone screening – it sorts out the good from the bad very quickly and reduces wastage on your time. Use role-plays to check the ability of your potential candidates and score them based on their ability on the telephone, not how they come across face to face, if they never meet customers.

Make sure staff are trained properly not just on how to deal with different situations on the phone but on systems and even how to transfer calls efficiently and professional etiquette. When considering training, look at measuring performance before and after training so that the impact can be measured. Make the training fun as well as relevant.

Motivation of staff is often a problem area in a customer service environment, especially when some staff receive constant complaints.

To address this problem, make your workplace a fun place with regular competitions and recognition schemes. Consider reward schemes for the employee of the month or special incentives based on excellent customer service.

Remember that rewards can be demotivating if they are not thought out in enough detail – better to ask the staff what they want.

And Finally – 10 Ways To Lose Your Customers!

• Pass the customer around – whatever you do, make it virtually impossible for the customer to get what they want when they call you. Make them work by asking them to repeat themselves then to add that bit extra, get someone who doesn’t know how to transfer a call to accidentally cut the customer off!

• Buy a system then fit your strategy around it – do like many companies do and buy a wonderful system for recording customer’s details that does not make it easy for your own perspective.

• Rely on technology – forget the people and buy the best technology, then put it in front of your customer service operation. Best to make it really difficult for the customer so that they get confused and when they don’t make a choice, route them to a really poor quality answering machine.

• Forget about training – just do what so many companies do today and put staff on the telephone without an iota of training. Better still, make sure they can’t be easily understood and are good at arguing with customers.

• Don’t reward loyalty – forget about all those loyal customers who have been with you for years. Instead go out of your way to attract new customers with better deals and tell your existing ones they can’t have the same special offer despite how long they have been with your company and how much they have spent.

• Ignore the millions of people with speech or hearing difficulties – if you operate predominantly in the consumer sector then ignore all those who may not be able to communicate effectively with you – after all, who wants another x million potential customers!

• Ignore customer feedback – why don’t you develop your services and ignore what your customers want. Don’t ask them – they won’t know, so why waste your time?

• Forget about third parties who work with your company – all those companies who work for you and communicate to your existing and prospective customers. Don’t invest time in working with them – after all, if they can’t help a customer then who cares, or if they give wrong advice and you get sued for misinformation so what?

• Forget about service – just sell, sell and sell. Don’t waste time on nasty topics such as service – customers don’t care about this so why bother? Just give them a keen price and rotten service and they’ll come back in droves.

• Forget cultural differences – make everyone do things your way even if they can’t speak your language or have different ways of saying things.

Tomorrow: Two very important weeks before we ease into the Christmas shutdown, so be sure to join me.

JF Uncut

My plan for today was to share with you an experience I endured last week, that at best could be described as the most horrific customer experience I have ever had, and at worst the most blatant act of criminal negligence, that could well have resulted in the loss of human life – but I am travelling today, so you will have to wait until tomorrow.

Instead, I am going to focus on leadership – well in fact, great leadership, which, given the current global financial debacle, is something we are dearly missing.

Shakespeare was good about leadership, as about most other things. The spoof letter which caused poor Malvolio to make such a fool of himself contains words that say a lot about the subject. “Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” Greatness and leadership are so closely akin that the words give us a useful point of departure.

“Born great” has two possible meanings: either being born to a great position, such as that of an hereditary monarch, or possessing natural talents and/or virtues of an exceptional kind. Clearly not everyone born to a great position is worthy of it, and relatively few have the qualities of a great leader. But the greatness of certain offices can rub off on their occupants, who may not otherwise have qualities out of the ordinary.

Some appear to have the gift of leadership, but are found to lack it when tested. Tacitus wrote of an early Roman emperor that he would have been thought capable of ruling if only he hadn’t actually been called upon to rule (capax imperii nisi imperasset).

Others are recognised as “born leaders” and exercise effective leadership up to a certain level, but prove disastrous failures beyond that level. It is very hard to judge the point beyond which a person will be overpromoted.

“Some achieve greatness” denotes, above all, those whose greatness is self-made. But all of the really great leaders must be regarded as achievers, whatever their advantages of birth and training. Alexander the Great was born to kingship and inherited a strong army. With Aristotle as his tutor, he was perhaps the most privileged person, educationally, that there has ever been. Nevertheless, what he achieved in his short life was beyond anything that could remotely have been expected of him.

Much the same is true of Julius Caesar. He was a young Roman aristocrat whose career began as a demagogic politician, but who turned out to be a military commander of genius. The trajectory of his career could never have been predicted.

Napoleon is the supreme example of the utterly self-made leader – the man who “achieved greatness” by his own unaided efforts. When he was on his way to St Helena, he was still slightly younger than John F. Kennedy at the time of his assassination. And Napoleon was not a millionaire’s son. Of course, he was privileged in another way, having the good luck to be born in a revolutionary period, when opportunity beckoned to a man of his phenomenal talents. But luck is a precondition of most human achievements. Natural leaders know how to exploit their luck.

Most of those who achieve anything in the world are ambitious, and some have very exalted ambitions which they have never the chance to realise. A few rise higher than they or anyone else could have imagined, and then prove equal to the challenge. Like those born to great offices who prove, against the odds, worthy to hold them, such people have “greatness thrust upon them”.

A case in point was Harry S. Truman. He was not born great, and seemed unlikely to achieve greatness beyond the level of a US Senator. Only Franklin D. Roosevelt’s incredibly casual, last-minute choice of him as running-mate for the 1944 election, soon followed by Roosevelt’s death, precipitated him into a situation where, as he said, he felt that the moon and stars had fallen on him. But he grew in the office of President and achieved a stature that surprised everyone, including probably himself. He was a man who seemed to be overpromoted, but was not.

Churchill and de Gaulle, two of the greatest leaders of modern times, also depended upon chance for the fulfilment of their potential. But they had formidable talent and limitless self-belief. Destiny seemed to wait on them. They were manifestly above the ordinary run of humanity, and made no attempt to conceal the fact.

By contrast, Mahatma Gandhi, though no less extraordinary a person achieved his appeal to the Indian masses by seeming to identify with them. His style was studiedly anti – charismatic, yet it gave him a charisma that was quite unique. Like many effective leaders, he used dress (or in his case relative undress) as a weapon. His loincloth was the PR equivalent of Napoleon’s black hat and grey overcoat, or Churchill’s boiler suit. (When Gandhi met George V at Buckingham Palace, and was asked afterwards if he felt at a disadvantage wearing only a loincloth, he replied cheerfully: “Oh no, His Majesty was wearing enough for both of us”).

Leadership is partly a confidence trick, and those who practice it cannot afford to be too predictable. Some have alternated ruthlessness with generosity. (This was one of Caesar’s trademarks). Others have appeared at times to be listless and drifting, only to spring suddenly to life. (This was Stanley Baldwin’s style).

Democratic leaders have the difficult task of both guiding the people and seeming to respond to the popular will. Autocrats  are obviously freer to exercise leadership, but among them the most successful have been aware of the need to be loved and admired as well as feared, just as many of the best democratic leaders have been natural autocrats, restrained only by conscience and realism. The essential qualities of a good leader are much the same, whatever the environment.

Of all the qualities needed for leadership, only one is indispensable – courage. Without it, all the others are more or less useless. Courage has been shown by all who we recognise as true leaders, from Alexander to Thatcher. A leader must have the ability to take hard decisions and calculated risks. This rule applies at all levels and in all situations – in school, factory, boardroom or sporting arena, no less than on the battlefield or in the council chamber.

Leaders have to give courage to others, while creating the illusion that they know exactly what they are doing. In Shaw’s “Caesar and Cleopatra,” when one of Caesar’s officers says something intended to lift his spirits, he replies witheringly: “Do you presume to encourage me?”

Shaw, like Shakespeare, knew what leadership was about.

Tomorrow: “How I Nearly Wasn’t Anymore”

 
So yesterday, we looked at why home ownership has been seen as the be-all and end-all of adult ambition However, not every society has burdened their young first-time buyers with unrealistic loan plans and consequently, unparralled levels of debt.

Home ownership sits at 72% in the UK; 68% in the USA, but barely 50% in France – so let’s take a closer look at the mathematics, the figures that realtors never tell you.

Recognising the risks of homeownership in an upturn economy wasn’t a matter of rocket science – it was simple arithmetic. The ratio of house sale prices to annual rent soared past 20 to 1 in the inflated markets, approaching 30 to 1 at one time.

Let’s say a homeowner takes out a 7% mortgage (this is of course very low for a subprime buyer), pays 1% of the value in property tax each year, and another 1% for insurance and maintenance, then ownership costs are equal to 9% of the sale price. If the house sells for 20 times its annual rent, then this family is paying 80% more in housing costs as homeowners each year than they would pay as renters. If the house were selling for 25 times the annual rent, then the family would be paying 125% more as homeowners as they would as renters – that’s the reality.

For low and medium income families who are finding it difficult to make ends meet, and pay for necessities like utility bills, food, healthcare and childcare, how are we helping them by asking them to pay 80-125% more than necessary for their housing costs?

Ah, but you are thinking, but they will accumulate equity in their home.

Erm, obviously not. They were led to believe, as we all have, that the property market will keep inflating indefinitely. Certainly, the evangelists of homeownership thought that housing prices would just keep rising forever, but this was an incredibly naïve and irresponsible thing to propagate.

So what has this all to do with Gordon Brown?

Despite suggestions to the contrary by his followers, appropriately called “Brownites” Brown has never been an economic genius: He completely misread the run-up to Black Wednesday by supporting Norman Lamont in 1992. He refused to pour calming oils on the dotcom bubble in 2000. Then he was all over the place when the ailing Railtrack finally collapsed; did not understand risk transfer under his private finance initiative, and then got into bed with Derek Wanless, known as the king of corporate spendthrifts, to totally sabotage the NHS by throwing absurd sums of money at it.

But I have to admit that nothing was more nonsensical than his handling of the housing “crisis” last spring. You see, there was no crisis, but rather a cyclical movement in house prices, largely in response to low interest rates. Median payments for first-time buyers at the time were 16.8% of income, compared with 14% in 2000, 27% in 1990, 18% in 1980 and 16% in 1975. Nothing was new (not even the hysteria).

So what did this supposedly “economic genius” do? His response was to panic. He declared his priority was to make house purchase even easier. Ownership “must be open to all those wanting to get on to the housing ladder for the first time”

To this incredibly naive extravagance he added the meaningless statement that “one of the great causes of our time…is affordable housing for all”. Amazingly, both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats agreed with him.

Companies such as Northern Rock failed to heed subsequent warnings from the Bank of England and other financial authorities. The politicians were pledged to sustain house-price inflation. The companies duly lent at seven or eight times annual income and borrowed short from other banks. They were spurred by the bonus culture that enabled dealing and sales staff to reap huge rewards from risks that their employers and shareholders – not they – would have to bear.

But of course, it has not ended there, it never does. When their employers could not fund the losses, we came the full circle and the government, Brown’s government, is bailing them out – well actually, the taxpayer is bailing them out, you and me.

According to the latest polls, the Conservatives are now a full fifteen points ahead of Labour – I hope that the electorate really have had enough of “the Brown stuff”

Tomorrow: Business as usual – we have a massive week coming up, so be sure to join me.